Michael Pollan

I was like, oh shit, this is not good for the journalist conducting interviews.

But like a meditation retreat that you were describing, it is almost a psychedelic experience when you're alone with yourself and the borders of self attenuate.

They become kind of more porous.

You realize the extent to which

Our identity as selves is a social identity, and it's reinforced by everybody we talk to because they're treating us like a self, so we must be a self.

But if you're absolutely alone in the middle of nowhere and you have no access to media, it softens.

And then I was meditating for hours at a time.

And 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.

And 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 it's a new moon, and there's no light pollution at all.