What Sam Harris Gets Wrong About Meditation, Or, How to Meditate Without Getting Weird

Meditation is an important part of my life. Doing 10 minutes of it each morning keeps me stable and relaxed, trending towards calmness rather than revving up towads insanity.

It makes sense. In this loud era, meditation is a counterbalance to the chaos.

But the older I get, the more frusterated I feel about the culture surrounding mindfulness and meditation. It seems that otherwise rational humans get weird when they think about meditating. They defer their own common sense to gurus and experts.

They say, “I don’t buy into this mystical stuff… but just let the guru do their thing.”

They talk about the illusion of the self and of transcendent, life-altering states. Even the most rational of the spirutal leaders, Sam Harris, compares deep meditative states with religious experiences.

For the record I love Sam Harris and am only picking on him to get pageviews. For the rest of this article I won’t attack him at all.

_{Sam Harris: Philosopher, Podcaster, and Neuroscientist}

A Rational View of Meditation

Then there’s my view of mindfulness…

I started meditating in my apartment during my college years, learning from a massive 700 page eBook that I only read a few chapters of.

Amongst the ramblings, there was a simple instruction: Sit, pay attention to the breath right where the air hits the tip of your nose, and try not to get caught up in your thoughts. The book recommended 10 minutes per session as a starting point, so that’s what I did.

After a few weeks of 10 minute meditation sessions, I was amazed at how strong my focus became. I could feel my mind shift towards calmness a little faster with each 10 minute session.

Now 7 years later my practice is not much different. There have been ups and downs - periods of relatively intense practice, 20 minutes twice per day, and months of no activity at all. On average, I do 10 to 20 minutes per day in the morning.

And to this day: I see nothing mystical in it.

I see no signs of supernatural phenomenon: There’s no whiff of a “deeper realm,” no new kind of “energy” to feel, no echoes of spirits in the internal fog.

There’s just me. My mind. The deeper I go, the more my view of myself progresses. That includes an evolution of my “illusion of the self” experience, perhaps the most hyped up element of mindfulness.

The Mythos of the Illusion of the Self

The “illusion of the self,” as I see it, is real… but it is less mystical than advertised.

During my more intense meditative journeys, I have experienced strong feelings of “selflessness.”

The feeling was of me NOT being the voice in my head.

You know, the voice where you think to yourself - “I am hungry, am I late for work, should I watch TV or go to bed, me me me…” — that voice is sometimes thought of as the center of “the self”, that stream of thoughts basically BEING you or coming straight from the central “you” thing in the brain.

But instead of seeing the “me” voice as me, I started to see the words in my brain as an extra part of me — an external part, something that could be removed without eliminating the ME from the equation. Like an arm or a leg, a PART of me, but not ME.

Now I was “the watcher,” perceiving my mental “me” voice as well as my emotions and physical sensations.

Another 2-3 years passed by. I began to interrogate “the watcher” itself, the “me” inside my mind that watched all of the other parts including the “me” voice.

And sure enough it changed agian. The watching “me” in my mind itself turned into just another part of me, external, possibly removable without losing the ME from the equation. Another limb. But this time, there was nothing else to shift the “me” to.

When the watching “me” stopped feeling like “me”, there was nothing left. I could see all of the old “me” parts - the voice, the watcher, the emotions, the physical sensations, the memories of the past, the expectations and ideas of the future, and more sensations beyond it all. Each was a part of me, but none was me itself.

The result was a decentralized self: many parts adding up to the emergent property of me, which did not feel centrally localized anywhere.

The “decentralized self” mental model is something I want to develop more. I only briefly tap into this feeling on rare occasion, and it is not an experience I can readily force to happen. Yet, it becomes more natural and more of my “normal way” as I practice it.

It’s not mystical. The self may be an “illusion,” but that doesn’t mean it is complete fantasy. Perhaps the self does exist but it exists in a different form than we are familiar with.

If a car hits you - you feel it, not me! So there’s a separation there. It’s important to factor that common sense fact into any model of the self or of selflessness.

The Self is an Illusion - But Not a Conspiracy

We are sold the idea of the self as a conspiracy.

The guru says: “You’ve been told your whole life that you are somebody, but it is not true. There is no “there” there! You are not a self, you are actually one limitless pulsing of energy and light through the universe…”

In other words, the whole thing is a setup! And how convenient is it that our “self” is designed to play along with society’s norms? This is the conspiracy mindset of selflessness.

The conspiracy model plays to our human instincts. We want to be part of a tribe, and we sometimes feel like the world is out to get us. When we learn that there is an “illusion of the self,” and when we decide that our society is perpetuating this illusion, we can end up becoming very conspiratorial and develop an “us vs. them” picture of the situation.

I encourage you to resist the conspiracy model of the self.

In my experience, the self is an illusion. It is not all that it appears to be. That’s the central truth that most meditators agree on. But it’s not an intentional conspiracy, certainly not a thing that the “powers that be” are forcing us to feel.

And you don’t need a new religion or new philosophy to begin to see the self as an illusion.

The most important fact is that doing meditation for 20 minutes per day, maybe a bit more, has tremendous benefits.

I encourage you to approach meditation rationally. Furthermore, accept that we live in an era where consciousness and the mind are NOT understood.

The way we view consciousness now is likely to be completely wrong, totally archaic compared to the model humanity will figure out in the coming centuries. It’s best IMO to accept this and live with it, rather than to rage against it.

Meditate.

Above all else, sit down and focus on your breathing, on the sensation right where the air meets the tip of your noise, with no music or TV playing in the background.

Do this 10 minutes a day, perhaps after breakfast. It feels wonderful.

How is your meditation practice going lately? What new lessons have you learned? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.