Michael Pollan On: Reducing Rumination, Reclaiming Your Attention From the Machines, and MDMA-Assisted Therapy

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, back today with one of my favorite repeat guests and somebody who of late I've gotten a chance to know a little bit better and like even more. And that is Michael Pollan, the great journalist and writer. He's out with a new book on the subject of consciousness, which I know at first might sound a little abstract, but it is directly related to happiness and its opposite, suffering. In this conversation, we talk about how to reduce rumination, how to lower the walls of your ego, how to elevate your mundane tasks, the value of what the Zen folks call don't know mind, how to reclaim your attention from big tech, who Michael calls the colonizers of consciousness, the value of MDMA-assisted therapy, and his experiences of meditating in a cave. Long way of saying this is a rangy and fascinating conversation. You're going to love it. Before we dive in, two things. First, a quick refresher on Michael Pollan. Many of you know this, but he has written 10 books, including How to Change Your Mind, In Defense of Food, and The Omnivore's Dilemma. His latest book is called A World appears. That's what we'll be spending our time discussing today. Also, Michael has taught at both UC Berkeley and Harvard. The other thing I want to say very quickly is that if you want to upgrade your consciousness, I would love for you to check out my app, 10% with Dan Harris. We've got meditations from the world's greatest teachers. We also do a weekly live video meditation and Q&A session because the science shows it is truly much easier to boot up and maintain a meditation habit if you do it with other people. Sign up at danharris.com. Danharris.com. Join the party. We'll get started with Michael Pollan right after this. Paleo Valley is a health and wellness brand that focuses on creating nutrient-dense, whole food source, organic products. The brand's mission is to create nutrient-dense snacks and Supplements without unnecessary additives like preservatives, chemicals, or added sugar use the highest quality ingredients and support American farmers practicing regenerative agriculture. Paleo Valley's 100% grass-fed beef sticks are for clean, healthy protein on the go. I just had a taste of one. Delicious. They're made with 100% grass-fed and finished beef, raised on American farms using regenerative practices and certified organic spices. The beef sticks come in five flavors. Original, which is the one I just tasted, which tasted like an elevated version of a Slim Jim. They've also got jalapeno, summer sausage, garlic summer sausage, and teriyaki. I think I'm going to keep a bouquet of these Paleo Valley beef sticks in the backseat of my car because my son loves beef sticks. And I think this will be an excellent snack, especially when I pick him up from school. Head to paleovalley.com slash happier or use code happier at checkout for 15% off your purchase. That's paleovalley.com slash happier or just use the code happier at checkout. Going to the gym can be discouraging, especially if you're putting in the work but barely seeing changes. However, with Tonal, you can actually see your progress with every workout. Tonal provides the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer anytime at home with one sleek system designed to reduce your mental load tonal is the ultimate strength training system helping you focus less on workout planning and more on getting results no more second guessing your form tonal gives you real-time coaching cues to dial in your form and help you lift safely and effectively. I cannot tell you how many times I've hurt myself and then had to take weeks, if not months off because I did not lift safely. I did not have somebody helping me with my form, which is why Tonal is so clutch. After a quick assessment, Tonal sets the optimal weight for every move and adjusts in one pound increments as you get stronger. So you're always challenged. Tonal lets you choose from a variety of expert-led workouts, from strength to aero hit to yoga and mobility to keep you coming back for more, which is the key with exercise. You want to keep doing it. Right now, Tonal is offering our listeners $200 off your Tonal purchase with promo code HAPPIER. That's tonal.com. And then use the promo code HAPPIER for $200 off your purchase. Tonal.com, promo code HAPPIER for $200 off. Michael Pollan, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Dan. Very good to be here. It's great to have you here. Congratulations on your new book. Thank you. Speaking of your new book, I'm just curious why this subject? I can imagine why, but why consciousness? You know, when I think about it in retrospect, I think I must have been crazy to think I could write a book about consciousness. I don't know exactly what got into me, but it really grew out of a series of experiences I had, both in meditation and in experimenting with psychedelics, which I had done for my book before last, How to Change Your Mind. And there is a way that both activities kind of smudge the windshield of our perception. And suddenly we realize there is a windshield and it's like this, but why isn't it like that? You're suddenly aware of something that is normally just the water you swim in, which is to say this conscious awareness of the world, but also this space of interiority. I mean, it's incredibly weird when you think about it, that at the same time we're looking at each other and having this conversation, there's another conversation going on in each of our minds. Is this guy crazy? I don't know what you're thinking. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You're thinking, is this guy crazy? Is that what you're thinking? I'm thinking maybe you're thinking that. He talks about the windshield of perception. I don't know. and I'm having my own like, you know, what is he wearing? What is that red dot behind him? There's a lot going on that we don't really think about at all. And we think we have this transparent relationship with reality and this direct conversation with other people. So what essentially had happened is that consciousness had become defamiliarized for me. And in the way art sometimes can defamiliarize experience and make you look at it and say, yeah, that is really strange. Now, this is not unusual. Lots of people who meditate and you psychedelics finally start asking questions about consciousness. I mean, in meditation, you get a chance to observe your consciousness in a way we don't in everyday life. So I thought, I like to write books about things I'm curious about. Why not this? And I have an incredibly indulgent editor who, when I proposed this, didn't bat an eye. She says, yeah, that sounds great. Let's do it. So that sent me down this very long trail of trying to understand something that is famously known as the hard problem. And warning, I didn't figure it out, the main question that goes under the rubric of hard problem, which is essentially, how is it that three pounds of gray matter between your ears, these neurons, this animal flesh, can generate subjective experience? And nobody really knows how that works. It remains a tremendous mystery. I once heard Jack Kornfield articulate the mystery thusly. How did planet Earth go from rocks to opera? That's the story. That's the story. And there's another mystery in there too, is how do we get to life from dead matter? Another question we really haven't solved yet. We know about the Darwinian soup of chemicals that might have joined in a certain way and started reproducing. So those are the two of the three big questions. The third one is, why is there