Freedom from Thought: Ending the Cycle of Mental Suffering - with Sam Harris
A New Way of Being
Simon Mundie
4.8 • 523 Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Meditation 2.0: Discovering the True Nature of Thought. This episode with neuroscientist, author and creator of the Waking Up app Sam Harris explores where people go wrong with meditation, with profound insights, not least for our true identity as well as an antidote to psychological suffering. As I often say, we are not our thoughts - we are AWARE of our thoughts.
Full episode with Sam Harris: https://pod.fo/e/16ff62
Other relevant episodes:
Rupert Spira: https://pod.fo/e/16ff5c
Awe - with Dacher Keltner: https://pod.fo/e/1803a7
My links:
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/YouTubeSimonMundie
Website: simonmundie.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/
Substack Newsletter: https://simonmundie.substack.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If I asked whether you control your heartbeat, you'd say no. But if I asked whether you'd choose |
| 0:10.6 | your thoughts, most people would say yes. But is that really true? You don't actually know what |
| 0:19.1 | your next thought will be, do you? |
| 0:21.7 | And the implications of this are profound, though your thoughts might try to convince you otherwise. |
| 0:27.9 | There is no chooser of thoughts, even though it feels like there is. |
| 0:33.2 | And meditation 2.0 is about seeing through that illusion. |
| 0:38.7 | Many people adopt this project without any deeper aspirations. |
| 0:44.5 | There's not a deeper contemplative or spiritual goal that they've set themselves. |
| 0:50.9 | Meditation, you know, the Buddha 2,500 years ago did not recommend meditation merely as a way to de-stress. |
| 0:59.2 | It's not really a self-improvement program. |
| 1:02.1 | It is a self-understanding program, which ultimately terminates in your cutting through this illusion that you call yourself. |
| 1:12.4 | There can be many misunderstandings here because we can mean many things by the term self. |
| 1:16.1 | So I'll clarify that. |
| 1:17.4 | But as you get deeper into it, you discover that really it's always about the difference between suffering and the end of suffering. |
| 1:26.9 | And the punchline for that the end of suffering. And the, you know, the punchline for that |
| 1:30.4 | is that we suffer because we are identified with our thoughts. And that is what it is to feel like a |
| 1:39.7 | self. Most people feel like there's a subject in the middle of experience. |
| 1:54.8 | 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. |
| 2:02.4 | I mean, we're having a conversation with ourselves as though we're not the one, we're not on both sides of the conversation. I mean, you will, |
| 2:08.1 | 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 |
| 2:13.2 | the one to say it, right? And as though there's someone else in you who needed to hear it. I mean, |
| 2:17.6 | just a simple example, you know, if I, you know, setting up for this podcast, if I'm looking |
... |
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