Annaka Harris

Pain arises, a bird chirping arises, a thought arises, a feeling arises.

You're just kind of watching it all unfold.

And there's something really beautiful about that.

And that there's something so beautiful about consciousness, about the fact that it's not just a dead universe with atoms doing their thing, that at least in this one instance, there is a felt experience of the universe.

I'm part of the universe, yeah.

Right here in this little point in space and time, there is an experience of the universe.

You're talking like in terms of psychic phenomena or you're talking in terms of just absorbing the information of the past and education and...

Just kind of our collective human project that gets in throughout our lives.

I don't know how quickly it goes down if you just take one out.

It depends on which one.

I think I half agree and half disagree with what you're saying.

But yeah, I mean, the other thing you notice when you spend a lot of time in meditation and when you spend a lot of time kind of shaking up these intuitions that I think get in the way of clearly thinking about what consciousness is,

is that we are these systems in nature that are not at all isolated.

And there are the obvious ways, like if I just stop drinking water, that's going to change the system very drastically, right?

So there's just the energy consumption.

But the fact that we exchange ideas is we...

Part of who I am is everyone I've interacted with.

And of course, the people I interact more with have sculpted me more.

But our brains are sculpted through our interactions with each other as well.

Yeah.