Sam Harris: Mindfulness is Powerful, But Keep Religion Out of It | Big Think

Sam Harris: Mindfulness is Powerful, But Keep Religion Out of It
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Sam Harris says that stress-reductive benefits of meditation are rather trivial compared to the insights one can discover about the nature of the self. And though such mindfulness practices can and should be approached through a secular lens, the business of religion is all too often a forced and unnecessary part of the parcel.
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SAM HARRIS:

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.

Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Sam Harris: Mindfulness is very much in vogue at this moment as many of you probably know. And it’s often taught as though it were a glorified version of an executive stress ball. It’s a tool you want in your tool kit. It prepares you emotionally to go into a new experience with a positive attitude and you know you’re not hauling around baggage from the past. And that’s true. Actually having focus and having your mind in the present moment is a little bit of a superpower in situations that we’re all in from day to day. But that actually undervalues what mindfulness really is and its true potential. It’s more like the large hadron collider in that it’s a real tool for making some fundamental discoveries about the nature of the mind. And one of these discoveries is that the sense of self that we all carry around from day to day is an illusion. And cutting through that illusion I think is actually more important than stress reduction or any of the other conventional benefits that are accurately ascribed to mindfulness.

The enemy of mindfulness and really of any meditation practice is being lost in thought, is to be thinking without knowing that you’re thinking. Now the problem is not thoughts themselves. We need to think. We need to think to do almost anything that makes us human – to reason, to plan, to have social relationships, to do science. Thinking is indispensable to us but most of us spend every moment of our waking lives thinking without knowing that we’re thinking. And this automaticity is a kind of scrim thrown over at the present moment through which we view everything. And it’s distorting of our lives. It’s distorting of our emotions. It engineers our unhappiness in every moment because most of what we think is quite unpleasant. We’re judging ourselves, we’re judging others, we’re worrying about the future, we’re regretting the past, we’re at war with our experience in subtle or coarse ways. And much of this self-talk is unpleasant and diminishing our happiness in every moment. And so meditation is a tool for cutting through that.

It’s interrupting this continuous conversation we’re having with ourselves. So that is – that in and of itself is beneficial. But there are features of our experience that we don’t notice when we’re lost in thought. So, for instance, every experience you’ve ever had, every emotion, the anger you felt yesterday or a year ago isn’t here anymore. It arises and it passes away. And if it comes back in the present moment by virtue of your thinking about it again, it will subside again when you’re no longer thinking about it. Now this is something that people tend not to notice because we rather than merely feel an emotion like anger, we spend our time thinking of all the reasons why we have every right to be angry. And so the conversation keeps this emotion in play for much, much longer than its natural half-life. And if you’re able, through mindfulness to interrupt this conversation and simply witness the feeling of anger as it arises you’ll find that you can’t be angry for more than a few moments at a time. If you think you can be angry for a day or even an hour without continually manufacturing this emotion by thinking without knowing that you’re thinking, you’re mistaken. And this is something...

[mkdevr]

it is astounding how reasonable this man is.

[BoStanfordify]

I've never seen someone express theirselves as well as Sam does. The vocabulary, the way he structures speech, the timing. How he manages to never be confusing even when talking about extremely complicated subjects. I'm such a big fan of Sam.

[pravinda]

I am a Buddhist. I do not know if you know this or not but Buddha always discourage blind faith. Of course Buddhism has 2 parts. One is like a science, logical and philosophical. There is also a part about things like Karma and stuff. But Buddhism never says you go to hell if you are not a Buddhist. Buddhism is open to questioning. Always has been.

[vitaminasHM]

For me, mindfulness and meditation changed my life completely. I rediscovered my own self and figured out it was an illusion. I recovered my capacity to feel a whole range of emotions that I had just covered with anger for a long time. I started with it exactly for the stress reducing values and ended up entering a whole new world that made me transcend to become the person I really want to be. Discovered compassion and how that emotion can make one feel. Just a pity the amount of time I wasted lost in automatisms and thoughts that fed negative emotions. But yes, meditation is an amazing and beautiful practice that, in my opinion, would be great if it were taught in schools since we are children.

[SpaydtheOmega]

Sidartha Buddha didn't start the religion he just developed a lifestyle.  His followers developed the religion. 

