Annaka Harris

And you might come out with some epiphany about what you should do next.

So the thing I was responding to that you wrote, I think I was partly...

picking up on the part of you that would really get a lot out of a meditation retreat.

That was my way of beginning that conversation.

That experience you had of a thought coming from somewhere else, when you spend an hour

extended period of time paying close attention to your moment-to-moment experience that's how all of your thoughts appear to you and it's really beautiful because you're letting go just through the practice of meditation meditation you're quieting down your default mode network and

And without necessarily intellectually thinking yourself out of free will, it naturally kind of drops away.

And so when you're under the spell of this illusion that you are the author of your thoughts and your conscious experience is driving all of your behavior and there's this eye that stands...

somewhere near your brain but is not your brain um that stands free of the physical world is is the thing generating the thoughts um when you're meditating that quiets down and can kind of

quiet down completely so that your experience is just of the next thing arising in your conscious awareness.

What you realize is the source of it is not your conscious experience.

And that's the important insight.

And that's the insight.

And so there are many insights you can have in meditation that align with the science, which is what's really fascinating because it doesn't have to be that way.

Like I can imagine finding meditation to be extremely useful and helping me with anxiety and all the rest and having all kinds of insights that turn out to not be true.

But the interesting thing is that these insights actually turn out to be true.

And so that is one of them is the

when you're just watching what your conscious experience actually is, you realize that it's not doing all of the things you usually feel like it's doing.

And so the thoughts really just arise in much the same way that a sound or a sight or a feeling, you know, maybe your leg starts to hurt.

When you're just watching moment by moment by moment,