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

This is a continuation of my summary of remarks made by Sam Harris on a recent episode of Andrew Huberman's podcast.  Read Part One here.  I am quoting Harris throughout, with some editing for the sake of brevity.  Also, Harris has command of a vast vocabulary which is indicative of his advanced intelligence.  I provide links to a few words to define them if you don't know exactly what they mean.  I invite you to watch the entire four and one-half hour episode here.

Harris is discussing how our illusory sense of self evolved.

“We are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we can possibly be or almost anything that interests us well.  We are not set up to be mathematicians or musicians or to create democracies that are healthy.  Evolution can see none of this.  We are doing these things based upon cognitive and emotional hardware that we are leveraging in new directions.  In terms of what we care about and certainly in terms of what's going to ensure our survival as a species, we have flown the perch that was created for us by evolution.  We're still practically chimpanzees armed with nuclear weapons and that is increasingly dysfunctional.  And very soon we are going to be in the presence of minds, or apparent minds, that we have built that are as intelligent as we are.  All of that is just evolution, it's just sort of the womb we came out of but it didn't anticipate any of that.  Mother nature has simply not had our best interests at heart.

“But when we are talking about the individual developmentally – we all come into this world as a fairly hairless primate that needs a tremendous amount of care by others.  Each of us comes into this world not recognizing ourselves in any sense that would make sense to reify.  It's not that there's nothing there.  There could be some kind of proto-self differentiation.  We recognize others first and we are certainly in relationship immediately and we orient to human faces.  We even detect others as good and bad moral actors very early, certainly long before we recognize ourselves in a mirror.  

“What eventually happens, certainly as we become at all facile with language use, is that we become aware that not only are we in relationship to others but we are an object in the world for them.  We have enough people pointing at us in our cribs and impinging upon our experience.  You're being physically moved and prodded and touched and consoled or not consoled.  You're on the receiving end of 10,000 interventions.  And you're completely helpless for the longest time.  All of that attention, you have all these people coming up to the crib and making faces at you and it's all pointed at you.  There's a classic magical narcissism that gets constructed there.  At a certain point your realize, okay, I'm the center of all this.”

Harris next describes how meditation addresses the self, and then on to various aspects of meditation practice.

“What I'm calling the sense of self and what I think most people feel as their core sense of self is this feeling of being the locus of attention, but it's also the feeling of being the locus of agency.  I'm the author of my thoughts and actions and specific uses of attention.  So, I can pay attention to the breath, I get lost in thought, I come back to the breath.  But, on some level, my thoughts themselves are more of my doing something with almost authorial intent.  Who's thinking these thoughts?  I am.  The person who really doesn't get what I'm saying is thinking something like that.  What is this guy talking about?  I know I'm here.  I'm a self, I'm a body, I'm a mind.

“There are some false assumptions about the underlying logic of this process which is worth addressing.  There is this sense that the self is here and it's a problem.  It is the string upon which all my conscious states, mostly unhappy ones, are strong.  It is the thing that is at the center of my anxiety.  It's the thing I don't feel good about.  It's the center of my problem and now I'm trying to feel better.  And meditation has been handed to me as a possible remedy for my situation.  And it's billed as a remedy.  The sense is I start out far away from my goal, I start out with a problem, I'm now meditating on the evidence of my unenlightenment.  

“I can feel my problem.  I feel that I'm distracted and distractible.  I feel this sort of cramp at the center of my life, that's me.  The inclination of all this and logic of it is all wrong.  Understandably so, given how we all get in to this situation.  But it's useful to continually try to undercut it and recognize that the thing that's being looked for is actually right on the surface, which is, there is no one looking.  If you are paying attention to the breath or sounds or noticing the next thought arise, this sense that you are over here doing that thing is actually what it's like to be thinking and not knowing that you're thinking.  There's an undercurrent of thought that is going uninspected in the moment.

