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

The conversation opens with Andrew Huberman asking what a "self" is, noting that, as far as he knows, no brain region has been found that can entirely account for our awareness of self. Harris answers that the word is used in many ways. The sense he puts at the center of meditation is the feeling that there is "a subject interior to experience in addition to experience." He says this self is an illusion, and that discovering this offers a kind of psychological freedom. He acknowledges that some people prefer to call it a construct that is "not what it seems." His own view is that it "actually is just a proper illusion."

He describes the ordinary feeling in detail. Most people feel they are "behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention," almost like "a passenger inside your body," on the edge of experience and "appropriating it from the side." The body seems to be an object in the world that you can only loosely control. You direct voluntary movements, but not your heartbeat or hormonal secretions, so much of what goes on is "in the dark for you." Harris argues that ordinary meditation instructions strengthen this split. When you close your eyes and aim attention at the breath or at sounds, you take up the position of "a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object," and a dualism is set up.

Harris separates two reasons to be interested in meditation. The first is "straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical": lower stress, more focus, staving off cortical thinning, and other benefits attributed to it by science. He adds a caveat about how strong that evidence is.

I'm not discounting any of those, though the science for many of them is quite provisional.

For him, the real purpose of meditation is the deeper claim that if you look for the "I," or for a thinker in addition to "the mere arising of the next thought," you will not find one, "and you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive, and that matters." He contrasts this with the common view that meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness, getting rid of anxiety and cultivating calm or unconditional love. Those changes are possible and fine, he says, but the "2,000-year-old wisdom of meditation" is recognizing "what consciousness itself is always already like, regardless of the contents and the changes in contents."