DAN HARRIS: I always feel bad when
people have to read the subtitle of the book.
It's like a Fiona Apple record title.
So if you had told me a couple of years
ago that I was going to end up as a traveling
evangelist for meditation, I would have coughed my beer up
through my nose.
This is kind of the last thing I ever
thought would happen to me.
And it's a funny story, actually.
It all started with a panic attack on national television.
What you're about to see happened in June of 2004
on a little show you may have heard of.
It's called "Good Morning America."
Because I'm a masochist, I asked our research department
to find out exactly how many people were watching,
5.019 million, so no big deal.
And so in this clip I'm going to show you,
I give kind of a blow by blow my on air Waterloo.
We can play it.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-From ABC News, this is Good Morning America.
-Welcome to the most embarrassing day of my life.
-We're going to go now to Dan Harris is at the new desk.
Dan.
-Good morning, Charlie and Diane.
Thank you--
-This is me 10 years ago.
And the reason this is the most embarrassing day of my life
is not that it looks like I've been attacked
by a blow dryer and a can of hairspray.
No, it's that I am about to freak out
on national television.
-Health news now.
One of the world's most commonly prescribed medications
may be providing a big bonus.
Researchers report people who take cholesterol lowering drugs
called statins for at least five years
may also lower their risk for cancer.
But it's too early to prescribe statins slowly
for cancer production.
-At this point I realize I'm helpless, so I bail,
right in the middle.
-That does it for news.
We're going to go back now to Robin and Charlie.
-All right.
Thanks very much, Dan Harris at the news desk
with some of the headlines of the morning.
Want to go to Tony Perkins now.
He is--
-Once the fear subsided, humiliation rushed in.
I knew with rock solid certainty that I just
had a panic attack on national television.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
I've watched that clip 1,000 times
and it never fails to suck.
Some people watch it and say, you know, it wasn't that bad.
And that's true.
It wasn't like, has anybody ever seen
the movie, "Broadcast News" where Albert Brooks breaks out
in flop sweat.
I can guarantee you that I had I not
had the luxury of tossing it back to Charlie and Diane,
that I would have resulted in flop
sweat and a Tourettic outburst and the end of my career.
To my vast surprise, that panic attack
ended up significantly improving my life
in a weird and windy way.
But I'm going to tell you a little back story first.
At the root of my freak out was, I think,
something that we all share, especially, I
would say, here at Google, that would be especially true, which
is a desire to be great at my job.
I arrived at ABC News-- sorry.
That's-- there it is.
I arrived at ABC News in 2008, excuse me, in the year 2000.
I was 28.
This is the picture they took of me on my first day at ABC.
A colleague of mine-- this is for my security ID.
It's still on my security ID.
I can't get them to change it.
A colleague of mine later joked that if you take a wide shot,
it looks like I might be holding a balloon.
So, I'm 28 years old and I'm working
with these giants like Peter Jennings and Diane
Sawyer and Barbara Walters, and I was green.
I knew I was green and I was really self conscious about it.
And my way of coping was to become a workaholic.
I just threw myself into the job.
And after 9/11 happened, I raised my hand
to go overseas and cover the ensuing conflicts,
frankly, without thinking much about
the psychological consequences.
This is me with the Taliban in October of 2001.
And I spent the following years in-- I spent a lot of time
in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West
Bank and Gaza, and I made six or seven trips to Iraq.
When I got home from one particularly long
and hairy visit to Iraq, in the summer of 2003,
right when the insurgency was starting, I got depressed.
And somewhat embarrassingly, I didn't actually
know I was depressed, although I now
know that I was exhibiting many of the telltale symptoms,
like I was having trouble getting out of bed.
I felt like I had a low grade fever all the time.
And at this point I did a toweringly stupid thing, which
was I started to self medicate with cocaine and Ecstasy.
I hasten to add, it wasn't like the "Wolf of Wall Street."
It was reasonably sporadic, never when
I was at work, definitely not when I was on the air.
As I like to say, I was stupid but not that stupid.
After my panic attack, I went to see
a doctor, who asked me a series of questions
to get to the root of the problem.
One of the questions was, do you do drugs.
I kind of sheepishly said, yeah, I do.
And he said, well actually, he gave me this look
that I read as, OK, asshole.
A mystery solved.
He explained that even though I hadn't been doing cocaine
every day, it was enough to raise the level of adrenaline
in my brain and prime me to have that panic attack.
This is a huge moment for me.
It really hit me very hard what a moron I'd been
and I realized I need to make some changes.
The first one was a no-brainer.
I quit doing drugs that day.
The second was that I agreed to go
see this shrink once or twice a week indefinitely.
This isn't some neat, clean story
where then I started to meditate and my life has ever since been
a nonstop parade of unicorns and rainbows.
There was something else that needed to happen,
which had to do with this guy, Peter Jennings, who some of you
may remember.
He died in 2005.
