Yuval Noah Harari on Meditation

Yuval Harari, author of the fantastic book Sapiens (which I’ve started and still need to finish), was a recent guest on The James Altucher Show. Go listen, it’s a great interview.

One of my favourite parts was Yuval’s brief thoughts on meditation. He explained that he starts and finishes every work day with one hours meditation. He explains:

“(Meditation) gives me balance, peace, and calmness and the ability to find myself.”

He continues:

“The idea of meditation is to forget about all the stories in your mind. Just observe reality as it is. What is actually happening right here, right now? You start with very simple things like observing the breath coming in and out of your nostrils or you observe the sensations in your body. This is reality.

For all of history, people have given more and more importance to imaginary stories and they’ve been losing the ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality. Meditation is one of the best ways to regain this ability and really tell the difference between what is real and what is a fiction in my mind.”