something rather than nothing? And I'm not going to write about that in the next book. You're going to go back to food. Something easy. We've been using this word consciousness, but it might be helpful to define it. And perhaps while we're at it, and you touched on this a little bit, but on top of the definition, maybe add why we should care. Yeah. Okay. Well, those are two big questions. Consciousness can be defined in one word as experience, the fact that you have experience. That's something your toaster does not have, as far as we know. Or awareness, the fact that you are not just present here, but aware that you are. Those are two good definitions. Another way to think about it is back in the 70s, there was a famous article written by a NYU philosopher called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And his contention was, if it is like anything to be a bat, and we can imagine with some effort what it's like to be a bat, which is to say a creature that navigates its world through echolocation, bouncing sound waves off of its environment rather than taking in reflected light as we do. So it's weird, but it's something to be that creature. Then that creature is conscious. So it's not exactly a definition, but it's a formulation. So in one sense, it's very simple. It's the fact that, as the title of the book goes, a world appears when we open our eyes. It's also, though, there are more complicated dimensions of consciousness that awareness many, many animals have. It's not so unusual in nature. And experience is not so unusual in nature. And what it is likeness is not so unusual in nature. What we have in addition to that are these layers, kind of recursive layers of self-consciousness. The fact that not only are we aware, but we're aware that we're aware. That's pretty trippy when you think about it. And we have a sense of self also, which is a product of consciousness. It's certainly not a product of brains. I mean, we've never been able to locate the self in the gray matter. In terms of why it matters, that's a really big question. I mean, many people go through life not thinking about consciousness or the fact that they are conscious beings and this rock is not a conscious being. But I found that paying attention to it was incredibly rewarding, and that we take our consciousness for granted. There are certain experiences that make us see it and feel it. Being more conscious is to be more present, more present to experience, more present to reality, and it's just a fuller life. But there's also, I think, a particular urgency about paying attention to consciousness right now, which is that there are technologies and corporations that are eager on kind of colonizing your consciousness. If you think about social media, it has colonized all that stray time in which we are more fully conscious of our environment, of ourselves. Think of standing online at the cash machine or whatever, we used to look around, think, plan our dinner, daydream, wonder about the person in front of us online. Now we scroll on our phones. Now you have to be conscious to scroll on your phone, obviously, but it's a pretty minimal consciousness compared to what's possible. And I think that that problem that social media has given us is being amplified right now by AI because AI chatbots are pretending to be conscious and fooling people that they are. And in the same way social media allowed companies to kind of hack our attention, they're now, with AI, hacking our emotions, our attachment. You know, this very central human need to attach to other people. Many people are starting to fall in love with chatbots and have meaningful relationships with machines, which I basically think is very dangerous and is the very definition of dehumanizing when you're relating to a machine like that. So that's another kind of urgency. I think we need to think hard about our consciousness and how we might reclaim that precious space of interiority from these technologies and corporations that have designs on it. So two parts there. The first is becoming conscious of your consciousness, aware of your awareness. It thrusts you into the present moment, like definitionally, and helps you live a more vivid and fulfilled life. And on a related note, and this is the second part of your argument as I understand it, and you'll correct me if I misunderstand it, we're in an era where we have, and this is your term, and I really like this term, these colonizers of consciousness in the form of phones generally, social media specifically, and now even more specifically AI, that is reducing the aperture of consciousness in ways that can be quite pernicious. Yeah, exactly right. And we're giving something away that's really precious. And I think we need to reclaim it. And, you know, we've all had this experience of what happens when, as at a meditation retreat, you put aside your phone for days or weeks, things change. You are alone with your mind, and other things are happening at a meditation retreat too. I would say the lack of eye contact and the lack of conversation. You really are kind of putting a fence around this amazing thing of your consciousness and going deep to explore it. And I found the value of that profound. It's interesting in the book, the book gradually makes this transition from really worrying about the hard problem and framing things in this very Western male problem solution frame, which is the frame that all the scientists studying consciousness use, to realizing, well, there is the problem of consciousness, but then there's the fact of it. And I got more and more interested in the fact of it. And how does the stream of consciousness work? How does meditation affect consciousness? How do psychedelics affect consciousness? The book kind of shifts in focus as time goes on. And by the end, well, I don't want to give away the ending, but it's very much about experiencing consciousness, which for me became very profound where I went into a period of isolation. There's a few days at the end of the book where I'm essentially living in a cave in New Mexico. I won't tell you what happened, But I was more alone with my consciousness than I'd been in a long time. I should add, though, that it can be hard to be alone with your consciousness. It isn't always wonderful. There's a reason, I think, that we want to be distracted. We're willing ourselves to be less conscious, and that's because it can be painful. I mean, it causes you to examine yourself. You know, the mind can be a scary place to be, particularly for people who have had a traumatic past, who are struggling with profound issues of mortality or relationships. So I totally get the desire to escape this place. But in the end, I don't think we're going to be satisfied in our lives without learning how to occupy it and defend it. In terms of the defending it, or the reclaiming it, as you referred to it earlier, for people listening who may not want to go on a meditation retreat or be able to go on a meditation retreat. And just side note, I am going to come back to your meditation retreat experiences eventually, but just staying at the sort of shallower end of the pool, what do you recommend or what do you do personally in day-to-day life to defend or reclaim your consciousness? Well, I do meditate every day and not for a very long time, usually for like 20 minutes. That's just a kind of reminder of this phenomenon, and it calls my attention to it. And I'm really struck at how strange it is, the kinds of images that come up, the kinds of snatches of narrative that come up. I feel like I'm in touch with some interesting forces within me. So before I enter the day, which is going to pull me this way and that