#493 — Two Reasons to Meditate

Sam Harris (0:21)

There are many reasons to meditate, but they tend to fall into two basic categories. The first is psychological and ethical. One wants to live a better life. One wants to suffer less. This is the reason that's emphasized in Buddhism, and it's what motivates most contemplative traditions. In Buddhism, meditation is part of what's called the eightfold path that includes right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. And the last three, effort, mindfulness, and concentration, encapsulate the practice of meditation. The other aspects of the Buddhist path relate to one's worldview and one's ethics and one's behavior altogether. The point is that meditation isn't traditionally recommended as a mere tool of stress reduction. It's part of a larger effort to live a better life. The goal really is to become more sane and ethical, and to experience less psychological suffering, less anxiety and regret and anger and despair, and to experience deeper states of well-being, love and compassion in particular, and have better relationships on that basis, to find a better way of being in the world altogether. Many people seem to have no idea that such a project exists, but some understand that it must exist. It must be possible to live a much better life than we have tended to until this moment. Such people begin to suspect that merely achieving things out in the world, or even in their personal lives, gratifying their desires, meeting their goals, becoming more successful, having a family, and conforming to the norms of whatever culture they happen to have been born into, isn't necessarily the path that leads to the deepest happiness.

To see the problem with an ordinary search for happiness, one need only reflect on how common it is for some of the most successful people in any society to nevertheless be spectacularly miserable. I'm not talking about the occasional lottery winner or some random billionaire who made their money in some terribly boring way. Think of all the extremely creative people who produce amazing work and earn all the recognition a person could hope for. The artists, musicians, actors, entrepreneurs, and others that succeed at the highest level and get invited to all the parties. Think of people like Picasso or Prince or Steve Jobs. People who got a chance to do exactly what they wanted in life and what they were best at, they were fully recognized for their talents and got rich on that basis and were surrounded by other famous and successful people who admired them. But they were still unhappy, obviously unhappy. On one level, these people were geniuses, but they were also deeply uninspiring people. Being great at something and being recognized for your talents, again, not for something trivial, but for something amazing, isn't the same as living a good life. Think of all the creative and successful people who have killed themselves because they didn't want to live another hour. Finding a way of being in the world that is genuinely good and communicating that goodness to others requires something beyond intelligence and talent and success. It requires wisdom and love. It requires a capacity to step outside oneself. This isn't at all in conflict with professional or material success, but it obviously doesn't come along with them either. And it is well understood that striving toward various goals in life, on the assumption that the fulfillment of any one of them will be the thing that makes you happy, can be the path to a deeper failure. A failure to truly put your house in order, psychologically and ethically. So this first set of reasons for practicing meditation is psychological and ethical. One wants to live a better life. One wants to be sane, really sane, whatever that means ultimately. And one approaches meditation and the surrounding philosophy as a method for changing one's moment-to-moment experience of life. The second set of reasons to practice meditation is intellectual and motivated more by curiosity than by dissatisfaction. One simply wants to understand what is true in each moment. What is true about the nature of oneself, the nature of the mind, and how one's brief existence in this world fits into the wider context of reality at large. And in meditation, one takes a scientific attitude toward exploring the evidence of first-person experience directly. Just what is going on here, really? What is possible to discover about the mind directly? What is this mysterious reality of consciousness from its own side? Whatever is relationship to the brain, what is consciousness in itself? Is there something profound to discover about the nature of experience? Once one has developed the ability to pay attention to it?

When I talk about meditation and the nature of the mind, I tend to move freely between these two types of motivation, because they both animate my practice, and they're actually connected. Understanding certain facts about the mind can lead directly to the mitigation of suffering. Deepening one's understanding of certain concepts can help one recognize a type of freedom that is beyond concepts. So while I might seem to emphasize the mitigation of suffering in some moments, and the discovery of what is true in others, please understand that these two motivations are really two aspects of a single project. To wake up from the often unpleasant dream of separateness and confinement to self, and to recognize a wider reality of mind prior to the identification with thought.