But he was a huge figure in American journalism
and he was my mentor.
And he gave me an assignment that I really did not want.
He told me I was going to cover faith and spirituality for ABC
News.
I tried to explain to him that I was raised in the People's
Republic of Massachusetts by a pair of physician scientists.
I did have a bar mitzvah, but that was only for the money.
I remember when I was eight years old, my mom explaining
to me that not only is there no Santa Claus,
but there's also no God.
So this is kind of atmosphere in which I was raised.
And I tried to explain this to Peter--
I left out the old mercenary bar mitzvah part.
--but he didn't care.
He said, you're going to do it anyway.
And it turned out to be a great thing for me.
I spent the next decade in megachurches and mosques
and Mormon temples.
I made a lot of really good friends.
I really developed a deep and abiding respect
for the value of having a worldview that transcends
your narrow, personal interests, which was useful for me
as a young reporter on the make.
That said, none of what I encountered really
spoke to me personally.
I didn't go kosher or anything like that.
Until the year 2008, when one of my producers recommended that
I read a book by this guy, whose name is Eckhart Tolle.
Has anybody heard of him?
OK.
We've got a smattering of hands.
I had not heard of him.
He is a mega bestselling self-help guru.
And as my producer explained, Oprah loves him.
All these celebrities are into him.
He was selling, you know, millions-- he still
is, selling millions and millions of books.
And her argument was, well, he's a big deal.
We should maybe look at him and do a story on him.
So I ordered one of his books.
And at first I thought it was irredeemable bullshit.
There's all this weird language about vibrational fields
and these grandiose claims.
First off, there's a lot of pseudo scientific claims
and then these grandiose claims about how this book is going
to produce a spiritual awakening in you, the reader,
and that, after his own spirit awakening at the age of 29,
he lived in a state of bliss on park benches
in the city of London for two years,
a city, which as far as I know, has winter.
Suffice it to say, I was not terribly
impressed at first blush.
But as I continue to read, Tolle started
to unfurl a thesis about the human condition
that I'd never heard before, that I
found incredibly compelling.
His argument is that we all have a voice in our heads, by which
he is not referring to schizophrenia or hearing
voices, he's referring to your inner narrator, the voice that
chases you out of bed in the morning
and has you constantly wanting stuff, not
wanting stuff, judging people, criticizing
yourself very harshly.
One of the hallmarks of the voice
is that you are constantly thinking
about the past or the future, instead
of focusing on what's happening right now.
My friend, Sam Harris, who some of you
may have heard of-- we're not related but we're good friends,
he describes the voice in the head or his voice in the head
or in his head, as, when he thinks about it,
he feels like he's been kidnapped
by the most boring personal alive, who just
says the same shit over and over again, most of it negative, all
of it self-referential.
The laughs indicate you know what I'm talking about.
And when you're unaware of this nonstop conversation
you are having with yourself, according to Tolle,
it yanks you around.
It's why you find yourself with your hand in the fridge
when you're not hungry, you find yourself
checking your mobile device when--
I should say Android. --when --when somebody's
trying to talk to you, or why you're losing your temper when
it's strategically unwise.
And for me, this was another huge aha moment.
I realized, A, it's intuitively true.
B, it's really true for me.
And that the voice in the head explained
the most embarrassing moment of my life.
It's why I went to war zones without thinking it through.
Its why I came home and got depressed and didn't even know
it, and then blindly self-medicated
and it all blew up in my face.
Suffice it to say, it was mildly embarrassing to be
a self-styled, skeptical newsman and thinking, this guy gets me.
But there was a bigger problem than the ego bruise.
As far as I could tell, there was nothing in Tolle's book
that was practical or actionable.
He didn't give any concrete advice.
Perhaps I was being obtuse, but I could not
divine any concrete advice for dealing
with the voice in the head.
I actually went, and this delighted my producer, who
was a little bit less cynical about Tolle than I am,
I went and interviewed the guy.
And I sat down and asked him, what
do you do about the voice in the head?
It was my first question.
And his answer, wait for it, was take one conscious breath.
What the fuck does that mean?
And then it got even weirder, because I started asking him
if he ever gets into a bad mood.
And maybe the gentleman in the back
can play you what he said to me.
[BEGIN VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Don't you ever get annoyed, irritated, sad,
anything negative?
-No, I accept what is.
And that's why life has become so simple.
-But if somebody cuts you off in your car?
-It's fine.
It's like a sudden gust of wind.
I don't personalize a gust of wind.
And so, it's simply what is.
-And you're able to enjoy every moment, even
if I start asking you a ton of annoying questions?
-Yes, that would be fine.
So it's really--
-Don't tempt me.
[LAUGHING]
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
He was so frustrating.
It was like he had pointed out that my hair was
on fire and then refused to give me a fire extinguisher.
And I was at wit's end.
I mean, I was really, really intrigued by his thesis
and just determined to figure out
if anybody had any ideas for doing something about it.