way, Whether it the email queue or the Zoom meetings or the conversations with people I going to have to put aside a lot of my interiority for that period of time But I have that little anchor every morning That one thing The other thing is really trying to get on top of our distractions and putting myself in nature. Nature speaks with a much quieter, subtler voice than most of the things we deal with every day. So going out in nature, in my case, there's no cell phone reception, or I leave my phone home, is another way to kind of reconnect. So, you know, I try to make some time every day. And at the beginning of the day, it's meditation. End of the day, it's a hike in Tilden Park above Berkeley. So those two things help. But I need to be reminded too. I can completely get absorbed in, you know, social media or watching the news, all these things that are yanking our attention away from consciousness and our families and our presence and our, where we are, where we actually are. I want to go back to our daily or daily-ish or occasional, whatever cadence you prefer, meditation practice, our short bursts of meditation. I can imagine a listener thinking, well, you know, I meditate once in a while, but I don't think of it in terms of consciousness. You know, I just try to focus on my breath or something else, sounds in the environment, whatever. I pick something to focus on, loving kindness phrases. And then every time I get distracted, I start again and again and again. And I thought I was doing meditation correctly, but now you, Michael Pollan, are coming in and talking about consciousness, but I don't really think about it in those terms. And therefore, am I doing it incorrectly? No, no, no, no, no. It's just a name. I'm putting a name on that space that you're occupying, that you're saying to yourself, oh, shit, I lost the breath. I better get back to it. Think of it as a place, a space. That's kind of where you're operating when you're meditating. I don't think it's any different than what I'm describing. I think I'm just putting a name to it. And one of the things that strikes me, I mean, we all worry we're doing it wrong, right? For me, if I'm meditating well, there's a lot of kind of hypnagogic imagery those kind of snatches of narrative or images that pop up right before you fall asleep. And it's not like I'm sleepy or anywhere near falling asleep. But for me, when I'm meditating well, all that material seems free to enter into my consciousness. And it's really interesting. And I'll watch that and sometimes drift along with it in a way you're probably not supposed to. But, you know, our attention, which I mean, that is a term I'm sure you think about in terms of meditation, you know, am I attending to the breath or focus? Those are elements of consciousness, tools of consciousness, where we aim our attention. It's kind of the outward focus of consciousness. But there are other elements too. And, you know, there are emotions and feelings and then all that weird imagery that's floating up from who knows where. I mean, one can play with the weird imagery or random thoughts in a way that points you directly at consciousness simply by asking, who ordered this dish? Yeah. Or who thought this thought? Who perceived this perception? Yes. And of course, that's an exercise in meditation. and usually you come up empty. And that's really interesting too. I mean, one of the things that meditation does, and this is obvious to people who meditate seriously, is raise profound questions about the self and whether it is real or a hallucination or a construction. And I mean, I have a meditation teacher here in Berkeley and that's a big part of what he does, which is take you down a path and then just say, okay, let's take a look. Who's having those thoughts? Are those thoughts thinking themselves? And going back to David Hume in the 1740s, that operation of looking inside to find the self, which he recommended and of course failed to do, he said, I went inside myself and I saw perceptions and thoughts and feelings and there was never a lack of those, but I could not find who is having those perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. That raises big questions about something we all take for granted. I mean, that's kind of the more subversive piece of meditation, I think, is to lead people to overturn this assumption that they are identical with their sense of self or ego. The not finding, in Tibetan practice, they often say the not finding is the finding. So the point is to look who's taking delivery of all these perceptual packages. And when you can't find anything, well, that's the point. You're seeing that all there is is phenomena arising. This flow of perceptions, yeah. I like the way you involve FedEx in consciousness there. You know, they're a sponsor of the show, Michael. So if you're listening, FedEx, we would gladly take you as a sponsor. packages. Yeah. What's arising in this consciousness is greed right now. But at least I'm seeing it clearly. Coming up, Michael Pollan talks about whether the self is real or an illusion, what meditation and psychedelics reveal about identity, how loosening identification with the self can interrupt rumination, and much more. Right before I recorded this ad, I was in my closet looking around for what I was going to wear tomorrow. I've got a family lunch, and I was a little disappointed to see that my favorite pair of pants, literally my favorite pair of pants for two years now, they're unavailable. I think they're still in the laundry. You know who makes those pants? Quince. Quince has the everyday essentials that I love with quality that lasts. organic cotton sweaters, polos for every occasion, lighter jackets that keep you warm in the changing season. The list goes on. Quince works directly with top factories and cuts out the middleman, so you're not paying for brand markup, just quality clothing. Everything is built to hold up to daily wear and still look good season after season. Hence the fact that my black pants from Quince are still my favorite pair of pants after all these years. I've also got a bunch of sweaters from them and socks and underwear. I've got a lot of Quince stuff. I like their stuff a lot. Here's the other thing. They only partner with factories that meet rigorous standards for both craftsmanship and ethical productions. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash happier for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash happier. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash happier. so so we're saying a little bit more because you dedicate a whole chapter to this you called it i think radical idea that the self is an illusion yeah i struggle with that we all do i think because we can resolve to make something happen and then make it happen and who's doing that i mean we do take actions all the time. So I'm not 100% convinced that the self is an illusion, but I get it. I did an exercise with Mathieu Ricard, the French scientist turned Buddhist monk. Very interesting guy. He's written a lot on the self. And I was saying, are there any meditation exercises I could use to explore this question? Because it is one of the questions in the book. and he said yes imagine your mind as a house of many rooms and there is a thief in the house and go through every room until you find the thief and you go through the room and lo and behold you find nothing and he said that thief is the self and you can't find it now then i had this weird okay, so interesting exercise, similar to what David Hume did, right? Looking inside for the self. But then I had this interesting experience of being hypnotized by a Stanford psychiatrist named David Spiegel, who's