Annaka Harris

The geometry of the earth.

Even if you're flying an airplane, if you're an airplane pilot, you have to be aware of the truth of our situation.

And then I think there are other places where it's interesting to remind ourselves.

It's where I start out my book.

Just...

as a way to inspire awe and to get yourself out of your everyday life and see the big picture, which can be just a relief, but also helps you feel more connected to the universe and to something larger than ourselves.

And so I see these intuitions

reminding ourselves that these intuitions are illusions in the same way, that most of the time they're not useful.

They are useful if we want to think about a science of consciousness.

They're useful for a whole range of neuroscientific studies.

And I think they can be incredibly useful in the same way that

lying on the ground and feeling the gravity pushing you against a sphere and realizing you're floating in the middle of outer space, it gives me the same feeling to realize.

And so I have... I mean, there's so many levels to it, but...

If I'm thinking about difficult things that I've experienced, different traumas in my life, when I take a step back and kind of get this bird's eye view of kind of the mystery of this unfolding of the universe and the fact that it happened the way it happened and whether it could have happened another way, there's no going back.

That's the way it unfolded.

And being able to surrender to that, I think, is very psychologically healthy and prevents us from, I mean, I think regret is one of the most toxic loops we can get into.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Because free will, I mean,

I think part of the function of the experience of it is learning.