And I then threw myself into the world of self-help,
not knowing what else to do.
It is not a pretty place.
I met a lot of these questionable characters who
promise that you can solve all of your problems
through the power of positive thinking,
which I hate to break it to you, is not going to happen.
And I can get on my high horse about positive thinking
in the Q&A session if you want.
But in the interest of speeding things along,
I will say that I found it deeply unsatisfying,
this world.
And I was even more frustrated.
And then one night, my then fiancee, now wife,
came in with the save.
She-- I walked into the apartment one night
and she said, You know, I've been listening to you
talk about Eckhardt Tolle and blah, blah, blah,
with varying levels of cogency.
And it made me realize, it reminded me of a book
that I read a long time ago by, not him,
that guy, who is a shrink, based here in New York City.
His name is Doctor Mark Epstein.
He actually has credentials and he
writes about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology.
And notwithstanding the fact that I was ostensibly
a religion reporter, I actually knew nothing about Buddhism,
other than the fact that at the age of 15,
I had stolen a Buddhist statue from a local gardening store
and put in my bedroom because I thought it looked cool.
Unbeknownst to me, this guy, heretofore known
to me only as a lawn ornament, had 2,500 years
before Eckhart Tolle started cashing his royalty checks,
this dude was talking about the voice in the head.
He had a slightly different term for it.
He called it the monkey mind.
According to the Buddha, our minds
are like furry little gibbons, constantly
lurching through a forest of urges and impulses and desires,
always grasping at things that will not last,
in a universe characterized by impermanence,
and hurling ourselves from one pleasant experience
to the next, one sexual encounter, one meal, one
promotion to the next, and yet, never fully satisfied.
I mean, if you think about it, how many
great meals if you had?
Are you done?
We are insatiable.
And unlike-- so again, very, very interesting.
And unlike, Eckhart Tolle, the Buddha
had a very specific piece of advice
for dealing with the monkey mind.
Fresh problem arises at this point,
which is, what he was suggesting I found to be repellent.
Because what he was suggesting was meditation.
My view was that meditation was only
for hippies and freaks and people who live in a yurt
and are deeply into aromatherapy and ultimate Frisbee and Cat
Stevens and John Tesh and wear little finger symbols
and use the word Namaste un-ironically.
My view is actually perfectly summed up
by Alec Baldwin's character on "30 Rock," who
said the following.
Gentlemen, can you roll that video.
[BEGIN VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Meditation is a waste of time, like learning French,
or kissing after sex.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[LAUGHTER]
DAN HARRIS: Love it.
When I saw that, I was like, I am finding that clip
and putting it in my PowerPoint.
But then I started do some research
and I've found that there's been a fascinating explosion
of scientific research into meditation.
It's still in its early stages, but it's
strongly suggestive of a long and almost laughably
long, almost laughable, list of health benefits, starting with,
it can lower the release of stress hormones.
It can lower your blood pressure.
It can boost your immune system.
It can help with depression, anxiety, ADHD,
age-related cognitive decline.
The further I get into my 40s, the more important
that becomes to me.
It could even help with seemingly unrelated things
like irritable bowel syndrome and psoriasis.
And here's where things get truly sci-fi.
Neuroscientists have been peering directly
into the brains of meditators and finding
that, when you meditate you are, in effect, performing
a kind of neurosurgery on yourself.
And this is not just true of people who wear robes,
it is true for the rest of us.
There was a study done at Harvard a few years ago, that
took people who had never meditated before
and gave them an eight week class.
During this eight week class, they
meditated for short periods of time every day.
At the end of the eight weeks, they scanned their brains.
They actually scanned it the beginning and then at the end.
What they found in those second set of scans, was
that the areas of the brain associated with self awareness
and compassion, the gray matter literally grew.
And the area associated with stress, the gray matter,
literally shrank.
I found this very, very compelling.
And then I learned something else.
Meditation does not-- let me just
say that the word meditation is a bit like the word sports.
It can describe a whole variety of activities.
Badminton and water polo don't have a lot in common.
The type of meditation that is mostly
being studied in the labs is something
called mindfulness meditation.
And this type of meditation does not involve a lot of the things
that I had feared, like finger symbols or whatever.
It does not involve sitting in a funny position, which
was one of my worries.
That's my cat Ruby with Gus behind her.
She's actually watching the Real Housewives in that shot.
That's not a lie.
Many of the other things I'm saying are probably lies,
but that is not a lie.
So you don't have to sit in a funny position.
You can if you want, but for somebody like me
who's not particular limber, you can sit in a chair.
It also doesn't involve joining a group, paying any fees,
wearing special outfits, believing in anything
in particular.
It's simple and secular and, as we've established,
scientifically validated in many, many ways.
So there are three steps.
I'm not going to make you do this, but just so you know,
the first step is to sit up right,
to sit comfortably with your back upright.
