Andrew Huberman interviews philosopher and meditation teacher Dr Sam Harris on the nature of the self, consciousness, and the deeper purpose of meditation
Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, speaks with Dr Sam Harris about the illusion of the self, the mechanics of attention, and what meditation is really for.
Summary
Andrew Huberman and Dr Sam Harris explore the nature of the self and what meditation actually reveals about consciousness. Harris argues that the self — the felt sense of being a subject interior to experience — is a genuine illusion, not merely a construct, and that the deepest purpose of meditation is not stress reduction or improved focus but the direct discovery that this subject does not exist. He draws a distinction between dualistic mindfulness practice, where a meditator aims attention at an object, and non-dual awareness, where the separation between observer and observed is recognized as never having existed. Harris also discusses the role psychedelics played in his own path, arguing they can prove the value of first-person inquiry but cannot substitute for meditation's capacity to make freedom available in ordinary waking consciousness. The conversation closes with Harris's argument that all goal-seeking is ultimately a search for permission to rest attention fully in the present — and that meditation reverses the usual causality, allowing fulfillment before circumstances cooperate.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
What Is the Self?
Andrew Huberman: Dr Sam Harris, what is this thing that we call a self? As far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our awareness of self.
Dr Sam Harris: The problem is we use the term self in so many different ways. And there's one sense of that term which is the target of meditation. You'll hear it from me that this self is an illusion, and that there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion. Some people don't like that framing. Some people would insist that it's not so much an illusion but a construct — it's not what it seems. The thing that doesn't exist certainly doesn't exist as it seems. And I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion.
This is the sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience. Most people feel like they're having an experience of the world and an experience of their bodies in the world, and in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. Most people feel like they're behind their face — a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention. It's almost like you're a passenger inside your body. Most people don't feel identical to their experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side. You're kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there. Your body is in some sense an object in the world, which you loosely control. You can control your gross and subtle voluntary motor movements, but you're not controlling everything your body is doing — not your heartbeat, not your hormonal secretions. There's a lot going on that is in the dark for you.
Then you give someone an instruction to meditate and say, "Okay, let's examine all of this from the first-person side. Let's look for this thing you're calling I." They're going to close their eyes, very likely, and now they're going to pay attention to something — the breath, or sounds. And it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath that this dualism is set up.
The Real Purpose of Meditation
Dr Sam Harris: There are really two levels at which you could be interested in meditation. One is very straightforward, remedial, non-paradoxical, and very well subscribed — it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get. You're going to lower your stress, increase your focus, stave off cortical thinning. There are all kinds of good things that science is saying meditation will give you. But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not in this long list of benefits — and I'm not discounting any of those, though the science for many of them is quite provisional.
The real promise is 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, you won't find that thing. And you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive. And that matters. There's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits — de-stressing, increasing focus, and all the rest.
Many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness. There are some contents you want to get rid of, like anxiety, and other contents you want to encourage, like calm or unconditional love or some other classically pleasant, pro-social emotion. That's all fine. That's all possible. But the real wisdom of meditation — the 2,000-year-old wisdom that really is the chewy center of the Tootsie Pop — is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like, regardless of the contents and the changes in contents.
Flow States and the Unity of Experience
Dr Sam Harris: Classic flow experiences have this quality — and this tends to be why they're so rewarding — where there's just, for some brief period, no distance between you and the experience. You were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere you weren't or micromanaging errors. There's just the flow of unity with whatever the experience is — a surfer on the wave. And we love those experiences. We are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them. "Oh my god, that was so good." "How do I get back to that?" You're looking at a sunset, the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen, and you're continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary about how amazing it is. And then: I wonder what real estate prices are here. Is it possible we could move here? Your mind is just continually narrating a conversation you're having with yourself.
Paradoxically, you're telling yourself things you already know, as though there were two of you. You're looking for the water and you say, "Oh, there it is." But you're the one seeing it. Who are you saying "there it is" to? There's someone else who needs to be informed about the thing you already saw. There's something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxical. And that's what ultimately meditation addresses. In this kind of meditation, you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation between you and your experience. There's not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other. There's just experience.
