Everything WRONG With The Modern World (+ A Hopeful Way Forward) | Sam Harris x Rich Roll

Watch: youtube.com/watch?v=gZ6SZ94JhBg

"Social media is making us ungovernable with lies spreading faster than truth 😵‍💫📲"

Social media is poised to render us effectively ungovernable. We know that lies are traveling faster and farther than the truth, and many of these trends have been advancing on us for many decades. When you see what's happening on college campuses now, where you've got people just openly supporting a death cult, there's just so much confusion. Misinformation is clearly a major part of it. We have performed a psychological experiment on ourselves that's not going well. Social media, in particular, is poised to render us effectively ungovernable. If we can't agree about the most basic things that are happening in the world, I just don't see a way forward. For example, I know someone who overheard a teenage girl who had just heard someone say that Hamas wanted to kill all the Jews, and she knows that's not true; to the contrary, she believes the Jews want to kill all the Palestinians. That's the problem in microcosm. Any effort to contain the misinformation problem is perceived as censorship. There's a business model that is just bursting at the seams with perverse incentives. There's just this new religion of contrarianism where every anti-establishment narrative just gets endlessly extrapolated. Figures like Tucker Carlson play a significant role in this media landscape. He's a demonstrated liar and demagogue, a very cynical entertainer really, and he's entertaining a personality cult that is organized around Trump. There are people who are uncancelable because they have found an audience that simply doesn't care about any normal indiscretion that would cancel somebody.

"Trusting institutions is like trusting your pilot at 30,000 ft—doubt can crash us all ✈️🛑"

Anomalies don't have to all fit together; it can be like a wall with strings connecting nodes of madness, John Nash style. Take Tucker Carlson, for instance. He really gets lionized throughout the podcast sphere since he got kicked off Fox, and no one asks him a skeptical question, even though he's a demonstrated liar and demagogue. He's entertaining a personality cult organized around Trump and other figures on the populist right in America. The people who love and support them don't care when they are caught lying; that's just how you play the game. This behavior is incentivized by the landscape of podcasts and social media, where what traffics are hypotheses that challenge the mainstream narrative, no matter how unhinged these ideas are, and that comes at the cost of truth.

There is no journalistic ethic at play in podcast landia or on social media at large. We could use a little bit of journalistic ethics. Regarding Tucker Carlson's awareness of his actions, there is something deeply cynical about him as a person. He's pandering consciously to an audience, and there's no level of incoherence that matters. In the contrarian space, it's a mood of suspicion and contempt for so-called elites and institutions. This kind of conspiracy thinking is like a pornography of doubt, a pornography of mistrust.

Reflecting on public trust in institutions since COVID-19, if we had another pandemic today, we would do worse—there's no question. Trusting institutions is crucial, especially in critical moments. Trusting institutions and maintaining even flawed institutions and order is an intrinsic good. The analogy I always draw here is to what it's like to be in a plane at 30,000 feet. That's not the moment where you want the person sitting next to you to get out their laptop and start doing research on that Boeing engine and start announcing to everyone on the plane that they've got their own ideas about the engineering of jet engines.

"Believing lies can crash us too—stay alert to misinformation 🛑🔍"

Trump not committing to a peaceful transfer of power and denying the election results, and then giving us January 6th based on pure misinformation and lies—it's just irresponsible to turn on the mic and let Tucker or other blowhards roll for four hours in front of tens of millions of people. We have to be alert to those moments where, yeah, I understand that the CDC isn't perfect, but it's the best thing we have at that moment. The science around an emerging pandemic was, by definition, a moving target, and we were going to get it wrong and revise our opinion. People childishly seize on Biden's statement that he said it was going to prevent transmission and look at it—it doesn't. It's all a hoax, it's all a "planemic." Public Health messaging is not just the communication of science; it's a political apparatus and perhaps too much so. The noble lie about masks was idiotic. I worry that there was probably no perfect communication of the truth, and the truth was messy.

Hamas can admit again and again from their original charter to their most recent utterances that they want to kill all the Jews, and you can still have people at Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford who think these are the good guys. Anything that's essentially against the West that can be spun as throwing off the yoke of colonialist imperialist oppression is supremely attractive left of center. I still view the current moment with Israel and the Palestinians and Iran—more properly Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—as a subset of this larger issue, which is a conflict between open societies and a death cult. These people expect to get to Paradise dying in the right circumstances, and Hamas simply doesn't care about how many Palestinians die because they know it works to their advantage. They sincerely believe that all the good Muslims go to paradise. One Hamas fighter even said, "Don't you understand? This is all great; everyone's going to Paradise. I want to get to Paradise. All of this, the death, is not a problem."

