Sam Harris: Meditation and the Illusion of Self – Part One

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Huberman Lab by Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neuroscientist and neurobiology researcher who covers every aspect of the human brain and human psychology from the science-based perspective of his field.  (Visit his website here, where you can subscribe to his free monthly newsletter.)  His weekly episodes are wide-ranging and rather famous for being so expansive and detailed.  In truth, I don't watch a lot of his content because it is either on subjects that aren't that interesting to me or, more frequently, I simply don't have the time devote to them.  Often they are over two or three hours in length and can be demanding for a layperson like myself untrained in the sciences that he navigates with such familiarity.

Nevertheless, as of this post, he has over 2.2 million subscribers which is an insane number for a strictly science-based channel.  The reasons are readily apparent.   His information is often fascinating, leading-edge from the latest peer-reviewed journals, and reveals where we are headed in terms of how neuroscience is revolutionizing the way we approach human behavior and well-being.  He tends to provide useful “tools” by which a common person can put this science to work to improve their daily lives on subjects from sleep to focus to building strong habits to creativity.  Huberman is currently working on his first book which I await with great anticipation.

As I have told several friends, watching the Huberman channel has taught me that the book we all need to read hasn't been written yet (and I don't necessarily mean his forthcoming book, I'm speaking in a wider sense).  Truly, neuroscience is making discoveries that will change the way human beings approach themselves by offering effective techniques of direct intervention into fine-tuning our brains and our behavior that have never been available before.  This is one of the most exciting and rewarding aspects of being alive today.  We are living in a time where we are learning to take proper, scientifically proven, control of ourselves to better our lives and the lives of those around us.  This has never been possible previously in human history and Huberman is one of the leading voices in this voyage of discovery.   

Huberman opened 2023 with an episode featuring Sam Harris, who is someone I have admired for years.  His book, Waking Up, is one of the best “spiritual” works I've ever read.  He offers a meditation app by the same name which has received wide praise (I really need to check it out).   His renown dialogues with Jordan Peterson were marvelous to watch.  Harris has his own YouTube channel to which I also subscribe.  He also offers his own podcast to paid subscribers.  His thoughts are often provocative but always insightful and I find myself agreeing with him almost every time.

As far as I know, this episode broke Huberman's podcast record for its duration.  Clocking in at almost four and a half hours, I made time to watch it over several increments and rewatched several sections of it since the beginning of the month.  In it, Harris gives the best overall explanation of meditation and the illusion of selfhood I have ever seen, and I have seen and read many, many such attempts at explaining this stuff.  It can still be a challenge to grasp, of course, the length of his discourse is prodigious, covering not only meditation and self but psychedelics and free will as well.  In brief, he attributes drugs as his “gateway” to the possibilities of (non-drug) meditation and he thinks free will is an illusion.  Both of those statements are controversial, of course.

But you don't have to sit through over four hours to see how insightful it is.  I typed up (before I discovered that Huberman offers transcripts of his episodes, duh!) what I found to be the best sections of what Harris says regarding meditation and self.  It should be noted that Harris is responding spontaneously here to questions by Huberman.  So, he is speaking in ways where he might have written his thoughts more succinctly.  For the sake of brevity, I have edited out several long but wonderful examples and explanations Harris offers to illustrate his points.  If you want the whole shebang I recommend you watch it all.  I have also edited these comments with paragraphing choices and fused certain sentences together that were separated by long asides.  I hope you find them as useful as I do.

He begins by discussing our sense of self and how it relates to meditation.

“The problem is we use the term “self” in so many different ways.  There's one sense of that term which is the target of meditation and it's the target of deconstruction by the practice.  You'll hear that this self is an illusion and that there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion.  Some people don't like that framing.  Some people would insist that it's not so much an illusion but it's a construct and it's not what it seems.  It's not that every use of the term “self” is illegitimate.  There are certain types of selves that are not illusory.  I'm not saying that people are illusions.  I'm not saying that you can't talk about yourself as distinct, yourself as a whole person.  Psychological continuity with your past experience is distinct from the person and psychological continuity of some other.  The thing that doesn't exist – it certainly doesn't exist as it seems and I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion – is the sense that there is a subject interior to experience in addition to experience.

“Most people feel like they're having an experience of the world and they're having the experience of their bodies in the world.  And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body, very likely in the head.  Most people feel they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention.  It's almost like they're a passenger inside their body.  Most people don't feel identical to their bodies.  This is the folk psychological origin of a sense that there might be a soul that could survive the death of the body.  The default expectation seems to be that, whatever the relationship between the mind and the body, there's some promise of separability there.  Whenever you push hard on the science side that the mind is just whatever the brain is doing, that begins to feel more and more counterintuitive to people.  There's some residual mystery that at death maybe something is going to lift off the brain and go elsewhere.  There's a sense of dualism that many people have and obviously that's supported by many religious beliefs.  

