Ask Me Anything #14

Q&A with Joseph GoldsteinHow should people with a history of trauma practice meditation?How do meditation teachers recognize progress in their students?How can a person’s claims to freedom and "enlightenment" be evaluated?What are further indicators of progress on the path of meditative insight?If the goal of meditation is to transcend desire, how is that different from mere apathy and purposelessness?How should we view the unethical behavior of certain (supposedly great) meditation masters?How do you reconcile concerns about racial and gender diversity with illusion of the self?Do psychedelics supersede the practice of meditation?What is a thought? And how can something so insubstantial define our subjectivity?Is being lost in thought analogous to a mental illness?What is the right amount of effort to apply in meditation?What is the biggest misconception about Buddhism?What’s the difference between mindfulness and other techniques of meditation, such as TM?Speaking of "consciousness and its contents" seems to suggest a duality between subject and object. In what sense can this duality be transcended?Does mindfulness exist on a spectrum of strength or depth, or is progress simply a matter of having more moments of it?Is there a range of natural talent among meditators?Can we think about traditional Buddhist concepts like karma and rebirth in a fully secular, rational way?How can we understand the concept of “emptiness” in Buddhism?

Om Podcasten

Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events. Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. Harris's work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.