“The problem that you're trying to solve with this practice does evaporate.  You don't actually get there in the way that you're hoping for.  The sense of you as subject isn't brought along to this thing you're looking for.  It's almost like you're making a fist and you're trying to get to an open hand.  The fist doesn't get to take that journey as a fist.  The fist doesn't go along for the ride.  The fist comes apart.  On some level our subjectivity is an attentional fist.  It is a contraction of energy.  It is so much bound up in thought for most of us most of the time.  When properly inspected there's just this evaporation of the starting point.  But there's not this fulfillment of this fist is just going to – if life gets good enough, if I get concentrated enough, focused enough, if I am austere enough, if I renounce enough, if I desire less, with enough good intentions this fist is going to move is going to move into some sort of sublime condition.  That's not the logic of the process.”

“Ultimately, meditation is not a practice that you are adding to your life.  It's not a doing more or anything.  It's actually ceasing to do something.  Its ultimately non-distraction.  Ultimately, you're recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the automatic arising of thought.  It's not that thoughts don't arise, it's not that you can't use them, it's not that you become irrational or unintelligent, you still have all of your tools, but everything is in plain view.  

“In the usual case there really is something in jeopardy.  Every time a thought comes, I'm not meditating anymore, and not only that, I feel terrible because of what I'm thinking about most of the time.  It's totally understandable that thoughts seem like a problem in the beginning.  For certain types of meditation they are specifically thought of as a problem because you're trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else including thought.  That's a training that is good to use.  It becomes a tool you can use for other kinds of insight.  But it's a very specific and kind of brittle skill in the end.  

“Many people approach meditation like climbing a ladder into subtly and vastness, that's the whole game.  It can be a deeply rewarding game to play.  It also comes with all kinds of ancillary benefits like the focus and the calm and the smoothness of emotional states.  All of that comes with greater concentration.  And it can be quite wonderful.  But again, at best that's a tool to aim in the direction that I am talking about now with respect to meditation, which relates to more what I would call mindfulness generically.  And ultimately non-dual mindfulness.

“So mindfulness generically and for most people, certainly in the beginning, dualistically is just the practice of paying careful attention to whatever is arising on its own.  In the beginning it's natural to take a single object like the breath as a starting point.  It's an anchor.  But, very, very quickly, over the course of even you first week of doing this – once you know the difference between being lost in thought and actually paying attention to the breath, then you can open it up to everything, sounds, other sensations in the body and moods and emotions.  Very quickly you can recognize that thoughts are not intrinsically the enemy to this practice.  They are also just spontaneous appearances in consciousness that can be observed.  

“But for some considerable period of time, people will feel that there is a place from which that observation is happening.  I'm now the one who's being mindful.  And however attenuated that sense of self can be, boundaries can dissolve and the feeling of having a body can disappear.  But from the point of view of mindfulness, the logic is to not care about any of the interesting changes and experience that comes as the result of practicing in this way, because the underlying goal to be more and more equanimous with changes.  So, it's not to grasp at what is pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant and boring away.  What you want is a kind of sky-like mind that just allows everything to appear.  You're not clinging to anything or reacting to anything.”

“You can consciously decide to play with these mechanisms such that you can decide what states of self would be more normative to have in a given what you want in life.  You can become increasingly attentive to the ways in which you get played by the world.  You're a kind of instrument.  Your mind is a kind of instrument.  Your brain is a kind of instrument that is continually getting played by the situations you are in and you can become more of an intelligent curator of your conscious states and your conscious capacities just by noticing the changes in you.  

“I can't talk about the ultimate fulfillment of this process.  I'm not a Buddha, I'm not saying I've finished the project.  But as you become sensitive to these changes and you become sensitive to what it's like to actually not be psychologically reactive and not be definable by your own self-concept, you're not identifying with anything, you're not hanging your hat on anything, there's a kind of invulnerability that arises that's not born of being well defended, it's born of being evaporated.  You're no longer keeping score in those ways.”