It's not that you're on the riverbank. This is how it can seem in the beginning. Even when you're practicing meditation fairly diligently, it can seem like you're on the riverbank watching the contents of consciousness flow by, and meditation is the act of doing that more and more dispassionately — no longer grabbing at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away, just relaxing and in the most non-judgmental frame of mind, witnessing the flow. But if you're doing that dualistically, you feel like the meditator. You feel like the subject aiming attention. You're on the riverbank watching everything go past. But the truth is you are the river.
There's a process by which you would eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience. You can wait for those moments in life where experience gets so good or so terrifying — so salient — that your amygdala is driving so hard. You're in a war and you can't think about anything because the enemy is shooting at you. Or you're at the peak of some athletic event where you don't know how you're doing the things you're doing but it's all happening automatically. But those are one-hundredth of one percent of one's life. What I'm calling meditation is a way of simply understanding the mechanics of attention whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience so much of the time, and recognizing that it's based on a misperception of the way consciousness always already is.
Evolution, the Inner Narrator, and the Self
Andrew Huberman: Something about our developmental wiring and the algorithms that these neural circuits run tend to bias most people — the non-practicing meditators — to live a somewhat functional life without this awareness of actor and observer. What you're really talking about is a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve that gap in the algorithm. What are your thoughts about the organization of the circuitry to essentially, under normal conditions, not reveal what seems to be one of its more important and profound and, dare I say, enlightening features? It's almost as if we have to intervene in the self in order to reveal the self.
Dr Sam Harris: We are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we possibly can be and to do almost anything that interests us. We're not set up by evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to create healthy democracies. We are doing these things based on cognitive and emotional hardware that we are leveraging in new directions. We are primates communicating with small mouth noises. We're language-using primates, and all of that is clearly evolved, and we're doing these amazing things — including science — where we're actually able to, almost entirely with language, understand reality at a scale that exceeds us in both directions: the very vast and the very small, and also temporally, the very old. It's amazing that we can do all of those things, but evolution is blind to all of that. We have flown the perch that was created for us by evolution.
So it is with learning how to regulate our emotions and punch through to a self-concept — or beyond a self-concept — that is more normative psychologically, that allows us to not be terrorized by our apish genes. Evolution never thought to build us an off switch for this. Language is so useful and gets tuned up so strongly for us, and there was never a reason to shut it off. There was never a reason to give you the ability to say, "Wouldn't it be nice to have four hours of quiet now — no self-talk." For most of us, we are covertly talking basically all the time. There's an imagistic component of this for many people — you're visualizing things as well — but there's just a ton of white noise in the mind that feels a certain way.
What you discover in meditation ultimately is that the self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. You and I are talking now, and people are listening, struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing with the conversation happening in their heads. The first discovery people make in meditation is that it's just so hard to pay attention to anything — the breath, a mantra, a sound, whatever it is — because you're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour, or how good it is that you downloaded this app. But that chatter isn't showing up as an object. You're not far enough back in the theater of consciousness to see it emerge. It is just sneaking up behind you and it feels like me again.
When someone is thinking a thought, they're not seeing it as an emerging object in consciousness. It just feels like me. The mind contracts around this appearance in consciousness. It is just a sound with the voice of the mind. If you actually inspect it, it is deeply inscrutable that we ever feel identified with our thoughts. How is it that we could be a thought? A thought just arises and passes away. When you go to inspect it, it unravels. It's just the least substantial possible thing. And yet it could be a thought of self-hatred — a thought that, unrecognized, totally defines your mood.
The Value of Recognizing Internal Chatter
Andrew Huberman: Could you elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli? Is just the recognition that there's a dialogue ongoing internally valuable in itself?
Dr Sam Harris: Here's a claim I would make that some people might find surprising, but I think this is an objectively true claim about the subjectivity of most people: unless you have a fair amount of training, or unless you just happen to be some kind of savant in this area, I believe this is a true claim — if you put a stopwatch on a table and set all of our listeners the task of paying attention to anything for the next 30 seconds — your breath, the sight of your hand, the sight of the clock, any object — without getting lost in thought, without getting momentarily distracted by the conversation you're having with yourself, a couple of things would happen.
