Sam Harris Gets Richard Dawkins to Meditate

[kieranperez]

 

Pretty damn funny. He might as well have tried convincing Trump why it's better to be honest than compulsively lie.

[Consilience]

32 minutes ago, Kalo said:

Meditation is child's play.

Meditate for 4 hours straight without moving and then let’s talk about child’s play  

[Consilience]

1 hour ago, Kalo said:

I don't like exercises. I have the gym for that.

“I don’t like protein, I have steroids for that.” 

[RMQualtrough]

@kieranperez That is what happens when I meditate. Some people legitimately can't separate the subject and object. I KNOW what it feels like and what I'm searching for (thanks Dimitri) and STILL can't do it awake. I don't even bother to meditate sober and awake because nothing happens like with Dawkins.

It works in lucid dreams though...

[kieranperez]

1 hour ago, RMQualtrough said:

I KNOW what it feels like and what I'm searching for (thanks Dimitri) and STILL can't do it awake. I don't even bother to meditate sober and awake because nothing happens like with Dawkins.

It works in lucid dreams though...

I have no idea what you’re talking about dude. Please make this more coherent. 

1 hour ago, Consilience said:

“I don’t like protein, I have steroids for that.” 

Lol

3 hours ago, Kalo said:

Meditation is child's play.

You’re like... SOOOO WOOKE BRO!!! I bet meditation is about as easy as beating up babies for you huh? Please tell me more about how easy it is for you so you can flex your own enlightenment like a body builder flexing through a shirt that’s 3 sizes too small. 

[RMQualtrough]

@kieranperez I mean that, like Dawkins, nothing at all happens when I meditate.

Unlike Dawkins I have experienced nondual states via drugs. So I know what it is. But even knowing of the divide I'm meant to replicate, I cannot do it sober. AT ALL.

Harris's suggestion to use LSD is probably a good one.

[Consilience]

11 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

I mean that, like Dawkins, nothing at all happens when I meditate.

Your first 1000 hours of meditation, very little will probably happen. Don't stop though. The practice is working at extremely subtle layers of mind that are normally inaccessible for surface level awareness. Just because you don't feel anything, this doesn't mean nothing is happening. The changes happen gradually, with intermitted bursts or breakthroughs a long the way. Using psychedelics while also committing to a rigorous meditation practice also helps speed things along, as the psychedelics can help you gain insight into your practice, the nature of experience, the nature of sobriety vs. altered states, etc. 

For example, if your goal was to squat 500lbs, don't expect 1 month in the gym to be very meaningful. Don't even expect 1 month of perfectly optimized, intense training to even matter. If you're wanting to use meditation as a practice towards transforming the mind and/or awakening, the first phase is just retraining the mind out of it's lifetime of conditioning. Once you can sit down for an hour without fighting with experience, then the real work begins. 

[RickyFitts]

5 hours ago, kieranperez said:

Pretty damn funny. He might as well have tried convincing Trump why it's better to be honest than compulsively lie.

Great analogy 

[kieranperez]

36 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

Unlike Dawkins I have experienced nondual states via drugs

Nonduality is not a state. All states are relative. Sober or not itself is relative. No duality cannot nor will ever be an experience, much less a drug induced one.

[Roy]

I was thinking about this the other day, now if only we could only crowdfund to get Richard Dawkins to an ayahuasca ceremony.

The egoic nuclear blast that would happen would be of biblical proportions 

[Terell Kirby]

5 hours ago, Kalo said:

Meditation is child's play.

Have Rickard Dawkins experience my greatest super-psychotic-spiritual experience and he would be baptized the next day ?

What a dummy. Only an ass who never meditates or take these insights seriously would say such a thing

[Terell Kirby]

4 hours ago, Kalo said:

I don't like exercises. I have the gym for that.

Idiot. 

[Roy]

@Terell Kirby and your responses just radiate understanding and emotional maturity 

[Terell Kirby]

@Roy it's kind of my style champ . Your definition of what emotional maturity is yours and yours only! Ultimately, no one cares.

[RMQualtrough]

@Consilience When I say nothing happens I mean literally NOTHING at all. After 30 minutes of it, I feel identical to normality. Is that expected and part of the process?

And if it is, then the video is silly because how could Sam not expect this to be the result?

