Joe Rogan asks Sam Harris & Dan Harris about Mediation

Hello freak bitches. Now I want to switch gears a little bit. It's not totally related, but it is in somewhat, in some ways, headspace. Talking about mindsets and talking about, like we've brought this up but really haven't delved into it much at all, about meditation. And about how much it's affected you and how it got you back on track and I know that you're a big proponent of it. I am as well, although I think I'd probably do it differently than you guys do. I'd love to hear how you do it. I use an isolation tank. Oh really? Like a sensory deprivation tank. Yeah. And I do a lot of yoga. Those are two big ones for me. I think those alone have straightened out my brain in a great way. Yoga in particular. Yoga because it's not... Yoga forces you to do it. You know, like if you're either doing it or you're not doing it, there's no room for distraction. You know, you're essentially forced to deal with what these poses require of you. And I think that in doing so and having a singular focus of trying to maintain your balance and stretch and extend and do all these different things while you do it, and then concentrating almost entirely on your breath, which is a big factor in yoga. It has remarkable brain scrubbing attributes. I would say, and I don't know much... Before I say this, let me just ask, what are you doing in the isolation tank? What are you doing in your mind? Well, you know, I use it for a bunch of different ways. I don't use it as much as I should, honestly. But I concentrate on... Sometimes I go in there with an idea, like I'll concentrate on material that I'm working on, or maybe jujitsu techniques that I'm having problems with, or some other things that I'm dealing with, you know, any sort of issues that I have. Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I just go in there and chill out and relax and breathe and concentrate. There's a lot of physical things that happen inside the tank. There's the amount of magnesium that's in the water because it's Epsom salts. It's really good for you physically. It's very good for the muscles. It loosens you up and relaxes you, and that eliminates a lot of stress. And that physical elimination of stress allows the brain to function with just less pressure and allows you to relax more. It puts things in perspective better. And it also gives you this environment that's not available anywhere else on the planet, this weightless, floating, disconnected from your body environment. You don't hear anything, you don't see anything, you don't feel anything, you feel like you're weightless. You have this sensation of flying because you're totally weightless in the dark. You open your eyes, you don't see anything. You close your eyes, it's exactly the same. The water's the same temperature as your skin, so you don't feel the water, and you're floating. I'll say this. I'm not sure this is going to go down. I actually don't have any questions about the benefits of being in an isolation tank, even though I don't know too much about it. And I also think yoga is great, although I don't do much of it myself. I think, though, that there may actually be a difference between those two activities and meditation. Because there's a kind of, this is a highfalutin term, metacognition, sort of knowing what you know or knowing that you're thinking. That happens in the kind of mindfulness meditation of which Sam and I are proponents, that I think is a different thing. Where you're seeing, and I'll just try to put this in English, when you're meditating the way we do, you're seeing how crazy you are. You're seeing your fucking nuts. And that actually has a real value. A systematic collision with the asshole in your head has a real value. Because when the asshole offers you up a shitty suggestion in the rest of your life, which is basically its job, like, oh yeah, you should eat the 17th cookie or say the thing that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever, you're better able to resist it. So what, like, what do you do? So, I mean, the basic steps of mindfulness meditation are to sit, most people close their eyes, you bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath. Just the, you're not thinking about your breath, you're just feeling the raw data of the physical sensations. And then the third step is the biggie, which is, as soon as you try to do this, your mind's going to go bonkers. You're going to start thinking about, you know, what's for lunch, do I need a haircut? Where do gerbils run wild? Whatever. Blah, blah, blah. You're just going to notice, oh, my mind's going crazy right now. But that noticing is the key moment, is in fact the victory. It's interesting because this is when most people think they've failed, that, oh, I can't meditate because I can't clear my mind. This is the biggest misconception about meditation. You do not need to clear your mind. That's impossible, unless you're enlightened or dead. The whole goal is just to notice when you become distracted and start again, you return your attention to your breath, and you just do that a million times. And every time you catch yourself wandering and go back to your breath, it's a bicep curl for your brain. It changes your brain. And that, over time, creates the kind of meta-cognition I was discussing before, where you see that you're a Homo sapien sapien. In other words, that's how we're classified as a species, the one who thinks and knows he or she thinks. And that just that knowing that you have this voice in your head, as Sam likes to joke, he feels like when he thinks about the voice in his head, he feels like he's