Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris, what is this thing that we call a self? You know, as far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our awareness of self.

**Sam Harris** (0:32)
The problem is we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And there's one sense of that term, which is the target of meditation, and you'll hear it from me, that this self is an illusion, right? And that there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion. And 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. The thing that doesn't exist 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. So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world, and they're having an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention. It's almost like you're a passenger inside your body. Most 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, your body is, in some sense, an object in the world, which you, you know, it's different from the world, you know, the boundary of your skin is still meaningful, you can sort of loosely control your body, I mean, you can't control, you can control your gross and subtle, you know, voluntary motor movements, but you're not controlling everything your body is doing, you're not controlling your heartbeat and your hormonal secretions and all of that, and so there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you. Then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, okay, well, let's examine all of this from the first person's side, let's look for this thing you're calling eye. They're going to close their eyes, very likely, and now they're going to pay attention to something, they're going to pay attention to the breath or to sounds, and it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath, that there's this dualism that is set up, and the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, there are really two levels at which you could be interested in meditation.
One is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical and very well-subscribed, and it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get from meditation. So you're going to lower your stress, and you're going to increase your focus, and you're going to stave off cortical thinning, and there's all kinds of good things that science is saying meditation will give you. But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not in this long list of benefits, and I'm not discounting any of those, though the science for many of them is quite provisional. 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 mirror rising of the next thought, say, you won't find that thing. And you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive, and that matters, right? And there's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery, which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits, de-stressing, increasing focus, and all the rest. Many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness. There's some contents you want to get rid of, like anxiety, other contents you want to encourage, like calm and unconditional love, or some other classically pleasant pro-social emotion.
And that's all fine, that's all possible, but the real wisdom, the 2,000 year old wisdom of meditation 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 contents. And classic flow experiences have this quality where there's, and this tends to be why they're so rewarding, where there's just, if you're in some athletic activity, or an aesthetic one, or you could be having sex, or you could be whatever it is, some peak experience, its peakness usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience, right? So 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, or there's just the flow of unity with whatever the experience is, a surfer on the wave, right? And we love those experiences. We are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them. We're thinking, oh my god, that was so good, or how do I get back to that? Or you're looking at a sunset, it's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen, and then you're continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary about how amazing this is, and I wonder, what are real estate prices here? I mean, is it possible that we could move here? And your mind is just continually narrating a conversation you're having with yourself, however paradoxically. I mean, you're telling yourself things, you're yourself things that you already know as though there were two of you rather often, right? Like, you know, you're just, you know, I'm looking for, you know, which is the water? And I say, oh, there it is, right? But like, I'm the one seeing it.