A Conversation with Sam Harris

[Music] Welcome to Deconstructing Yourself, the podcast for modern mutants interested in world peace, meditation, awakening, non-duality, hardcore dharma, high weirdness, predictive processing, and much, much more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast, and in this episode I'm speaking with Sam Harris. Sam Harris is a renowned author, philosopher, neuroscientist and podcast host who weighs in. On issues around religion, morality, and the human mind, Harris holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford, and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, and has practiced meditation for more than 30 years with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers. Harris is particularly recognized for his exploration of meditation and non-duality, delving into their significance in understanding consciousness and the self. He's also well known in the meditation community for his book Waking Up, and for the app of the same name. And now without further ado, I give you a conversation with Sam Harris. [Music] Sam, welcome to the Deconstructing Yourself podcast. Thank you Michael, nice to hear your voice. You too, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. I think I started this in about 2016, so it seems like really recently to me, but actually that's a while ago now. But if I look back at my original list of who I want to have on the show, you're sort of like at the top of the list, even at the very beginning there. So after all these years, I'm extremely pleased and happy to welcome you on Naja. Thanks for agreeing to do this. So there's a lot to talk about, and there's a lot going on. Certainly many things have changed in this area of interest since 2016. It's an ever-growing, ever-transmogifying scene, especially here in the area where I live, but also in America and the West generally. So I just want to start out by asking you what's turning you on the most right now about all this, someone who's just elbow deep in this world all the time, like I am like you are. What's actually super interesting to you right now in what's going on in meditation or spirituality in general? I'm increasingly interested in coming to some understanding of the ultimate promise of the contemplative life. We can call that enlightenment for lack of a better word that is truly in harmony with our 21st century understanding of all that goes into living a good life. It's more than meditation, I mean it was even more than meditation in the time of the Buddha, but there's just a lot more to it. There are many things that we can't quite solve individually. I'm interested in how systems and how we organize society, the incentives, economic and otherwise can make it easier and easier or more and more difficult to be a good person. So it's more than just having an ethical code, it's more than just recognizing certain things about the mechanics of your own suffering and the nature of mind. It's what social media is doing to us and making more difficult or easier dependent. So I do have a fairly global set of interests here that converge on this fundamental question of what freedom is, what constitutes a good life and what is wisdom in a 21st century secular society? So that's the whole map of my interest as they relate to meditation, but I'm also, as I think you know, specifically interested in the difference between dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness or methods and I'm interested in getting people to recognize the non-dual side as early as possible. And I think it's yet to be discovered the most efficient way to do that. I'm continuing to explore in that area. And so besides presenting a wealth of teachers trying different methods, showing their best methods to the world in your app and on your podcast and so on, what's showing up right now as potentially something new, different, exciting in that field or maybe even really old and boring, but still like this is the thing that seems to be working. Well, it's not new. This is something that I think many of us sort of stumbled upon, you know, 20, 25 years ago. But I think you know, my background is in Fapasna first, but then I got into, you know, Zobchen practice. My main teacher was Tukurgan Rinpoche, but there were several other important teachers there. And you know, I have experienced with the Advaita side of, you know, various Indian teachers and Pungiji was somebody who was also helpful to me. And it became clear to me, or at least it seemed clear and still does, that a fairly rigorous and systematic approach to Fapasna was almost certainly the best preliminary practice for Zobchen or any non-dual. And that's not what's taught in the Zobchen tradition. It's not what Vajra and Abudism teaches. It's not taught in Mahamudra. There are analogous practices, but what you get, if you go through the front door of Vajraana and try to get access to non-dual teachings, you get a really a profusion of religious exercises and religiosity. I mean, the full iconography of Vajra and Abudism comes crashing down on you. And as a secular person in the 21st century who might not want to absorb a new religion, there's a lot to cut through there to find some kind of ground truth from which to get the firmware upgrade that non-dual practice ultimately promises. So I feel like mindfulness as taught in the West by people like Joseph Goldstein, who's a good friend, is really the perfect preliminary practice. Of course, it doesn't tend to think of itself as a preliminary practice. It considers itself a completely self-sufficient practice, but I found reasons to be dissatisfied, which we can talk about. As a preliminary practice, it really is the only thing that keeps you honest in a moment-to-moment way about the nature of what you are experiencing. And it bypasses many of the errors that I see people making. Certainly in an invite to non-dual context where it's much more about talking about the nature of reality or the nature of mind. You just basically stay in the conversation about it until you have an epiphany. And in my experience, there's not a lot of rigorous honesty about just what one's moment-to-moment experience is there after, you know, at every stage along the way and after one has had that recognition. So it's really a fusion of lapassana and non-duality, whatever your favorite variant of that is, that I think is still kind of the gold standard from, you know, starting from wherever people happen to be and leading them into what I increasingly think of as just non-dual mindfulness. Yes. So there's a lot to dig into there that is super interesting in a big picture way. I'm totally agreeing with what you're saying. I think it's very accurate. And yet there's some questions I would have just to kind of dig in there a little bit. One would be, and of course, I've worked extensively with Joseph Goldstein's teaching, so practicing them and also just publishing them when I used to work at Soundstrue. And so one of my questions is in this case, and just let me unpack it a bit, what do you mean by mindfulness? And by that or lapassana, because there's like a western lapassana, which is really a jancha lapassana, which has its own character. And then there's what I'll just loosely call teravada lapassana, where it's like, okay, we're looking for the three