[Music] of all the solar systems in this universe that might sustain complex life we find ourselves in this one it took billions of years of evolution on this earth to produce the people we now are our brains and bodies have evolved through millions of generations reaching back to creatures totally unlike us to animals so strange that we wouldn't even want them as pets and finally to single-celled organisms for ages the world got on without us but now we're here and among all the possible people that could exist we are among the tiny minority that actually do and of all the periods in human history where we might have appeared we live in this one arguably the first in which it was possible to understand our circumstance in a truly universal sense for the first time a person's view of the world need not be dictated by the mere location of his birth or the religion of his parents for the first time the barriers of language and geography have totally fallen away at this moment you have instantaneous access to more information than even the greatest scholar or world leader did a generation ago and yet on some level we confront the same mystery of our existence that socrates or the buddha faced the fact that you are you the fact that you exist in this moment is a miracle of sorts there's something fundamentally inexplicable about it there's no amount of knowledge that seems adequate to dispel the mystery of our appearance here and whatever you know whatever you believe whatever you have done or hope to do you have this moment of conscious life to contemplate and it will never come again it really is the mystery of being what is the color blue not as a function of wavelengths of light or neurophysiology but as it is directly perceived we're really left with nothing to say but that it's blue which of course does nothing to clarify things in fact it's not even blue which is just a word it's a noise we're making but what we see before us is whatever it ineffably is the moment we suspend the conceptual associations we have with a given object or perception our direct experience of it can grade into this experience of just pure mystery we're left with this wordless intuition of consciousness and its contents about which nothing more really can be said but right now as you listen to me speak pay careful attention to the process of listening the feeling of sitting in your chair look closely at everything around you i'd like to suggest that while you know many things about the present moment you do not know what anything in itself is now look at your hand what is it you can define this part of your body in language you can call it hand you can consider the fact that it's made of bone and muscle and threaded with blood vessels and nerves but this is all a description about the object that you're now looking at if you simply look at your hand and ask yourself what is it you might realize in a moment of rare open-mindedness that it is an absolute mystery it is in fact as mysterious in appearance as any you could ever hope to find now there are scientific arguments that can be arrayed against the mysteriousness of any object we can point to the fact the atoms in your hand were born billions of years ago in the belly of a star and in fact some of these atoms may have inhabited several stars in succession it's even possible that some atoms that were once in the bodies of historical figures like churchill or cleopatra are now in you in fact it might be descriptively true to implicate the entire universe in your hand but no such litany of concepts or connections can account for the mystery that looms whenever you just look at something closely anything however commonplace and realize that while you might have volumes of knowledge about it you don't have the slightest understanding of what it is in itself we confront the mystery of being in every moment but we don't notice it because this mystery is tiled over with concepts now meditation isn't about understanding things conceptually it's the ability to experience things more clearly prior to concepts and the more you practice it you'll find that it really is a new form of intelligence it leads to another way of being in the world and one that can allow for a kind of psychological freedom that a continuous entanglement with concepts doesn't there's a famous parable from the buddha meant to get at this difference a man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow and a surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life but the man resists he first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrow's shaft and the type of wood from which it was cut and the motive of the man who shot it and the name of the horse upon which he rode and a thousand other things that have no bearing at all upon his present suffering so this man needs to get his priorities straight his commitment to thinking about the world results from a basic misunderstanding of his predicament and though we may be only dimly aware of it we too have problems that will not be solved by more thinking there are many approaches to meditation there are thousands upon thousands of books on the topic and now hundreds of meditation apps to help you practice so how is waking up different well first let me say that everything that's in waking up is here because i think it will help you understand the nature of your mind and experience greater freedom in your life but waking up is not a conventional meditation app its purpose is to radically transform your sense of what life is about there are two main approaches to teaching meditation you can try to modernize it and put it in conversation with 21st century science or you can present it in some traditional way more or less as it's been taught for millennia in various schools of buddhism or indian spirituality apps that take the first approach and present meditation as a fully modern and secular practice which has a range of health benefits invariably dumb down the practice and divorce it from its actual purpose the purpose of meditation is to truly wake up from the unhappy dream you call your life not merely to lower your blood pressure in that dream conversely approaches to meditation that maintain a connection to its traditional purpose tend to endorse a whole raft of metaphysical dogmas that are very hard to justify rationally whether it's under the guise of new age spirituality or traditional religion these approaches are increasingly in conflict with a modern scientific understanding of the world but there is a third path through this wilderness and it's the one i attempt to follow in waking up the purpose of meditation isn't merely to de-stress or to sleep better or to learn to be a little less neurotic the purpose is to radically transform your sense of who and what you are so you won't find any simplistic message about the benefits of meditation here there are benefits to meditation and many of them are now being studied by neuroscientists and psychologists but most of this research is actually of secondary importance and i discuss why that's the case in various places in the app the real purpose of meditation is to have fundamental insights into the nature of your mind insights that change your whole approach to life so waking up isn't about merely reducing stress or having better relationships so i would say it's good for those things too it's about confronting some of the deepest questions in human life for instance how can we be truly happy when all that we experience quickly fades and disappears when every desire we satisfy or goal we achieve reveals itself to have been a kind of mirage have you noticed this have you noticed that you never quite arrive waking up isn't a mental fitness app in the usual sense the point isn't just to add another arrow to your quiver in your battle for self-improvement of course there's nothing wrong with dieting and getting in shape and tracking your sleep or doing any of the other things that people do to improve their lives but i have much deeper interests myself and i have much deeper hopes for you the point of waking up is to realize specific things about the nature of your own mind that very few people ever realize and to be changed by these discoveries and then the point is to integrate these new ways of seeing with a growing commitment to making the world better than it was yesterday so the goal of waking up is to offer a scientifically and philosophically sound response to the mystery of our being in the world for me this journey started years ago and i'm still on it and i've built waking up so that you can join me anytime you like [Music] you