Can consciousness serve as a refuge from suffering? By examining the raw textures of difficult emotions like anger and sadness, Sam Harris explains how we can experience them without suffering, and how digging into awareness reveals a layer of openness below the mental state.

Harris explains how meditation and direct attention can alleviate pain and liberate us from a prison of our emotions.

0:00 The condition of awareness

0:48 Reframing our mental state

2:22 The condition of consciousness

4:55 How does consciousness arise?

7:09 Meditation and consciousness

7:36 Thought vs physiology

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About Sam Harris:

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.

Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.