characteristics. We are trying to find these three things. And then there's the pashana as you'd find in Zogchan and Mahamudra, after you dig through the layers of crust that you accurately describe, they are in there and in there you are specifically looking for emptiness. And so there's a lot of different ways to approach the pashana. I personally work with people in any of those modes, but particularly coming from the shins and tradition, that's some kind of a pasana, but really getting into this apassana from the non-dual traditions, which is like, let's focus on emptiness as what we're looking for. So I'm curious how you would respond to that. Yeah, so my background was in the more classic, more Burmese style of teravada lapassana, which is very focused on the three characteristics, you know, as taught by somebody like Upandita Saita. And the problem I have always had apart from the very clear message of striving toward the goal that one gets in that tradition. I mean, it's a very dualistic picture of where you are and where you need to get to entails a fair amount of I think ultimately confusion, but a fair amount of suffering, if you really are struggling to get there. The other issue I had with it is that, though there are the three characteristics of impermanence and unsatisfactoriness and selflessness, really the primary characteristic that one is focusing on is impermanence. And it's almost like the insight into selflessness or emptiness, depending on how one wants to think about it, is derivative of an insight into impermanence. You're noticing that everything is changing, you know, thoughts and moods and sensations and feelings and perceptions. Literally anything you can notice is by its very nature of its arising transitory. And you get steeped in that experience of ceaseless change such that you begin to sense that there can be no stable self that is carried through from one moment to the next. It's kind of a derivative insight. It's almost an extrapolation from impermanence that you get to Anata, the insight into selflessness. I'm sure there are traditional Vapasana practitioners who would want to argue against that view, but it's certainly my experience that that was the emphasis. And you can also have an insight into selflessness which comes by virtue of just very intense concentration and continuity of mindfulness. Usually this would happen on retreat more than in one's daily practice, such that when you're hearing a sound, there's a collapse between the sense of there being a subject and object in that experience. And there's just a moment of pure hearing, right? So it's just in the herd, only the herd or in the hearing, only the hearing kind of insight. But in my experience, that always seemed to arise spontaneously in a haphazard way. It seems predicated on having a lot of concentration and a lot of continuity of mindfulness. And it's almost like a peak experience, and although it's not necessarily one that's associated with tremendous positive effects, it's one of those moments where you think, "Ah-ha, okay, that was an insight. That's the way it is. There is no subject and object. There is no self. There's just pure experience." But again, we're talking about mere moments over the course of full days of practicing dualistically noticing, for the most part, impermanence. However effortlessly, however pleasantly, however expansively, there's still this sense that there is mindfulness as a type of attention, and just kind of a bare attention to experience, was being aimed from some sort of locus of consciousness that is the observer. Even if the observer seemed momentary and spontaneous, like spontaneously arising consciousness of seeing hearing smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, even if it seemed to be part of the flux of experience and itself, this sort of transitory process, it seemed like there were two things, right? There's consciousness in its object. It wasn't until I had experience with the Sokchen teaching where I recognized that the insight into selflessness, the insight into emptiness ultimately could be introduced directly and that it could become its own object to use that word loosely of mindfulness. When you're no longer distracted by thought, the thing you then notice is the non-duality of open awareness and rigpa in the Sokchen tradition. I think you asked me what mindfulness is at the most basic level. Mystic mindfulness is just an open, non-judgmental, non-conceptual awareness of whatever you notice next, right? Just hearing sounds or feeling sensations in the body and dropping down a level past your concepts about sounds and sensations and just coming into contact with more of the raw data of experience. Rather than feel your hand, you feel this changing constellation of sensations that are more primary, like warmth and movement and pressure or tingling, etc. And rather than hear a bird, you're actually making contact with the raw sensation of the acoustic qualities of that sound as it hinges upon awareness. But again, in the beginning, that it's almost invariably a dualistic experience and you're encouraging people to just pay careful attention to those raw data moment by moment. And again, not reacting to the pleasant by grasping at it and trying to prolong it and not reacting to the unpleasant by contracting in the face of it and trying to push it away, but just being truly open to the next experience. And then getting lost in thought is the antithesis of that, but ultimately thoughts themselves can become objects of that kind of open awareness and just notice for what they are as just appearances in consciousness that spontaneously arrives. But from a non-dual perspective, ultimately what you're recognizing or becoming mindful of moment to moment is just that there's no center to any of that. You're not on the edge of experience looking in and you're not in the center of experience appropriating it from a point of view in the head as a subject. There's just experience and that insight, there are many different ways to describe it, but one way to describe it is in the Buddhist terminology as emptiness. Most importantly, it's empty of a separate subject in that moment. It's empty of many other things if you want to analyze its constituents. But the crucial insight from my point of view is to have the feeling of me, the meditator, and attention drop away and just have the openness of what remains. Yes. In this way of describing it, it sounds like you're not necessarily looking for three characteristics. Or if you are, you're mainly looking for the, let's say, centralistness or non-self type experience. Yeah. And so for you, that's maybe the most practical introduction people could have to get ready, so to speak, for deeper non-dual practice. But the actual recognition of it then just becomes the direct enjoyment of the goal, right? You now no longer have a goal in your practice when you can simply notice that there's no center to experience. One way to get of the difference between dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness is, if you ask the question in this moment, how do you know that you're not enlightened? How do you know that you're not already an arhunt or the Buddha, right? Well, if you're practicing dualistically, you really do have an answer to that question. I mean, you