This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello everybody, how we doing? So this is going to be an interesting one. I'm both excited and a little worried to hear how you respond to this. Let's get right into it. For the past 15 years, I've been listening to an ongoing argument between two of the most influential meditation teachers in my life. Sam Harris, the author, podcaster,

and proprietor of the excellent waking up meditation app, and Joseph Goldstein, also an author,

and the co-founder of the legendary Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts. Sam and Joseph

are not only old friends of mine, but they're also very old and very close friends of one another.

For decades, they have been debating the relative merits of two ancient styles of meditation.

One is Vipasana, or Insight Meditation, the foundation of most modern mindfulness practice.

The other is Zogchen, a Tibetan

approach that points you directly to the open, boundless, selfless nature of awareness. If this

sounds confusing, bear with me. I will unpack this as we go. Here's how the debate between Sam and

Joseph breaks down.

Sam believes that Zogchen is the more direct route that you can recognize right now that the sense of I that we all harbor self-consciously is actually an illusion.

This recognition that you can get through Zoghan is often called non-dual awareness, meaning there's no separate me or I observing my anger or my sadness. There's just experience unfolding, sensations, thoughts, emotions, all passing like weather in the open sky. This may sound a little esoteric, but it's actually incredibly practical.

When you stop taking your emotions so personally and so seriously, they lose their power to hijack you. Most of us, however, practice in a more dualistic way, watching the breath, noticing

thoughts, feeling like there's an eye observing them.

That's how you start practicing when you do vipassana or insight meditation, although over time you do eventually come to see that the self is an illusion.

So Sam's argument is that Zoh-chan is better because it emphasizes the direct recognition that there's no separate self behind your experience, that what we call I is just thoughts, sensations, and emotions unfolding in awareness.

Joseph does not disagree that this realization is incredibly important, but he argues that for most of us,

we actually need to gradually and steadily cultivate mindfulness in order to really have

this non-dual insight in all of the freedom it brings. This is why Joseph teaches in a way that

mixes both Vipasana and Zoggen. Am I making sense here? Are you with me?

Just to restate it, Sam emphasizes the direct recognition that there's no separate self or you or I behind all of your experience.

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