"Some ideologies thrive on chaos and death—stay informed and vigilant 🌍🧠"

Hamas simply doesn't care about how many Palestinians die because they know it works to their advantage, and they sincerely believe that all the good Muslims go to paradise. I remember talking to a Hamas fighter who was ecstatic over everything that was happening—all the casualties and his own injuries—and the fact that he was going to get back into battle immediately. When they chant "we love death more than the infidels love life," most secular liberal people imagine that that is some kind of propagandistic posturing, whereas it is an actual statement of psychological truth. This belief system is not a distortion of Islam; the Muslim world has to sort this out themselves. They need to win a war of ideas within their own community, much like how Christianity would seem pretty crazy too if we were dealing with the Christians of the 14th century.

People often criticize me for focusing on the jihadists and the bad actors, saying they represent only a tiny radicalized sliver of this gigantic religious movement. But even those who still want Islam to determine politics and the character of society, but aren't willing to blow themselves up on a bus, would agree that blasphemy and apostasy are killing offenses. In the UK, the polling on this is never a tiny segment; 25% say they want to live under Sharia law. If you ask whether the cartoonist should have been punished for drawing those cartoons, you get 60-70% of Muslims in the UK saying yes, they should be punished. None of the Muslim-majority countries are free places to live. Western Europe really has a problem; London really has a problem. The Metropolitan Police in London even tell people not to go to certain areas because they can't keep them safe.

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"Talk it out or risk it all—conversation over conflict 🗣️✌️"

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Now, transitioning to the power of conversation in societal issues, conversation is all we've got. It's a choice between conversation and violence, right? When conversation fails and things really matter, we resort to force. Most people want more or less the same thing; most of us can, most of the time, converge on shared values. We want to be in high-trust societies, and we know a lot about how to build all that up and how to tear it down. One of the barriers to effective conversation is dogmatism. Dogmatism is just a problem everywhere, except in religion where it's celebrated. We have these dogmas that have come down on high that we've been forbidden to challenge for thousands of years, and they make less and less sense when juxtaposed with all that we've come to know about the world.

What does the Bible have to tell us about what to do about AI? Absolutely nothing. There are things in the Bible, like the Golden Rule, that contain a tremendous amount of wisdom, and we would ignore that wisdom at our peril. I view morality as a navigation problem, and we're always faced with this forced choice of what to do next. We're always going to do something individually and collectively. We have vast numbers of people who have very strange ideas about how to navigate, and one of the strangest is that we have these dogmas that have come down on high, which make less and less sense when juxtaposed with all that we've come to know about the world.

"Why follow outdated scripts when we can write our own wisdom? 📜✨"

I'm going to say that they were dictated by the creator of the universe, right? And that takes precedence over any good idea from the brightest minds and the latest breakthroughs in science and understanding that we have today. Nothing is going to supersede this source code that we're attached to. We've gotten so used to the idea that the Creator of the universe wrote or dictated books, but it would immediately seem strange if someone thought that they had a CD ROM that had been produced by the creator of the universe or a film. There are things in the Bible, like the Golden Rule, that contain a tremendous amount of wisdom, and we would ignore that wisdom at our peril. We have access to the totality of human knowledge now and non-human knowledge as it's soon to be produced. Most people in most places most of the time think that's the most important literature on Earth for moral guidance, yet it's literature that doesn't even get slavery right. Slavery, on balance, is supported in both the Bible and the Quran. It's not that you can't pick parts of the Bible and find a reason to no longer keep slaves, but you barely can do that. And if you want to keep slaves, you find straightforward justification. The fact that we are even tempted to talk about it is an opportunity cost. So much of our lives have to be spent cognizant of all the dangers and dysfunction born of everything we've been discussing thus far. It's all just a symptom of confusion.

Transitioning to a personal narrative, I initially stopped out because I thought I was going to write a novel. I had had an MDMA experience that really just completely changed my view of the world. The first book I read after I had this experience with MDMA was Ram Dass' book "The Only Dance There Is." Ram Dass was this figure who I didn't know anything about at the time. He was a former Harvard Professor who, with Timothy Leary, both got fired for having fully democratized the research on LSD and psilocybin by giving it out to undergraduates. I sat my first Meditation Retreat in the summer of '87. I made, I think, seven trips to Nepal and maybe six trips to India in that period of a handful of years.

