1. Starting

Hi, this is Sam Harris.

Welcome to the Waking Up app. I want to take a few minutes to give you a sense of what you’ll experience here. The purpose of Waking Up isn’t just to help you meditate. It’s to help you live a more fulfilling life altogether. To that end, there’s no shortage of resources you can explore in the app, including dozens of conversations with philosophers, scholars, and contemplatives. There’s a wide range of courses with highly regarded meditation teachers. There are discussions about psychedelics, and sleep, and happiness. There are lessons on stoicism, effective altruism, time management, and more. And the list of topics we cover is always growing. But I encourage you to start here with our introductory meditation course, which may differ in a number of ways from other meditation resources you might have used. The course is structured in a step-by-step way over several weeks. Meditation isn’t a quick fix. It’s a practice. It’s a growing perspective, really, that you train in and become more familiar with over time. The course alternates between theory, lessons that explain the why of meditation, and practice, the meditation sessions themselves. So you’re not just learning to meditate. You’re also learning to incorporate the insights you’re gaining into your daily life. The meditation technique you’ll be using is a form of what’s commonly referred to as mindfulness. But with our approach, we’re not merely helping you calm down or reduce your stress in the moment. You may very well experience those benefits, but really we’re teaching you how to observe the nature of your own mind, so that you can discover some fundamental truths about it. Your mind, after all, is the basis of everything you experience in life, and of every contribution you can make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it. You already know what it’s like to have an untrained mind. We all do. It’s what allows us to be less than happy even when things are about as good as they can get. Even when everything is fine, we spend most of our time thinking about all the things we need to do, or want to do, or wish we hadn’t done, and we spend very little time truly content and focused in the present. And because of this, we often fail to really connect with the people around us, even the people we love most in this world. Understanding your own mind directly through the practice of mindfulness is the best way I know of to correct for this. There’s another aspect to mindfulness, one that is more profound, and that can radically change your perspective on life. And this has to do with discovering a sense of freedom that is intrinsic to the nature of your mind, and that is therefore always available, even now, in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness. This is something I’ll talk about a lot more in future sessions, so don’t worry if it sounds a bit far-fetched at the moment. For now, I just want to encourage you to stick with the introductory course. Most of the meditation sessions are around 10 minutes in length, so just try to do a session on as many consecutive days as you can, and then listen to the brief theory lessons in between. If you miss a few days, or even a few weeks, that’s completely fine. Just begin again. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with doing multiple sessions in a day, or repeating sessions as many times as you like. Ultimately, the goal here is not for you to become a meditator, even a good one, rather is to dissolve the apparent boundary between meditation and the rest of life, because as you’ll soon discover, no such boundary exists. The clarity and freedom you can experience in periods of meditation are no different from the clarity and freedom you can experience in your life, in your relationships, at work, once stuck in traffic, even when receiving a scary diagnosis from your doctor. If the Waking Up app works for you, it will become a kind of wise companion, a guide to help you deepen your understanding of your own mind, so that you can live a more meaningful and fulfilling life. And if it works for you, you’ll find that it has enormous implications for everything you do in life. Again, welcome to Waking Up, and I want to thank you in advance for the effort that you put in here. I think you’ll find that it’s worth it.