Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and we'll only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast.

If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at samherris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today.

Today I'm presenting a conversation originally recorded for the waking up app. And while podcast subscribers already get access to those conversations through my website, it seems to me that this episode might be of more general interest. So I'm releasing it now on the main podcasting feed.

To dam speaking with David White, David is a poet and the author of 10 books of poetry, along with four books of prose. And he holds a degree in marine zoology and has traveled very widely. And as you'll hear a sensibility that is quite relevant to questions of awareness, the nature of the self.

What it means to live an examined life and other topics that are central to my concerns here. It really was a great pleasure to speak with him. And he has a wonderful voice. So now I bring you David White.

I am here with David White. David, thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure.

So I recently discovered you. I think I was actually at the TED conference where you spoke a couple of years ago, but I think I was not in your session and just heard echoes of the effect you had on the rest of the crowd, which was quite positive.

And then I subsequently saw that talk when it came online. And I don't know, saw some, some, another place where you were speaking and reading and now have have read one of your recent nonfiction books here, prose books, the three marriages, which I want to talk about. But you're primarily a poet. And so I just to begin.

Can you describe how you view your career as a writer and some of the other things you're doing? So I know you're not just working as a writer. You also work with organizations and you have an interesting way of interfacing with the world. So tell me what you're up to.

So I suppose there's two ways of looking at my way as a writer. One is looking back on it and looking at the astonishing journey. One is the frontier that I'm on now.

And I've always seen poetry intimately connected to good thinking. There's a tendency to think that poetry is on the arts side and therefore you leave your strategic mind at the door.

But it's actually good poetry is very, very practical in looking at the phenomenology of of the conversation of life. In other words, what happens along the way when you try to deepen that exchange.

And Courage said no, no port begins in philosophy or they write very bad poetry and it's very true. But he also then said, but every port becomes a philosopher. Interesting. And so yes, the practice of verbal acuity connected to listening and visual acuity starts to read you for larger and larger understanding.

Understandings and I suppose the work of the poet is to invite create language that invites everyone else into that understanding at the same time in a beautiful way actually not just a not just a quitted and mechanical way but in a way that actually enriches you as you enter the experience.

You have a background in is it marine zoology. I do indeed. I had a 10 year excursion into science sciences from when I was 17 to 27 or so. And I worked as a guide in a naturalist, young at the very least in the Ecuador National Park system in Galapagos.

I felt like I actually I actually experienced all of my ambitions being fulfilled and left Galapagos wondering what I would do for the rest of my life really.

And that's when the return to you could say that the states of attention that I experienced in Galapagos also began my restart at my poetic career because I've written poetry since I was six or seven years old.

Probably under the influence of my Irish mother. And then I wrote seriously through my teens until I was 17 or 18 when my science has overwhelmed my time for writing.

And it was good to have that hiatus but when I was in Galapagos I started to understand that there were five different levels of attention that I could identify of course there are many, many more to bet and I have gradations of hundreds of them.

But there were five that I could identify and they were I noticed that the deeper my level of attention for the world the more that my identity as a person actually changed and also deepened and and widened.

And you could say that I started to understand that that a person's identity didn't depend on their inherited beliefs and I've always felt actually that a person's beliefs are the least interesting thing about them actually.

...