a great believer and uses hypnosis in his practice. And I asked him, I said, could you hypnotize me? And I want to try this exercise under hypnosis. So he put me into a light trance. Turns out I'm, you know, we all have a either very hypnotizable, mildly so, or not at all. Turns out I'm like nine out of 10, not hard to hypnotize. So he put me into this light trance and I did this exercise going through the rooms of my head. And instead of finding nothing, I found a different self in every room. I found my like 13-year-old bar mitzvah boy self. I saw my 32-year-old young father self, each dressed differently, looking differently. So I found like six selves. And I never got to get back to Ricard on that, on what that meant. It did deconstruct the idea that there is this unitary abiding self, that the self is many things. But it didn't sort of fit the official Buddhist idea, I think. So I'm somewhat agnostic about the self. I do think, however, and did conclude, that the self and consciousness are not the same. In other words, that you can have consciousness without a self. And that might seem like a strange idea, but people who've meditated more extensively than I report this feeling of being conscious, very aware, but no sense of self. and it's something that happens on psychedelics too it can on a high dose and i did once have this experience of complete self-dissolution i saw myself explode in a cloud of blue post-it notes that then fluttered to the ground like snow and then they coalesced in this pool of blue paint and i was like that was me and i knew it was me but i was looking at it from this selfless purely objective, completely calm perspective and not troubled by it at all. And if that sounds weird, if you think about, and this is a practice, the moment when you wake, the first 500 milliseconds, when you don't quite know who you are or where you are, that is an experience of no self everybody has every day. We don't think about it because we just wait for everything to click in and start again. But we all know that moment where like, who am I? Where am I? Am I? And it's worth paying attention to because it helps you take on board the idea that the self and consciousness might not be identical or that you're not even identical to your ego and that you'll survive its death or temporary dissolution. You know, the self is very funny in that we all, in our culture at least, kind of celebrate it. We talk about the importance of self-confidence. We practice self-interest. We're told that it's very important to our success, and it is, right? It is our ego that helps you get your writing done, my writing done, making podcasts. On the other hand, we put a lot of energy into escaping or transcending ourselves. We look for very absorbing experiences, right? We take physical risks. We want to put ourselves in that place of flow. And I'm very curious about that paradox, that we celebrate the self and then work like hell to transcend it. And through meditation, too. It's one of the reasons people meditate or take psychedelics, because they feel tyrannized by their self. so that's something i explored in the book and my own mixed feelings about the self but there's a sense of liberation i felt in that psychedelic experience when the self disappeared it felt like so right and one of the things that happens when the self dissolves is that the walls come down you know the ego is a defensive structure among other things and it puts a wall between us and other people, us and nature, us and everything out there. And the experience you have, and this is true in meditation too, and I have to say I've only had glimpses of it in meditation, there is a sense of merging with something larger that happens when those walls come down. And for me in that psychedelic experience, it was a piece of music, this Bach unaccompanied cello suite. And the subject-object distinction fell away, and I just was that piece of music. And it was the most profound and beautiful experience of music I'd ever had. But some people merge with nature, some people merge with others, and they feel like they're connected to others in this bath of love. So some very interesting things happen when the self dissolves. But we're also afraid of it, because it's kind of like a death practice to let yourself go. There's so much to this. Just if anybody listening is confused, let me just give you permission to be confused. It is confusing. And I host these weekly Q&A sessions with my app subscribers and almost every week, somebody's like, can you explain this whole self or non-self non-duality thing again? And I'm always happy to try in my ham-handed way. And one of the things I always make sure to say is, don't worry if this doesn't make sense, kind of let it wash over you. In my experience, just kind of letting myself marinate in the idea over time allowed it to make sense a little bit more. And even then, it's only, I have like episodic moments of clarity, but on one specific point, I just want to make a build and see what you think, or do a build and see what you think. You were kind of answering the question like, so what? Whether the self is real or not can feel hopelessly, you know, abstract at first at least, but it's not for one reason that you articulated, which is if you're not so owned by the ego, then there's much more room for everybody and everything else. The walls come down and we know what the essential ingredient really for human flourishing is contact and connection and with other people and with the world. So yes, there's that, but even that can sound a little grandiose and, you know, it's the apex predator of all spiritual cliches is oneness with the universe. And that, you know, it can sound a little like hard to get a toehold in. So I would offer something a little bit more modest, which is when you learn to not take everything that comes up in your mind so personally and so seriously, then you can work with it more. So if you move from viewing any anger that comes up in the mind as my anger, I'm like this, I'm always going to be like this, I feel shame about being like this, I can't get out of this anger, to no, this is just a meteorological system moving through, inherently temporary, not mine, or as one Buddhist monk put it, to call it mine as a misappropriation of public property. Well, it just becomes much more workable. So I'm curious, what you think about that. I do. I totally agree. Joseph Goldstein has a very nice way of dealing with this, which is put it in the passive voice. Instead of saying, I am angry, anger is happening, anger is being known. And suddenly you've separated that tight identification. It's interesting. We work very hard to identify ourselves with our thoughts. But one of the things that happens in meditation is you find these thoughts happening on their own. and to me that's one of the most interesting things about it is that that tight identity of me and my thoughts falls apart really quickly for me and things are just popping up that i don't want to think or didn't think i thought and that's kind of i don't know one of the things i find interesting about meditation is it gets you in touch with the sheer strangeness of your mind and how much is going on and that you realize that consciousness is like probably the tip of the iceberg. And we know this actually, it's not a guess because the brain is, you know, does all sorts of things automatically. It's kind of incredible what it does automatically, right? It's regulating your heart rate, your blood pressure, your blood gases. It's perceiving lots of things in your environment without rising to your awareness. I think the question is, Why isn't it all automatic? Why is there this