"Turn your mind inward and discover the universe within. 🌌🧘‍♂️"

He was on the whole cannabis thing before anybody else, and I don't know if he was editor, but the article he wrote came out in the Crimson and resulted in their summary dismissal. After the dismissal, he went to India, met his Guru, and changed his name to Ram Dass, becoming a teacher with a very colorful career as a spiritual figure. No, that was Milbrook—that was before my time—but he was teaching at various retreat centers. One of those was up at Brighton Bush in Oregon, which I think partially burned down in one of the recent fires we've had on the West Coast. He was teaching a very eclectic range of practices at that point, combining his Hindu background with lots of Guru yoga and devotional chanting. Mindfulness, as he taught it, is just paying close attention to your experience. You start by focusing on the breath, but soon it expands to noticing everything you can as you can.

I actually took acid for the first time on one of those retreats; it turns out my roommate had some. That first trip was about as good an acid trip as I could imagine—it was a pure bath in the beatific vision, with gratitude, love, and awe turned up to 11, while fear, neurotic self-attachment, egocentricity, and envy were turned down to zero. It launched me into a decade of inner exploration where I absolutely knew there was something substantial to discover. Coming down from that high was a grotesque re-education into selfhood; it was brutal but deeply instructive. Psychedelics can give you a false picture of spirituality, making it seem like freedom is elsewhere, despite all the good they can bring when things go well. I know I'm not nearly as happy as I want to be or should be. I find it very difficult to meditate because I try to pay attention but get immediately distracted. Yet, during those moments, you get shot into the stratosphere of positively valenced being, where the present moment opens up and discloses a depth and beauty you couldn't have imagined was ever there.

"True freedom is finding peace in the present moment. ✨🕊️"

I'm not nearly as happy as I want to be or should be. I find it very difficult to meditate because I try to pay attention but I'm immediately distracted. I'm taking this chemical in the hopes of learning something about what's possible for my mind. The present moment opens up and just discloses a depth and beauty that you really couldn't imagine was ever there. What is also obvious is that on some level this is more true than what you've been living even when you come down. The absolute freedom from self-concern and an ability to locate the profundity of mere being in the present is transformative. Virtually all of our suffering is a matter of our entanglement with thought. There's a hallucinatory aspect to our thinking, even very normal thinking, that is quite analogous to being asleep and dreaming. The deepest gratification of one's desire is to be seeking something, seeking happiness in the next moment. It's the experience of a full arrival in the present, which very few people tend to have. There's always this superficiality, our incapacity to really pay attention and really make contact with experience. The problem has never gone past anticipating the future, lost in thought. I saw this experience as the antidote to that and I really wanted an antidote to that. My best friend died when we were 13, and I realized, wow, this is not the game I thought I was playing. I spent a lot of time thinking about death from that moment forward. Then my dad died when I was 17. I was like clinically depressed, perseverating on having lost this relationship. I was so bummed about myself. I saw the mechanism during an MDMA experience—how it was entirely self-imposed. I was just thinking in this endless loop about how much I wished I had this relationship that I no longer have.

"Real freedom isn't about escaping reality, it's about embracing it fully. 🌈🧘‍♂️"

I spent a lot of time thinking about death from that moment forward, especially after my dad died when I was 17. It was a tough period; I had a girlfriend break up with me after my freshman year, and I was like clinically depressed, just perseverating on having lost this relationship. I felt like I was in a black hole. The moment I had my first experience on MDMA, though, I saw the mechanism—it was entirely self-imposed. I realized I was just thinking in this endless loop about how much I wished I had this relationship that I no longer have. I was pinching myself and then wondering why I was uncomfortable.

Until you can meditate, the profundity of psychedelics shows you a different possibility, but in my view, it's not the method to actualize that possibility. The real freedom can be found in ordinary states of consciousness. You don't actually have to feel this incredible onrushing of energy that causes your body to disappear; you can look for yourself and fail to find it conclusively even when you're checking your email. I was practicing a meditation on loss and disappointment and loneliness—it was a thought-based reflection that was going on from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep for months. The blows to you are meted out by thought, and it requires having no perspective on the thought. That's the spell that meditation breaks.

There is no ego in the middle of it and there's no ego on the edge of it. What you feel your ego to be in each moment is but another experience within the context of consciousness. Consciousness itself doesn't feel that way. Consciousness is conceptually irreducible—it's the fact that there's something that it's like to be you or to be any system that is conscious. If there's something that is like to be a bat, then that bat is conscious.