Again, you can sit in a chair or if you
want to get all cross-legged, that's cool too.
The second step is to focus your full attention
on the feeling of your breath, coming in and going out.
Pick a spot, wherever your breath
is most prominent, your nose, your chest, your belly.
You just want to feel the breath coming in
and feel the breath going out.
The third step is the biggie.
As soon as you try to do this, your mind is going to go nuts.
You're going to start thinking about what am I
going to have for lunch?
Why did I say that dumb thing to my boss?
Why did "Dances with Wolves" beat "Goodfellas"
for Best Picture in 1991?
Why do celebrities only marry other celebrities?
Whatever, your mind's going to go nuts.
And that's fine, that's fine.
The whole game is to notice when you're lost in thought
and to start over and start over and start over.
And when you do that, that is a bicep curl for your brain.
And it shows up on the brain scans.
Not incidentally, it is also a radical act.
You are breaking a lifetime's habit
of walking around in a fog, in a daydream of projection
into the future and rumination about the past.
And you're actually focusing on what's
happening right now, which, I know it's a new age cliche,
but it is always now.
And that's where your life is at, and yet most of us
don't live there.
So when I learned all of this, I decided to start meditating.
I started with like five or 10 minutes a day.
That's a picture my wife took of me, meditating on vacation
with some opportunistic chickens trying to bum rush me.
And I'm not going to lie to you.
It wasn't like, awesome.
You know, it's hard.
The act of sitting there, trying to focus on one thing,
getting lost, and returning, is-- it takes grit.
It's kind of like holding a live fish in your hands.
And especially when you're new, it's like learning,
it is-- It's not like, it is, learning a new skill.
And it takes a little while to get used to.
That being said.
I very quickly started to notice some significant benefits.
The first was, my ability to focus got better.
I can't prove this, just so you know.
I feel that it's true, but I didn't
have my brain scanned before or after.
However, there have been studies that
show that meditation can help with your ability to focus.
We live in the age, an age that's
been called the Info Blitzkrieg.
You know this better than anybody.
And it is very hard to do one thing at a time.
In my job, I literally have other people's voices
directly in my ear through an earpiece.
It's really hard to focus and yet very important
that I do so, because I need to get the story correct.
I need to report it correctly.
So I just found that the daily exercise
of trying to focus on one thing and then getting lost
and starting over, really helped me with that.
The second benefit was the big one.
And it's this word mindfulness.
It's become somewhat of a buzz phrase.
Oddly, it's also kind of like a boring anodyne-sounding word,
but is a game changing proposition.
A simple serviceable definition of mindfulness--
which by the way, it's an incredibly rich term.
It goes back 2500 years.
It's all the Buddhist texts.
But let me give you a simple definition that
can be relevant in your life, which is, it's the ability
to know what's happening in your head at any given moment
without getting carried away by it.
I was going to say that again, not to be didactic,
but it is useful to hear it twice.
It's the skill of knowing what's happening in your head
right now without necessarily taking the bait
and acting on it.
So let's just think about how useful this could be.
You're standing on line at Starbucks
or one of your 5,000 micro-cafeterias here
and somebody cuts you off.
What happens?
You think to yourself, I'm pissed.
What happens next?
You automatically, reflexively, habitually inhabit
that thought.
You actually become angry.
There's no buffer between the stimulus and your reaction.
When mindfulness is on board with a little bit
of meditating, you might be able to notice,
after that person cut you off, my chest is buzzing.
My ears are turning red.
I'm having a starburst of self righteous thoughts.
I'm getting angry.
But maybe right now I don't need to act on it.
I like to think there's another way to think about this.
I'm not a good artist but I drew this.
You can think of the mind as a waterfall.
And that's water coming down.
Those are your thoughts.
Most of them have to do with me, me, me.
Mindfulness is the area behind the waterfall.
You are stepping out of the traffic
and watching what's happening nonjudgmentally.
We have three habitual reactions to every piece
every stimulus in our lives.
We want it.
We don't want it.
We don't care.
And mindfulness is a fourth option,
which is to just see it dispassionately,
without getting involved.
If you think I'm making this up, it
is worth noting that we, as a species,
are classified as homo sapiens sapiens, which means the man
or woman who thinks and knows he thinks.
But the second sapiens has been atrophied with time,
because nobody points out to us that we have this bonus
level in our brain, which is the ability to step out and watch
it calmly and nonjudgmentally.
Let me just get back to Starbucks example.
I suspect some of you may be thinking,
aren't there times when I need to get angry?
Yes, although I would argue probably less than you think.
The idea here, the argument I'm making,
is not that you should be rendered
into some lifeless, nonjudgmental blob.
The argument is that there are times when it makes sense
to get angry, but most of the time it doesn't.
So what mindfulness gives you is the ability
to respond wisely to things that are happening
instead of reacting blindly.
I love this, respond not react.