One is that no one would be able to do it. This is not just a superficial inability. 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. And yet some percentage of them are so distracted by thought that they would try this experiment and think they succeeded.
For these people, what happens is you put them on a meditation retreat and have them spend twelve hours a day in silence doing nothing but this. The practice is just: pay attention to the breath when sitting. Eventually you incorporate everything — sounds, other sensations. You intersperse that with walking meditation, paying attention just to the sensations of lifting and moving and placing the feet. Once the practice is going, you incorporate sounds and sights and everything. The goal is that for every moment you are going to cultivate this faculty of mind which is increasingly known as mindfulness. Mindfulness is nothing other than very careful attention to the contents of consciousness. The crucial piece is that it is not a moment of being lost in thought. You're not blocking thoughts — thoughts can arise — but in those moments of being truly mindful, you're noticing thoughts as thoughts. Whether it's language in the mind or images, you're noticing those too as spontaneous appearances in consciousness.
Most people — certainly anyone who thinks they can pay attention to something for 30 seconds without being lost in thought — put those people on a meditation retreat and on the first day they'll feel like they were with the breath for five minutes solid, then got lost in thought, then came back. But as the days progress, even ten days into a silent meditation retreat, they're going to experience more and more distraction. It's going to seem like they can't pay attention to anything for more than five seconds. Because what they're discovering is just how distractable they are.
If you train your attention in this way — to notice the particularities of sensory experience and emotional experience, looking for the atoms of experience — you get better and better at that, and certain things happen. One thing that I really do think happens is there's a kind of frame-rate change in the data stream where you're just noticing much, much more.
The Dualistic Trap and Non-Dual Awareness
Dr Sam Harris: This whole dance of "I'm lost in thought, now I'm strategically directing my attention again" seems to ramify the sense of self — the sense that there's one doing this, somebody holding the spotlight of attention and getting better at coming back to the object of meditation. But the thing I like to do when I talk about all of this is undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring all of that as early as possible. Because where I think you want to be is recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention. This whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there. It's not that it's there and you meditate it out of existence successfully. It's really not there. And if you learn how to look for it, you can see that it's not there and feel that it's not there and it no longer seems to be there. It becomes like a bistable percept — you looked at it long enough, you thought, "Now I see the vase and the face," and you can't unsee it. Every time you look, it's there again.
Andrew Huberman: If we were to break meditation down into some basic component parts, what are they? And where I'm really going with this is: why would those component parts eventually allow for the realization that there is no distinction between actor and observer?
Dr Sam Harris: Ultimately, meditation is not a practice 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 recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the automatic arising of thought. It's not that thoughts don't arise. It's not that you can't use them. It's not that you've become irrational or unintelligent — you still have all of your tools — but everything is in plain view.
There's an analogy in Tibetan Buddhism which I love: thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal. In the usual case, thoughts really are something in jeopardy. Every time a thought comes, you're not meditating anymore, and not only that, you feel terrible because of what you're thinking about most of the time. So it's totally understandable that thoughts seem like a problem in the beginning. For certain types of meditation they are explicitly thought of as a problem, because you're trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, including thought. That's a training that can be good to do. It becomes a tool you can use for other kinds of insight, but it's a very specific and kind of brittle skill in the end.
If you have a laser focus on any one thing — whether it's the breath or whatever it is — you can lose all sense of everything. You can lose all sense of hearing. Your physical body can disappear. It can become incredibly subtle and vast and drug-like. Many people approach meditation thinking the whole game is climbing the ladder of those changes into subtlety and vastness. It can be a deeply rewarding game to play, and it does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits — the focus, the calm, the smoothness of emotional states. All of that comes with greater concentration and it can be quite wonderful. But at best that's a tool to aim in the direction I'm talking about now.
With respect to what I would call mindfulness generally, and ultimately non-dual mindfulness, the underlying goal is to be more and more equanimous with changes — not to grasp at what's pleasant or interesting, and not to push away what's unpleasant or boring or otherwise non-engaging. What you want is a kind of skylike mind that just allows everything to appear, without clinging to anything or reacting to anything.
