2. Meditation 1

Learn to pay close attention to your breath, and let sounds and sensations pass.

This is Sam Harris. Throughout this course I’ll be introducing several methods of meditation, but all of them have their foundation and practice that’s widely known as mindfulness. Mindfulness isn’t so much a technique of meditation, as it is a quality of the mind itself. It is simply undistracted attention. It’s the ability to notice the sights and sounds and sensations, and even thoughts that are arising in consciousness in each moment, in a way that isn’t cluttered or even mediated by concepts. Exactly what mindfulness is, and the subtle difference between it and its counterfeits, will become much clearer as we train in it over the next few weeks. And this growing ability to pay attention will become the basis of many further reflections and considerations that I’ll introduce as we make progress through the course. Today we’ll begin with just five minutes of meditation, using an extremely simple practice of paying attention to the sensations of breathing. I’ll discuss the logic of this practice later on and explain why it makes sense to do it. But for today, I just want you to try it for five minutes. So take a moment to find a comfortable posture. You can sit cross-legged on a cushion if you want to, but generally I recommend that you find a comfortable chair where you can sit upright. A desk chair would be perfect. And once you’re comfortable, close your eyes and then take a few deep breaths. And now gradually become aware of the sensations of breathing. Notice where you feel the breath most distinctly, either the tip of your nose or in the rise and fall of your chest or abdomen. And wherever you feel it, just focus there on the raw sensations. And then just let your breath come and go naturally. There’s no need to control it. If it’s deep, that’s fine. If it’s shallow, that’s fine. Just feel these sensations as closely as you can. As you pay attention to the breath, you will notice other perceptions, sensations in your body or sounds. Notice these things too, and then just come back to the feeling of breathing. See if you can become sensitive to what’s happening in your mind the moment you hear my voice. In the beginning, almost invariably, I’ll be interrupting a train of thought, catching you thinking while you are attempting to pay attention to the breath. Just notice this without judgment. Judgment, in fact, is just another thought. And then come back to the feeling of breathing. The moment you become aware that you’re thinking with images or language, observe the thought itself and then come back to the sensation of breathing. For the last minute of this session, just begin again. See if you can feel the next inhalation from the moment it appears until the moment it subsides. And so too with the next exhalation. Okay. Well, if that was your first time meditating, congratulations. You’ve just begun doing something that is deceptively simple, but extraordinarily profound. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate how deep and interesting and transformative this simple practice of paying close attention to your experience can become. Now, unfortunately, there’s no way I can prove that to you, short of getting you to do the practice to the point of real insight. Consider by analogy the science of astronomy. Now, you might live as many of us do in a city where there’s a lot of light pollution. So when you look up at the sky at night, you might not see any stars at all. Or the only stars that you do see might in fact be planets, because they’re the only things bright enough to break through the haze. So your situation is such that you can’t even notice how beautiful or interesting the cosmos is, because you can’t see it in any detail. Of course, this doesn’t give you any reason to doubt that astronomy is a real field of discovery. But the difference is that you’ve probably been out in the country, or in the wilderness at night, and seen what the sky looks like without any light pollution. And beyond that, you’ve surely seen photographs taken from the Hubble Space Telescope of brilliant fields of stars and even other galaxies. So even if you almost never experienced it directly, there’s no reasonable basis to doubt that the sky is incredibly beautiful, and that there really is much to discover there. But with respect to your own mind, you may have never had a moment where the conditions were right to see anything of interest directly. Meditation is a method for creating those conditions. And in fact, it’s analogous to building your own telescope. And once it’s built, you don’t lose it. You may have to tune it up from time to time. But it really is difficult to exaggerate the difference between having recognized the sky of the mind with properly trained attention and never having looked up at all. So, thank you for embarking on this journey with me.