There are many, many cliches in the meditation world
that make me kind of put a little bit of vomit right here.
But respond not react is a brilliant one
and it's a life changing proposition.
And as you can imagine, it has so many applications
in the workplace, which is why it's now being offered here,
Procter & Gamble, Aetna, Target, General Mills.
These are the people that make Hamburger Helper
and they have meditation rooms in every building
in their corporate campus in Minnetonka, Minnesota.
It's now very big in Silicon Valley.
This is a clip from "Wired" magazine, where they referred
to meditation and mindfulness as the new caffeine, which I love.
I also love the irony of the fact
that you people, who are developing
all of the technologies that are destroying our ability
to focus, are embracing this technology.
This is just-- it's just awesome.
And it's not just in a corporate setting.
This is the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, who,
as you may recall, dominated in the Super Bowl.
They have a meditation coach.
Novak Djokovic, who did reasonably well at Wimbledon
not too long ago, a meditator.
Many, many, many Olympians, meditators.
The New York Knicks, not doing great,
but they just started meditating.
Let's see how they do at the end of the season.
It's also happening among entertainers.
That's a lead singer of Weezer.
Katy Perry does it.
Fifty Cent, that dude got shot nine times.
He deserves some peace of mind.
Perhaps most compellingly though, it is now
being done by the US Army and the US Marines, who
are spending millions of dollars to research
whether meditation can make more effective and more resilient
soldiers and whether it might be something that could be used
to cut down on the scourge, the epidemic, of PTSD.
So at this point, I'm going to make
a little bit of a prediction, with a caveat
that my powers of prognostication
are historically weak.
Just as an example of that, in the early 2000s,
I convinced my younger brother to invest with me
in a company that makes the Palm Pilot.
That didn't go super well.
Having said that, I firmly believe
that meditation is the next big public health revolution.
In the 1940s, if you told somebody
you were going running, they would
have said, who's chasing you?
What happened?
We then saw a ton of scientific research
that proved, beyond really a shadow of a doubt,
that physical exercise is really good for you.
And now we all do it and if we don't do it,
we feel guilty about it.
I think this is where we're heading with meditation.
I think meditation is going to join the bucket of no-brainers,
like brushing your teeth, taking the meds that are prescribed
to you, getting enough sleep, et cetera, et cetera, when
it comes to physical and psychological wellness.
Think about it.
We spend so much time working on our stock portfolios,
working on our home decor, working on our bodies,
and almost no time tuning up the filter through which we
experience everything, and that is our minds.
Now despite the fact that I've become this,
to my surprise, this weird traveling
meditation evangelical, I want to be clear,
it's not going to solve all your problems.
It's not going to, and I have learned this the hard way,
it's not going to regrow your hair
or help you win the lottery or like fix everything
in your love life, which is why I wrote a book
and I called it "10% Happier."
That's an absurd unscientific estimation,
but it's true enough.
And I like it because it sounds like a good return
on investment.
I would argue that it does compound annually.
My idea is that if you can strip away
all of these saccharine, syrupy, and frankly, pretty annoying,
language, which has been used to promote meditation
for too long, it could be accessible to lots
of smart, skeptical people who would never otherwise
go near it and don't use the word Namaste ever.
And at the core of it is a simple and really attractive
and really fascinating idea, which is that we assume,
consciously or subconsciously, that our happiness depends
on external factors, the quality of our childhood,
did we get a promotion recently, how's our love life.
But in fact, it's not-- now, I'm not
argue that those external factors don't matter.
But in fact, happiness is a skill,
that you can train your mind and your brain to be happy,
just the way you can train your bicep in the gym.
And that is an incredibly powerful and liberating notion.
And it should be accessible to everybody, not just
the folks who have been drawn to meditation
since the Age of Aquarius.
As for me, I've been meditating for five years now
and I am still, I think you could probably fairly describe
me as a workaholic, just like I was when I was a 28-year-old.
And I still firmly believe that if you're
trying to be great at anything, either your job, your volunteer
work, parenting, whatever, there's
a certain amount of stress and plotting and planning involved.
There's just no getting around it.
But what I've learned is to draw the line, at least 10%
of the time, between what I call constructive
anguish and useless rumination.
And that has made a huge difference in my life
and in my relationships.
That said, if my wife was here, she
would give you her 90% still a moron speech.
And my younger brother, the one who
I convinced to invest in the Palm Pilot,
he recommended that we re-title the book
"From Deeply Flawed to Merely Flawed."
I'm going to close, but I just want to say,
I just want to leave you with one exhortation, which
is, give it a try.
Whatever your preconceptions are,
they're probably misconceptions.
I think five to 10 minutes a day is a great way to start.
You can tell yourself, you'll never do more.
And I don't care how busy you are.
I don't care if you have three jobs and 15 children,
everybody's got five minutes.
Right when you wake up, right before you go to bed,
before you-- when you park your car in the driveway,
if you drive, right before you go into your house,
there are five minutes for you.
