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Hi, this is Sam Harris. In this collection of lessons, I address many everyday concepts and experiences, things like regret, and gratitude, and meaning and loss. Ideally, these lessons will help you further dissolve the boundary between formal practice and the rest of your life. In fact, you might find it helpful to listen to them in between formal sessions of meditation. In this way, theory and practice can become mutually reinforcing. The goal of these sessions is to learn how to clearly see whatever circumstance you're in. Whether you're feeling worried, or just rushing through your day, or confronting an important experience of loss, whatever is happening, the goal is to use these experiences as a basis for insight. That way, you'll find that meditation really isn't separate from the rest of life, and that you're growing in wisdom and self awareness, and free attention, even as you do other things. Whether you're brand new to meditation or have been practicing for years, I think you'll find something valuable in these sessions. They're not organized sequentially, so there's no need to listen to them in order. You can just choose based on what looks most interesting. I really enjoy creating these lessons and I hope you find them useful.
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I'm going to talk today about the problem of boredom. Now it's true, we encounter boredom, less and less with all of our gadgets and with the totality of human knowledge and artistic output always available to us. When you can always hear your favorite song or watch a great film, or read a great book, or text a friend. Because you can do all of these things with a device that you have at your side, 24 hours a day, you might successfully avoid boredom for the rest of your life. But you might also never discover what's on the other side of boredom. And you might not recognize the price you're paying for being compelled to distract yourself for having lost or having simply never acquired a capacity for doing nothing, or productive capacity for doing nothing. Once you learn to meditate, you realize that boredom is simply a failure to pay attention. If something as simple and repetitive as breathing can become a source of blissful contemplation, and it can. And if the feeling of boredom itself can become an object of intense interest. And it can, there's no way to be bored if you're paying close attention to your experience. So training and meditation is the true cure for boredom is a kind of permanent inoculation. Once you learn how to meditate, you will never be truly bored again. Now, this isn't to say that you won't still make choices in life, certain activities might still feel like a waste of time, and they might be a waste of time. Given all the other things you could do. You might still walk out of a movie or stop reading a book because it's, quote, boring. But when left alone with yourself, how do you feel? Are you desperate to be distracted by some stimulus? Or can you find a deep feeling of well being as an intrinsic property of just being conscious? the gulf between these two conditions is enormous. And in my experience, only meditation allows us to reliably span it. In the beginning of my book waking up, I described my most memorable experience of suffering the costs of not knowing how to meditate. I'll read you that first page because it's relevant here. I once participated in a 23 day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world's mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day. What was in essence a forced march through hundreds of miles of back country culminated in a ritual known as the solo, where we were finally permitted to rest alone on the outskirts of a gorgeous Alpine Lake for three days of fasting and contemplation. I had just turned 16 and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother's womb. It proved a sufficient provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the lake. The promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages in my journal not with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher or mystic, but with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and Starlight with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence to be a source of perfect misery, for which I could see not so much a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters home in their plain toughness and self pity rivaled any written at Shiloh or go lipoly. So I was more than a little surprise when several members of our party most of whom were a decade older than I describe their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply didn't know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could someone's happiness increase, when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me, only my life did. And I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to change. Okay, so that that's how the book starts. And that is really, although I didn't know it at the time, how my interest in esoteric things like meditation started, I mean that that was a very clear reference point, for me, the consequences of having an untrained mind and have seen no alternative, but to be continuously lost in thought. Throughout this course, I'm going to talk about many of the insights that can come as one learns to meditate insights about the nature of consciousness and the self, and the ways in which a growing understanding of the mind connects to ethics. But I think the deepest reason to learn this practice is to deepen one's wisdom and well being and that really comes down to not suffering unnecessarily. It comes down to the simple ability to be able to recognize one's thoughts as thoughts as appearances in consciousness, and to no longer be their mirror captive. But we'll talk more about that later on.