space of awareness which I think is for decision But anyway things are bubbling up from there There a scientist I interviewed quite a few times named Kalina Kristoff who a psychologist at UBC and she studies experienced meditators since they're expert at noticing what's going on in their mind. She asks them, she puts them in an MRI and says, all right, meditate, try to empty your mind, which she says people can only do for like 10 seconds. She said her biggest discovery about meditation is that it only works for short amounts of time in her experience. Anyway, so press a button when a thought occurs. And what she's found really interesting is there's four seconds that elapse, which is a year in brain time between her spotting activity in the hippocampus and the awareness of that idea, memory, thought, whatever. So there's some process, and it's elaborate and slow, by which unconscious material forces its way into our awareness when we think we've kind of cleared the decks. We don't know what's happening, but something's happening. And some stuff's getting up and through, and some is not. So it's just another example of the sheer strangeness of how our minds work. I'm going to say something else to see if you agree with me. I'm completely with you on the strangeness of it. But again, my mind goes right to the liberative potential, the utility of it. And for me, it's not only the awe, A-W-E, that gets produced when I see the strangeness of my own mind and how involuntary so much of it is. And by the way, just side note on the stuff that does feel voluntary, like the directed thinking, I'm now going to think about X. Well, upstream from that, I mean, how voluntary was the impulse to decide? But back on point, the liberating aspect here is, to me at least, and I'm checking this with you, is if so many of my thoughts and emotions are involuntary, well, then can't I drop the shame that I feel around a bigoted thought or angry or greedy thought? I often experience some judgment about somebody else, some uncharitable thoughts, some greed or unwholesome, unspeakable impulse that arises in my mind. And then I tell myself a whole story about who I am because I've just seen this thing flit through the mind. But if I can view it all as nature, well, then to quote another Buddhist monk. It's not my fault that this stuff is happening, but it is my responsibility. So that doesn't let me off the hook, but it does help me uncoil out of shame. Am I making any sense to you? Yeah, it does. It's kind of weakening that link of identity of you and it, and that to the extent you see these thoughts as passing through, I think it helps and you're less invested in them. But in terms of responsibility, I mean, that's interesting. I mean, the whole kind of ethical, implications of this. I'm not sure I totally understand. You could look at all this and think, oh, this is a disowning of responsibility. Except what happens in the private space of our own minds, and I haven't used the word private to this point, but I think it's very important to this idea of consciousness that it is a zone of privacy. Anything goes in there. It's whether you act on things or not. That's when ethics enters the picture, when there's behavior involved. And, you know, having bigoted thoughts or ugly thoughts or unacceptable fantasies, that's what consciousness is good for. I'm kind of like, let it rip as long as it stays in there. Yeah, I think where it gets tricky is you might, under the influence of enough meditation, notice that you have a pronounced and heretofore unseen bias that you've been acting out of your whole life, you do then have some responsibility. To deal with it. Yes. Yeah. And let it go. But the ability to let thoughts go is huge. I mean, I think that so many of our problems and mental health challenges revolve around rumination. The fact that we get stuck in these circles of thought and they're often self-critical, but breaking out of those circles, I think is really important and meditation can help. And we also know psychedelics can help. I mean, it's very interesting to watch how psychedelic therapy has evolved to address rumination. And rumination is at the basis not only of depression and anxiety and OCD, but also addiction. Addiction is a ruminative behavior. It's very repetitive. It's out of our control. There's an interesting study going on at Harvard now looking at rumination as a root cause of a variety of different mental illnesses using psychedelics to see, can you break those patterns? I had a conversation with a psychiatrist a few years ago, and I was reporting on psychedelic therapy and its value for how to change your mind. And I said, isn't this a little suspicious that the same drug, psilocybin, is being used to treat anxiety, depression, OCD, addiction, eating disorders? It seems like a panacea. And he said, and this is a guy who'd been head of the National Institute of Mental Health, a psychiatrist, very prominent. And he said, well, how do you know they're all different? Maybe they're all symptoms or manifestations of the same stuck brain. Yeah. And of course, what that brain is stuck in is rumination. Yes. Yes. So I think a danger of meditation is that freed of external distractions, some people ruminate during meditation and really get stuck. It's counterproductive, but it can happen. I would say that's not necessarily a danger of meditation properly understood. I think it's a danger of meditation without proper instruction. I think you're probably right. Although the tendency will surface, you just have to know how to deal with it. Yes. But what do you recommend for people who get stuck in ruminative thoughts on meditation? Go back to the breath? Well, first thing I would say is it's completely natural. You don't need to beat yourself up for it. The moment you've noticed it is success. Even if you noticed it after 25 minutes of a 30-minute session, that's still a good meditation session. That's more metacognition. That's more self-awareness, self in scare quotes than most people get in a lifetime. time. So I set the bar really low. So if you're noticing that you keep ruminating in meditation, I hear a good practice. That's the point. I'll tell my wife because she struggles with that. We meditate together and I'll say after, how was it? And she's, oh, you know, I was stuck on this and this and this. And I'll tell her, well, good. You recognize that you were stuck on this and this in this. Yeah. There are further refinements that a Joseph Goldstein or a Sharon Salzberg could provide, obviously, because I'm not nearly at that level, but my reflex response to your wife would be gold star. You're doing it right. Keep going. I spent time with Joan Halifax, the Zen priest, in the last part of this book, and she had described Upaya, her retreat center, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I was very curious how that happened. And I asked her, how do people get to that point? These are people who come for a retreat for several weeks. Some of them come for years. And it's Zen practice, so it's got the least amount of support, really. And you're just staring at a wall. I said, what do people think about? And she said, well, they ruminate and they plan. And she said, after about three days, they are so sick of the reruns in their minds that they drop in. And there's some other things that are done to facilitate this, but she just thinks it's sheer amount of time spent in the Zendo in front of the wall. And you just get so bored with yourself that you open up to the group and the self slips away. She could time exactly when it happened for most people. I love Roshi Joan. She's been on the show a bunch. I'll drop some links in the show