And here's my little tagline, which
is, if it can work for a fidgety, skeptical newsman,
it can work for you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So we have time for questions.
There's a microphone over there.
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Dan.
My name is [? Adityah, ?] and I'm an engineer here.
And I've got a story that has some similarity to yours.
I joined Google six years ago, in part
to help teach meditation.
And I apologize if my question is
a little bit outside the scope of your talk,
but I really enjoyed your conversation
with Sam Harris, the one on his blog.
I think it's called "Taming the Mind."
And I was particularly struck, because in that conversation
you bring up nonduality, which is something a little bit
difficult to speak about.
It's not exactly the same thing as mindfulness,
but there's obviously some overlap.
And what I've noticed in the last maybe
5 or 10 years is that mindfulness
has become more mainstream.
There are more people sort of willing to talk about it,
to listen to it.
Your talk is a very timely in that regard.
I'm curious if you've see anything
with regard to nonduality and if that's something like,
could be a meditation two point, or what you perceive
the public openness to that is.
DAN HARRIS: It's a great question.
Let me just explain what nonduality is.
So my whole thing is to make this as attractive as possible
to everybody.
But the mindfulness comes out of Buddhist teachings
and it's just one part of Buddhist teaching.
And it has been secularized, I think,
in a really great way, which is the way it's offered now,
in many contexts, there's no Buddhism at all.
And I'm completely fine with that.
I think the Buddha himself would be fine with that.
He wasn't trying to start a religion.
He never envisioned an ism.
But one of the things he talked about,
which is a little bit deeper than mindfulness,
is the fact that the self, the voice in your head, the you,
that you think is so real, actually
doesn't exist in the way you think it does,
that it's actually an illusion that you are creating moment
to moment.
Very tough concept to get your head around.
And I struggle with it.
Sam Harris, who-- [? Adityah, ?] is that your name?
--referenced, who I talked about before.
He's the guy who said he thinks that he's been hijacked
by the most boring person alive.
He is a famous atheist writer, and also,
and this was a big surprise to a lot of his fans, a very, very
serious meditator.
And he's just written a book called "Waking Up," which
is an excellent book and I recommend it
to everybody, in which he talks about the fact
that mindfulness meditation is great.
But really the point is to see that this self that you think
is so real, is actually the source of all of your misery.
And so to answer your question, do
I think this is the next thing coming down the pike?
I hope so.
I think that would be great.
And I think Sam's book, which is still on the top 10 York Times
bestseller list after four weeks, is a great first step.
I think it's a very tough thing to talk about
in a comprehensible way.
I'm not even sure I've done that here.
But one of the things I think about
is, whether, maybe in my next book,
I can learn to talk about it in a way
that is simple and engaging and seems practical and applicable
in daily life.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
DAN HARRIS: Appreciate it.
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
My name's Nick and I wanted to thank you
for coming and talking.
And my question is, kind of speaks to your story before.
About when you first started doing some of the meditation,
and sort of the way you think about it
seems to be very parallel to myself
and I'm hoping some of the others here.
When I first started doing some of the more mindfulness stuff,
I can't help myself but think about it
in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish.
And every time I get distracted and I come back,
I get this feeling of, I'm failing.
I'm not doing it well.
And after doing it for a month, and getting no better at it,
based on the name of your book, I'm guessing you understand.
It feels like I'm not accomplishing something.
I'm not getting better.
Why am I doing this?
And I just leave more frustrated than I entered,
and I was hoping you could talk to that a little.
DAN HARRIS: OK.
I have a million things to say about that.
The big one is you're not alone.
I mean, that's the deal.
The good news is, let me just lead with the good news,
because it is that it gets easier.
It just does.
I've been doing it for five years.
It's still hard, but it's a lot easier.
And I do much more now than I used to.
I do 35 minutes a day and I sometimes
do a supplemental second sitting before I
go to bed because I find it helps me sleep.
Not because I have to, nobody's putting a gun to my head.
It's just grown organically and it's gotten a lot easier.
But is it hard?
Yes.
Sometimes people come to me and say, I get it.
You make a good case.
Meditation is good for you.
But you don't understand, I could never do it.
My mind is too busy.
I call this the fallacy of uniqueness.
Welcome to the human condition.
Everybody's mind is crazy.
Think about it like going to the gym.
If you go to the gym and it's easy, you are cheating.
And if you're meditating, and it's easy,
you're probably cheating, maybe you're enlightened,
or you're dead.
You are fighting, as I said in my speech, a lifetime
habit of just blah, blah, blah, blah, me, me, me.
And it is hard to stop that.
By the way, you don't have to clear your mind.
You're just focusing on one thing.
That is the game.
So drop that.
And yet, here I am, five years in,
and when I find myself lost and distracted, there's like a,
I think I used this phrase in my book, a tornadic blast of self
flagellation.
