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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.
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I woke up the other day in a truly lousy mood, and was immediately hit with several small problems in my inbox, which magnified by my mood struck me as minor emergencies. And later that day at lunch with a friend, I began to complain about these problems. And my friends had two things that were extraordinarily wise. Here, you'll see the psychological value of being in good company, but also the value of being someone who's committed to seeing his mind and life in a certain way. So after hearing me out, the first thing she said was, well, none of these problems seem that big, right, you can easily deal with these things. So the question is, do you really want to be this stressed out right now? Now, of course, that was a rhetorical question. She knew the answer was no. And she was simply reminding me that it was possible for me to be mindful of how my thoughts and emotions were arising in that moment, like a perpetual motion machine of dissatisfaction. She was reminding me that I could give them space. And that it was possible to achieve real equanimity in the present, whatever these problems were. But of course, if you don't know how to meditate, you can't really do that. You have to find some way to think yourself into a new state of mind, you have to begin solving the problems. Otherwise, you can't get off the ride. But if you can be mindful, you can change your state before you solve your problem, or apparent problem, before you think your way through to a place of optimism about the future. So the fact that I wasn't paying close attention to the mechanics of my own mind, was my real problem. In that moment, I was the problem. What I was doing with my attention, was the real proximate cause of my unhappiness. And my unhappiness was what was motivating me in that moment, to brood about my problems. But then she addressed my situation on a conceptual level, as well, which is often even more useful. Because simply reminding someone to be mindful, doesn't prevent him from falling back into the same pattern of thinking a minute or an hour later, finding a new framework in which to think about a problem can. So she said, What are you really expecting to have no more problems? At some point in your life, you're just going to wake up one morning, and none of this would be happening, there'd be nothing on your to do list? Do you actually want nothing on your to do list? Life is mostly about solving problems. And you can solve these. So my problem more than anything else, was that I was treating problems themselves as anomalies, I was tacitly assuming that I should be able to get rid of all my problems, and avoid any new ones. Even though this sounds ridiculous, that was implicit to my thinking, and to my emotional life, to the way I was meeting each new problem. But of course, I can never get to a place where problems stop appearing. And neither can you. Life is an unending series of complications. So it doesn't make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one. The magnitude of the problem might surprise you. But the fact that new complications in your life are arising, hour by hour is absolutely to be expected. Very soon, some machine that you're relying on to do your work, or to keep you comfortable, is going to break this is guaranteed to happen. You're also going to catch a cold in the not too distant future. And your plane will be late or your luggage will get lost. At some point you will injure your knee and need to see a doctor for it. It can't be any other way. Really, it can't be any other way. And the expectation that it can or should be some other way, is a great source of unnecessary suffering. suffering that actually makes it harder to solve the problems we happen to be faced with. Ironically, this is a problem that you can solve. And you can do that by expecting more problems to arise every day of your life. It's like you're playing a video game. Did you expect that there would be some incredibly boring level of this video game without problems? This is the game we call existence. Problems continually arise. So Enjoy them.