been hijacked by the most boring person alive. Just says the same shit over and over, a joke that I steal from him all the time. That is enormously powerful because then you are not held hostage by this voice. A similar thing happens in the tank. I do a form of meditation in the tank sometimes when I go in there without an idea, like if I'm not working on material or anything else, where I just concentrate on my breath in through the nose, out through the mouth, and I just literally concentrate on the breath and the same thing happens. That's meditation. Yeah. That's meditation. It's not similar. It's the exact same thing. The difference is in the tank, after a while, after about 20 minutes or so, that breaks loose to psychedelic states. Have you ever combined the tank with psychedelics or altered states? Yeah. Yeah. It's for trippy. LSD or mushrooms? Mushrooms. Mushrooms. But the big one is edible pot. Edible pot seems to be as strong as anything in there. I eat enough pot where I'm convinced I'm going to die and then I climb in there. Every time I do it, I go, don't do that again because I just get out so terrified. What's your motivation when you're eating the pot and climbing into the tank? Let's see what happens. Yeah, just be scared. Be terrified. Really? Yeah, because nothing ever happens. You never die. But, God damn, you're just convinced that the universe is imploding around you. So it usually has the character of fear being a major part of it? It's part of it. But it's also not embracing the fear, not letting the fear run rampant and just sort of relaxing and giving in to the vulnerability, the finite nature of your existence, and just breathing and concentrating and letting the dance take place. Because there's some sort of a weird... One of the things that there's a big misconception about when it comes to edible pot is that edible pot is like smoking pot. It's an entirely different process physiologically. The time course is very different too. You can stay stoned for three days. Yeah, you could fuck up and eat too many brownies and you'll be gone for a long time. That sounds miserable. It is, but it's not because you get something out of it when it's over. The process is excruciating, but when you come out of it, you just feel so happy. Feel so happy it's over. Yeah, it's like the joke about the dude who's banging his head up against the wall and somebody says, why are you doing that? He says, because it feels so good when I stop. In a way, but there's no physical damage banging your head up against the wall. You're going to hurt yourself. This is true. Yeah, I don't know. I think there seems like there might be easier ways to get to the same wisdom. Maybe, but I think there's also creativity that gets inspired by the edible pot. Something called 11 hydroxy metabolite that your body produces. It's so different than most people when they eat pot. They think they've been dosed. Like anybody who's smoked pot before and then you give them a brownie, they think, oh my God, there's something in that. And they're convinced because reality itself just seems like it just dissolves. And especially inside the tank, there's something about the tank environment that produces in the absence of any external stimuli, your brain becomes sort of supercharged. Because what you're trying to do when you're just sitting down and concentrating and relaxing is you're trying to focus on your thoughts, but you're still aware of your body. You're still aware of your elbows touching this desk, your butt touching the chair. There's all these different factors that are, that are, there's stimuli that's coming into your senses. Whereas in the tank, there's none of that virtually. It's almost completely eliminated. There's some, but you can, you can, you can phase that stuff out. Like you could still feel the water a little bit. If you think about it, you could still, sometimes you bump into the wall and you have to like center yourself and you have to like relax again and make sure you're not moving so you don't touch things, which can kind of dissolve the experience. There are experiences in meditation where you have that same experience where you lose your sense of the body, but it, that usually comes with more concentration. You have to be very concentrated on them. I feel like you would have that experience and it would be even more intense if you did the exact same thing that you do outside the tank in the tank. I don't think you need any psychedelics in the tank. It's one thing I tell people when they ask me, should I get high before I do it? I'm like, no, just do it. Just do it. If you decide after a while, have you done it three or four times? You're like, I wonder what it's like if I just take a little bit of a hit of pot and see where it takes me. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not going to hurt you. You know, if you're a type of person in George marijuana or whatever, but the tank alone by itself, just the absence of sensory input, your brain goes to a very, very different place. As long as you can relax, as long as you don't think too much about the fact that you're in the tank, just concentrate entirely on your thoughts, entirely on your breath. And again, let all those crazy, like where do hamsters live? Like all that shit. Let all that stuff run wild through your mouth. But I feel like in the tank, at least that gets to a certain spot and then it stops existing. And then the psychedelic state takes over. Yeah, well, it depends on what the goal is. I think there can be many different goals of meditation or quasi-spiritual practice and they're distinct. So I mean, the center of