The whole game is to just notice that too.
Oh, I'm beating myself up.
Let's go back to the breath.
And Sharon Salzberg, who is an amazing meditation teacher, who
spoke here yesterday, I had brunch with her
on Sunday morning, and we were talking
about my problem of beating myself up
when I get lost in thought.
And she said, it's helpful to have a sense of humor.
Because, as much as you may think your life
is about big things like faith, honor, fidelity, patriotism,
or whatever, and that may be true, but most of your life--
And I could prove it to you if you just sit down and close
your eyes and watch what happens. --most of your life
is about, what am I going to have for lunch.
It's funny, right?
So we're all assholes, you know, and so,
like so just to sit down and close your eyes
and then find yourself lost, if you can do it
with some lightness, if you can do it with a sense of humor,
it makes it much easier.
And then, just know-- And I'll repeat
what I said at the beginning.
--that it does get easier.
It just does.
And so you may not feel like you're accomplishing anything,
but I'd like to hear, after you do it for a couple months, what
people who live and work with you say about you.
Because it was my wife who started noticing it before I
did.
I started hearing her say at cocktail parties,
Harris is less of a jerk.
And that really was a good motivator.
And great teachers will say to all the time,
the real litmus test is what people around you
are saying about your behavior.
So just keep going.
Don't worry.
This is unlike everything else in your life,
where you do something and expect a preordained result.
It requires, and I know this is a sticky word,
it requires a little bit of faith or trust
that it is worth it, which is what I'm trying embody.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
DAN HARRIS: Good luck.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Dan.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
When I first started meditating.
I went to a meditation retreat and I
was telling my boyfriend and best friend
that I was going there.
And I felt like, after I told them
that, I had to convince them I wasn't joining a cult.
But the thing is, that I think it would really
benefit both of them.
I'm never sure though, how to tell the story.
I mean, obviously you're promoting meditation now,
with your book, but before you decided to write it,
was it something that you were actively
recommending to other people?
And if so, how were you talking about in a way that
would make sense to a western, college educated person?
DAN HARRIS: Well, there was a "New Yorker" cartoon
that I'm trying to get into my PowerPoint
because it's awesome.
It was recent and it has two people
a lunch and one of the women says,
I've been gluten free for a week and I'm already annoying.
That's kind of my view about meditation.
I'm perfectly happy to get up and put a mike on
and say, you guys all need to meditate.
But I won't do it one to one, because it's really annoying.
And there's just no way around it.
And I think-- my wife doesn't meditate, by the way.
I mean, she's a physician, scientist,
and she's seen all the data.
She buys it.
She loves that I'm less of a jerk.
But she doesn't do it.
And I know the shortcut to a smack in the head
and her never meditating, would be for me
to a lecture about when she stressed about how, maybe it
would help if you meditate.
Bad idea.
I'm going to steal something from my Christian friends.
They often say that the best thing to do
is not to evangelize one to one, but to live your faith
in a way that is convincing and compelling
to the people around you.
And over time, you may find that people
come to you of their own volition,
and say, what's this all about?
Because I guarantee you, in a world, as I said before,
that is characterized by both impermanence.
I.e. nothing lasts, and entropy, where everything's out
of our control, your friend and your boyfriend
are going to have crises in their lives.
And they may, at that point, come to you
and say, tell me about this thing you're doing.
One last cliche, it's often said in Buddhist circles
that it's better to be a Buddha than a Buddhist.
And so, I would just say, live your life.
Maximize your own happiness through your practice.
Don't wag your finger at those around you.
And let them come to you, because they will.
AUDIENCE: I have a follow up question.
DAN HARRIS: Yes.
It's worked really well with my cat, that cat Ruby.
She hated me for a long time but then
when I started ignoring her, she loved me.
AUDIENCE: So, Sharon, yesterday inspired me to start again,
because I'm kind of off again, on again.
And the thing that happens when I meditate in the morning,
is when Peter's in the shower, I'm always like,
let's hope the meditation ends before he gets out
of the shower.
Because when he gets out and comes out into the room
and sees me sitting there, he inevitably asks me if I'm OK.
Like I go to that place when I'm sad or something like that.
And I'm never sure how the quite tell
the story without going into-- I don't know, in a way
that he's going to comprehend and make him feel like I'm not
doing it because I'm feeling depressed.
I'm just doing it--
DAN HARRIS: You need to start talking to him the way you
would about physical exercise.
You should start-- This, I think you
could say to him pretty aggressively,
just view this as if you came out and found
me doing jumping jacks.
You know, this is just part of upkeep.
You don't have to do it.
It's totally cool if you don't want to do it.
But this is my thing and I'm just
trying to be consistent about doing it five to 10 minutes
a day.
And that's way every westerner can grasp.
And if you're doing it every day,
he's not going to think, he will not have any reason to think,
you only do when you're sad.
And let me just make a pitch for dailyness.