notice the next crappy thing that arises that doesn't feel like enlightenment. And you notice the ongoing struggle to pay attention or to get somewhere, to have your experience transfigured by concentration or something that you expect to happen when you're meditating. You're expecting some change at the level of experience to signal that you've made progress. And so, you know, you're practicing dualistically and all you can do is notice impermanence, and otherwise notice just the organariness of your experience. Well then, when I ask you, well, how do you know you're not enlightened, you can honestly say, well, I mean, just a moment ago I was lost in thought and now all I notice is a pain in my shoulder, right? So what good is that, right? There's stuck as a meditator with a project that suggests in fairly vivid terms that there's somewhere better that you need to get to. And it's only through this heroic effort of bearing down upon the present moment for a vast amount of time that you're likely to get anywhere worth going. And again, there are certain teachings that explicitly encourage that view. I mean, Upandita was certainly a teacher of that sort, where it was perfectly apparent to him that you weren't enlightened and that you had to really grind away with your mindfulness to make any sort of progress. And that's a self-confirming view of the present moment, I would say, and I practiced with the consequences of that for quite some time. From the non-dual perspective, once you can actually be mindful of selflessness or emptiness directly, non-duality, directly, centrallessness, then if you ask the question, well, how do you know in this moment that you're not enlightened, there's actually nothing to find. There is no experiential answer to that question, which affirms its legitimacy, right? What you find is the complete absence of anyone who could be unenlightened and what remains is just the totality of experience. And from that point of view, any experience is as good as any other, really, to reveal the centrallessness of an inherent clarity and openness of consciousness, right? There's just consciousness and its contents, whatever they happen to be. And there's no one to appropriate it in a moment of clear mindfulness, in non-dual mindfulness. Yeah, I want to attempt to clarify something there and see about your thinking on it. To me, there's a further non-duality necessary there to really come into the full vision of Rikpa or deep non-duality, which is what I would loosely describe selflessness as being the contents of awareness are not separate. And so that's the kind of non-duality that's usually talked about when people talk about selflessness or non-self or usually talked about that. way in Advaita and so on. But it seems to me there's a deeper realization that is required, which is that awareness and its contents are not separate. In the first formulation, when you say the contents of consciousness are not separate, not separate from what? Each other, you know, within consciousness or awareness, there's feelings of self-apening, there's experiences of the world happening, and our fundamental error, let's say, of average consciousness is to think that those things are separate. But within the view of consciousness itself, they're not separate, there's no entity over here having an experience of another thing over there. And so there's a kind of clear insight that these things that we thought were separate are not. However, in many traditions, awareness itself is then given a kind of privileged position, either as the ultimate transcendent thing or even deified or made into God. And so there's a real common thing there where we get a sort of pure philosophy of pure transcendence, right? It's all about just awareness itself and everything else is either a dream or even more perneciously somehow blocking you, blocking awareness's pure vision or something. And so it seems to me a further thing is required, which is then also noticing that this awareness is itself not different from its contents. Those things are non-separate, I should say. Yeah, I'm definitely collapsing those two insights into one. I guess the caveat would be that I do think there are experiences of pure awareness, it's divorced of content, right? So in that sense awareness can be separate from sensory experience, but sensory experience is not separate from awareness. It's just an expression of awareness. So it's like the analogy that's often given in Zogchen is to a mirror. The things you see in the mirror are not separate from the luminosity, leaving aside the actual objects in the world that are being reflected, that make this a bad analogy. If you just take the mirror and its appearances, in and of themselves, what you see there is not separate from the luminosity or the reflective property of the mirror. And I would say the same about consciousness, though there might be a world out there and almost certainly there is some sort of world beyond the world that we experience. Our experience as such is simply, including the world you see with your open eyes, it is a vision that is inseparable from what we're calling consciousness or awareness. And there is a freedom to be found in that because so much of our suffering is based on the illusion that things are otherwise. There's a self in variably, a fairly embattled self in the middle of experience. And it's shoring up that vulnerable self is the project to which more or less all of our life energy is put. So the insight into selflessness really does directly relieve the contractiveness and the goal orientation that is otherwise the default of more or less any experience, however pleasant. I mean, we're just in, you know, busily gratifying desires and avoiding discomfort, unless we're recognizing the nature of this prior openness. I would add one other piece to that, distinction you made, which is that it's also not just oneness either. I mean, the reason why I like the language of Buddhism a little bit more than the language of Advaita, I don't tend to talk about a capital S self, is that there's a kind of a reification there that when you lose the sense of separateness, what many people imagine is that you gain this sense of unity and totality and a more grandiose somethingness. And while I would say that those experiences are there to be had, I mean, you can definitely have a kind of fusion experience or unity experience, which really feels like a bigger something like you can sort of grab more mind in some ways. I think the more fundamental insight is in the not-tuness, the non-duality, but also the not-wanness. And because I mean, there is still the multiplicity of appearances. I mean, you can distinguish between sights and sounds. Say, you don't get this fusion of everything. Discrimination is still possible, even in a context without a center. And so it's more of a paradoxical openness and non-tuness, which is why the Buddhist concept of emptiness seems to be as badly as it translates into English and as easily as it misleads people who don't like the sound of the concept, I think it's probably a better concept than the concept of unity. Total agreement. If we get into the oneness in a strong way, then it's like a gray mush scenario, right? Everything is just all difference and all beauty and multiplicity and exquisiteness of the