the bullseye for me is not suffering unnecessarily. Right? So one thing that mindfulness gives you is, I mean, so it's compatible with every experience you can have. There is nothing in your experience that isn't an appropriate object of meditation. You just, most people start with the breath because it's just a very convenient thing to start with. But once you know how to do this particular practice, your goal is to just be clearly aware of whatever your experience is in each moment. So emotions arise, thoughts arise, sounds come in. Your attention is wide open to whatever your experience is. So it's not like, so nothing in principle is a distraction. I mean, you could be meditating right next to a construction site and the sound of the hammers is just as good an object of meditation as the breath or anything else. So there's nothing, everything is included. But the superpower you're after, which you actually can acquire through this practice, is to realize that virtually all of your psychological suffering, and actually, arguably, virtually all of your physical suffering, I mean, the difference between physical pain and suffering, which I mean, those two are not quite the same thing, is a matter of being lost in thought. It's a matter of thinking without knowing that you're thinking. And what mindfulness does, and really any technique of meditation ultimately should do, is teach you to break the spell of being lost in thought, and to notice a thought as a thought. I mean, the huge difference is, until you learn how to meditate or do something like meditation, you're just helplessly thinking every moment of your life. You're having a conversation with yourself. You're having content, whether it's imagistic or linguistic, pour forth into consciousness every moment, and so incessantly that you don't even notice it. It's just white noise. And not only does it completely color your experience moment to moment. So if they're angry thoughts, you're angry. If they're depressed thoughts, you're depressed. If they're sad, you're sad. So you become your thoughts, but you also feel identified. You feel that you are the thinker of your thoughts. You feel like a self. And it's completely structured by this flow of mentation every moment, and it produces everything you do. It produces all of your intentions and your goals and your actions. And he said this about me, and now I'm going to say this. It's like everything coming out of you is born of this same process. And meditation is a way of recognizing that consciousness, what you are subjectively, is this prior condition of just awareness in which everything is showing up, sounds, sensations, and thoughts. And thoughts can become just other objects of consciousness. And so to take even a very basic example of the difference between pain and suffering, you can feel very strong physical pain, unpleasant pain, and just be aware of it. The sense that it's unbearable is virtually always untrue because in that moment you've already born it. The feeling that something's unbearable is really the fear of having to experience it in the next moment in the future. Because if someone drives a nail into your knee, that sounds like it's unbearable, but every moment you're feeling it, you're bearing it. What you're thinking about is the last moment and the next moment, and you're thinking about how much, when am I going to get some relief, and what's the cure, and how badly is my knee injured. You're worried about the future continuously, and you're not noticing the automaticity of thought that is amplifying the negativity of the experience in that moment. And we all know that you can have super intense sensation which is either pleasant or unpleasant depending on the conceptual frame you've put around it. So for instance, if you had this massive sense of soreness in your shoulder, you would experience it very differently if it was A, the result of you deadlifting more than you ever had in your life and you were proud of it. B, probably cancer, and you're waiting for the biopsy results and you're worried about this is the thing that's going to kill you. Or you're getting ruffed, some deep tissue massage and it hurts like hell, but you actually totally understand the source of the pain and you know it's going to be gone the moment the guy pulls his elbow back. So it could be the exact same sensation in each one of those, but the conceptual frame you have around it totally dictates the level of psychological suffering, or it can dictate the total absence of psychological suffering. Now we were talking before the podcast started about your apps, and we were talking about the amount of different meditation exercises on the apps. What kind of different meditation exercises are there if you're talking about just concentrating on mindfulness and breathing? As it turns out, you can iterate off of that basic exercise to infinity essentially. Because you talk about not only, I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but basically the basic instructions are that we listed before you're feeling your breath coming in and then when you get lost you start again. But then you can add on to that. So one big thing to add on is something called mental noting. So you're breathing in and out, you're feeling your breath, and then you get distracted by a huge wave of anger. Generally speaking, when we get hit by a wave of anger, we just inhabit the anger. We become angry, there's no buffer between the stimulus and our response to it. But there's this little technique you can do of just making a little mental note of, oh that's anger. And that kind of objectifies the thing. It's a little