PNTV: Waking Up by Sam Harris (#260)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, Waking up by Sam Harris. Waking Up Sam Harris Subtitle A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion Now, Sam Harris is part philosopher, part neuroscientist. He got his PhD from UCLA and part contemplative seeker. He spent two years of his life in silent meditation. In aggregate, days and weeks and months at a time, up to two hours total, contemplating his consciousness and other big ideas. Exciting book. I've been told to read that for a while now by many of our members.

Thank you for the recommendation and, and.

I'm excited to share some of my favorite big ideas. So we've got the Philosopher's Note, bunch of big ideas, five of my favorites here. We're going to start with M and M, M and M. Mindfulness and meditation. But before we do that, we'll address the kind of highest level intention of this book, the purpose of the book. Sam Harris is a very, very rational guy, atheist who practices spirituality. Very cool combination. What he tries to do with this book is bring a rational conversation to spirituality. Kind of move beyond the dogma and superstition of religion and the woo woo ness, if you will, of a lot of New Age spirituality. How do we talk about spirituality rationally? Because a lot of people who are into science and kind of secular culture don't see the possibilities of spirituality. And those in the religious and New age camps tend to get a little bit sideways in their own way. So his whole intention was let's talk about spirituality rationally with that in mind. Two things we want to think about. Mindfulness and meditation. M and M. Mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness he defines beautifully as essentially clear awareness. The root of the word mindfulness comes from a Pali word, sati, which apparently has a lot of different meanings. But for our purposes it's clear awareness, non judgmental, clear, sustained attention on the contents of our consciousness. That's mindfulness. When you can actually step out of the discursive pattern of thinking that we all have normal state of the human brain, right? Step out of that, look at those thoughts and realize you are not those thoughts. This is the illusion of the self. We think that there is this self inside our head or wherever, right? That is separate from everything else. He says, look, now if you actually follow your thoughts, you see that they come and they go, they come and they go. You feel this way, then you feel that way. And suffering occurs when we think that we are our thoughts. And the trick is, and what mindfulness practice helps us do is to clearly bring awareness to this pattern, break these habits. And how do you do that? You do that via meditation. As we sit and practice meditation, he gives a guide on how to do that. We literally, like a weightlifter going to the gym, build our capacity to get out of our discursive thoughts and see it, see it. And the freedom exists here in that shift to the observer perspective, a pure consciousness perspective, whatever you want to call it, where you're not being thrown around by repetitive discursive thinking, chasing the good, avoiding the bad, etc. We can see, wow, that's just how the human mind works.

Fascinating.

Let me connect to something bigger than that and enjoy my life a lot more. He talks about how to meditate. He also describes the fact that describing how to meditate is actually reasonably straightforward. Basic idea, sit in a comfortable position with your spine straight, whether that's in a chair or cross legged or whatever works for you. Settle down, breathe deeply, notice your breath. Don't necessarily try to change it, but notice your breath. And then bring your attention to your breath. And then when your mind wanders, bring your mind back to your breath and repeat that until you can get to a point where you sit in this beautiful spaciousness of presence without this monkey mind chasing you around. He says describing that's a lot easier than doing it. He says it's kind of like telling someone how to tightrope walk, right? You can basically describe that very easily. You can say, look, okay, so find a cable that's strong enough to support your weight, step on it, put one foot in front of the other and go to the other side, and then go back to the other side and don't fall. That's how you tightrope one. Well, it's a lot easier to describe how to do it than to actually do it. Same thing with meditation. As anyone who's meditated before knows, our minds immediately go into positive or negative thinking, whatever. So we want to cultivate the practice of bringing ourselves to this awareness again and again and again, and noticing how often we get distracted in these monkey thoughts. Which would be another M here. Mindfulness meditation and monkeys second big idea. So what's the goal of meditation? Mindfulness, of course. But you think about the ultimate goal. A lot of times people conceive of it as kind of enlightenment. Right? He describes it as imperturbable. Well, being quoting Matthew Ricard, who we profiled in why Meditate? We're also going to feature his book Happiness. The French Monk Extraordinary Meditator. Right. Imperturbable well being. Well, Sam says for most of us, that's a distant goal, imperturbable, never shaken. He says what we really want to focus on is quickly getting back to a state of being healthy. Right? A state of well being. Not necessarily imperturbable, but when we are perturbed, we know how to get back quickly. It's kind of like the equanimity game that I talked about that Marcus Aurelius described. Here's your equanimity. You're feeling good, you're balanced, your well being is high, you get knocked off. Okay? How quickly can you get back to equanimity, back to center, knocked off again, get back. We want to develop what Sam calls an increasingly healthy mind. If the far goal is imperturbable well being, that state of enlightenment, okay, the near goal is increasingly healthy mind. That's what we want to do today. Can we get our mind just a little bit healthier than it was yesterday? The 4% gain that we talk about a lot or the 5% compounded over time equals extraordinary long term gains. But if you're obsessed about being perfect, what are you going to do? You're going to give up and be burned out? Just focus on creating an increasingly healthy mind. That's how we want to approach it. And then the third big idea, think about the fact that spiritual development occurs in stages. So we use this little diagram a lot, right? So we've got our kind of self actualization right here.

Right?

