Dan Harris

Actually, if you tune up the microscope of the mind, you see that everything's changing so rapidly that there can't be some solid, unchanging nugget of anything.

And by the way, this goes back to my story about being a bad person.

How could I be permanently bad when nothing is permanent?

There is no bedrock.

And this is just intuitively true when you say it out loud, but hard then when you apply it to something like a soul.

And so the key to understanding this, again, from a Buddhist context, which nobody has to believe if they don't want, is that two things are true at the same time.

On the one hand, Rachel Martin is real.

I'm looking at her, and if she looks in the mirror, she will see herself.

And she's got a social media feed, and she's got a podcast and a resume and all that stuff.

And yeah, Rachel's real.

However, if you close your eyes and look for some core nugget of Rachel, you won't find it.

You'll find physical sensations, thoughts, emotions in a fluxing gumbo.

So that is what our self is?

Just fluxing gumbo?

There is no – it's like this chair I'm sitting in right now.

Bring a high-powered microscope to it.

I would find mostly empty space populated by spinning subatomic particles.

That's true.

At the same time as this chair, I trust it and I sit in it.

And so Rachel's real and she's not real at the same time.