Ezra Klein

Then I was meditating for hours at a time.

It was very interesting because life became like a meditation.

In fact, I had more profound meditations doing chores, chopping wood and sweeping out my little cave than I did when I was sitting on the platform.

It shifted my thinking about consciousness in this way.

I had gotten caught in this frame, very Western, very male, of problem, solution.

Hard problem of consciousness, solution.

And I had trained my attention.

I had narrowed, right?

I had a focus on that question for five years of really struggling to understand this.

And I suddenly realized, well, there is the problem of attention, but there's also the fact of it.

And the fact of it is so marvelous and so astonishing and mysterious.

And why aren't I paying more attention to that?

Why aren't I being more present?

One night I woke up in the middle of the night to go out to pee and there is, it's a new moon and there's no light pollution at all.

And the stars, this vault of stars is more numerous and more gorgeous than it's ever been, but it's not out there.

It's reaching all the way down to me here that we occupy the same space, the same intergalactic blanket.

And it was such a, all my kind of learned ways of looking at the starry sky, you know, we all have these predictions, right?

The brain is a prediction machine.

All the concepts and the frames just went away.

And it was just kind of like me, stars, space.