Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

The self you've been trying to improve may not exist the way you think it does. Three practices for seeing through the central illusion and what opens up on the other side.

With Dr. Sam Harris

"The self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking." — Sam Harris

Dr. Sam Harris, on the episode

Andrew Huberman sits down with neuroscientist and philosopher Dr. Sam Harris to go well past the standard meditation pitch of stress relief and better focus. The pop framing of meditation is that you practice it to change how you feel. Harris argues the real target is something most practitioners never touch: the sense that there is a subject separate from experience, a locus of attention distinct from the things being attended to. That felt separation, he says, is not a feature of consciousness. It is an illusion produced by thought going uninspected. This protocol pulls three of the most operationally concrete moves Harris describes for dissolving that illusion and what the two-step function of practice actually looks like from the inside.