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What is the point of living an examined life? Why practice meditation, or refine one's ethics? or spend any time at all trying to implement a philosophy of life? Well, one answer is to live without regret. And I think this does frame the project pretty well. Of course, most of us can only aspire to feel that we are using our time that wisely. But we should, we should keep this aspiration in mind. And it should guide us, the more you experience your mind at its best, at its most open and clear, the more you'll notice your failure to truly live from that place. Even with the people you love, most life can begin to seem like a nearly unbroken string of missed opportunities, the distance between who you are by tendancy moment to moment, and who you want to be, who you know, you can be, indeed, who you truly are, can be very painful to experience. But I would encourage you not to get stuck in that place. Regret shouldn't become a sinkhole in which you merely contemplate your failures to no good end. You need to use regret to strengthen your commitment to being free. Yes, you failed a moment ago, there was that awkward conversation with your sister about how she's raising her kids, you probably didn't have to go there, right. But you really are free to begin again in this moment. Even while she still has that look on her face, you are utterly free to begin again, as the waking from a dream, just drop your reactivity entirely. Become weightless, like you just jumped out of a plane, freefall through yourself through the energy of awkwardness and contraction. Just rest his consciousness in this moment. And then when you seize up again, mere moments from now, why did you have to make that dumb joke, no one laughed, literally no one. And now completely surrender again in this moment. Just give up the war. This is how you free your attention. At the level of experience, there is only consciousness and its contents. And the practice is simply to recognize that again and again. And recognize to that everyone is merely striving to be happy, all the while chattering to themselves in such a way as to deny happiness any place to land, just for a moment, feel compassion for this whole catastrophe. This next moment is as good an opportunity as you will ever have to truly accept life as it is. Regret can be like contemplating death. It can make you morbid, or it can energize you, and help you get your priorities straight. Regret can seem unrelated to gratitude, or even seem like it's opposite, but they're really connected. In fact, regret can be a springboard into gratitude in nearly every moment, you can actually feel grateful to see your missteps and learn from them. And you can feel grateful to have a chance to start again in this moment. And you can feel this immediately. This really is a game of attention. Use attention. Well, you'll experience real tranquility and ease of being. And if you didn't experience it a moment ago, you can experience it now. But use attention foolishly. And you'll be miserable. Even when everything is good. Again, you have this moment. And this. Enjoy the process. Commit right now to enjoying the process. That really is the only goal. The goal is now. And to do this, you need to forgive yourself every failure. Even now you'll be born away by thought. recognize it and keep practicing. Not just in formal meditation, or when listening to this app, but in every other moment.
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And notice those moments where you're taking a little extra care actually mattered where you caught a fleeting look on someone's face, and asked a question that took the conversation in a new direction. Notice when you are able to pause for just an extra beat or two. Before vomiting your ill formed opinions about trade with China, all over your friends. Notice the incremental gains in wisdom and self awareness and free attention and enjoy them even when they reveal signs of your mind that are less than flattering. The truth is living an examined life is one insult after another. You have to maintain your sense of humor. And realize too that you aren't just practicing for yourself. You are practicing for others to be better company for them in the end. You want to be a better spouse, or parent, or colleague, or friend, or all of these things. The growth of wisdom is not a solitary endeavor. So you know, you want to minimize regret, you want to minimize the distance between how you are living, and how you will wish you had lived at the end of each day, and week, and month, and year, and at the end of your life. And the point is, no one can do this for you. And what's more, you must decide to do it. Because you're very unlikely to do this naturally, habitually, by tendency. And when you lose sight of this project, because old habits have totally taken over your life, you must decide to engage it all over again, living in the general vicinity of the present moment isn't good enough. And sort of maintaining your deepest values isn't good enough, either? How could it be? There really is no reason to hedge your bet here. The future doesn't have to be uncertain. I mean, ask yourself, do you think you're going to brush your teeth every day for the rest of your life? And barring some crazy emergency? You will, right? Can you make the same decision about meditation practice. Of course, the goal with meditation isn't to become a meditator, or have a meditation practice is to recognize the way the mind always already is. And to have the whole of one's life permeated by this recognition. But if you aren't tending to do this, when you're working, or watching television, or talking to your friends, then you need to train deliberately, until recognizing the nature of mind becomes effortless. And there really is a danger of falling oneself here, especially when one has made some progress in the practice. It's entirely possible to imagine that want to somehow beyond the need for practice. When you can recognize the nature of consciousness anywhere, anytime, and often do it. It's still possible to imagine that one is doing this much more than one is in fact, and to get lazy, and to have old habits reassert themselves, and then to squander your attention in 1000, ordinary ways, and in ways that you will live to regret. The greatest teachers I ever met, who spent decades on formal retreat, still practice meditation in their daily lives. The greatest athletes still practice their sports. If LeBron James still practices basketball, how likely is it that you have gone beyond the need of practice? So ask yourself, will you commit to doing this until there really is no difference between your clearest moments of insight and tranquility and the rest of your life? Please answer this question for yourself.