world just somehow erased in this ultimate productive move. Furthermore, you know, doesn't really get us very much, whereas again, instead of kind of disappearing into this transcendent mode of what I would call first-level non-duality, the whole point of including the fact that awareness and its contents are non-separate is that it brings us back into the beauty and multiplicity of the world, right? And all its verdant creativity, right? We're suddenly delivered back into the imminent realm and able to interact and have lives and jobs and families and so on. Yeah. Yeah. And see that all as part of spirituality or the sacred or whatever, and not somehow just this lesser thing than my awareness only. To me, it's an incredibly important thing to be clear about because there can be a moment where we've discovered non-selfness and the power of consciousness or the power of awareness and just how beautiful that is and exquisite and also kind of like all-encompassing. And so many of the traditions right at that critical moment are going to tell us yes, the world is just blocking you from this and somehow getting in the way and all your experience that you want to just reshape your life so that you can just feel this and sort of block everything out. And obviously what's so in my mind crucial and superior definitely is a hierarchy in Buddhism in general, but particularly Mahamudra and Zokchan and also quite obviously in Nandul Shiva Tantra, they're very clear about the status of the whole world as basically the ornament or the expression of this consciousness and that it's not somehow in the way. Yeah. Although I guess one could argue that one's fascination with anything other than the nature of mind is in the way. If you look at the project of stabilizing this insight, what's the difference between me and the Buddha? Well the difference is I'm not stable in this insight. Yes. I spend a fair amount of time over the course of my day not clearly recognizing what we're talking about and being lost and thought and the reason for that is I'm interested in other things, things that really have nothing to do with the project of stabilizing this insight and you know there's a word for that in Buddhism and Hinduism, it's samsara, right? It's the problem that I was find overcome dualistically by practicing mindfulness in the first place. There's a line, I think it's in the Astravakra Gita. There's this admonition to desire nothing but your own awareness. This would seem to suggest the first problem you just pointed out that the primacy of awareness can be misleading and lead to a lack of recognition of the second version of non-duality you described. But when I think about that advice and what it would mean to take it to desire nothing but my own awareness, well that would be a kind of algorithm for stabilizing this thing we're talking about. Not getting distracted ever again until there's no possibility of being distracted. Assuming one can actually take the practice to that level of real stability and I have no reason to think one can't. I just have a reason to think that I haven't based on what I was doing with my attention just moments ago, right? So when I look at my practice it's interesting to see what non-duality means. It's easy to see how you can lose your commitment to stabilizing this insight by just recognizing that there really is nothing lost or gained. If I can always recognize emptiness in this moment and my practice is non-dual to the point where I don't even care about the quality of experience, right? So that any contents of consciousness is good enough, right? I'm not looking for something meditative. I don't have to be blissed out. I can be checking email and then recognize that there's no center to that experience. That is true and that's a very useful insight in that it completely undercuts the logic by which one would seek enlightenment or seek freedom or seek anything in a problematic way. But it can also unplug you from the imperative to actually stabilize the practice, right? What you have in that case is just your tendency to want to recognize or to be interested in other things. And then you have your life circumstance which may or may not function as a kind of mindfulness. alarm. I find that life is generally good enough that it's easy to go to sleep in the midst of fairly pleasant, you know, non-contracted experience. And it's only when something begins to produce some suffering for me that a kind of a mindfulness alarm goes off. And I realize, okay, well, okay, now either have to recognize or I will be suffering pointlessly. And it's not to say I don't recognize when things are nice too. But the thing that really functions as a goad to recognition is some kind of contraction, some sense that there's a problem. You know, I've gotten impatient, I've gotten angry, I've gotten, you know, something in the world has bumped into me and gotten my attention. And when you think about what it would take, the other way to talk about this, I recently did MDMA again after having not taken it for, you know, more than 30 years. And I was asking myself at every point along the way, how is this improving consciousness if it is at all? What's better about this? Because if you're dualistically fixated on the quality of consciousness, the energy of your body, the type of appearances that are noticeable in your mind, there's a lot that's better. If you want to be blissed out, if you want to be overwhelmed by feelings of love and gratitude, well, I'm getting much more of that on MDMA than I am checking my email. And yet the insight into non-duality does equalize the experiences in a way when I'm cutting through into emptiness at the peak of the MDMA experience. There really is just, you know, centerless consciousness and the energy has changed, but it's not different from this moment. But there is one difference, which strikes me as interesting, which is that if my experience had more and more of that quality that I experience on MDMA, it would be very easy to respond to the injunction, desire nothing but your own awareness. It would be overwhelmingly easy because there is nothing else, certainly not much else, to desire, given that constellation of changes in one's physiology and one's experience, right? It's like it's during that hour, I was not inclined to turn on Netflix or, you know, go shopping or check my email or do anything else. If someone at that moment says, really, the way to fulfill this whole project now that you've gotten onto all of the in hand is to desire nothing but your own awareness. During the MDMA flash, that is just an instantly, recognizably sane use of one's attention, more or less for the rest of one's life, right? So that does suggest a kind of tipping over into something like the monastic project. It's not to say there are things you wouldn't want to maintain about an ordinary life, even from that place, but it would cut through many other priorities. And so it's just a long way of saying that there's something to, in my view, the dualistic recognition that the character of experience does have a certain kind of consequence, which is to say that if I got up every morning feeling that way, I might spend, I almost certainly would spend much more time just basking in the suchness of the nature of mind, right? And not finding reason to do many