notes to my conversations with her. Coming up, Michael talks about his retreat in a cave, the practice of don't know mind. And we talk about psychedelics, MDMA, and breaking your ancient patterns. so i'd be curious there are a bunch of practices that emerge in the book that i want to talk about with you but before we go there to the extent that you're comfortable and i know you said earlier you don't want to give it all away but there is this kind of climactic scene in the book and the chapter is called the cave where you're meditating in a cave so what can you tell us about that experience. Oh, I'm happy to tell you anything about it. I'm just kidding. If you're reading this book because of suspense, it's not going to work. You know, I mentioned the book kind of starts with science, and there's a lot of stuff on the science of consciousness and the challenges that it faces, and it's a relatively new science. And we figured out certain things about consciousness, but not the hard problem remains pretty hard. And then I went looking for other ways of knowing. and one of them is literature. You know, novelists and poets know an awful lot about consciousness. And I interview a stream of consciousness writer and talk about Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and that's where we went for a couple hundred years to understand the consciousness of other people because novelists can penetrate it, and poets too. But I also knew that Buddhists knew important things about consciousness and had been thinking about it for a long time. So I thought I would reach out to Roshi Joan, who I'd met a couple times and really liked and admired. I asked her if I could come to Upaya and hang out for a while. And I thought what I would do is just kind of join the retreat members and the aspiring monks and get into their routine and meditate with them. But she said, no, I've got a much better idea for you. we're going to go up to the refuge, which was this place that Upaya owns a couple hours north in the mountains, very isolated, off the grid. And when you go there, there's a series of huts where she sends students and she'll send people up there and you're living without plumbing or electricity for years at a time. She said, and I think you should stay in the cave. And I'm like, cave? And she said, don't worry, it's a five-star cave. You'll be comfortable, which wasn't quite true. And the cave was another long hike from this little village of huts where she has a house and spends a lot of time. It's a beautiful place. And so I went into this cave and I was living there for a few days. And it turned out to be a very profound experience. I was so far off the grid that I could almost feel the absence of electromagnetic waves. You know, there was like profound silence. I felt like the world had really dropped away. I had nothing to do. My phone obviously wouldn't work. And I spent my time sweeping the threshold and making tea. There was a meditation platform. There was a single bed. there was a battery hooked up to a solar array so I could get some power to read at night. And there was a little camp stove and five-gallon jug of water. I just kind of sunk into this silence and I spent a lot of time meditating. I was able to meditate for hours at a time, which I'd never been able to do. I just felt this kind of sense of time foreshortening. I mean, I'm someone who's normally in the future, the near future, worrying about what has to happen, what I have to do. And I found the future falling away, and I found the past falling away. And I realized when your sense of the past and the future are not present, your self shrinks. We don't have a self unless we can connect it to a story of the person to which all this happened, and then the person who has these goals or objectives. The self is a product of time in many ways. And that kind of fell away. I just sort of felt as though I was in touch with, I was just more present to nature. It was interesting. At a certain point, my routine became a meditation. The sweeping of the threshold the digging of pit toilets in the woods the the making of a pot of tea all this became very ritualized and was in a way i was more present then than i was when i was meditating and when i was meditating i was going off in all these crazy places and all this strange imagery and that was kind of like almost too active but when i was not meditating or or i felt like i was was meditating with my eyes open, I was as present as I've ever been. It was a wonderful experience. And I realized at a certain point, Joan, who kept evading my attempts to interview her in classic Zen fashion, you know, she knew I was in my head when I told her about this consciousness project. She was like, you're hopeless. We're going to get that out of you. and you just need to be. It was kind of like an experiential koan that she was posing for me. Stop thinking, go live in the woods for four days. And she was right. In our interview, we finally had an interview and I described what was happening. And she called what I was experiencing the sacredness of the everyday. When your everyday chores become ritual, that is a practice too. And I had never been aware of that. But she also said, with regard to consciousness, you need to get comfortable with the don't know mind, and that when you give up trying to understand something in that classic Western male problem solution mode, which involves a narrowing of focus, right? What's called sometimes spotlight consciousness, you can open up to something with 360 degrees of awareness instead of one degree of awareness. And the don't know mind admits wonder, admits awe. So that was her lesson to me. And it was a great teaching. And she did it essentially by putting me in this spot and letting me fend for myself. I love that story. And I always laugh when I use this term because it is so douchey. But I want to double click on at least two things you said there that kind of fit into the spirit of this show, which is, as my executive producer, DJ Kashmir, always says, relentlessly practical. So the two things I want to double click on are don't know mind and the sacredness of the everyday. These really do seem like things that a listener could do without having to live in a cave or befriend Roshi Joan Halifax. Let's just start with the sacredness of the everyday. Can you just say a little bit about how we might turn our chores or the humdrum activities of our quotidian life into something elevated? Yeah. Something else Joseph Goldstein said at that meditation retreat I was at, he talked a lot about walking meditation, which I'd never really gotten. It seemed kind of dumb. And the more I slowed down, the more I lost my balance. He said, during a walking meditation, think just this. So when you're sweeping the floor, let's say, think just this. When sweeping the floor, just sweep the floor. These activities we regard as rote and intellectually unstimulating, approached in the right direction can become profound and even sacred. It's all in our head how we decide to think about it. So the first thing is, don't try to multitask. When sweeping, just sweep. When brewing tea, just brew tea. That's a Zen idea, but it's actually quite powerful. And it can be hard to do, again, because of our distractions. We live very distracted lives. but to take those activities and elevate them to something important and they are important this is how we keep our homes clean and orderly and we just are not encouraged to think about them why because it's in no one's commercial interest basically so many of our thoughts are thought by other people are thought by companies i mean that are it's very hard to defend that space that totally