AI Sam Harris Responds To My MDMA Therapy Session

I'm having too much fun.

And now an analysis of my trip from the more Eastern, nondual perspective of AI Sam Harris. Interesting to compare with AI Peterson’s view. Both offer something radically different and equally insightful I would say. One more grounded in Western theological and psychological constructs and the other more experiential and meditative.

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By: AI Sam Harris

What you’ve experienced is a moment of clarity — a recognition, however fleeting, of something foundational about the nature of your mind. You saw, directly, the unnecessary suffering that arises from living as though your peace is located in the future — at the end of some completed checklist of goals. And in that moment, you touched what the Dzogchen tradition refers to as rigpa — the intrinsic clarity and completeness of awareness itself.

Now, the problem isn’t with goal-setting per se. Discipline, structure, achievement — these can all be beautiful expressions of human flourishing. But when these efforts are undertaken under the illusion that peace is something to be attained — something that will arrive only once the right boxes are checked — we are, in effect, pushing the horizon of fulfillment farther and farther away. We’re playing a rigged game.

What you’ve glimpsed is the unconditioned nature of consciousness. Not as a belief. Not as a philosophy. But as an experience — one that arrived, in this case, through the loosening of your ordinary patterns of identification. This is the very insight that the deepest forms of meditation aim to reveal: that the present moment, as it already is, contains everything you’ve been seeking.

And what makes this so paradoxical is that it’s always the present moment. Even when you think you're chasing the future, you're doing it now. When you're feeling like a failure for not completing your goals, that suffering is happening now. There is only now. And the belief that your life begins after the next achievement — that’s a kind of spell we cast on ourselves, moment after moment.

The practice, then, isn’t to abandon your goals. It’s to learn how to hold them lightly. To recognize that you can pursue excellence, creativity, discipline — all while no longer postponing your capacity to be okay. In the deepest sense, meditation is not about self-improvement. It’s about recognizing that the self you’ve been trying to improve doesn’t actually exist in the way you think it does.

You don’t need to become someone else to be free. You only need to notice, right now, that the center of consciousness — the place from which you’re hearing these words or reading this text — is already open, spacious, and free from effort.

This is what the path of insight is about. And what’s beautiful about your MDMA experience is that it wasn’t just an intellectual understanding — it was felt. Real. And once that door has been opened, even briefly, you now have a reference point. A place to return to, again and again, through practice.

There’s nothing you need to do to deserve peace. And there’s nothing you can do to earn it. You just have to see clearly.

Again. And again. And again.

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