Why Should I Explore My Own Consciousness? - Jeff Warren - #032

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, hello, hello. It's time that we revisit the inside of our own minds. There are more connections in a single square centimetre of human brain tissue than there are stars in our galaxy. Our inner universe is infinitely more vast than we will ever notice, and yet our unexamined daily experience of life offers very little to suggest that this is the case. Today, I'm joined by someone who can hopefully help us map out exactly where we're going. Why it is the case that we don't notice the nature of our own minds day to day and how to work around it. Jeff Warren is a meditation teacher and a writer. He's the co-author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics with Dan Harris, who is an American news anchor that very famously broke down and had a panic attack live on air. Dan then went on a journey of meditation and Jeff was a big part of that journey. Now, I've wanted to get Jeff on for as long as I can remember and his schedule is absolutely manic. I first discovered him on Joe Rogan's podcast and then read his and Dan's book. Subsequently, after that, I'm also now rereading Waking Up by Sam Harris, which is an absolutely fantastic exploration into the sense of self, the nature of our own consciousness and meditation and spirituality without religion. So it was very timely for me to sit down with Jeff. He gives us a lovely breakdown of why we should be concerned about exploring our own consciousness, as he calls it interpersonal hygiene, the meditation practice which everyone should be doing as often as they're washing themselves. And yeah, it was really eye-opening. Jeff's obviously an incredibly experienced guy in this field, and I felt like I learned a lot as someone who's read into it quite a bit already. So hopefully you do as well. Enjoy.
Mr. Jeff Warren, welcome to Modern Wisdom. How are you, sir?

**Jeff Warren** (2:25)
I'm good. Nice to be on, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (2:27)
Fantastic to hear from you. So for the listeners at home who don't know who you are, could you give us a little bit of a background to yourself, please?

**Jeff Warren** (2:36)
Yeah, sure. Well, I started out as a journalist. I was working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, writing scripts for a big current affair show over in Canada.
I was interested in ideas. I became the ideas person for that show where I was doing a lot of big picture interviews. I was really interested in science in particular, in neuroscience. I had a literature background, but got really into the brain stuff. My brothers are neuroscientists, so we have lots of talks. I ended up getting into consciousness, the whole mystery of the mind and how the mind works. I wrote a book called The Head Trip, which is about where the neuroscience meets our experience, like how and what these shifting states of consciousness mean for us, waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and the different variations and iterations. Through that, I got into meditation, and then that ended up changing my life. I ended up really going deep on the meditation path, and just spending all my time practicing, and going to as many retreats as I could. I eventually found a really great teacher in this guy, Shinzen Young. He encouraged me to start teaching myself. I started a community of practitioners in Toronto called the Consciousness Explorers Club in 2011, and that grew really quickly. It had a unique way in which we approached the whole subject of exploring the mind, and started teaching, and eventually just came out with a book with Dan Harris called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, which is a no-bullshit guide to what really goes on in a practice, why it's helpful, where it's maybe not helpful, what are the stumbling blocks that prevent people from getting into it, the common challenges that you hear, and what are some of the best practices for addressing that, and it's a road trip as well. Since that happened, it just opened me up now to a larger demographic, so I'm doing lots of podcasts like these, and I have various programs I'm starting to roll out around practice. That would be a bit of an overview.

**Chris Williamson** (4:41)
That's fascinating. So it sounds like a real trajectory from where you started. I absolutely love the name Consciousness Explorers Club. That's a fucking club that I want to be a part of.

**Jeff Warren** (4:54)
Just have to be conscious to be a member.

**Chris Williamson** (4:56)
Nice. So very, very low requirements for the members.

**Jeff Warren** (5:00)
And not even, you can maybe expand it out to the non-human world too. Throw a few cetaceans in there, some ravens. Ravens are very skillful at certain mind moves, they say.