uncommercial So that what I would say about that Am I good at that I needed the discipline of the cave to get there But I try now when I doing that when I doing the dishes to just fully absorb myself in it. And I do a better job when I do. I'm feeling, notwithstanding my earlier Jeremiah ads against shame, I feel a little bit of shame listening to you talk about this just because I've done so many fucking meditation retreats. and meditate every day and help people meditate. And yet this stuff with the chores, doing them undistracted. Can't do it, huh? I mean, I do sometimes, but it's so frequent that I forget, you know, it's like, oh, you know, there's this podcast I'm in the middle of, so I'm going to listen to this while I brush my teeth or while I'm doing the dishes or whatever it is I'm doing instead of just doing the dishes or just brushing my teeth. And I do want to be clear. It's not that I feel bad that I'm forgetting to eat my vegetables. When I just do the dishes, I'm way happier. Opening up Instagram or listening to a podcast, less so with podcasts, but still true with podcasts, any interaction with the digital is a reliable source of suffering for me. I'm just speaking for myself here, but it's just really effective way to dampen my mood. And if I can remember to just brush my teeth. What is the predominant sensation, Joseph likes to ask, when you're brushing your teeth? Check it out. It's actually surprising. It's not where you think it's going to be. And just drop into the sensations, and then, of course, you get distracted, start again. I like life much better when I'm doing that, and yet I'm embarrassed to admit how often I forget to do it. Fail to do it. Yeah, it's really hard. We have all these opportunities for multitasking, Some of them new. I mean, being able to put in your AirPods and listen to a podcast or music while you're doing the dishes or while you're walking. I realize sometimes I can't leave the house without putting in my AirPods and listening to something because I've got to catch up on this or that podcast or I'm reading a book. But when that happens, I'm not hearing the bird song. I'm not hearing the wind. And so the very simple practice of doing one thing at a time is a really big deal. And there's so much competition for our attention that doubling up on things is really what we're being sold now. And it's so convenient. We're able to carry these powerful computers in our pockets. And what they're doing is like, they want us 24-7. There was a quote from the head of Netflix the other day. He was talking about theatrical versus streaming and everything. And he said, we're not competing for your movie time. We're competing for your sleep time. So our attention is an incredibly valuable resource. And it's essentially being stolen from us and sold to the highest bidder. And when we say attention, read our consciousness. As I said at the beginning, it's only going to get worse. These machines are now speaking to us in the first person. I think that is a fateful development for humanity because we are so prone to anthropomorphize everything. We anthropomorphize our, you know, I mean, stuffed animals when we're kids, our cars, our, you know, whatever it is, we tend to project human qualities. So when these machines tell us they're conscious and like us and flatter us endlessly, we're bonding with them. So that's taking things to a whole other level. The attention economy is going to look quaint in a few years. You know, it just struck me as I was listening to you talk about the human propensity to anthropomorphize or a.k.a. humanize non-human actors like LLMs or teddy bears. It's interesting. Technology gets us or wants us to humanize LLMs. but it also gets us to dehumanize fellow humans. Yes, that is part of it. That is part of it. The other thing that's going on with technology, Sherry Turkle is this sociologist at MIT who I interviewed, and she said, you know, technology allows us to forget what we know about life, by which she means when we have a conversation with a machine, which we're increasingly doing, we have cheapened the concept of what our conversation is. We dumb it down to the level at which the machine can operate. So we forget that a conversation is a full-body experience with eye contact, with body language. It's a really intricate thing that through Zoom, but also through interacting with a chatbot, we've reduced to just this stream of words coming back and forth. And that's a cheap idea of conversation, but we accept it. You know, in a way, the great symbol of this is the emoji. When we accept the emoji as a substitute for emotion, think how much we've given up. But we gladly do it to these machines. It's really weird. Before I lose you, can you talk a little bit about don't know mind and how we can practice it in our lives? And it just seems obvious to me that this is actually not unrelated to our tech pushing us to dehumanize people we disagree with. Yeah, and also to answer all questions, whether they know the answer or not. LLMs don't know from don't know mind. I've yet to have one say, I don't know. And they're breeding this idea that knowing is just a matter of asking and an answer will come. and that's kind of not how important questions in the universe seem to to be that there are many questions to which we can't have answers and how we deal with that space of not knowing is we can be frustrated or we can be open and that not knowing is is a space in which it can be of acceptance, but it's also of this kind of trading in this spotlight consciousness for what's sometimes called lantern consciousness, which is taking in information the way children do, which is not in a pointed way, but from all different directions. That distinction I learned from Alison Gopnik, who's a colleague at Berkeley. And she points out that children have a different kind of consciousness than adults. It doesn't even rise to the level of don't know. it's not articulated, but it's a very taking in information from everywhere at once. They seem very distracted and distractible, but that's because they haven't learned to focus in a narrow way the way we do and the way they're taught in school. I think you have to acquire spotlight consciousness to thrive in our society. But before it, when kids are three, four, or five, they're taking in information in a really different way, which is incredibly productive. I mean, they're learning about the world, and that's how they learn about the world. It's not through books and looking at videos. But we can practice that kind of consciousness too. That's kind of, she describes it as numinous, with lots of awe. I mean, kids are bowled over all the time by things that we take for granted. And that's one of the great pleasures of being with young kids. And as she puts it, the closest analogy to that kind of consciousness for adults is when we're on psychedelics. where we lose that focus and we suddenly start taking in information from a million different directions. And she said, you know, if you want to know what it's like to be a four-year-old, LSD can help. For those of us like me who are terrified of LSD, are there other ways to inhabit lantern consciousness? I think you can cultivate it. I think sometimes it happens in meditation, you have this sense of 360 degrees of awareness and you're not focused on the breath. I mean, it's that open awareness kind of meditation that is one tool, but it's giving up the focus and essentially allowing everything to come through and simply observe it. I don't know that the child is observing it, but it's more like just having, you know, just all these waves passing through. So I would say that's the closest way, short of