If I asked whether you control your heartbeat, you'd say no. But if I asked whether you'd choose

your thoughts, most people would say yes. But is that really true? You don't actually know what

your next thought will be.

And the implications of this are profound, though your thoughts might try to convince you otherwise.

And meditation 2.0 is about seeing through that illusion.

Many people adopt this project without any deeper aspirations. There's not a deeper contemplative or spiritual goal that they've set themselves. Meditation, you know, the Buddha 2,500 years ago did not

recommend meditation merely as a way to de-stress. It's not really a self-improvement program. It is a self-understanding program,

which ultimately terminates in your cutting through this illusion that you call yourself. There can be

many misunderstandings here because we can mean many things by the term self. So I'll clarify that. But as you get

deeper into it, you discover that really it's always about the difference between suffering and the end of

suffering. And the punchline for that is that we suffer because we are identified with our thoughts.

And that is what it is to feel like a self.

Most people feel like there's a subject in the middle of experience.

We feel like we're passengers in our bodies, you know, up in our heads,

in some strange relationship to our own bodies and even to parts of our own minds.

I mean, we're having a conversation with ourselves as though we're not the one, we're not, we're not on both sides of the conversation.

I mean, you will, if you take the, if you look at the structure of so much of your thinking, it is conversational in a

way that doesn't make any sense. You'll say something to yourself as though you weren't the

one to say it, right? And as though there's someone else in you who needed to hear it. I mean,

just a simple example, you know, if I, you know, setting up for this podcast, if I'm looking

for something on the desk, you know, let's say I'm looking for a pen.

I might, upon spying the pen, I might actually think the thought, oh, there it is.

...