Welcome to waking up this is Sam Harris. One take a few minutes to explain why one would want to meditate and what makes sense to use an app like waking up as a support from one 's practice. First your mind is the basis of everything you experience in life and every contribution you can make to the lives of others. So given this fact it makes sense to train. You already know what it's like to have an untrained mind we all do is what allows us to be less than happy even when things are about as good as they can get. Even when everything is fine many of us are still consumed by stress. We spend most of our time thinking about all the things we need to do or want to do or wish we hadn't done and we spend very little time truly content and focused in the present and because of this we often fail to really connect with the people around us even the people we love most in this world. Understanding your own mind directly through the practice of meditation is the best way I know of to correct for this. Now in order to make progress in meditation is essential to understand the theory behind the practice. Theory and practice are like 2 wings of a bird here so you'll see that each is given its own section in the app. On the practice side you'll begin with the introductory course and your first session already appears in the center of the home screen. Once you finish the introductory course you'll see a daily meditation appear on the home screen and this will automatically change each day there are several additional meditation tracks on the app to and they can all be found to the practice tab at the bottom of the screen.
The second area of waking up this call theory and is focused on an ever growing series of short talks what we've called lessons there's also an expanding series of conversations I'm having with a wide range of teachers and scholars and you find sessions in which I and others answer frequently asked questions. You can listen to the theory sections in any order that you like and I encourage you to begin doing this early on as you work your way through the introductory course we're continually developing waking up and adding new features but the basic structure will remain quite simple theory and practice.
And to be clear the goal of meditation is not to become a great meditator. The goal ultimately is for there to be no difference between the clarity and freedom you experiencing periods of formal meditation and the clarity and freedom you experience in your life in your relationships at work when stuck in traffic even when receiving a scary diagnosis from your doctor. There is no boundary between life and practice. In the waking up app shouldn't give you a sense that such a boundary exists. If the app works for you you'll become a kind of wise companion which you can use daily or even only occasionally to help you deepen your understanding of your own mind will become a tool to help you live a more examined life. And if it works for you you'll find that it has enormous implications for everything you do in life. So I encourage you to just start with the introductory course and feel free to go at your own pace and needless to say you can always go back and repeat sessions as many times as you want. These realize there's a world of difference between practicing even only occasionally and not practice internal. Once again welcome to waking up and I want to thank you in advance for the effort you put in here. I think you'll find that is worth it.
0:00 There are many approaches to meditation. There are 1000s upon 1000s of books on the topic, and now hundreds of meditation apps to help you practice. So how is waking up different? Well, first, let me say that everything that's in waking up is here, because I think it will help you understand the nature of your mind and experience greater freedom in your life. But waking up is not a conventional meditation app. Whatever your expectations were in downloading the app, its purpose is to radically transform your sense of what life is about. There are two main approaches to teaching meditation, you can try to modernize it, and put it in conversation with 21st century science. Or you can present it in some traditional way, more or less, as it's been taught for millennia in various schools of Buddhism or Indian spirituality. apps that take the first approach, and present meditation as a fully modern and secular practice, which has a range of health benefits, invariably dumbed down the practice and divorce it from its actual purpose. The purpose of meditation is to truly wake up from the unhappy dream, you call your life, not merely to lower your blood pressure in that dream. Conversely, approaches to meditation that maintain a connection to his traditional purpose, tend to endorse a whole raft of metaphysical dogmas that are very hard to justify rationally, whether it's under the guise of New Age, spirituality, or traditional religion, these approaches are increasingly in conflict with a modern scientific understanding of the world. But there is a third path through this wilderness, and it's the one I attempt to follow in waking up. The purpose of meditation isn't merely to de stress, or to sleep better, or to learn to be a little less neurotic. The purpose is to radically transform your sense of who and what you are. So you won't find any simplistic message about the benefits of meditation here. There are benefits to meditation, and many of them are now being studied by neuroscientists and psychologists. But most of this research is actually of secondary importance. And I discuss why that's the case in various places in the app. The real purpose of meditation is to have fundamental insights into the nature of your mind, insights that change your whole approach to life. Sometimes I've been asked if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self, what would you say? Well, waking up is my long form answer to that question. And while the app is appropriate for people who have never meditated before, the truth is, I'm also teaching things that I didn't understand, even after having spent a cumulative year on Silent Retreat. There is something paradoxical, about the practice of meditation, about the whole project of trying to understand oneself for the purpose of living a better life. And in waking up, we don't shy away from this paradox. The more you examine your mind, the more you discover that there's no fixed truth to who you are as a person. And you realize that you've persisted in the same ruts year after year, for no good reason. deeper still, you discover that your very efforts to improve your experience are generally what prevents you from recognizing the depth and beauty of even the most ordinary moments in life. And you realize that to seek happiness, in all the usual ways, is to overlook it. Now.