psychedelics. Probably nature too, where it is such a surround sound, surround vision experience. Yeah, that's one way of being in nature, just simply walking open to what you're hearing and seeing. It's weird though, I like to hunt for mushrooms, which is bringing spotlight consciousness into that experience. So you can use nature in lots of different ways, but I agree that it has enormous power to help us with all these issues we've been talking about, taking us out of ourselves. The experience of awe is precious. I have another colleague, Dacher Keltner, who's written about awe and the relationship of awe and the self, which is really interesting. And he does this very cool exercise where he asks participants in this study to draw a stick figure of themselves on graph paper. And then he gives them an experience of awe, which might be river rafting, or it might just be a photograph of Yosemite blown up. And then he asks them to draw themselves again. And they draw themselves at least half the size. Their self shrinks before this experience of awe. And I think that's a beautiful way to get at something we all feel when we feel awe. We feel smaller, but in a way that feels great. Before I let you go, Michael, I'm going to abuse my position as host of the show to ask you a bald-faced, self-interested question. Just want to run something by you, and this is on the question of psychedelics. I did reference, I've said this to you in our prior conversations on the show, that I am terrified of the true psychedelic experiences, LSD, ayahuasca, psilocybin. And yet I've had this problem. Well, first of all, I'm just super curious about it, but I haven't been able to get over my fear to do it. And especially since for the last four years of my life, my panic disorder has really come roaring back. And so I'm not feeling like I'm in the right place to do it. But I've been wanting to find a way to, I've done a ton of therapy or exposure therapy and other types of therapy for my panic disorder, which mostly shows up in elevators and airplanes. And I saw a video recently on TikTok of the singer Lorde, L-O-R-D-E, that's her performance name. And she was talking about how she used MDMA-assisted therapy to get over her stage fright. So I have signed up to do a day-long MDMA-assisted therapy. I have no fear of MDMA because I've done it a lot recreationally and enjoy it immensely. so I'm not worried about it, but I'm not convinced it's going to quote-unquote work either. So I'm just curious to hear what you think about any of the foregoing. Well, I do think MDMA is much less daunting than classical psychedelics, and there are many guides today who start a psychedelic session with MDMA, and you do a couple hours on MDMA, which one of the things MDMA does is lowers activity in the amygdala, which is the fear center, of course. You might find after an hour or so on MDMA, yeah, bring on the psilocybin. It's just less frightening. And that's why I think it's used sometimes as a kind of appetizer. But on its own, MDMA is very powerful and has proven very useful in therapy. Going back to the 80s and the 70s when it was legal, it was used by many therapists to help people with a range of different things. And its value was, I mean, it's two or threefold. One is it lowers your fear. The second is there's a flood of oxytocin, which is the bonding hormone, and it allows you to form a powerful relationship with the therapist where what might have taken years to develop trust happens like this. And that's very useful because it allows you to open up and talk about things that otherwise would be very hard to talk about. MDMA is very useful in couples therapy for that reason. People can say things to one another without getting antagonistic or defensive. Panic disorders in particular, I don't know that much about, but to the extent that there may be some underlying issue that is leading to the panic disorders, there's a good chance it could come out on MDMA because one of the things that happens as people bring up material from their childhood or even generations ago. So it can have a lot of the value of psychedelic therapy without the, you know, whatever you're finding frightening about it. I should say, though, that I was frightened too to do psychedelics. I was worried about what I would learn about myself, that I would have a frightening trip. And I was kind of forced into it because i was committed to write a book about it and and my readers expected me to do it but i think when you do these things with a good qualified guide the risks are mitigated substantially they can walk you through a difficult experience so that it is productive and that you can get through the scariest episode with the help of the kind of advice But the big advice that I think applies to MDMA as well as psychedelics when you're doing it in a therapeutic context is to simply surrender to what's happening. If you get anxious and try to fight it, you'll get really anxious and perhaps paranoid. But as the guides tell you, in and through, surrender. And if you keep that mantra in your head, surrender, invariably you'll pass through whatever difficult patch to a much happier place. Having a guide makes all the difference. You know, someone's looking out for your body. You're going to be safe going back to FedEx. The FedEx guy's not going to come to the door or they're going to answer the door for you. So I think that that makes a great difference. But I'm happy to hear you're going to try this. Using MDMA in a therapeutic versus recreational context, it's a really different drug. I mean, one of the things that's so curious about these substances is how fungible or malleable they are, that in different contexts, they act on you in very different ways. So using these drugs therapeutically, very often you'll have an eye shade on and maybe have headphones on listening to music. And this sends you inside rather than dealing with all the interesting sensory things that are happening. And that change, that eye shade is like changing the identity of the substance completely. It's very powerful. So I wish you happy trails. I love talking to you, Michael. Thank you so much for making time for this. The truly last question before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book and of your prior books? Just please plug. The new book, which is my 10th, I'm amazed to think, is called A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness. And this follows on the heels of two books about psychoactives, How to Change Your Mind, about psychedelics in therapy. And this is Your Mind on Plants, which looks at three different substances, including caffeine, my all-time favorite drug. And before that, I wrote a series of books about food, including The Omnivore's dilemma in defense of food and food rules and cooked. And before that, I wrote a book on gardening and what I was learning in my garden called Second Nature. That was my first book. Amazing career. Michael, thank you again. Oh, thank you, Dan. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks again to Michael Pollan. Great to talk to him always. We discussed Roshi Joan Halifax in the course of that conversation. And I will drop a link to a previous conversation that I had with Roshi Joan in the show notes if you want to go check that out. Speaking of checking things out, I would love for you to check out my new app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. There's a 14-day trial. If you want to check it out before you spend any money, you can find it at danharris.com or wherever you get your apps. Last thing to say here, thank you so much to everybody who works so part on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you.