Andrew Huberman likes to deliver highly informative 2-hour videos - this one is double the length!
His introduction of Sam Harris includes one fundamental point.
Prior to this episode I thought that meditation was about deliberately changing one's conscious experience in order to achieve things such as deeper relaxation, a heightened sense of focus or ability to focus, generally elevated memory, and so on. What Sam taught me, and what you'll soon learn as well, is that while meditation does indeed hold all of those valuable benefits, the main value of a meditation practice, or perhaps the greater value of a meditation practice, is that it doesn't just allow one to change their conscious experience, but it actually can allow a human being to view consciousness itself. That is, to understand what the process of consciousness is, and in doing so to profoundly shift the way that one engages with the world, and with oneself, in all practices, all environments and at all times, both in sleep and in waking states, and in that way making meditation perhaps the most potent and important portal by which one can access novel ways of thinking and being and viewing one's life experience.
When I read The End of Faith, I recall thinking that the book seemed unfinished; that it lacked at least one final chapter. Near the end, Harris makes veiled references to some Eastern points of view that sounded rather familiar to me, yet without opening the discussion into that area. So I scanned the copious reference section at the end of the book and there it was: Dzogchen. Sam Harris's attacks were against faith, and fideism, not against experiential spirituality.
Listening to Harris almost 20 years later, he seems to have maintained many of the core tenets of Dzogchen, and this is where the idea comes from that our awareness of being aware - our core awareness - is not something we need to search for, but rather, is always there; somewhat hidden most of the time for most people. Thus Huberman asks the obvious, yet fundamental, question as to why should our nervous system hide something that is so basic and intrinsic to consciousness. Such teleological questions can be dangerous, especially in biology; at one point they discuss the mammalian visual blind-spot, which on observation looks like miswiring.
I think that when more humans have the same experience, only then is there a basis to discuss the nature of that same experience; at the moment, much discussion is at cross-purposes. One clue is the relationship between meditative states and the so-called default network. It remains unclear why direct awareness of such a resting state should be so difficult to achieve, and why it should yield such profound changes to the individual. After all, it is our natural state!
One word Harris uses struck me as a good metaphor: orthogonal. A 2-dimensional plane requires two orthogonal directions; adding a third direction, that is out of the plane, gives us the third dimension. Mathematically, it is then possible to add a fourth orthogonal vector to create 4-space, and so on. But our mind has no experiential correlate to imagine such a fourth dimension. However, if one thinks about it linguistically, experiences are expressed as subject-object-verb, so can be thought of as a bridge connecting two points. The difficulty of expressing pure awareness is that such a relationship does not exist, or cannot be expressed. The experience of unity and timelessness makes the SOV grammar break down. Thus it can be thought of as orthogonal to the subject-object-verb landscape. A memory of the experience is created, but I think it impossible to give a commentary during the experience, as that would fracture the unitary nature of the experience.
The experiencer is neither above nor below anything, but has become aware of a transcendental state - a state that was always there. Harris gives the example of our optical blind-spot, and the role of saccades in our vision. We do not see our blind-spot - there is no nebulous patch there. Indeed, if we focus intently on space, trying to stop the saccades, we can make our whole field of vision disappear - we become blind although our eyes can still see. Visual sensations take place in the eye, but visual perception takes place in the brain - how it really does it, we still don't know.
It's a long discussion, but Sam Harris makes some interesting points that few others have articulated.