3:38 Most people who begin practicing meditation do so for the purpose of solving some apparent problem in their lives, they're unhappy. And meditation has been recommended as a remedy. embraced as a tool. In this way, it becomes a trap. There's a better trap than most. But when practice as a method of producing more pleasant states of mind, meditation is just another way of staying asleep. The analogy to sleep and dreaming is quite literal. It is as if each of us is asleep, and dreaming that we're in a prison of some kind. And most of us are just trying to make the best of it. The crucial point is that we don't know we're dreaming. Most people don't know how much their thoughts are structuring their experience of the world. And not knowing we're dreaming. We find ourselves surrounded on all sides by things that we want, and things that we hate, and fear. We do our best to distract ourselves, of course, and happily, they gave us smartphones around 2007. And these provide endless entertainment. And meditation, among other spiritual practices is offered as a means of escaping this prison, which sounds great, right rather than accommodate ourselves to the ordinary routines of unhappiness, rather than being merely egocentric and envious of other people's Success, and endlessly worried about the future want to break out of this place all together and be free. But the problem is, this advice gets assimilated by the logic of the dream itself. Some traditions recommend that you begin sign at the bars of your cell early in the morning, when the guards are still asleep. Others offer what purports to be blueprints of the prison, so that you can begin digging a tunnel in the right direction. And many people spend their whole lives struggling to escape from a dream prison, rather than simply waking up. The truth is, is that when you really learn to meditate, you discover that you didn't have the problem that you thought you had. And then meditation, and life itself becomes a far more interesting game. And your understanding of yourself in relationship to the world fundamentally changes. The part of reality that is outside of your mind, isn't something that you ever come into direct contact with. This should indicate how important your mind is in determining the nature of your experience. Because it is the source and substance of all of your experience, realizing this is enormously empowering.
6:18 So waking up isn't about merely reducing stress, or having better relationships? I would say it's good for those things, too. It's about confronting some of the deepest questions in human life. For instance, how can we be truly happy when all that we experience quickly fades and disappears? When every desire we satisfy, or goal we achieve, reveals itself to have been a kind of Mirage? Have you noticed this? Have you noticed that you never quite arrive? What is the connection between being happier, and more fulfilled? And being a genuinely good person? How can we make sense of the fact that many great meditation teachers have created tremendous harm for their students? And just how good could human life become if we all got our head screwed on straight? How many of the world's problems will be solved by each of us becoming better people individually? And how many require systemic cultural change? What's the connection between seeing reality clearly, and being free? psychologically? How is human suffering related to not understanding what is true about the nature of our minds? Is there a connection? And how does any insight along these lines relate to our growing scientific understanding of the world? I think these are some of the most important questions human beings ever asked. So waking up isn't a mental fitness app in the usual sense. The point isn't just to add another arrow to your quiver, in your battle for self improvement. Of course, there's nothing wrong with dieting and getting in shape, and tracking your sleep, and setting goals, or doing any of the other things that people do to improve their lives. But I have much deeper interests myself, and I have much deeper hopes for you. The point of waking up is to realize specific things about the nature of your own mind that very few people ever realize, and to be changed by these discoveries. And then the point is to integrate these new ways of seeing and being with a growing commitment to making the world better than it was yesterday. So the goal of waking up is to offer a scientifically and philosophically sound response to the mystery of our being in the world. For me, this journey started years ago, and I'm still on it. And I've built waking up to the you can join me anytime you like.
