Qualy #94 - Comparing the two broad types of meditation, and Peter's favorite meditation apps

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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You've talked about this idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all. Can you elaborate on this?

**Sam Harris** (0:48)
Yeah, well, so I guess I should define mindfulness, which is really the target state that one is trying to cultivate in at least this, probably what's the most popular type of meditation now? I mean, there are different, as you alluded to, there are different types. There are two basic types of meditation where the distinction is between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of whatever the object of meditation is. So that's true for all types of meditation. Thought really is the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning to meditate, because our natural, our default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling ourselves a story all day long, and we're not aware of it.
So once one begins to meditate, one is trying to pay attention to something. And this is where the two different types diverge.
The first that you alluded to, that you're like a mantra-based or a concentration-based object of focus is the attempt to pay attention to one thing, to the exclusion of everything else, right? You want your attention to be absorbed in that object.
And in many of those practices, the explicit goal is to do that so well that thoughts no longer arise, right? So you're really trying to get rid of thought in some basic sense. The arising of thought in that context is a sign that you're not meditating hard enough or one-pointedly enough. Those types of practices can produce extraordinarily positive states of mind, that you can feel bliss and rapture and you can actually use as an object of meditation specific states of mind, like loving kindness, which is called metta in the Buddhist tradition, or sympathetic joy or compassion or equanimity. You can cultivate specific attitudes, which if you can focus on them to the exclusion of anything else, you're inhabiting that state to a degree that most people would find unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type I have spent much more time doing and is almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper practice, is often described as mindfulness because that's the state you're using in the Buddhist tradition to cultivate it. Mindfulness comes from a practice called Vipassana, which is insight meditation. And there you're not trying to selectively notice one thing or another. You are trying to break the spell of being distracted by thought. So you're trying to be aware of everything without perceiving things through this discursivity or this conceptual lens in each moment.
But your attention can be much more choiceless. I mean, you can just notice whatever in fact you notice. You're noticing things all the time, sounds and sensations and moods and thoughts, but you're not noticing them clearly because you're thinking every moment of the day. Mindfulness begins for most people as a training on one object like the breath, but very quickly it becomes something that you apply to the full range of your experience. And what's nice about it, apart from all the benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it, this type of meditation is clearly coincident with any experience you can have. I mean, there's nothing that is excluded in principle from the meditation. You're not, you can be working out or watching a movie, or I mean, there's no thing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness.
And that's not true of other types of practice.

**Peter Attia** (4:47)
Yeah, just sharing one example, because the other thing that I remember you said at the time, I said, you know, Sam, I wanna really shift this practice and sort of, I wanna figure out a way to experience that more and more.
And you actually said, look, there are a bunch of apps that are already out there that are all pretty good. I mean, obviously you're producing yours because you think it's gonna offer something additional, and I'll just make my plug for it here. I've used every one of the apps out there, and I do find yours the best.