In one of the ‘Fundamentals’ lessons in the Waking Up app, Sam Harris beautifully articulates two reasons to meditate. This post summarises his key points. This is the “why” behind the questions my projects aim to explore through direct experience. I’ll keep referring back to this as I develop more installations.
The two reasons to meditate
- Psychological and ethical: to live a better life and suffer less (less anxiety, regret, anger and despair; more well-being, love and compassion). In Buddhism, meditation is one part of the Eightfold Path (right effort, mindfulness and concentration), alongside ethics and worldview. It isn’t just a stress-reduction tool.
- Intellectual and curious: to understand the nature of the mind, the self and consciousness by examining first-person experience with a scientific attitude.
- The two are connected. Understanding certain truths about the mind directly reduces suffering.
Why ‘success’ doesn’t guarantee happiness
- Many highly talented, recognised and wealthy people (e.g. Picasso, Prince, Steve Jobs) were still visibly unhappy.
- Being great at something isn’t the same as living a good life. That takes wisdom, love and the ability to step outside oneself.
- Chasing goals in the belief that achieving them will bring happiness can lead to a deeper failure to put your psychological and ethical house in order.
The core problem: identification with thought
- Thinking isn’t the enemy. Thinking without knowing you’re thinking is, and that’s how we spend most of our time.
- This identification produces most (perhaps all) psychological suffering. It also creates the feeling of being a separate self, an inner subject with free will.
- Harris’s central claim is that the self is an illusion (related to the claim that free will is an illusion), and this can be discovered directly in meditation.
What makes this approach distinctive
- The purpose of mindfulness is to cut through the illusion of self and recognise consciousness before identification with thought.
- This reveals a freedom already present in the moment, rather than something to be sought in the future. You “arrive at your destination with each step.”
- It’s a radical insight into the nature of experience that erases the boundary between formal meditation and everyday life. It’s not mainly about calm, productivity or self-improvement.
The “war” analogy
- Spiritual practice is often compared to fighting an army of thoughts, habits and negative emotions.
- You can make progress by fighting (dualistic mindfulness: regulating reactions, improving ethics), and beginners must start there. But there’s no final victory, because you’ll never fully pacify the mind.
- Seeing through the self is like capturing the general: the battlefield stays the same, but the war ends, at least for moments at a time.
- Once mindfulness becomes non-dualistic (no sense of someone being mindful), there’s nothing more to do and no one to do it. Meditation then becomes a matter of getting used to what’s already obvious.
Bottom line
- The two reasons to meditate are ultimately one. Understanding the mind leads to a psychological freedom most people don’t know is available.