other things. You'd look much more like Ramata Maharshi in how you spent your time. If that's how consciousness was tasting most of the time. And, you know, that's kind of a co-on that I haven't solved for myself, but I do see the implication of that. Like, if I really want to stabilize this thing, not just for my own benefit, but for the benefit of others, there's something about having the sale on your boat, receiving the full wind of Ananda, right? It puts the Ananda back into such ananda, really. And there's a consequence to having it, I would say. Very much so. Thank you for that. And I feel like there's so much there to kind of go into. And the one place I want to press down just a little bit and see what you have to say about it is the very central non-dual insight that the contents of experience is not separate from experience itself. The contents of experience is not separate from awareness or consciousness. And therefore, any experience is still bathed in, at least potentially, saturated with this, such an Ananda, this radiant bliss of awareness, no matter how disgusting and shitty and awful the experience is in a relative way. Now, of course, I'm sure as much as you are maybe like hundreds of times worse for a lot longer, that way of talking just really, I found frustrating and upsetting and enraging and unbearable mind-fuck paradox thing. Like, that may be true, but that's so different from my experience that it's just upsetting and furthermore how you're telling me to notice that is not work. So, I mean, I get that there's a new pie equality here where until one is ready to notice that stuff, it's just almost not even helpful to hear it. You need the Vipassana background or other preliminary backgrounds. You need to have selflessness at least partially available. There's other things to really begin to notice that. For me, the first time I really got a deep sense of this was, and I noticed other people having this be a watershed kind of moment too, or like a moment where they really notice it for the first time is when you get really sick from me, it was food poisoning, and just how miserable that is in every dimension of you would experience just the nausea, and you can't sleep, and you're cold, and you're shivering, and it's as miserable as you can be as a person, or at least it's pretty miserable. And somewhere in there in one's journey, or at least for me, it was after decades, I just noticed that without even trying, this wasn't a mindfulness bell or a mindfulness pointer where alarm is you put it, I was just sick. But I noticed I wasn't having a bad time, yeah, and that it was just fine. This is the problem with a word like Ananda. I mean, in no human dimension, could you call that bliss, in a regular way of talking about emotions or whatever, it just doesn't register, but even emotionally it was miserable, and yet the core of the experience was just fine, and that neutral just fine, but actually blissful. Yeah, well, that really is the kind of the tantric description of this, which is interesting, and I think phenomenologically true, is that when you can recognize everything as just an appearance in and as awareness, right, certainly from the position of there being no center, then there's just the raw energy of appearance, and when that is nausea, it is just raw energy in the same way that anything classically pleasurable is raw energy, and the energy itself has a kind of blissful character, again, experienced from the point of view of just a radical openness and non-graspene, non-contraction around whatever happens to be appearing. I remember an early experience of this I had when I was just practicing zogchen for the first time. I was in Nepal, and I had just gotten teachings from Togur again, and it had just kind of resolved them for myself, and was fairly confident that I knew what I was paying attention to. I got sick. I think I've told the story somewhere in waking up, or I think I tell the story, but I was on a bus, and they literally had to stop the bus because I had to get off to throw up, and as I leap off the bus, and I'm throwing up in a gutter in Kathmandu, but unfortunately I was right in front of a chai shop, so I was ruining the afternoon of half a dozen people who were sitting there and joined their tea, watching this American come lurching in front of them and barfing. But I had the presence of mind in that moment to ask myself, "Okay, is the insight into freedom available right now?" I mean, is this a problem? Can you transcend this experience? Are you waiting for this to be over? Is the insight into emptiness just as available now, or any less available now than it was when you're sitting there looking into Togur again's eyes being as meditative as you can be? And the truth is, there was no difference, right? It was just as clear in that moment, and that's the kind of test that I would recommend that anyone who thinks they're practicing in a non-dual way, you know, run on themselves. When you're in extremists in some way, it's important to ask yourself, "Okay, is wisdom available right now?" Not five minutes from now when I've gotten ahold of myself, or you're cleaned up this mess, not, you know, once the pain goes away, but right now, and if it's not, it's not, right? Like, it's important to be honest with yourself, but whatever's true there, in my view, matters, right? If it's not available, you don't even know what I'm talking about, and there's nothing worse than nausea, and yeah, there's no way to be free until you get rid of the nausea, and then we can talk about meditating. Well, then that's one place to be in your practice, but that's not good enough, really. What we all want, and I think our right to want, is a mode of practice such that it is available even when all of the sensory channels are telling you that everything is wrong. And I'm also not saying there aren't problems that are worth solving by some other method than just cutting through to non-duality. I mean, obviously, if you're throwing up, you know, call the doctor and figure out what's wrong with you, you can do all of those things too, but the question is, can you drop your problem in this moment, if only for a moment, whatever's happening? And in my view, that is the test of one's practice, and you know, it will always be the test of one's practice. Very much so, and leads to something I think is both co-on-like and let's say subtle and difficult and yet really important here. So there's a kind of, we'll just call it bliss, freedom, but not neutrality, right? It's definitely a joyous freedom that's available in any sort of experience and that's because of the availability of reflecting or however we want to put it on emptiness or one's awareness right there in that moment, there it is. I don't mean thinking about it, of course. So that's like physical discomfort, but what about even the fact that it's there even when we're distracted from it or even when we are having a big emotional freak out or whatever, it's always there just like it might be appropriate to call the doctor when we're sick, it might be appropriate to be angry right now or whatever and yet that kind of bliss, that kind of freedom, never went away and again I used to resist this sort of talk so much because it's like well be honest with yourself where you're experiencing it. As