0:00 In his apology, Plato attributes the following now famous words to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. Now whether or not that's strictly true, the unexamined life is certainly needlessly painful, both for oneself and for others. And painful or not. The unexamined life is certainly less interesting. We really spend our lives learning how to live. And this isn't necessarily as absurd or as tragic as it sounds. Most of us find a pattern of living that makes approximate sense. And we tinker with it for decades. If you're lucky, you'll discover that you can live more or less the way you want. But even if you're lucky, you'll find that it's possible to want the wrong things to be lowered into squandering your time and attention to be bewitched in a way, by things that don't really matter. Even if you're lucky, happiness can be surprisingly elusive. So why meditate? The basic logic is quite simple. The quality of your mind determines the quality of your life, or happiness and suffering, no matter how extreme our mental events, the mind depends upon the body, of course, and the body upon the world. But everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations, because changing how you respond to the world is often as good as changing the world. Of course, you can try to change the world, you can try to get everyone around you to behave exactly as you want. You can try to never get sick or injured, you can try to keep your favorite possessions from getting damaged or lost. But try as hard as you might. The sources of stress and disappointment and embarrassment, and self doubt will always be there. Happily, there's another game to play. And not everyone knows about it. Rather than trying to change the world. In each moment, there is another move open to you. You can look more closely at what you're doing with your own mind, and actually cease to respond to life in ways that produce needless suffering for yourself and those around you. When we're lost in thought, there are certain things we tend not to notice about the nature of our minds. For instance, every thought or feeling you've ever had, good or bad, has arisen and then passed away. The anger you felt yesterday, or a year ago, isn't here anymore. And if it arises in the next moment, based on your thinking about the past, it will once again pass away when you're no longer thinking about it. This is a profoundly important truth about the mind. And it can be absolutely liberating to understand it deeply. If you do understand it deeply. That is if you're able to pay clear attention to the arising of an emotion like anger, rather than merely think about why you have every right to be angry, it actually becomes impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments at a time. If you think you can stay angry for a day, or even an hour, without continually manufacturing this emotion, by thinking without knowing that you're thinking you are mistaken. This is an objective claim about the mechanics of your own subjectivity. And I invite you to test it. And meditation is the tool you would use to test it. Well, I can't promise that meditation will keep you from ever becoming angry again, you can learn not to stay angry, or fearful or embarrassed, etc. for very long. And when talking about the consequences of negative emotions in the real world, and in your life, the difference between moments and hours, or days and weeks, is impossible to exaggerate. This is not to say that external circumstances don't matter. But it is your mind rather than the circumstances themselves. that determines the quality of your life. Some people are content in the midst of real deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. And there are practices that allow us to break this habit of being lost in thought, and to simply become aware of our experience in the present moment. And the main one that I'm teaching in this course, is a technique known as Vipassana, which is generally translated as insight meditation. And this comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism known as the Tera vaada. The quality of mind cultivated in Vipassana practice is almost always referred to as mindfulness. There's nothing spooky about mindfulness.
4:37 It's simply a state of clear, non judgmental and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This practice has been shown to produce long lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception. And these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain. Mindfulness is now very much in vogue Of course, but it seems to me that there are still many misconceptions about it. It's often taught and marketed as though it were merely an improved version of an executive stress ball, where it is really more like the Large Hadron Collider. That is a method for making profound discoveries, in this case about the nature of our own minds. And there's nothing passive about mindfulness. You could even say that it expresses a certain kind of passion, a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in each moment. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience. It is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. One of the great strengths of this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view is that it doesn't require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of our experience in each moment. So as you progress through this course, notice that what you're being asked to do more and more is to simply recognize what is already arising in consciousness in each moment, without modifying it without grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away. In some basic sense, meditation is the act of doing less than you normally do is the act of being less distracted in the midst of everything that is already happening on its own. And once one is less distracted, one finally has a tool with which to notice truths about one's mind that otherwise would never be discovered directly.
