Look for the One Who Is Looking
Most meditation instruction sets up a subject-object structure before practice even begins. You sit down, close your eyes, and aim your attention at the breath. That framing quietly assumes there is a you doing the aiming, separate from whatever is being observed. Harris calls this dualistic practice, and while it produces real benefits, it reinforces the very illusion serious meditation is meant to dissolve. The alternative is to actually look for the one who is looking. Not as a thought experiment, but as a direct inspection. When you are paying attention to a sound, a breath, or a thought, locate the subject that is supposedly doing the attending. Harris says you will not find it. Not because you looked in the wrong place, but because there is no place to look. The sense of being a locus of attention, a passenger behind the face, turns out on inspection to be just another appearance in consciousness, not the thing holding the flashlight. Harris uses the analogy of a tourist who joins the search party that is looking for her. The search goes on for hours, helicopters are readied, and then she realizes she is the missing person. The problem does not get solved in the way the search implied it would. It simply evaporates. That is the structure of the meditative insight he is pointing at. You are not going to find a self and then dissolve it through sustained effort. You are going to look, fail to find one, and discover the looking itself was based on a false premise.