What Yuval Noah Harari tells about meditation?




When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is meditate for an hour. Later in the day, sometimes I’ll meditate for another full hour in the afternoon. Meditation serves a significant purpose for me—it’s about getting in touch with reality.

The mind constantly produces stories—stories about myself, about society, and about the world. These stories create a barrier between me and reality. Meditation is about learning to let go of these stories and truly see what is happening.


It starts with the simplest things, like observing your breath as it comes in and out of your nostrils. Surprisingly, this is incredibly difficult to do. I remember when I first started meditating—I was doing my PhD at Oxford at the time. I thought of myself as an intelligent person, someone in control of their mind, someone who knows themselves well. But I realized I didn’t even have the basic ability to observe the simplest thing in the world—my breath—without my mind wandering off into some fantasy.


This made me question: if I can’t focus on the reality of my own breath, how can I ever hope to understand the deeper sources of my psychological structures? Or how can I make sense of something as complex as the economic or political systems? Meditation has shown me just how much work it takes to truly observe reality, starting with my own mind.


-Yuval Noah Harari 

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