you say that's very important and yet as a later pointing out instruction it starts to lead someplace very interesting and not a realm of lying to yourself or bypassing or something but actually to me this starts to get at the key to long-term stabilization is noticing that even in the distraction there's non-destraction even in the reaction there's non-reaction like the stability is always there and so it's almost like a change of view more than a practice and again it's so easy to hear this as a kind of fooling yourself but I will just say that to me there's a deep access to the continuity of consciousness available in the direction of that I'll call it go on. Yeah well I think the way I tend to think about that and experience it is from the other side of where I would say that the evidence for your unenlightenment is always in the past it's always retrospective it's always oh that thing that happened a moment ago you know that was coming out of distraction that was coming out of dualistic fixation that was coming out of something other than just recognizing the look on my face a moment ago they'll be still be the look on my face now that I'm noticing it it'll take a second to dissipate but that whole thing arose based on my not recognizing but now I recognize right so once bondage is always behind one your chains are always something that you have already slipped in the moment of noticing them but I don't feel much of a disposition to keep score of those past moments as evidence you know to build a case against my own bootahood but my wife does you know like my wife will notice those you know she has a picture of my bondage that is you know probably quite humbling to consider because she has the outside view of me and how I show up in the world and you know presumably if we get her testimony here it's less than fully inspiring of the completion of the project the wheel of the Dharma has not turned its last revolution in my case and the question is what to make of that right and so there's a dualistic response to that which is well I should just be a much better yogi if I really cared about her and I cared about myself and I cared about the world I would spend much more time practicing and I would get this project you know better in hand and finish it right and yet in this moment I can't actually discover that it's not finished right when I pay attention right so the non-dual punchline is always kind of interrupting the dualistic project that's just another name for mindfulness ultimately in my case I just keep practicing but again coming back to the MDMA insight or pseudo insight I do worry that it's possible to just kind of coast in a way that it's not as wise as it might be right I mean I know what Tukurigan's advice would be to me you know he's the one who taught me you know everything I know about non-duality right and he taught it in the clearest way I ever encountered despite all the other great teachers I studied with and I saw how he lived I mean basically he lived like someone who didn't desire much more than his own awareness right he spent a tremendous amount of time on formal retreat and even when he was not on retreat he spent a lot of time just sitting in his little room looking at the sky so the question is on some level I'm rejecting his advice by having a more ordinary life right and I'm of two minds about that but the important thing is I'm of two minds about it right there might be a consequence to having only one mind about it which is the more traditional you know there's nothing better than practice sort of mind but again that has all kinds of consequences which I'm apparently not currently willing to live with by temperament now I tend not to view this as a problem because everything seems quite good at the moment but I also know that I'm vulnerable to a few illusions here which is that life is really nice right now and virtually everything that makes it nice is temporary right you know I'm healthy enough I'm wealthy enough I'm surrounded by people I love they're healthy enough for the most part the bad thing or the many bad things that are guaranteed to happen very directly to me and to the people I love haven't for the most part happened yet they're bad things that have happened people close to me have died but you know not recently so I think somewhere in Tibetan teachings there's this image of a a yogi who's not making nearly the efforts he should just kind of lying in a relaxed way on top of a haystack enjoying that beam of sunlight that happens to be falling on him and all the while there's some great flood unbeknownst to him eroding the foundation of the haystack he's lying on and he's soon to be washed away and I recognize that's the world in which we live right there is a flood coming and the time to have a practice that is truly stable that makes you good company for everyone around you and good company for yourself in the midst of an emergency the time to have achieved that practice is not in the middle of the emergency it's before you need it not when you need it so as you can hear I'm thinking about the implications of just staying on cruise control as I seem to be and not really taking the advice to practice more urgently that that I know someone like Tukurigan would give me at this point well you've brought up several times here psychedelic experience and I'm sure Tukurigan would not approve of that I assume I don't know I never spoke with them about it I'm not sure if anyone had so I don't know but but you haven't experienced with Pungiji that was quite funny because Pungiji we were studying with him it was a very small group this before he was discovered by a much wider circle of people so there are probably just ten of us there at that point and we asked him if we could take LSD and come back and have Satsang with him and he said oh yeah if you took LSD it would be much easier to just move you guys into the fully enlightened state so yeah just you know by all means and so we came back the next day or yeah it was probably literally the next day having dropped acid but it took however long it took to fully kick in and like just as we were peaking you know like Satsang was over and he was telling us to you know he had to go to the dentist or whatever he had to do this was a Friday and we were telling him to put Pungiji like it was just one more question here and he said well come back Monday at the statement come back Monday was just like the cruelest joke played by an indifferent universe at that point is like come back Monday like all there was was the yawning void of the eternal present at that moment and the idea that the most enlightened person we'd ever met was telling us to come back Monday just you know shattered our minds but in any case there was at least one adept who was approving of psychedelics at that point yeah so currently obviously psychedelics are this is a huge renaissance and for me in the past but certainly was an enormous part of my path just gobbling lots and lots of psychedelics with often some intention but I'm curious I think we both know the obvious pitfalls and that promise there what do you think about both the kind of current resurgence of that and how it looks how it's manifesting but also its potential interweaving with what our culture now knows about meditation practice about the brain