"True consciousness is realizing that the 'self' is just an illusion. 🌀✨"

You're on very firm ground scientifically if you're biased in that direction. None of that changes what I'm saying about the power of meditation or the nature of conscious experience. The right definition of consciousness is that there is something that is like to be that system. The transition from something to nothing subjectively—that is the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. Everything about us that's recognizably human is a matter of us leveraging the power of language. It should be coincident with all experience, not making a fetish of the highs of experience. The first step in mindfulness practice is to notice that there is some distinction between what I guess you could deem higher awareness and the ramblings and vicissitudes of the mind and thought. This sense of the self that is very indelible is in fact an illusion and just yet another appearance in consciousness. It took me a while too; I had spent about a year on silent meditation retreats before I could fully embrace this non-dual perspective.

"Mindfulness lets you see pain as just another fleeting moment. 🌿🧘‍♀️"

The first step in a mindfulness practice is to notice that there is some distinction between what I guess you could deem higher awareness or perhaps you could call it the self and the ramblings and vicissitudes of the mind and thought. The practice that I teach and advocate through my app, talks, and books is characterized as non-dualism, which is a steep mountain to climb to truly embrace as truth. Reflecting on my personal experience, I had spent about a year on silent meditation retreats, including a particularly intense three-month period. Silent meditation retreats are powerful but not for everyone; going into silence is a real crucible, much like psychedelics, and while not suitable for everyone, it can be incredibly useful. The goal here of noticing all of this is, at least in this system, to increase the mental factor of equanimity. You're noticing impermanence, you're noticing that the more closely you look, the more fleeting experience becomes. You can get to a point where you can have really strong pain in your body, pain that would have been excruciating yesterday, but now you've got such equanimity that it's just change. The three characteristics within Buddhism—impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness—are crucial. Unsatisfactoriness, a translation of dukkha, points to the principle that there's no stable 'there' there due to constant change. Because everything's changing, there really can't be a permanent subject, and the more you pay attention, it begins to feel like even subjectivity itself is just arising by itself, almost as a kind of punctate thing.

"Let go and flow—everything's just passing through. 🌊✨"

It’s just like there's no "there" there; even the moment you try to find the stabbing sensation that was a problem a moment ago, it's not there. Everything's just falling away from attention the more you pay attention, and there's an immense freedom that comes with that. The second characteristic is what's often translated as suffering, but that's not quite right. It's this principle that there's no "there" there based on change; there's just nothing to hold on to, and so there's nothing worth clinging to—just let everything flow. The third characteristic is selflessness. Because everything's changing, there really can't be a subject. When you have a lot of concentration on retreat, you can have the experience of, in brief moments, the self really seems to disappear. What you have more and more with concentration is just hearing, just a pure experience of hearing. There's just hearing, there's just seeing, there's just sensation. For the longest time, it was just lots of impermanence with a strong sense of there being a subject experiencing all the impermanence. What's interesting about doing retreat is that with the next retreat, you sort of start where you left off in the previous one. You can just ramp up very, very quickly because it is a skill you're learning. You discover that the transition from kind of normal life to this new place is very, very brief. Some of my retreats, I felt like in a few hours, I had just crossed over into this land of silence. From a non-dual perspective, the center of the bullseye is available right here in the middle of this podcast. It equalizes retreat and non-retreat; the boundary between formal practice and the rest of life is really, at bottom, just a concept. It’s a story you're telling yourself about why it makes sense to not expect this moment to be it. The best moments that I experienced on retreat were not moments that allowed me to recognize selflessness on demand. I could recognize sensation on demand; I could notice the hearing of it and notice that it just came and went. But it wasn't a clear insight into selflessness. You can do this while driving, while having a conversation. This is compatible with any possible experience. From the point of view of non-dual awareness, none of those experiences are a problem. There's just experience. Once you allow the center to drop out of any experience, even if a moment ago you were anxious.

"Stop searching for yourself; you're already part of the world. 🌍💫"

Freedom from self and from psychological suffering isn’t actually predicated on the contents of consciousness changing. The anxiety of stepping out on stage, for instance, is a problem if you're trying to fight it, wishing you weren't this person. But if you could just let the center of that drop out, it solves the problem even before the physiology changes. From the non-dual perspective, the non-dualist would say there's no self to be anxious to begin with—everything just is. This leads to techniques like those proposed by Douglas Harding: when you look for your head, you find that in place of where your head is supposed to be, there's just the world, there's just this open space in which everything's appearing.