“But this feeling is a very peculiar starting point.  People don't feel identical to their experience.  They feel like they're on the edge of experience.  Somehow appropriating it from the side.  You're kind of on the edge of the world and the world is out there and you're body is, in some sense, an object in the world that is different from the world.  And you give someone an instruction to meditate and you say okay let's examine all of this from the first-person side.  Let's look for this thing you are calling “I”.  There are really two levels at which you could be interested in meditation.  One is very straightforward.  It's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get from meditation.  You're going to lower your stress, you're going to increase your focus, and you're going to stave off cortical thinning.  There's all kinds of good things that science says meditation will give you.  None of that entails really drilling down in this paradoxical claim that the self is an illusion.  

“From my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not this long list of benefits.  It's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you're calling “I”, if you look for the sense that there's a thinker in addition to the mere rising of the next thought, you won't find that thing.  What's more, you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive and that matters.  There's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation [only] on the side of its benefits.”

“The right framework to talk about all of this is consciousness and its contents.  We have consciousness.  The fact that there is something that is like to be us, the fact that the world and our internal experience is illuminated.  That it has a qualitative character.  And then there is the question of what is that qualitative character?  What is it like to feel to be us?  How do different states of arousal change that?  Consciousness itself is simply the cognizance, the awareness, that is the flood lights by which any of that stuff appears.  So consciousness doesn't change but its contents change.  Many people think that meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness.  There are some contents you want to get rid of like anxiety.  Other contents you want to encourage like calm and unconditioned love and some other classically pleasant pro-social emotion.  That's all fine.  That's all possible.  But the real 2000-year-old wisdom that really is the chewy center of the Tootsie Pop is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like regardless of the contents and the changes in the contents.”

“The interesting thing is that people are constantly losing their sense of self.  There's a suppression of the sense of self every time attention is absorbed significantly in its object.  We even have this concept of “losing yourself” in your work.  Classic flow experiences have this quality and this tends to be why they're so rewarding.  If you're in some athletic activity or an aesthetic one or you could be having sex or whatever it is, some peak experience, its peakness usually entails some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience.  For that moment you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere where you weren't or micromanaging errors.  There's just the flow of unity with whatever the experience is, a surfer on the wave.  We love those experiences.

“Then we are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them.  Oh my god that was so good or how do I get back to that?  You're looking at a sunset.  It's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen.  Then you are continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary about how amazing this is.  What are real estate prices here?  Is it possible I could move here?  Your mind is just continually narrating a conversation you're having with yourself.  You're telling yourself things that you already know as though there were two of you rather often.  There's something about our internal dialog that is paradoxical.  I do think there is a continuous interruption in our sense of self that goes unrecognized.  But the conscious acquisition of the understanding that the self is an illusion is a different experience because you're then focusing on this absence.  

“This insight into selflessness, the nonduality of subject and object, is close to ordinary consciousness.  People get interested in these spiritual things, for lack of a better word, that the truth must somehow be deep within.  There's some distance between the one who is looking and the thing that has to be found.  And you have to go through this long evolution of changes.  There really is this distance between the starting point and the goal.  What I am arguing is the path and the goal are coincident, you have to unravel the logic by which you would seek something that's outside the present moment's experience.  Because with so many things, there's something you don't know and you want to learn it and there's this whole process.  You might not be capable of doing it.  Real mastery is far away.  

“The insight into the core of the Buddha's teaching, to take one historical example of this, really is available now.  Granted it can be very hard for some people.  I had to spend a year on silent retreats in up to three month increments before I got to the point I'm making now.  What I'm trying to argue here is there's a fair amount of leverage you can get with better information, which can cut the time course by which you're searching for this thing and cancel your false expectations about just where this is in relation to your ordinary waking consciousness.  

“This sense of subject – object division in consciousness is illusory and vulnerable to investigation.  If you investigate it as the right plain of focus, you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation between you and your experience.  There's not the experience on one hand and the self on the other.  There's just experience.  There's just the totality of the energy of consciousness and its contents.  It's not that you're on the riverbank.  This is how it can seem in the beginning, even when you are practicing meditation fairly diligently.  It can seem like you're on the riverbank watching the contents of consciousness flow by.  And meditation is the act of doing that more and more dispassionately, so you're no longer grabbing at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away.  You're just kind of relaxing in the most non-judgmental frame of mind, just witnessing the flow.  But if you are doing that dualisticly, you feel like the meditator.  You feel like the subject aiming attention.  Now you are on the riverbank watching everything go past.  

“But the truth is, you are the river.  Experience itself is that there is just experience itself.  You're not on the edge of experience and everything you can notice is part of the flow.  There's no point from which to abstract yourself away from the flow to stand outside it and to say, okay this is my life, this is my experience, this is my body.  Yes, you can do that.  Those are all just thoughts.  But that's just more of the flow.  So there's a process by which you would eventually recognize that there is no distance between you and your experience.  You can wait for those moments in life when experience gets so good or so terrifying, it's just so salient.  Your amygdala is driving so hard.  But those are just 1/100 of one percent of one's life.  What I'm calling meditation is a way of simply understanding the mechanics of attention whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience so much of the time and recognizing that it's based on a mispreception of the way consciousness always already is.”
 
(to be continued)