about awakening about what we've learned about the potential for freedom in selflessness and so on is this a direction that will bear fruit yeah well I'm somewhat conflicted about it I'm very hopeful that it will alleviate a fair amount of suffering for people I think the research is suggestive that there's a lot of promise there with the various compounds for various maladies I think MDMA in particular which is not classically a psychedelic holds a lot of promise for psychological healing but also psilocybin and LSD and perhaps there are hundreds of other compounds in the end that could hold a lot of promise for us but I worry that we could if we're not careful recapitulate some of the errors of the 60s in just their indiscriminate use of these compounds more recreationally I think there are many people who shouldn't take any of the classic psychedelics say because they're prone to. psychopathy and the kind of triggering event. It's not an accident that drugs like LSD and psilocybin were originally considered to mimic psychopathy because they really do have the capacity to fragment one's sense of self in a way that's not healthy. So there are caveats there in recommending the use of these drugs. But it would be dishonest for me to not acknowledge that they appeared to be indispensable for me, at least in the beginning, and just convincing me that there was this deeper project of looking, turning the mind upon itself and looking for something of interest there. The idea that introspection could bear any fruit at all was something that I think I was by default more or less just unavailable to. I don't know what would have happened if someone had urged me to meditate or taught me how to meditate prior to my taking MDMA the first time, but I think with a fairly high confidence that I would have just bounced off the whole project. As far as the way in which psychedelics can be really important for the meditative journey, there's definitely a possible importance for many people at the start. I mean, just to convince people that there is an inner landscape of mind that's worth exploring. I think there are just some people who are just going to be hard-headed enough and I think I was probably one of them such that there's no other way they're going to come to that initial insight that has them pointing attention within. Beyond that, I think there's some utility. I think it was useful for me to take MDMA and psilocybin after a hiatus of more than 25 years in the case of psilocybin and more than 30 years in the case of MDMA, but I think there's also something misleading about the psychedelic experience. I think it can convince people that spiritual life is a matter, almost by definition of having peak experiences, radically changing the character of experience. It's swapping the ordinary contents of consciousness for truly extraordinary contents and they're just getting more and more of that is the path. I think that's obviously wrong. It sets up this goal orientation and striving and attachment. But all of those states of mind are by their very nature impermanent. The thing we're looking for is the thing that is not impermanent. The thing that is always available, whatever the character of experience. When I see the people who have focused on psychedelics, more or less to the exclusion of every other method, I mean occasionally I see someone who I admire a lot and there's a lot of interest there. I'm thinking of somebody like Terrence McKenna. I'm definitely a fan of his talks and books, but it seems to me that he actually didn't really understand much of what you and I have been talking about for the last hour. He located the goal in some other place. I met him once very briefly, but I never got to know him. For him, it was all about having visionary experience. He was attached to a very specific slice of the bandwidth of the psychedelic experience and it was all about visual changes in experience as far as I can tell. He loved psilocybin and DMT above all. It's certainly interesting. It says a lot about the possibilities of experience and having those experiences can be humbling and beautiful and gratifying and inspiring, etc. But all of that is kind of orthogonal to the project you and I have been describing, which is this fundamental insight into the nature of consciousness that reveals the illusoryness of the separate self and a direct recognition of how that is liberating, of if not all suffering, most suffering. I don't know what its limits are, but in terms of release valve for psychological suffering, its utility there is very direct and its connections to living an ethical life, perhaps not as direct as we might hope, but certainly if you do the work to actually think about ethics, there are all kinds of points of contact between self-transcendence and moral goodness and integrity. The psychedelic experience as advertised by someone like Terence is mapping a very different place. It doesn't have a necessarily direct connection to ethics and doesn't even have a direct connection necessarily to the transcendence of subject object dualism. In most cases, you can have a sense of subject intact while you enjoy the phantasmagoria of peak psilocybin flash. The heroic dose of psilocybin, it's not to say that your sense of separateness won't be overwhelmed at some point. In most cases, it certainly won't be overwhelmed in a way where you recognize that this is the way consciousness always already is, unless you already have that insight before you take the drugs. I think psychedelics, their pitfalls aside, they might be indispensable for some people to convince them to look into any of what we've been talking about here and to begin any sort of practice. But once that process starts, their interest is somewhat orthogonal to the actual path of recognizing and stabilizing and insight and emptiness. Yeah, I strongly agree that for most people in the West, they are the inciting incident. If you're going to be interested in spiritual topics of this or meditation, the consciousness of the mind, all of that, almost certainly you got there by taking some acid or something. It's there in almost everyone I talk to, it's kind of the part of the central western biography of, spiritual biography at this point. And so, yes, they're incredibly powerful. And with all the caveats who said there's so many people who just literally chemically shouldn't, you know, biologically should never take it. And so on. But I would say that however transient, however non-stable, I had the experience of getting a clear insight into selflessness that basically never went away. You know, it's like that thing that was revealed stayed revealed. Which compound? How do you take it? Quite a large dose of LSD. And of course, with a background in meditation and so on. So it wasn't just, I don't know if there's the possibility of an unscripted experience, but it wasn't unscripted. But you know, that's like 1986. Of course, it's developed since then, but that fundamental freedom of selflessness was there. And it never went away, even if it wasn't stable, of course. Well, yeah, I don't discount that possibility. I mean, there are people who have a fundamental insight while on psychedelics that they can then recognize while off. In my experience, that's not the usual case. It's not the usual thing. And you need