Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris
7/23/202641 min
In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, my guest is Dr. Sam Harris, PhD, a neuroscientist, bestselling author, and world-renowned meditation teacher whose work focuses on consciousness, ethics, and religion. We discuss how meditation can help us better understand the nature of the self and transform the conscious experience. Sam also explains how meditation can help overcome universal challenges such as distractibility, mental chatter and emotional reactivity, which can allow for greater focus and fulfillment in the present moment.
Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) Sam Harris
(00:00:21) Sense of Self, Meditation Purpose; Flow
(00:08:37) Sponsor: Eight Sleep
(00:09:55) Self Awareness, Self-Talk & Mental Chatter
(00:14:44) Mindfulness, Distractibility
(00:19:55) Sponsor: Waking Up
(00:21:30) Meditation, Benefits, "Sky-like Mind"; States of Self
(00:27:33) Meditation Practice, Mindfulness & Freedom
(00:30:17) Psychedelics, Consciousness
(00:34:15) Sponsor: AG1
(00:35:34) Process vs Achieving Goals, Fulfillment in Present
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAndrew Huberman· Host0:00
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris, what is this thing that we call a self? You know, as far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain- Mm. -that can entirely account for our awareness of self.
Sam Harris· Guest0:32
The problem is we, we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And, and there's w- there's one sense of that term which, um, is the target of meditation, and you'll hear it from me, that this self is an illusion, right? And, and that there's a, there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion. And some people don't like that framing. Some people would, would insist that it's not so much an, an illusion, but it's a, it's a construct, and it's not w-what it seems. The thing that doesn't exist, uh, certainly doesn't exist as it seems, and I would w- I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion, is this, the sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience. So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world, and they're having their... an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. Most people feel