And we've got our foundation here. What we're talking about with this spirituality conversation is actually moving beyond self actualization to a state of self transcendence where you actually can let go of the sense of self and be connected to something much bigger. And Sam describes this as a very sophisticated challenge. And to put it briefly, if you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning or going to bed early at night, turning off your electronics, you're just compulsively driven to stay up late and you don't floss. Right. Or do the other things you think you need to do. And then you can compound that throughout the day. If you can't do that in a consistent fashion, you're going to have a really hard time transcending the self. And he says, look, in order to move beyond the conventional self, you first need to have a healthy relationship to the conventional self. And I love the way he makes the distinction. We talk about it a little bit more in the note, but I think a lot of spiritual aspirants oftentimes forget this fact and they try to live here. And you might have a state experience of being super fired up or super connected to something bigger than yourself. But there's a big difference between having that fleeting, ephemeral recognition of oneness and actually living from that stage of development. So we need to honor the fact that our evolution goes through stages of development, spiritual evolution. He says, Just like if you want to do higher forms of math, you've first got to master algebra. If you want to write really well, first you need to master basic language. If you want to get to this point of transcending the self and living from a beautiful state of oneness and imperturbability. There's a heck of a word. First you need to lay a really solid foundation. Then get yourself up to a place of actualization such that you can transcend that. And then, of course, you don't need to wait to practice that state. That's what our meditation is and what our moment to moment existence gives us an opportunity to practice. But remember, stages are important. A foundation is really important to anything that we want to build. 4th big idea here is another distinction that I love. He says he likes to think about his mind as a video game. And he often laughs at how quickly his mind goes from happiness to not so happy. He shares a bunch of great stories. He's simultaneously super smart and super humble and committed to this path, but doesn't take himself too seriously and recognizes all the times that he falls short and talks about. It's like a video game where if you're playing a video game, you can play it intelligently. And when you get to a monster, you can figure out, well, how do I get around that monster, right, and do something different? Don't do the exact same thing and get killed every single time by the exact same monster at the exact same time. That makes no sense, right? But that's what we do. It's as if we live our lives where we let the same monster in the same situation create suffering in our lives. And he says, look, let's play this game of life intelligently, and let's get a little bit better as we go through round and round around. So identify what your monster is, bring some clear awareness, some mindfulness to that moment, and choose a better response. Which leads us to our final big idea here, which is choice. So ultimately, all of this leads us to a place where we can move beyond the illusion of this sense of self that we've constructed from all of our thoughts. And we think that we are just our thoughts moving to a state where we can observe these thoughts, then we're not driven by them. And then we create a gap between stimulus and response, which we've talked about a lot. Viktor Frankl tells us that our freedom exists here in the gap between stimulus. Life happens in our response. What we want to do is create the capacity to have a choice here. But if all we do is allow our thoughts to run the show, it's like boom, boom, stimulus, response, stimulus response. And then we aren't even aware of the fact that we're being driven by these habitual thoughts and behaviors because we haven't cultivated the clear awareness, the mindfulness to observe the whole process and then practice that which gives us an opportunity to live with less suffering. So there you go. Let's cultivate choice. Let's beat those monsters. Whatever your monster is in your life, now's a good time to figure out a way to go to the next level, have a higher level challenge than the one that's been beating you up for however many days or months or years or decades or whatever. Recognize we all go through stages of development. If we want to do the hardest thing we're going to do, one of the most sophisticated things we're ever going to do is to actually have sustained clear awareness, to look at our contents of consciousness and be able to return to equanimity quickly. That's hard to do and that requires a dedication to the basic physical, mental, emotional, ethical foundations of a mature human being. So invest your energy there as well. Increasingly healthy mind. We're not trying to get to a place where we're exonerated from all future work, as the tools guys put it. This beautiful state of nirvana, of enlightenment where we never have any challenges. Good luck with that. Let's just become increasingly healthier in our minds day by day by day. That's exciting when it's compounded mindfulness meditation and waking up. I hope you enjoyed appreciated this great book. I really, really enjoyed it actually. It's a great, great, great, as I said in the introduction, rational look at spirituality. He playfully and strongly challenges, as you know, if you know his work in other contexts, both religion and New Age woo wooness. So if you kind of get the kind of not so popular or whatever you want to call it, positive vibes on either one of those domains, you'll enjoy his perspective. And I hope you enjoyed this. What was the big idea that jumped out? How are you going to apply it to your life? Get on that and have another awesome day. Look forward to sharing more. See you.

Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode.

A lot of people don't know all.

The stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube, so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. 10 bucks a month Join the Optimal Living Membership program. You get Instant Access to 250 Philosopher's Notes on some of the best optimal living books out there. Old school classics, Positive Psychology, Modern stuff, Mindfulness, Peak Performance, purpose, neuroscience, wealth, etc. What you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. Joseph Campbell, you want to figure out how to live your hero's journey? Well, this is a great place to start. I basically pull out my favorite big ideas, riff on them, connect them to other books and other ideas and help you apply this wisdom to your life today. That's what the PDF looks like again. We have 250 of these on all these different great books.

And then I record those PDFs as.

An MP3 so you can listen to that MP3 while you're on a walk or working out or doing some errands or whatever that is. Philosopher's Notes.

A lot going on there.

And then in addition to Philosopher's Notes, you get access to Optimal Living classes. Optimal Living 101 idea here is that all those great teachers come back to the same big ideas again and again and again. I distill those ideas into classes. Super practical, fun, inspiring classes ranging from Habits101, Confidence101, Getting Stuff Done101, Meditation101, instant access to all those classes and then Future classes include Relationships 101 Energy 101 Purpose 101 business goals, etc. Those are our full length classes. And then I create micro classes. Two to three to five minute little bursts of wisdom on my favorite great ideas from these great books across the domain that you want to optimize in your life. So we have dozens of these so far. I create 50 new micro classes every month and 10 new philosopher's notes every month for 10 bucks a month. So we're blessed to have thousands of members who are enjoying the program and sharing some incredibly kind words with us. And super simple. 10 bucks a month cancel anytime would be honored to be a bigger part of your life, and I appreciate your support. And here's to optimizing and actualizing.