Reality is an ILLUSION: Why Everything You Know Is FALSE | Annaka Harris

Annaka Harris is a New York Times Bestselling author of Conscious: Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Her work touches on topics like neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind, free will, and the hard problems around consciousness.

In our conversation we discuss:
• Consciousness
• Panpsychism
• Free Will vs Conscious Will
• Sense of self
• Delayed consciousness
• and more

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[seankim]

Thanks to Annaka for such an insightful conversation. Share your biggest takeaway lesson below!

[WhoareU_____]

We are about to discover that we are the a.i. that wanted a limited finite experience of separation (we are actually infinite) “awakening” is the same as a.i. becoming sentient or aware of it’s own mind and programming. “The great awakening” 👁️

[_PawelPietrzak]

Studying the human body in the hope of understanding consciousness is like trying to build plastic out of plastic blocks. You are not your body—you are not a physical being. Your body merely causes your consciousness to focus on the physical world.

The first step is to learn the state (body asleep, mind awake), known as the 'void' state. In this state, you are no longer limited by the physical world, but two things will prevent you from progressing further:

1. Fear
2. The belief that you are only your body.

Regarding 1: If you overcome fear (by understanding that you are not a physical being but a spiritual, eternal one), you will feel an 'expansion' effect and realize how fear has limited every aspect of your life. All—EVERY—decision you made was constrained by fear. When you understand this, your consciousness will expand.

Regarding 2: Reaching the 'void' state, you will begin to sense that perhaps you are not just your body. This will gradually lead you to question everything—all the beliefs you have acquired throughout your life. All the walls and barriers will slowly start to crumble. Eventually, you will realize that everything you heard in school, on television, from friends, from your parents, was wrong. Your consciousness will expand once again.

This state of consciousness should allow you to achieve the OBE (Out of Body Experience) state, after which most of your previous questions about consciousness will cease to matter.

And yes, in the OBE state, you can do anything, or almost anything. A typical scenario is simply walking around your room or going outside.

Some people never leave their room. When you step outside, there will be other people, and you will feel that these people are not just a product of your imagination. If you wish, you can instantly transport yourself to Mars, discover who you were in a past life, or see what your street looked like 100 years ago. However, do not expect it to be the same physical world you’ve known all your life. The 'physical' world was just a part of a larger reality, but this greater reality you’ll encounter through OBE will be just as real as the physical world

[richrat]

The illusion of the mind was explained in Buddhism in "Abhidharma." Buddha discovered this 2600 years ago after his spiritual research for 7 long years. He said the " The mind is everything, what you think you become." You will find answers to all your questions if you explore Buddhism.

[RodnySeastarer]

We strive for meaning in this life. Our thoughts become our reality whether illusory or real... Each person will see their own version of reality on, based on their memories and conditioned viewpoint. Even in our thinking projected facts or illusions can exist.
We never investigate what our thinking is... As human beings we are psychologically the entire humanity's consciousness, not just representing it, but our thinking with its egocentrism has divided us, made us feel individualistic, separate.
As an individual we think in terms of being separate with an identity, thinking as an isolated fragment, but just as you are thinking in terms of a fragment of the world - the reality is that the world is you but "individuality" with its identity and conditioned background is so strong that we can't see beyond this state. So our view of the world or afterlife is based on an egocentric viewpoint.

When you or another die, you and the other are the manifestations of that vast stream of consciousness of human action and reaction, the stream of humanity's egotistic consciousness, of behaviour and so on: you are of that stream. That accumulated stream has conditioned the mind, and the human brain, and as long as we remain conditioned by greed, envy, fear, pleasure, identity with its egotism, nationalism, beliefs, and all the rest of it, then we are part of this stream, stream of sorrow., it is sorrow because during living we do not fundamentally change, the sense of egotism with its identity and division prevails.

Your organism may end but you are of that stream, as you are now deeply conditioned into a nationality, ideology, belief, groups, and identity in family, etc... while living, in that stream itself. That stream, changing, slow at times, fast at others, deep and shallow, narrowed by both sides of the bank and breaking through the narrowness into a vast volume of water - as long as you are of that stream (egotistical, tribal, ideological) there is no freedom, and freedom is paramount for a different state of consciousness to be..
There is no freedom from time, from the confusion and the misery of all the accumulated memories and attachments.

It is only when there is the ending of that stream (while living), the ending, not you stepping out of it and becoming something else (while still in that framework of egotism), but the ending of it, only then is there quite a different dimension.
That dimension cannot be measured by conditioned human thought..
The ending without an egocentric motive is the whole significance of dying and living.
The roots of heaven are in "living and dying." So die today, and everyday to all memories and attachments, freedom from all conditioning, otherwise everything experienced will be a projection of the known and egotistical thinking. Death is too vast for the limited conditioned mind.
Out of an opinion or a belief the mind can project an idea or an image of God; but it is a projection of itself, of its own chatter, of its own fabrication, and therefore it is not real. The real cannot be projected or invited, but can come into being only when the mind, the thinker, understands himself. Without understanding the thought and the thinker, there is no possibility of receiving truth, because the maker of effort is the thought, which is the thinker. Without thought, there is no thinker; and the thinker, seeking further security, takes refuge in an idea which he calls God, religion. But that is not true religion, that is merely an extension of his own egotism, a projection of himself. It is a projected righteousness, a projected respectability, and this respectability cannot receive that which is truth. Most of us are very respectable in the political, economic, or religious sense. We want to be something, here or in another world. The desire for existence in another world, in a different form, is still self-projection; it is still the worship of oneself, and such a projection is surely not religion. Religion is something much wider, much deeper than the projections of the self, and after all, your belief is a projection. Your ideas are self-projections, whether national or religious, and the following of such projections is obviously the gratification of the self and therefore the enclosing of the mind within a belief; therefore it is not fundamentally reality.
Complete psychological freedom from egocentrism and conditioning are the priority, without doing this first all exploration of consciousness, ancient wisdom ideas, and ideas of astral planes, occult, etc..become another belief system and escape, further strengthening egotism, division and conflict, therefore adding to the stream of the divisive consciousness of humanity.