This applies not just to something like mindfulness but even to something like the self. The sense of self is also a process. It's a verb. We are selfing more than we are selves. Even appropriate uses of the term self don't go away when you recognize that the core subject-self is an illusion. There are states of self where you can recognize in your life that you inhabit very different modes of being depending on context. By walking into a certain building you suddenly transition into a different state of self — you pass through a door and now you're a customer in a store. You can be a student in the presence of a teacher, a parent in the presence of a son or daughter, a spouse in the presence of your spouse. The change in context really does usher in fundamental psychological changes in the states of consciousness that are available.
More and more, as you become sensitive to these changes and to what it's like to actually not be psychologically reactive — not be definable by your own self-concept, your own identity — you're not identifying with anything, not hanging your hat on anything, not thinking about yourself in terms you would export to others and then care about what they think. There's a kind of invulnerability that arises that's not born of being well-defended. It's born of being evaporated. You're no longer keeping score in those ways.
Anger, Equanimity, and the Practical Value of Mindfulness
Andrew Huberman: I'm into martial arts and self-defense, and yes, you're not supposed to be just a puddle of goo out in the world who can be mistreated by people and never put up resistance. But psychologically, even if a state like anger or contraction is sometimes normative and appropriate, the question is: how long is normative and appropriate? How long do you want to stay angry?
Dr Sam Harris: In my experience, classically negative emotions like anger and fear are appropriate as salience cues. They orient you to an emergency or a potential emergency. But in dealing with the emergency, they're almost never the state you want to be in. It's better to actually be calm in an emergency.
Andrew Huberman: Would you say that meditation as a practice done for a few minutes each day is a step function — very nonlinear in terms of people's progress? What does the meditation practice look like over time?
Dr Sam Harris: The first step function is to very clearly experience the difference between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of any part of experience, including thought — and to notice the comparative psychological freedom that gives you. Something's made you angry and now you're thinking about all the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're going to tell that person when you see them — and then you notice you're thinking. You notice the connection between the thought and the anger. The minute spent lost in thought about what's making you angry is the thing that drags you through the physiology of anger. From the point of view of the one who's being mindful, this is tremendous relief. At minimum, it's a degree of freedom. You can at that point decide: how long do I want to be angry? Is it useful to stay angry? Do I want to be angry for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes?
Before you have that capacity to be mindful, you're going to helplessly be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be that way — just based on the time course of your thinking about it, brooding about it, telling your wife about it. You are going to be the hostage of that for as long as you'll be the hostage of that. You'll have nothing you can do apart from deciding to check out and watch Game of Thrones again for the third time. You can divert your attention to something else, which is sometimes a good thing to do. But mindfulness — even dualistic mindfulness — gives you this capacity to just observe the mechanics of this and then get off the ride whenever you want.
The other step function is noticing that there is no one who is doing that. This is the non-duality, the selflessness, the centerlessness of awareness — the fact that there's no place from which the mindfulness is being aimed, but that there's just this open condition in which everything is appearing, thoughts included. At that point, your mindfulness no longer becomes this dualistic effort to strategically pay attention to anything as opposed to being lost in thought. It's just what's left when the present recognized thought unravels. Even before it unravels, what's recognized is that you are simply identical to the condition in which everything is appearing.
Psychedelics and the Path to Self-Discovery
Andrew Huberman: Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful — used safely and responsibly, age-appropriate, context-appropriate, ideally with some clinical or other type of guidance — and what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect with this discussion? What utility do they play in recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes?
Dr Sam Harris: I would just say that for many of us — certainly for me — psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that a first-person interrogation of the mind was worth doing. For somebody like me at 18, the noun "meditation" meant absolutely nothing to me before I took my first dose — in this case it was MDMA.
One of the limitations of a drug is that no matter how good the experience, the drug wears off and then you're back to more or less your usual form, and now you have a memory of the experience — and it can be a fairly dim memory. Some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness that it can be like trying to remember a dream. You recognize: okay, there was a way of being that is quite different from what I tend to access by default, and it is different in ways that are obviously better and psychologically more healthy. It's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way I never imagined.