bit like pressing the picture in picture button on your remote control where the story that's taken up the whole frame can be seen with some perspective. So that's just one example of the little techniques that you can add on to the basic exercise and you can go for a long time. So as we were discussing, Sam was about to start his meditation app, which is going to be called what? waking up? And I have mine, which is called 10% happier. Sam is going to be doing all the teaching on his app, and on my app, since I'm not a teacher, we have experts coming in like Joseph Goldstein, who's again a friend of both Sam and I. And each teacher has their own emphasis, and you then start talking about applied meditation. So how do I use it when we're, how do I use it in my everyday life? How do I use it if really what I want to do right now is control my eating? So meditation, for example, we have a course on the app that talks about using it to not overeat. By the way, I'm terrible at this, but you can use your ability, your mindfulness, your ability to know what's happening in your head in a given moment without getting carried away by it to not overeat. Notice, oh, I'm having this urge right now to eat as I did last night, an entire bag of malted chocolate in my hotel room. But I don't I can ride that urge and not do the thing that I know is stupid. So anyway, that's just a little taste of how you can take meditation and bring it in kind of numerous directions. Do you guys feel competitive? Both of apps? No, his isn't even out yet. No, I feel not yet. When his comes out and completely cannibalizes mine, then yeah. How happy is for me? I actually I'm 10% happy. I'll be like negative 500%. What's 10% of zero? Yeah, exactly. No, I actually think I'm of the view, you know, now that I've been in this meditation app business for a little while, I'm kind of I don't think it's Uber. I don't think the business model is that there's just one huge app that everybody uses. Maybe there's some distant, you know, second, I actually think it's more a little bit more like fast food. I think it's gonna be a bunch of big players and in you may switch back and forth. Does one need an app? No, no, no, you don't. But I mean, the thing that's useful, and it's really useful at any level of expertise in meditation, at least this kind of meditation is having someone guide you. Yeah, it's it's like a mindfulness alarm that's constantly going off or going off it, you know, periodically over the course of 10 minutes or 20 minutes or however long you're sitting. And because distraction is just continually the problem, you're either meditating or you're distracted. You're either you're either you're either aware of what's happening at that moment, or you're lost in thought. And that's true throughout your life. I mean, you're either hearing what I'm saying right now, or you're thinking about something else, and you don't know it, right? Or you're either reading the book you're intending to read, or your mind is wandering, you're gonna have to read that paragraph again. So this, this failure to concentrate this failure to be able to focus on what you're intending to focus on, is it just this, this universal problem of human consciousness. And so meditation trains that. And other benefits follow. But the having a voice in your head reminding you that you're even attempting to be meditating is very powerful, even if you're even if it's your own voice, I mean, even in when I'm recording, listening to a meditation that I recorded, just my own voice, remember, reminding me that I'm that I'm supposed to be meditating. It works like any other voice, you know, and it's, it's, it's really, really important to be meditating. And so it's just it's a feedback system that you can't really provide for yourself. Although you can obviously you can, I mean, you can meditate without an app and most people do. I mean, I've spent very little time meditating with apps, I just think they're, they're very useful. But you, you know, both of us started meditating, you started meditating well before I did, but we both started pre the apps weren't around. So you can read, you can read a book, read a good book and learn how to meditate out of the book, just basically remember the basic instructions and do it. But it really is useful to have an app, especially for some people, because one of the biggest problems in meditation is this persistent fear that you're not doing it right. And so to have a voice you trust in your ear, just giving you reminding you of the basic instructions, which are so simple, but very easy to forget, it can be very useful. I like the idea of it being like bicep curls for your mind. Yeah. I mean, you see, you see it in the brain scans. And Sam will correct me where I run a foul of scientific accuracy here. But this base, this, this simple act of sitting, trying, trying to focus on one thing at a time. And then when you get distracted, knowing you're distracted and returning to your breath is changing your brain when you do that, you're boosting the muscles, the obviously, the muscles, I'm using a light loosely, you're boosting your focus muscle. And in many cases, whether there was a study in 2010, I think was done at Harvard, that took people who had never meditated before, and they scan their brains, and then they had them do eight weeks of, I think, a half hour day of meditation, the end of the eight weeks, they scan their brains again, what they found was in the area, the brain associated with self awareness, the gray matter grew. And in the area, the brain associated with stress, the gray matter shrank. That to me is pretty compelling.