I think it's more powerful to do short daily doses than once
in awhile long.
It's that daily collision with the asshole in your head, that
will help you fend off its shitty suggestions.
Because that's it's job.
And what you want is the wherewithal
to not follow those bad suggestions.
And you get that through the daily collision, which
is why I say five to 10 minutes a day,
time we all have, no question about it.
And you can always get it down to two minutes
on your super busy days.
It's just the dailyness of it that
helps you really stick with it over long periods of time.
And when you're sitting there worrying
about your boyfriend's going to say, just notice worrying.
That's what, that this is what worrying's like.
Then go back to your breath.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Andrea.
My dad and I both read your book.
And we really liked it.
It's great that you admit that you're flawed
and it makes it seem more realistic and more--
DAN HARRIS: Thanks for bring that up again.
AUDIENCE: No problem.
That's what I'm here for.
I'm curious if you've looked into positive psychology at all
and if you've considered incorporating that
as well into your life or your next book.
AUDIENCE: I don't know anything about positive psychology,
per se.
That usually doesn't stop me from to speaking at length.
But I'm going to use this is an opportunity
to talk about positive thinking.
Sorry.
Positive thinking, there's actually
a scientific term for it.
I believe the scientific term is bullshit.
This idea that you can get anything you want--
Don't watch this, but there is a DVD called "The Secret."
It was very popular a while ago, for reasons that I cannot fully
comprehend.
And there's a DVD which, again, I don't think you should watch,
in which they basically argue, you
can get anything you want, like a diamond necklace
miraculously, a cure for cancer, and a that better love life,
if you just think positive thoughts all the time.
It's just demonstrably untrue.
And think about the inverse of the logic
and how damaging an argument this is.
First of all, it's damaging because you
don't want to be telling people, you
don't need to go the doctor.
That's just a terrible thing to suggest.
But with the inverse of the logic is,
so anybody born in a refugee camp in Africa
was thinking negatively in utero?
Everybody in Port Au Prince, Haiti in 2010
was thinking negatively and that's
why they got hit by an earthquake?
It's crazy.
And it's not helpful.
And the only people I know who've
had their problems solved through these books
are the people writing them.
So I would urge you to stay away.
I will do some research on positive psychology.
I suspect it's less pernicious.
AUDIENCE: A little bit.
And one quick follow up question?
Are there any meditation apps you recommend?
DAN HARRIS: Yes.
Headspace.
Really good.
And those guys know what they're doing.
They're legit.
Andy, the guy who founded it, was a monk for 10 years
and yet is young and really, really cool and can juggle.
And so, it's a good app.
It's very sticky.
People tend to like it and I think it's great.
I don't think you need technological assistance, just
for the record.
But if you want an app, that's a good one.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Dan.
My name's Daniel and I'm an engineer.
In your book, you mention going on a retreat.
What role did that play in your journey
and are there any good places in New York?
DAN HARRIS: Yes.
OK, that's a great question.
I went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat,
which was the most annoying thing I've ever done.
And also, the happiest I've ever been.
I don't think you need to do it.
I did it because I was writing a book.
I needed some shit to write about.
So, but, it's a great thing to do
if you're getting into meditation.
The reason why I'm just being a little careful
is because I don't want people to think in order
to be a meditator, you need to go off and do 10 days
with people who wear socks and sandals.
But it is a great thing to do.
It can really deepen your practice
and give you-- because this is, again,
to use the physical exercise analogy,
once you're on 10 days and its what you're
doing all day, every day, you get into great shape
so to speak, and you're going to have experiences
that are different than what you're
doing in your daily life.
And for me, I had an experience where
I just, all of the struggling and striving and the suffering
kind of just, whew, just evaporated for about 36 hours.
And I was just right there with whatever was happening.
It wasn't spiritual, there was no white light or string music
or anything like that.
I just had this incredible 36 hours
of being fully where I was.
And that was accompanied with a big blast of serotonin.
And then it went away and it went back to sucking.
But I think that meditation retreats
are where your practice really changes.
And if you're starting to get serious--
there's a bit of a spectrum.
There are people who just do a little bit every day,
and I think that's fantastic.
But some people move up the spectrum
where they get more serious about it,
then I think going on a meditation retreat
is a great, great idea.
And there's a place in Massachusetts,
three hours drive from here.
It's called The Insight Meditation Society.
Sharon Salzberg, who was here yesterday, she co-founded it.
And they run meditation retreats all year.
It is a font of wisdom.
It is where this revolution, mindfulness revolution,
started.
And you are getting the purest of the pure
and they're not going to try to inveigle you
into some fancy religion or get your money.
It's cheap.
It's super legit, and I would recommend it highly.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
DAN HARRIS: Pleasure.
It's 1:00.
I suspect maybe you guys have to work.
I'll answer questions as long as you want.
I love talking about this stuff.
But if you need to go back to work, I'm sorry.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Appreciate it.