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. But if your only framework is the good experiences, the good feelings you had on whatever drug it was, I think you can be misled into just seeking lots of peak experiences — trying to string together a lot of peak experiences, hoping they're going to change you, every one of which by definition is going to be impermanent.
What everyone really wants, whether they know it or not — and they're right to want it — is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness. I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years because they were super useful for me in the beginning. Then I discovered meditation on the basis of those experiences, got really into meditation, and realized: okay, this is making much more sense to me conceptually, this is delivering the goods in terms of my experience, there's no need to keep seeking these peak experiences with drugs.
What I think people want is a way of having free attention and unconditional love in this totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience — which can be psychologically fraught, and you can meet iterations of yourself that you don't like, that are not equipping you to be the best possible person in a relationship. What we want to do is cut through all of that and actually be in love with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more of the time.
I'm not saying that repeated psychedelic journeys can't be integral to that project, but the project can't be being high all the time. Whatever is extractable from the occasional psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness. And the real point of contact does kind of run through what I've been calling the illusion of the self. And again, that part is discoverable without any changes in contents.
Goal-Seeking, the Present Moment, and What We Actually Want
Andrew Huberman: None of this can really be solved in a single practice, it sounds like. But it does seem to me, based on what you've told us today, that only through a deep understanding of the self as it really is — as opposed to this illusion that you've framed up — could we actually arrive at some answers about what's actually right for each and every one of us.
Dr Sam Harris: There's 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. It's to become more process-oriented and to be more and more sensitive to the mirage-like character of achieving our goals.
I'm not against achieving goals. I have a lot of goals. I'm very busy. There are lots of things I want to get done, and I'm as satisfied as anyone to finish a project. But if you look at the time course of all of that fulfillment, there are few lessons everyone has to draw. One is: most of your life is spent in the process. The moment at which the goal is fully conquered has a very short half-life. The moment you arrive at it, it begins to recede, because in the meantime you have all these other goals that have appeared on the horizon. In some sense, if you're focused on goals, you can never arrive.
I think what we're all looking for in life is good enough reasons to let our attention fully rest in the present. That is the logic of success. The sense of: I've got all these things I want to do. If I could just get rich enough or fit enough or dial in my sleep well enough or improve my life in all these ways — get the right relationship, start a family — I want all of these things. I'm not discounting those relative forms of happiness or sources of happiness. But one thing is absolutely clear: it's possible to be miserable in the presence of all of those things. You can add great wealth and fame and everything on top of that. It's possible to be absolutely miserable having everything anyone could seemingly want.
So what is it that we actually want in all of our seeking to arrange the props in our lives and have a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves that we're doing the right thing? All of that effort is predicated on this desire and this expectation that if we could get all of this stuff in the right place — everyone we love is healthy for the moment, we're healthy, we've got something to look forward to on the weekend, there's no plumbing leak in the house we have to immediately respond to, we like our house, our career is going fine — now can we just actually give up the war? Can we fully locate our sense of well-being in the present moment? Can we relax the impulse to brood about the past or think anxiously about the future long enough to discover that all of this here is enough?
Even if we're guarding our time to do the things that are most important to us, we can spend all of that time regretting the past or anxiously expecting the future — just bouncing between past and future in our thinking about ourselves and our lives, dancing over the present and never making contact with it.
What we want is a circumstance where attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling. And unless you have had some kind of radical insight that allows you to do that on demand, you are in some sense hostage to the circumstances of your life to do that for you. You're constantly trying to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the present moment good enough.
What meditation does — and psychedelics to some degree do this, but meditation very directly does this — is reverse the causality and let you actually change state such that you can be fulfilled before anything happens. Your happiness is no longer predicated on the next good thing happening. You can be in the presence of the next good or bad thing already being fulfilled. It's like: how much can you puncture that seeking-happiness project with the recognition that you're already free?
It's not that you just need to be a pushover when you learn how to meditate or work on yourself in any of these ways. But what I think you want to find is your point of rest in the midst of any struggle.
Andrew Huberman: I feel very blessed, in no small part because of our conversation today. Thank you so much.
Dr Sam Harris: Well, to be continued.
Andrew Huberman: To be continued. We'll do it again and again.