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I'd like you to take a moment to think about all the things in this life that you will experience for the last time. Of course, there will come a day when you will die, and then everything will have been done for the last time. But long before you die, you will cease to have certain experiences, experiences that you surely take for granted. Now. If you're a parent, when is the last time you will pick up your child or tuck her into bed, or read her story. Our youngest daughter still says amels instead of animals. And though I'm a stickler for words, I am not correcting her. Each one of those is priceless. Now, thinking in this way, lends a poignancy to everything, even to things that you don't like. Again, let's say you're a new parent, and you're getting woken up several times a night by your baby. That's brutal. But there will be a last time. And knowing that can change your experience in the moment. There's something sweet, even about this experience, it's possible that you will miss this. We do everything a finite number of times. And yet we tend to take even beautiful moments for granted. And the rest of the time we're just trying to get through stuff. You're just trying to get to the end of whatever experience you're having. Tim urban, who writes this wonderful blog titled Wait, but why often touches this topic. He actually publishes a poster, which represents 90 years of life in weeks. Each line has 52 squares. And there are 90 lines on a single page. And the scale is frankly, a little alarming to contemplate. Each week is a significant piece of 90 years. And you can put your finger on the current week in your life. You can see where you are. And then of course, you realize you have no assurance of how many weeks you have left. Assuming that you have 90 years, certainly 90 good years is generally not a safe assumption. What you can know, however, is that each time you do something pleasant or unpleasant, that is one last time you will do it. And there will come a time when you will have done something the final time. And you will rarely know when that is. For instance, I used to love to ski and I now haven't skied and well over a decade. Will I ever ski again. I have no idea. But I can assure you that the last time I took off my skis, I was not even dimly aware of the possibility that it might be the last time right that I might live for many, many more years. And yet this stood a good chance of being the last time I would ever ski. When is the last time you swam in the ocean. Or when camping? When is the last time you took a walk just to take a walk. as you go about your day today. Consider everything you're doing is like this. Everything represents a finite opportunity to savor your life. On some level, everything is precious. And if it doesn't seem that way, I think you'll find that paying more attention can make it seem that way. Attention really is your true source of wealth, even more than time, right? Because you can waste time being distracted. So this is just to urge you to take a little more care. When you meet someone for the first time and you shake their hand, pay a little more attention. When you thank somebody for something, mean it a little more. Connect with your life. And mindfulness is the tool that allows you to do that. Because the only alternative is to be lost in thought. And every time you notice that you're lost, that you're distracted by a thought about the past or the future. And you come back. You are training your mind. And it may feel like an effort at first. But eventually it's like continually waking up from a dream and ask yourself how much effort does that take?
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I'd like to talk for a few minutes about gratitude. There's now a lot of research to suggest that gratitude is good for us. No surprise there. And as an emotion, it is very easy to invoke. Unless you are living the worst possible life, it should be easy to find something for which you're grateful. And it can be very skillful and wise to do this. Now, one reflection I find myself doing, when I'm in some ordinary contracted state of mind, let's say I'm stressed out by something not going well. I'm reacting to some hassle, I could be caught in traffic and late for an appointment. I sometimes think of bad things that haven't happened to me, I might think that I haven't been diagnosed with a fatal illness. I'm not caught in a war zone. And I think of all the people on earth in that moment, who are suffering, those sorts of dislocations in their lives. And then I reflect that if I were in their shoes, I would be desperate to get back to precisely the situation. I'm now in, just stuck in traffic and late for an appointment. But without any real care in the world. I noticed this at dinner the other night with my family, everyone seemed to be in a fairly mediocre frame of mind. We were all in some way disgruntled or stressed out, I had a million things I was thinking about. And I suddenly noticed how little joy we were all taking in one another's company. And then I thought, if I had died yesterday, and could have the opportunity to be back with my family. I thought of how much I would savor this moment right now. And it totally transformed my mood. It gave me instantaneous access to my best self, and to a feeling of pure gratitude for the people in my life. Just think of what it would be like to lose everything, and then be restored to the moment you're now in. However ordinary. You can reboot your mind in this way. And it need not take any time. The truth is you know exactly what it's like to feel overwhelming gratitude for your life. And if you have the freedom and the free attention to listen to this lesson right now, you are in an unusual situation. There are at least a billion people on earth at this moment. Who would consider their prayers answered, if they could trade places with you. There at least a billion people who are suffering debilitating pain, or political oppression, or the acute stages of bereavement, to have your health even just sort of, to have friends, even only a few to have hobbies, or interests and the freedom to pursue them to have spent this day free from some terrifying encounter with chaos is to be lucky. Just look around you and take a moment to feel how lucky you are. You get another day to live on this earth. Enjoy it.