[kaiavera]

"One accidental strand of human culture" Love that phrase!

[Gullinnova]

this video is very timely for me. I have dived into a lot of Alan Watts and i do enjoy how he challenges what i would define as the limits of philosophy. Identity, words/symbols and their meanings/limitations, Meditation definitely changed my life and showed me a new angle of mind and i can tell Sam has experience what i have with his meditation based on his descriptions which does indeed confirm its objectivity. I agree keep the worship/religion out as always, think for yourself question authority. I always just try to shatter what i believe in to find new ground.

[Nathan-hptj]

I always listen to Sam Harris when I feel stressed out, his words have a way of calming me down

[mkprocter]

Sam Harris is exactly how I want to be, he truly is a guy who knows his place in the world and has a deep understanding of life, it's inspiring to know there are millions of people that think along these lines.

[jbombify]

WOW! The phrase "meditation is a tool for cutting through this continuous conversation were have with ourselves" was *SPOT ON!!*

[jibbygibb]

2:52 that is so fucking true. Justification of my anger or displeasure is what continues it on, and it's so hard to stop when i feel it's justified.

[GTSuzukaTimeTrials]

"Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved." - Mark Twain

[savcmsiscool]

Sam Harris is so articulate. His vocabulary is insane and I definitely get lost sometimes when he's speaking about neurons and what-not, but the way he speaks has a calming effect.

[OnyxIdol]

Ironically, the way I understand it, Gautamas teachings were very much agnostic in nature. They were turned into a religion later, and against Gautama's wishes.

[bartstewart]

The guy is a giant. Much of the criticism of him is just nit-picking. Some of it is just biased baloney.
Is he 100% correct on everything? No. Nobody is.
Is he brilliant and worth listening to? Yes, he is.
I hope if you agree with me on that you will spread the word on Sam Harris. Just pass along some links.

[keshavfulbrook]

Dharma is not the same as religion. The concept of "Mindfulness" has been carried forward into the modern day through the context of teaching traditions such as those found within Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism), Bauddha Dharma (Buddhism), Jain Dharma (Jainism), etc. These Dharmas are not warring sects, but schools of thought that have their own teaching traditions. We think of them as "religion" because we are projecting our own Western notions of "religious sectarianism" onto Eastern Dharmas. Eastern Dharmas do not hold dogmas or doctrines of "one exclusive way for all mankind." Quite the contrary. Speaking from the Hindu tradition, the Bhagavad Gita tells us that we all are struggling through various paths that will ultimately lead to the same destination, by whichever name it is called. (Chapter 4, verse 11).

You must then ask yourself, what is the value of tradition? It is through these traditions that the teachings have been preserved and passed down for you. It is the tree that grew the fruit of wisdom you now enjoy and eat. This wisdom can benefit all, regardless of their path. But to take the fruit alone while neglecting the tree will lead to destruction of the fruit itself. Someone has to care for the tree. Calling traditional Hindus and Buddhists, who care for the tree whose fruits you eat, "fundamentalists" or "the problem with humanity" is an unfair and narrow sighted criticism . Hari Om.

[rf-ujsc]

The difference is Jesus never talked about physics, so Christianity and physics and unrelated. But the Buddha specifically taught mindfulness meditation himself, so even though mindfulness meditation can lead one to discover universal truths regardless of their religious affiliation, giving credit where credit is due isn't a bad thing. Especially when the guy figured it out 2500 years ago. Neither is identifying with the teachings of Buddha, since the Buddha never encouraged sectarianism in the first place.

[MyLeSaff]

I actually miss the days when I wasn't conscious of my own thoughts, it seems like as blissful idea to me now.
I now spend all day hearing myself, and listening to the arguments and conversations that go on up there.

If it wasn't for the experiences I've had since I'd definitely take blue the pill.

[CarolynEllisQtEllis]

Just because we have inner peace and strength as a result of learning from people like Sam doesn't mean there'll be peace in the outside world as a result.  But I'm sure it's the place to start.

[ramilurazmanov]

Oh my god, Sam's mind is so brilliant. I'm really thankful to him for delivering all this information is such a digestable way and right to the point❤