Edited May 27, 2021 by RMQualtrough

[Consilience]

3 hours ago, RMQualtrough said:

When I say nothing happens I mean literally NOTHING at all. After 30 minutes of it, I feel identical to normality. Is that expected and part of the process?

I wouldn't say it's normal, but everyone's experience is different. I would make the claim that there are changes happening in your mind, but your sensory clarity, the sensitivity towards your mind and the transparency of the surface level of mind to the depths of mind hasn't cleared enough for you to be able to accurately discern what those changes are and what's actually happening experientially. The changes can be insanely subtle. Sometimes after meditating, it literally feels like nothing at all has happened. Even for experienced meditators. However again, I would make the claim this is not the case and if you had a more highly trained mindfulness ability, you'd be able to detect these incredibly subtle shifts in mind patterns. 

If you really wanted to feel something, again sit for 4 hours without moving and you'd 100% feel the mind reacting to the practice. So it's not about meditation not creating a change. The changes will eventually be felt if pressed hard enough. If you expose yourself to enough of the stimulus, you would feel an effect whether positive or negative. 

Ultimately I have no clue if your ego/mind/body/sense of self would resonate with meditation. From what I've observed, most people don't, but this does not mean most people shouldn't practice. It is my belief that most people should. Even for someone like myself whom I consider to be pretty serious with my practice, I still struggle regularly. The human mind is not designed to sit in its own presence. Most people, especially for the first 3-5 years, are going to be grinding away with this practice. But if you seek out good teachers, techniques, and are playful, experimentive, curious, and have a vision of what mastering meditation actually does for the mind, you will make a change and at some point the changes start to become exponential.  

If you can't sit down for an hour and focus on the breath for the full 60 minutes, then work to train your mind until you can and I will PROMISE you, you will not feel "identical to normality" at the end of all of the work it takes to have that level of attention stability. Normality is running around, tensing up and turning away from painful experiences, reacting to our emotions, being bored and addicted to various dopamine sources, and generally working to manage an immense amount of unconscious background suffering all while acting out unconscious survival patterns and agendas. The normalitly 99% of humanity walks around with is utter insanity and dysfunctionality . 

60 minutes per day for 6 months will give you a good idea of whether this path is for you or not. If after those 6 months you still feel nothing, yeah fuck it. What I did when I first began was a 60 minute sits broken out into six 10 minute segments. Id do one technique for 10 minutes, a second technique for 10 minutes, a third technique for 10 minutes and then repeated that cycle. 

1 Hour meditation session: 
0-10 mins - technique 1

10-20 mins - technique 2

20-30 mins - technique 3

30-40 mins - technique 1

40-50 mins - technique 2

50-60 mins - technique 3

The variety helped me start to get a feel for how different techniques do different things and kept the boredom from being overbearing. Maybe you could do something similar to help with it not feeling so ineffective. 

Last thing... Don't worry about meditation creating immediate changes anyways. Just let experience do whatever it does in that session. If that means feeling normal for 30 minutes, then do that. Experience is always shifting. Meditation is just slowly cultivating new channels. 

[RickyFitts]

8 hours ago, Consilience said:

Normality is running around, tensing up and turning away from painful experiences, reacting to our emotions, being bored and addicted to various dopamine sources, and generally working to manage an immense amount of unconscious background suffering all while acting out unconscious survival patterns and agendas. The normalitly 99% of humanity walks around with is utter insanity and dysfunctionality .

Yep, you've pretty much nailed the human condition right there! I think of meditation as being, in its most basic sense, a willingness to stop and just be with ourselves without all the external stimulation that we usually use to distract ourselves - and it can be a real eye-opening experience to start to become conscious of just how much we've been suppressing. You need serious discipline and dedication to stick with it, it's little wonder to me that so many people give up pretty quickly. I think you've almost got to be at the end of your rope in some way to keep going (that's certainly how it was for me, at least).

[RMQualtrough]

@Consilience That was a very thorough response, much appreciated mate, thank you.

[Leo Gura]

Now someone get Sam Harris to realize he isn't awake.

There's the rub.

[RMQualtrough]

@Leo Gura I think Sam Harris is just in heavy denial. He's spent an entire lifetime as an intellectual atheist arguing alongside great speakers like Christopher Hitchens etc.

Now he is a full-blown mystic and refuses to acknowledge it even to himself.

A good thing though - he is a good olive branch to the materialists of the world. Through him they can feel okay about looking inwards and be introduced to Spira and so on.