Sam Harris: The superpower you're after, which you actually can acquire through this practice
is to realize that virtually all of your psychological suffering
Sam Harris: is a matter of being lost in thought.
Sam Harris: If you really know how to meditate you can break the spell precisely in an instant.
Sam Harris: Until you learn how to meditate or do something like meditation you're just
helplessly thinking every moment of your life. You're having a conversation with yourself.
You're having content, whether it's imagistic or linguistic pour forth into consciousness
every moment and so incessantly that you don't even notice. It’s just white noise.
Sam Harris: Most of what people care about can be thought of as a skill. I mean well-being
is a skill. Not suffering unnecessarily is a skill. Regulating, noticing your emotional
life, and regulating a negative emotion is a skill.
Voice over: Everything is a skill.
If you want o lead a better life, there are skills you can develop for that.
If you want to control your anxiety, not give in to negative thoughts and be able to find
the solution to your problems you got to develop these skills.
But most people don’t know that.
We go to school to learn math, English, and geography. And sure, these things are important,
but they are not what is going to help you lead a successful life.
The secret is in your mind.
How you feel and how you deal with your problems directly affect your outcomes.
To improve your chances you need to become stable. You need to be in control of your
life.
And there is ONE skill that can help you do just that and change your life forever.
MINDFULNESS.
Sam Harris: The moment you begin practicing mindfulness, which is just learning to pay
close attention to the nature of your experience. You're not adding anything to your experience,
you're just noticing what it's like to be you, moment to moment, but in a way
that is not reactive. You're not grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant
away. You're just ...To make this concrete. I mean, let's say you have a fear of public
speaking right. So you've got to go down out on a stage and you feel anxiety. The usual,
the default state of someone who doesn't want
to have that experience it's just trying to figure, is one, in advance to worry about
that experience. I mean, the anxiety is kindled just by the mere thought of what you have
to do. Then, once you feel the butterflies, you are at war with them, right. Your mind
contracts around it. Your conversation with yourself is an unhappy one. It's like why
the fuck am I this person who just can't, like I see people do this all the time, they're
relaxed, I'm unhappy, you know. When am I... And you're talking to yourself. You're not
noticing it because you're the thoughts just come up from behind you as fast as they can
and they seem to be you, right. You're identified with each thought that emerges in
consciousness and most people live their lives as though there's no alternative. We're not
given a rulebook for how to operate a human mind, right. And there's no place in a normal
education where we're what's even indicated that there's an alternative here. And so we
get, we kind of stumble out into adulthood more or less assuming that we have will always
have the minds we have and that really there's, you know, we, the only thing we can do to
really upgrade our firmware is to just add new content, you know. We can read books,
we can develop interests but there's nothing at the sort of root level of our emotional
and cognitive life that can change. And so mindfulness is a way of kind of dropping a
little bit lower and realizing so, in this case, if you're feeling anxiety there's actually
a place from which you can just feel it, right, and be actually indifferent
to it or anything else you could be feeling. They just notice that there's even an unpleasant
sensation. First, you even notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant. It's so
close to excitement in its actual physiology, there really, the difference between excitement
and anxiety is more or less just the framing. It's just the story you're telling yourself,
you know. If you felt these tingles and this, you know, is a slightly adrenalized response,
right before, you know, you're about to go on a roller coaster that's part of why you're
going on the roller coaster. You like that experience, right. But the fact that you feel
that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to
walk out on stage that's intolerable, right. So just dropping back and realizing the power
of the framing is again, this is a skill, that is fairly esoteric one, but now, you
know, many people are learning it, you know the secret's
out and it has immense utility because then you can realize that the half-life of negative
emotions is incredibly short. I mean, one you could you can actually be psychologically
free even in their presence, right. Your freedom and your well-being isn't even predicated
on getting rid of the physiology, right. It can still be there, but if you're not continually
thinking about all the reasons why you should be anxious the physiology dissipates very
very quickly and that's true for anger, it's true for anything that that is classically
negative.
Voice over: You are not your thoughts.
You are not your feelings.
You are not defined by one thing.
What you are is a choice.
You are what you focus on.
If you focus on your failures and identify with them, that is what you will become.
But if you choose to see them just as a part of your journey you will open up space for
all the positive things about yourself.
And you will become them.
The difference is in the framing.
We become so stuck in our heads, we let out negative feelings control us.
They change our perspective and all we see is the bad.
But there is a way out.
You can set yourself free.
Don’t give in to your emotions!
They are just a part of the equation.
You can use mindfulness to see things from afar and realize the beauty of your life.
Even with all the pain, even with all the hardship, there is beauty in your life.
And there are opportunities to create even more.
Sam Harris: The normal range of psychological suffering, you know, not clinical depression
but just feeling like you know life sucks and you're a failure and there's nothing,
you know, it's like you just, you're stuck. That is
a story of telling yourself a story. You're thinking and you can either become more and
more mindful of that and interrupt that more and more and or and it should be and, you
can reframe this continually and tell yourself a better story. You can actually just engineer,
you know, you can change the code that you're, you know, running moment to moment. A very
simple one which I, you know, I used actually recently, recorded this in a lesson on the
app, you know, just gratitude. just thinking is actually you
know this particular maneuver is, I believe, comes from stoic philosophy. I didn't actually
get it from stoic philosophy but this sort of use of negative imagination where you think
of all of the bad things that haven't happened
to you, right. So if you're just you know if you're stuck in traffic driving the job
that you don't like and you're frustrated you can think of all the things that could
happen to you, right, that haven’t. And if any one of them happened to you,
you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment,
right. Like, you haven't been diagnosed with cancer, right. You've got two young kids say,
you know, you want to live to see them grow up and you could be the guy who today is gonna
find out you've got two months to live, right. And you have to then the next two months is
spent just unwinding your worldly affairs, right. You're not that guy, right. That hasn't
happened to you yet. That's just more thinking but it can have a profound effect. You can
reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about
your circumstance and it can let the light in and there are many techniques like that
are just a matter of invoking useful concepts skillfully.
Voice over: Use gratitude to get out of the darkness.
Even if you are not where you wanted to be right now, YOU ARE ALIVE.
Life is a gift. Every day you live is a new chance to do something great.
Don’t waste any more time.
Be grateful.
And run after your dreams.