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

If we just put a stopwatch on this table, and people could just watch 30 seconds elapse, and set all of our listeners or viewers the task: for the next 30 seconds just pay attention to anything... without getting lost in thought ... If your life depended on it, you wouldn't be able to do it. If the fate of civilization depended on it, none of our listeners would be able to do this.

Once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like MDMA, you know that there's a there there. You know that unconditional love is a possibility. You know that feeling truly one with nature, just so one with nature that you could spend 10 hours in front of a tree and find that to be the most rewarding experience of your life, that's a possible state of consciousness.

I was somebody who, at age 17 or 18, before I had any real experience with MDMA or LSD or psilocybin, if you had taught me how to meditate at that point, I think I would have just bounced off the whole project.

We absolutely have the finite resource of time, but within the finite resource of the continuum of time, we have the even more precious resource of free attention that can find our fulfillment in the present.

The sense of self, it is illusory ... The thing that doesn't exist, certainly doesn't exist as it seems... is this sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience.

We are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we possibly can be and to do almost anything that interests us well. We're not set up by evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to create democracies that are healthy. Evolution can see none of this.

The sense of control is a total illusion, because you don't know what you're going to think next ... Thoughts simply arrive.

By learning to play the guitar, you're not going to learn what I'm calling meditation; and you're not going to learn it by, you know, cycling ... But, paradoxically... once you know how to meditate, then you can meditate doing all of those things.

I've designed my life so that I can spend a lot of time meditating without having to be formally meditating ... I'll go for a hike for 2 hours, and what I'm doing when I'm hiking is identical to what I'm doing when I'm 'meditating,' you know, sitting in a chair, doing nothing but meditating.

One generic answer that I think can be extracted both from psychedelics and from meditation and just from thinking more clearly about the nature of our lives, and it's to become more process-oriented and to be more and more sensitive to the mirage-like character of achieving our goals.

The real purpose of meditation and its real promise... 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 mere arising of the next thought, say, you won't find that thing.

Many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness ... The two-thousand-year-old wisdom of meditation... is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like regardless of the contents and the changes in contents.

So much of our suffering in the presence of pain is the result of resisting it, worrying about it... everything we're doing with our minds but just feeling it.

Everything is just springing into view. There's no place from which you are authoring your next thought because you would have to think it before you think it. There is just this fundamental mystery at our backs that is disgorging everything that we experience.

Ultimately, meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life. It's not a doing more of anything; it's actually ceasing to do something. It's ultimately non-distraction. You're ultimately recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the automatic arising of thought.

Meditation, properly recognized, is not an artifice that you're adding to your life. It's not even a practice. It is less rather than more. And therefore, it is also coincident with, potentially, every waking moment.

What you discover in meditation, ultimately, is that the self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. A thought arises unexpected and seems to just become you ... People are listening to us, they're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing with the conversation happening in their heads.