“The feeling of self is bound up in the sense that I'm the thinker, I'm the one attending, I'm the one vulnerable.  I'm the inner homunculus that's vulnerable to experience.  And it can be gratified by it or not, and it's constantly trying to improve it or mitigate negative aspects of it.  It's the sense that there's kind of a rider on the horse of consciousness as opposed to just consciousness and its contents.  It rides atop this illusion of control.  

“To go back to what I recommend as a starting point for meditation, it's often recommended that people close their eyes and there's a sitting practice that's different from a walking practice.  You can do both but people tend to start sitting with their eyes closed.  But again, ultimately where this is going is meditation properly recognized is not an artifice that you're adding to your life.  It is not even a practice, it is less rather than more.  And therefore it is also coincident with potentially every waking moment.  There's nothing you can do with your attention once you know how to meditate that in principle excludes [even] meditation [itself]. Because meditation is just a recognition of an intrinsic character of consciousness in each moment.  All you have in each moment is consciousness and its contents, whatever you're doing.

“So, in the beginning, you'll be very deliberate and precious about deciding to practice meditation, and you'll set aside 10 minutes in the morning, and you'll do that.  And it will seem very different from the next 10 minutes when you're spilling out onto your to-do list and you're trying to figure out what the day looks like.  But ultimately, you want to erase this boundary between formal practice and the rest of life.  That's achievable.  Even from the very beginning you can relax this conceptual distinction between meditation and its antithesis, because it's not at any level of anything you're doing, it's at the level of what's happening in your relationship to thought.  The practice becomes the transition from being lost in thought and then waking up and breaking the spell of thought.  

“It is very much like waking up from a dream.  To be in bed and not know it and to think you are running along a beach or you're getting tried for murder in a court of law of whatever the thing is that you're completely delusional about, that is psychosis.  It's like you're fundamentally unaware of your circumstance.  Two things can happen there.  You can either become lucid within the dream, which is interesting and there's a whole phenomenology of that which can be practiced.  But more commonly you can just wake up from the dream and, all of a sudden, the problem you thought you had is no longer there, and you have a completely different context for your conscious life.  

“Now, you know you are safely in bed all the while.  There really is something analogous when you break this identification with thought.  You're having a thought that seems to be some kind of moral or psychological emergency and yet the moment you see daylight around it, the moment you see that the mind is larger this mere appearance, then suddenly you see a  degree of freedom that a moment ago was just unthinkable.  You sort of “come to” in a way, you recognize your circumstance in a way that you weren't a moment ago when you were just talking with yourself, when you were just identical to that conversation.

“Many people who don't know much about meditation will say things like for me running is my meditation or skiing or rock climbing or playing the guitar or something they like to do that gives them an experience of flow, that's what they go to to feel better and that's the opposite of all the chaos of their lives or their time on Twitter or whatever it is.  In virtually every case, it's not true to say that that is effectively meditation.  By learning to play the guitar, you're not going to learn what I'm calling meditation.  You're not going to learn it by cycling.  No matter how good you get at those things, you're not going to learn it by doing those things.  

“But paradoxically, I mean not really, but it can seem like a paradox, once you know how to meditate then you can meditate [while] doing all of those things.  Meditation is totally compatible with playing the guitar or skiing or doing any ordinary thing you like to do.  Again, it's totally natural in the beginning to formalize it and to set time aside each day to do it because it is a training.  It is something that in the beginning you have to get used to.  But once you're getting used to it then there is no good reason not to be experiencing this thing I'm calling meditation, this insight into the centerlessness of consciousness, the non-selfhood of consciousness then you should experience it when you're playing your favorite sport or when you're having a conversation with somebody.”

There is just so much more in this YouTube video that merits consideration.  What I have attempted in these last two posts is to summarize the critical backbone of the discussion.  Again, I feel what Harris expresses here is one of the best explanations of meditation and articulations of the illusory self that I've ever seen.  Harris is remark for his brilliance and his wisdom. I wish him continued success as I continue to follow his work and the work of Huberman going forward.