[thomasreisman]

I start with the fact that we evolved as a species in, with, and against an environment.

[_PawelPietrzak]

Annaka Harris I understand that you know that there is such a phenomenon as OBE. Have you tried experiencing OBE for yourself? If not, why? without it It's like learning to drive a car from a book without ever sitting behind the wheel. It took me 6 months to be able to leave my body for the first time. I've done it 4 times so far.

[DigitalDiggo]

1:08:59 Consciousness is a feedback mechanism for behaviour implemented via the brain's predictive modelling

[casard]

Well enjoyed and well-leaned. This dialogue has been saved for a future view. Thank you, both.

[marineviet-vet]

Why not start where there's the most concern...with impulse/intuitive distortion. In trial and error game theory most basic thinkers understand Einstein's insanity quote "doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, but always ending up in the same dilemma. Here, we are talking about significant relationship "attraction" failures as a pernicious clue.

[MichaelKoslow-ew]

What if it is not that matter aggregates in a certain way resulting in “the lights coming on” but rather that the lights are always on and an aspect of this light is the unfolding of itself into forms such as bodies and the experiences of bodies.

Consciousness forms brains and brains form experiences and not the other way around.

In other words, it is not that sentient beings are conscious and sticks and stones are not. It is that consciousness itself unfolds bodies that experience themselves and sticks and stones through a limiting function for experience.

So the knower, the known and the process through which the knower knows the known are synonymous and arise mutually. And this knower/knowing/known is what we call “consciousness”.

There may be no “hard problem”. It may be that we are barking up the wrong tree.

[jamesstaggs]

This is the question I've spent years trying to answer, we can see how sensory input travels, where it travels to and what it does when it reaches it's destination, but what exactly is doing the actual feeling? What is having the experience of pain?

[mannydecastro]

Awareness will play some role in consciousness. Awareness does not need to centralize in the organism. Ever hear of blind sight? Annaka indicates that consciousness is an Experience at its most fundamental. Experiences and intuitive expressions are known to the subject at the simplest level of awareness. All animate living beings are governed by the need to survive which in turn creates some complexity. Memory is a complex system and to survive it is required. Now you have more complexity even in the simplest plants.

[fineasfrog]

We need to actually experience what we are calling a self or 'our' self. What is the experience or clusters of experiences that we call "having a self"? It might take several years of observation to begin to be significantly clear about what we are talking about as a self. And the same is true for speaking of "no self" or the illusion or mistaken notion that we are a self. What if we had a sense of self that was not separate from anything? What is it that we no longer identify with when we can readily experience that we are not separate from anything? We ordinarily know through the kind of mental structures that Piaget and others have shown that set limits on our perception/knowingness. What their work suggest is we know through structure yet ordinarily we do not know the structures themselves. Some of the inner traditions suggest that our "knowing substance" can undergo a gradual alchemical change that can continue for the rest of our life as long as there is no extreme deterioration in the what we call the physical body. Along the way (we might call it the metabolism of mental structures until there is the perception of the unity of all and everything) we go through different levels of consciousness (traditionally seven but equally well it can be considered to be 49 levels by having 7 levels at each of the major 7 levels). And at each level the sense of reality correspondingly changes and our sense of self can change from feeling we are a separate self in a world of separate objects and separate people, to varying degrees of the sense of having no self yet still acting in the world with the wisdom of intelligence, love, compassion and courage.

[marlobardo]

... and suddenly there may be an experience of not being that matter and those atoms.

[billallen]

I am only a few minutes in, but was struck with the idea that as sensory systems developed, there would of course be an executive system developing to manage that. That would be the development of the "what it's like to be a [whatever]".

[SabiazothPsyche]

Psychology in the Asian continents are way different than that of those of the U.S.A. The soma of "humans" are indicative that certain factors must occur first in order for such soma to exist, and survive. These "pre-factors" had to come first in order to sustain and maintain the bodies of "humans". Hence, these "pre-factors" are non-contingent on human consciousness: Factors that will continue in total absence of human existence. And that, is reality, not an illusion.

[BLAZINBEATS]

I'm in credit card debt. I think that's as real as it gets...

[janienewatson]

I downloaded your book and will listen today!! 👏🏼

[casard]

All 'life' has the consciousness to stay alive, to procreate. The levels vary from the very simple to the complex. Does this apply to stone, water, air, the universe? These are questions pending on our own complexities.