at least in my case, in the case of the people I've seen like this, you have to have a pretty strong meditation practice after that to do anything with it, so to speak. Yeah. And I have found that there's kind of an enduring consequence to having taken MDMA and psilocybin again after all these years. Because there is something about what we just spoke about. You know, there's the Ananda component of consciousness is more salient to me now than it was just because I kind of blew out those pipes so fully in this fairly recent MDMA experience. Right? I mean, it's not surprising neurologically. I think there is some neuroplasticity that accounts for this, but it's like an athletic ability. It's like you learn a new move athletically. And by virtue of visualizing it and rehearsing it, the psychedelic experience allows you to rehearse this thing, not for five minutes a day for years, but strangely, when you manage to rehearse this thing for like 10,000 hours over the course of one day, right? Like it's like you just kind of groove your golf swing to the point where you really know what it feels like. And then you wake up the next day and you've magically gotten just at the level of your physiology, just all kinds of practice hours that seem impossible to have gotten some ordinary way. So as far as potentiating the energetics of that insight, it's not nothing, right? So there is kind of a hangover effect from it. But I would say that there's a negative hangover from a negative experience. I mean, the reason why I stopped doing psychedelics back in the day, and at that point I had been taking an acid. I haven't taken acid as much as many real veterans have. Once I discovered it, I was taking it once a month and doing lots of meditation and meditation retreats. But it became a kind of almost spin of the roulette wheel where my first, let's say, 10 trips were just uniformly blissful and just like a pure advertisement for spiritual potential. Whereas the subsequent few trips I took after that, I had like equally bad experiences, right? Just harrowing plunge into psychopathology. It really is a simulac of madness. However good any further trip would have been, you know, as I say, somewhere the door to hell was always a jar, right? Like it could have been a good trip on balance, but there were moments of it where I realized, okay, this could go spectacularly wrong too. And so it just seemed like I was playing Russian roulette on some level. So I stopped and I stopped because when I had a bad trip, I mean a couple of times where I had a very bad trip, there was a hangover for a very long time where I felt like, you know, for months I was less sane, you know, less happy, less healthy neurologically, but the converse is true. I mean when I had good trips, there was a very positive hangover. It just feels like this is really not a prescription for anything because you really can't control set and set in and they're nice. So it is notwithstanding, you really can't control what trip you have, though it does seem it might be much harder to have a bad trip on MDMA than any other proper psychedelics, but there is just this long neurological consequence to having an experience that intense, you know, positive or negative. The thing I'm time-wise, I have to bring this conversation to a close even though there's like so much I'd like to ask, so thank you so much for coming on the show today. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. And great to finally meet you, Michael. Yeah, very good to meet you too. All right, have a great one. That's it for this episode of Deconstructing Yourself. If you're interested in the topics we discuss on the Deconstructing Yourself podcast and want to go deeper into your own meditation practice, then I'd like to tell you about an upcoming meditation retreat I'll be leading this May from the 24th to the 31st. I'll be teaching an eight day residential practice retreat at Mount Madonna Center in the Hills of Northern California. This deconstructing yourself summer retreat is designed for practitioners interested in deepening their spiritual practice, particularly through non-dual meditation. The days will include guided meditations with me, periods of silence sitting with the entire group, and exploration of non-dual techniques and concepts in teaching sections. I'll also be meeting with each of you individually for a private interview and there will be a lot of highly experienced TAs as well to help you with your practice. It will also feature a meditative movement practice each day facilitated by my good friend, Laura Ward. If you're looking to dedicate eight days to intensive practice in a supportive environment, alongside other sincere practitioners and surrounded by redwoods, deer, turkeys, ravens, frogs, and a gorgeous sky, I encourage you to consider joining us. You can find all the details and register at deconstructingyourself.org. To follow the link to the retreat information page, I truly look forward to practicing together with you and the entire deconstructing yourself Sangha. This may, out Mount Madonna. See you there. If you enjoyed the podcast, please recommend it to a friend or talk about it on social media. Something that helps it find its way to more people who might be interested. If you're moved to support the podcast, you can do that by contributing to the production costs on my Patreon page. That's at patreon.com/microsoft. The money goes to support the recording, production, and bandwidth costs of this program, which are substantial. By contributing to Patreon, you're making it possible for me to continue to create and share these conversations as often as possible. A special perk for high-level contributors is a monthly or even by monthly event with me on Zoom, where you can ask me any meditation questions you have. I deeply appreciate your support. I also have a number of free resources for you beginning with my YouTube channel. There are hundreds of hours of free guided meditations and videos there, so if you're interested, that's quite a large resource, and offer it to you completely free of charge. The channel address on YouTube is mwt111, or you can just search my name, Michael Taft. I encourage you to subscribe to the channel, and join me each week for a new live guided meditation session. And of course, there's the deconstructingyourself.com website itself, which has articles, interviews, and more about meditation going back over 12 years at this point. So be sure to check that out. Beyond these free options, I also have a number of paid online courses to help you grow and develop in your spiritual practice. You can find out about those either by signing up for my email list at deconstructingyourself.com/signup, or at the site deconstructingyourself.org. I look forward to seeing you in class. The deconstructingyourself podcast has always had excellent sound, which is the result of an amazing audio engineer and amazing human being named Stephen McNamara. He's an all-things audio person with many decades of experience in producing music and spoken word audio. If you're interested, you can contact him at his website, yogitarr.com. That's yogeitr.com. Music on the deconstructingyourself podcast is a track by Peter Bowman entitled Crossing the Abyss from his album Machines of Desire. Thank you for listening. [BLANK_AUDIO]