The Importance of Zen Meditation

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With zogchen you actually can't start until you can notice that consciousness has no center. Then then the practice is to be mindful of that so I've been both sorts of people who have had this spontaneous loss of self and then struggled to get back to that. So it does become a it becomes a real antidote to negative emotion because you know if you can do that in the midst of anger or any other negative emotion it really does undercut its basis fundamentally.

Sam Harris returns to the podcast to talk about meditation and his new Waking Up meditation app. What are the goals of mindfulness practice - stress reduction and greater focus, or something much deeper? Can it cure David's existential dread? Tamler's fear of his daughter going away to college? Can sustained practice erode the illusion of self? Is that even something we'd want to do? What if it diminishes our attachment to people we love? And what is the self anyway? Is Sam a defender of panpsychism? So many questions... Plus, the ethics of creating talking elephants by curing them of their autism through bonding and possibly mounting. (Seriously.)

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