Sam Harris - enlightenment, real meditation, and consciousness explained

When you pay very close attention to the way consciousness is in each moment, the sense of self drops away. There is no center to consciousness. There’s no subject interior to the body.

Meditation isn’t something you’re doing. It’s not actually a practice. When you’re actually practicing, you’re ceasing to do something that you always tend to do, and that thing is identify with each passing thought.

There's no question that the sadness and the pain are coming. And the time to train to get better at that, to get more equanimous, to be more flexible, is now. It's very hard to get a strong meditation practice in hand when you really need it. The time to do that is when life is great...

Consciousness is already free of the self. It’s not that you have a self and you get rid of it through meditation; it’s an illusion. You can cut through that illusion directly, and you don’t have to schlep up to the mountaintop to do it; you can do it right here at the mountain’s base.

In most cases, people who attempt to meditate and for the longest time think they are successfully meditating, they’re really just... thinking with their eyes closed. They don’t have enough concentration to even notice how distracted they are...

You want friends who speak about you in your absence exactly the way they would speak if you were sitting at the table.

When you look at the mechanics of your own suffering, when you look at why you become anxious or afraid or self-hating or anything, ashamed, it is a matter of being identified with a thought.

I'd like you to take a moment to think about all the things in this life that you will experience for the last time. Of course, there will come a day when you will die, and then everything will have been done for the last time. But long before you die, you will cease to have certain experiences—experiences that you surely take for granted now.

When you have given someone truly honest feedback that is critical... then, on some other occasion, when they give you something that you really love, and your feedback is fundamentally different, at that moment, they just know you’re being honest; they know you’re not bullshitting, and that’s so valuable.

There's just no place in the brain for an ego, an unchanging self, to be sitting. That's just not what's happening in there; it's not what's happening structurally, and it's not what's happening physiologically.

There’s something about breaking the spell of being lost in thought with real mindfulness that is analogously freeing. For that moment, at least, you’re not taken in by the thing that, otherwise, would have totally determined your state of being for moments, minutes, hours, depending how long you got on the ride and couldn't see any other alternative for.

The reality is that there are certain people who just don't want the truth. They'll hand you something for feedback, and all they really want is to be told it's great. When you demure at all from that line, you're offending them. What happens is you just wind up training these people that you're not the person to come to when they want to be bullshitted.

I still think that Vipassana is the best introductory practice for anybody, because unlike mantra practice or any visualization practice, there’s nothing that you’re strategically adding to your experience; you’re just paying attention to the next breath, the next sound, the next thought—whatever’s arising.

Each time you do something, pleasant or unpleasant, that is one last time you will do it. And there will come a time when you'll have done something the final time, and you will rarely know when that is.

Meditation is a way of recognizing that consciousness, prior to identification with thought, is simply that way.

You can experience states of meditation where extreme pain and extreme pleasure are equalized—where you can’t even tell if whether it’s pain or pleasure anymore; it’s just extreme.

You want to erase the boundary between formal practice and the rest of your life. You want to find clear moments of recognition in every kind of ordinary experience. As you're reaching for a door handle, as you're taking a first step on a staircase, or as you're starting your car—all of these moments can be moments where you clearly cut through through to the same kind of mindfulness you experience in the clearest moments in any formal session.