In social interactions, much of your sense of self is born of a feeling that you're behind your face, you're in your head. The sense that I'm an object in the world for you is constantly being imposed upon us, and this sense of being scrutinized can lead to neurosis—it is the source code of neurosis, the thing that makes you uncomfortable with other people. Reflecting on personal experiences, I realized there wasn’t a cell in my brain that was concerned about what he thought of me; that preoccupation was a barrier to true experience.

"True freedom is loving without worrying about being judged. ❤️✨"

I was just totally free of self-concern. I was just talking to one of my best friends and we were just sitting across from each other on, you know, two couches having a conversation. There wasn't a cell in my brain that was concerned about what he thought of me. I just was feeling nothing but love and admiration and gratitude to be with my best friend. The part of me that I didn't even know was there, which was constantly cycling on how am I being perceived, that just went offline. It made me realize that this constant self-scrutiny is the source code of neurosis, the thing that makes you uncomfortable with other people. When that part of me went offline, there was no distance between me and the thing I was doing; I was just doing it. You can actually have that experience in any arbitrary context.

This brings up intractable questions about reality and consciousness. If everything is but an appearance in Consciousness and Consciousness is truly all that there is from our point of view, it becomes another intractable question to answer. But nothing of importance for our well-being hinges upon our answering that question. If Consciousness is born of information processing, then we certainly should expect conscious machines. My concern is that we won't actually know whether or not we've done that. If its portrayal of suffering or happiness is so thoroughly convincing to the bright human mind, we will interface with it accordingly.

Reflecting on the TV show Westworld and its implications, I think about how, in the presence of humanoid robots this compelling, no human would treat them the way that they are treated in the show. Westworld would act like a bug light for the world's Psychopaths.

"Unlock your mind, and set yourself free from unnecessary suffering. 🧠🔓🌈"

If we don't understand how Consciousness actually arises or if it does arise on the basis of information processing, we're at bottom not going to know whether that system is conscious. It will be very important to know if its seeming to suffer is real suffering. Are you committing a murder when you turn on your conscious robot if its portrayal of suffering or happiness is so thoroughly convincing to the bright human mind? The insight we had there is that Westworld's impossible because in the presence of humanoid robots this compelling, no human would treat them the way that they are treated. The non-psychopath among us would look at this and say, "We no longer respect you, you need to get help." There's no way we would behave this way. My concern is we will lose sight of the interesting problem as to whether or not they're conscious because they're just going to seem conscious, and in truth, we won't know. If the mind, including Consciousness, is really just what the brain is doing, then when you're dead, this disappears. You know, the candle goes out. It's not like there's some continuity of Consciousness because this really was just what your brain was doing. Everything you're experiencing right now is just a vision produced by neurophysiological changes moment to moment in your brain. You can abstract self into an experience in relation to someone else who doesn't even exist. Your version of me is very much a neurophysiological vision for you—that is its ontology. Your experience of it really is this visionary phenomenon; it is very much like what you experience in a dream. It offers an immense freedom to change your experience. So much of the story of being happy or happier than you are tending to be is not a matter of changing the world, it's a matter of changing your response to the world. It's interesting that we all live in a prison of our own mind and the suffering that we experience is all a function of our Consciousness. Yet, there is this key that if we insert it in the lock and turn it appropriately, we can liberate ourselves from so much of that suffering. We see gyms all over the world; we go to the gym if we want to get stronger. I think we're growing into this awareness that we can do the same for our minds. The solutions to all of those problems reside in the quality of our minds. Bad ideas are ascendant, strong opinions without any sense that you don't necessarily have to be identified with your opinion. We're spending basically all our time talking to ourselves and not noticing it. That is the state that's the default state for every person you see out there. So much of our suffering is totally unnecessary.

"Stop talking to yourself and start noticing the world around you. 🌍✨"

In our conversation, we delved into various philosophical and societal issues, touching on human consciousness, the impact of lying, and the nature of mystery. It's analogous to waking up from a dream; it's not to say that some thoughts aren't more significant than others. For instance, the cure for cancer, when it arrives, will be a profoundly important thought to communicate widely. Yet, we spend so much time talking to ourselves without noticing it, which is the default state for everyone. This self-imposed dialogue is a significant source of our suffering, which is largely unnecessary.

