Engage in meditation not just to alter conscious experience for benefits like relaxation or focus, but to profoundly shift how you interact with the world by understanding consciousness itself. This practice allows you to perceive the nature of awareness, rather than just its contents.
Understand that the common feeling of being a ‘subject interior to experience’ or a ‘passenger inside your body’ is an illusion. By looking for this ‘I’ (the thinker in addition to thought), you can discover its absence, leading to psychological freedom and deeper benefits.
Cultivate mindfulness to recognize that there is no separation between you and your experience; you are the ‘river’ of experience, not on its bank. This means realizing there’s no distinct ‘self’ aiming attention, but rather an open condition in which everything appears.
Recognize that the ‘self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you’re thinking.’ In meditation, observe thoughts as spontaneous appearances in consciousness, rather than identifying with them, which is like ‘waking up from a dream.’
When experiencing negative emotions like anger, fear, or anxiety, practice paying scrupulous attention to them as pure physiological energy and changing sensations. This reduces resistance to the feeling, causing the psychological meaning and suffering to dissipate.
Recognize that true fulfillment comes from allowing your attention to fully rest in the present moment, rather than constantly brooding about the past or anxiously anticipating the future. This reverses the causality of happiness, allowing you to be fulfilled before external events occur.
Become more process-oriented in life, recognizing that the moment of goal fulfillment is fleeting and quickly recedes. While goals are valuable, happiness is not solely predicated on achieving them, as it’s possible to be miserable with everything or happy with very little.
Aim to erase the boundary between formal meditation practice and the rest of your life. While starting with dedicated time (e.g., sitting with eyes closed) is useful, the ultimate goal is for meditation (the recognition of consciousness’s intrinsic character) to be compatible with every waking moment.
For those who are skeptical of traditional meditation, carefully considered and guided psychedelic experiences (e.g., MDMA, psilocybin) can prove the value of first-person mind interrogation and reveal an inner landscape worth exploring, offering a glimpse of profound psychological health.
Incorporate eyes-open meditation into your practice, as much of the anchoring of our sense of self is based on visual cues. Losing the sense of self (giving up your ‘face’) can be especially vivid and salient with eyes open, fostering greater relationship and invulnerability in social contexts.
In meditation, if you find yourself easily distracted by thoughts, view this as progress rather than failure. Recognizing just how distractible your mind is, and the constant internal chatter, is the first step towards cultivating clearer awareness.
Adopt an attitude of understanding and intention towards physiologically unpleasant circumstances (e.g., intense physical exertion during a workout). By owning the experience and knowing its purpose, you can transform classically negative sensations into something intrinsically positive and achieve equanimity amidst struggle.
Reflect on whether social media platforms, particularly those prone to conflict (like Twitter), are producing needless conflict, fostering a negative view of humanity, or creating an ‘addictive component’ in your life. Disengaging from such platforms can free up immense mental bandwidth and lead to a less noisy, more considered existence.
Ensure adequate hydration and electrolyte balance by dissolving one packet of Element in 16-32 ounces of water first thing in the morning and during physical exercise. This is crucial for optimal brain and body function, especially for nerve cells.
Explore the Waking Up app, developed by Sam Harris, for a structured approach to meditation and understanding consciousness. Huberman Lab listeners can access a 30-day free trial at wakingup.com/Huberman.