0:00 We have this notion that mental growth stops in adulthood. You can learn new things, of course, but your mind itself doesn't improve. Or at least, that's what people seem to imagine. So we seem to view our minds as being entirely distinct from our bodies. Because we understand that physical training is real. There are people who lose 100 pounds and become competitive triathletes, right. Now, however rare, those extreme transformations are, we know that they're possible. And the rest of us pursue our own efforts at physical self improvement. On that same landscape of possibility. We can see the landmarks, in fact, they're continually advertised to us. Every month, we see a new celebrity who got in great shape for a film, for instance. So there are no secrets here. And if we don't decide to get in the best shape of our lives, starting right now, it's not because we didn't know that it was possible. But most of us are genuinely unaware that it is possible to change our minds. The concept of mental training is barely entertained. And yet there really are things we can do that lead to cognitive and emotional and, and even ethical changes that are wholly good for us. So it seems to me What we need is a new norm of human growth, where it's understood that growth is possible, and even necessary, continuously throughout life, intellectually, in our relationships, in the way we prioritize the use of our attention. At what age do we learn how to have better conversations? At what age do we learn to have better conversations with ourselves? And at what age do we learn that any conversation with oneself, the very structure of our thinking, is, in fact, based on an illusion that creates so much suffering for us. Now, of course, there are many components to live in an examined life. And there's no single way of thinking or use of attention, that accomplishes everything we want. But meditation, real meditation is an essential piece here. And the fact that none of us are told this in school, or by our doctors, indicates nothing more than a cultural blind spot. It used to be the physical exercise was something that only a very strange person would pursue deliberately. And smoking was considered a healthy habit. There were actually television ads in the 40s and 50s, showing doctors smoking in their offices. And the ads claimed that in a national survey of doctors, more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette. It's possible for an entire society, to be totally confused about something rather important. Anyone who has real experience with meditation, knows that there's something to be discovered there, that they were missing. And it's something that most people are still missing. And the fact that most people don't know they're missing, it doesn't make it any less of a problem for them or for the rest of society. Once you know how to meditate, you see that more or less all of the world's chaos, apart from natural disasters, is born of our lack of insight into our mental lives. All the conflict between people and all the pointless suffering, it causes all the disorder in people's lives born of their own misbehavior. These are symptoms of people's minds, being totally out of control. The next time something happens in your life that makes you angry, or afraid, or sad. How long will you spend locked in the prison of one of those emotions? And what will you do their? What indelible mark might you make in your life, or in our world, on the basis of one of those emotions? One benefit that people get from learning to meditate is the ability to simply let go of negative emotions. You can decide how long you want to stay angry for. Right That's a superpower. When you look at what's happening in the world. You can get off the ride before you say or do something stupid that you'll later regret and negative emotions aside. Have you noticed how fragmented your attention has become?
4:51 Have you noticed how hard it is to sit down and read a book for an hour? When was the last time you read a book for an hour without checking your email or social media. There's a multi front war being fought for our attention. And most of us are losing it. Have you seen that people staggering around with their smartphones, even crossing the street while texting, literally stepping in front of traffic without looking up? Have you seen parents around their kids? visibly tethered to this digital leash? Are you one of these parents? There was a recent photo exhibit that was rather brilliant where a photographer captured people using their smartphones. But then remove the phones from their hands. See, see these images of people in various situations in life while staring vacantly into their open palms. It's worth thinking about this psychological experiment we're performing on ourselves. You will not learn to meditate by accident. And you won't learn it by jogging or hiking or playing music, or doing any of the other things you do to feel good. Paradoxically, once you know how to meditate, you can experience the same insights into the nature of your mind while jogging and hiking and playing music, and doing all the other things you like to do. But you're very unlikely to have these insights and experience the associated change in your perception of yourself and the world without explicitly learning the practice of meditation