We also discussed the potential for immense societal change by addressing our relationship with truth. Referencing the book "Three Body Problem," I illustrated how an alien arriving on Earth might initially be willing to cooperate with humanity but would decide to destroy us upon realizing our propensity for lying. This highlights the severe consequences of our incapacity to maintain a truthful relationship. Moreover, there's a distinction between lying and bullshitting. A liar attempts to craft misrepresentations to meet logical expectations, whereas a bullshitter, like Trump, doesn't even try to align with the truth, leading to even more pervasive misinformation.

Reflecting on human intelligence and hubris, we acknowledged our tendency to view ourselves as the pinnacle of intelligence. However, in many ways, we're still rudimentary animals and could benefit from more humility regarding our capacities. Mystery, too, is intrinsic to existence. Even the most ordinary object, like a cup, can be profoundly mysterious if we pay close attention. Our conceptual understanding doesn't eliminate this mystery; it merely tiles over it, causing us to take it for granted.

"Every moment is a unique mystery waiting to be noticed. 🌟🧐"

If I actually pay close attention to anything, even the most prosaic object, it's as mysterious as anything you could produce. The level of our conceptual understanding doesn't actually banish that experience; it just kind of tiles over it and causes us to take it for granted. For instance, I can hold a cup and realize I will never have this exact experience again. The details of anything are completely unique, and this uniqueness extends to every moment we experience. Insofar as consciousness has a perennial quality, the mystery doesn't go away. It's like if you're married and you try to reduce your spouse to their name—that doesn't explain them. Similarly, the actual experience of moving my arm is a total mystery. It doesn't get less mysterious the more language you can hurl at it.

Transitioning to religion, the reason why I'm an atheist is that each religion rests on a claim about specific books. You just look at the books and you know that can't be true. It would take about a minute to improve these books morally, just by editing out all the parts that seem to support slavery, for example. An omniscient being could have included in a holy book a thousand words that map out the next 2,000 years of science and math. Instead, the Bible tells you to kill your neighbor if he works on the Sabbath.

When it comes to Buddhism, I disavow the organized religion and faith-based aspects. I don't call myself a Buddhist, but I've certainly been influenced by Buddhism more than any other tradition. Buddhist texts are more likely to offer a useful and non-dogmatic glimpse of the possibility of awakening and wisdom than anything you'll find in the Bible or the Quran. So much of what you find in Buddhism is just a very patient, endless repetition of a recipe for living an orderly, examined life—ethically scrupulous and increasingly wise—and it doesn't require belief in anything. Whatever is true in Buddhism or any other spiritual tradition is true at a deeper layer than culture, in the same way that physics isn't Christian, English, or American.

Reflecting on figures like Isaac Newton, it's astonishing to consider that Newton did something like a century or two of scientific work on his own in just 18 months. Despite being a Christian, he spent half his time trying to cash out biblical prophecy. This shows that even the greatest minds can be influenced by the cultural and religious context of their times, yet their contributions transcend those boundaries.

"True happiness isn't about what you have, but how deeply you live in the moment. 🧘‍♂️✨"

Buddhism offers a very patient and, admittedly, fairly boring kind of endless repetition of a recipe for living an orderly, examined life that is ethically scrupulous and increasingly wise. This approach respects the profundity found in the experience of the present moment and doesn't require belief in anything. Whatever is true in Buddhism or any other spiritual tradition is true at a deeper layer than culture. On the other hand, the Christians effectively invented physics—Isaac Newton, for example, was brilliant and essentially invented physics for all intents and purposes. There’s a similar shocking asymmetry spiritually in the running in the other direction, particularly with respect to the power of introspection and specific techniques like meditation. Abrahamic religions have confused us for centuries with their dogmatism and intolerance.

The great barrier or challenge, of course, is that the art and science of self-transcendence, which is the legacy of the East, becomes a very difficult message to deliver to a Western culture that puts the self at the center of everything. It's not an accident that Eastern society has not produced a political regime that we admire. Though there is no self, taking individual rights as primary politically is a very good algorithm to run. However, this overemphasis on personal liberty without an adequate appreciation that the liberties we enjoy are premised upon some level of collective responsibility is problematic.

It's possible to have almost nothing and to be happy; conversely, it's also possible to have everything and be so miserable that you're going to kill yourself. Spiritual insight, ethical depth, and real profundity are in some basic sense available at every moment, however we want to improve our lives or the world. Consciousness is open and already free of self, and there is no problem to solve in this moment.