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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

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Transcript

Question: What makes you happy?

Sam Harris: Well it’s an elusive thing to get a hold of. I think the absence of neurosis, the absence of fear, the absence of anxiety. When you recognize what consciousness is like, when those states of mind have subsided, it seems to me intrinsically happy. It’s intrinsically at ease. It’s intrinsically peaceful, and at times even blissful. It’s just the lack of complication. Just merely being aware of one’s self in the present moment, and not continually being in conversation with one’s self about the present moment and just thinking, thinking, thinking incessantly.

When that can subside, either because you’re meditating, or because you’re enjoying yourself so much in sports. Or you’re having sex. I mean, any peak experience has this feature of having your attention really focused in a very uncomplicated way on your experience in the present. And that state of mind is what I would call happiness.

And all of the obstacles to being at rest in that state of mind, I think of as the obstacles to happiness. And those are things like a neurotic self-absorption with how other people perceive you; or anxiety about the future; or regret about the thing you didn’t say yesterday. Those are the ways/modes of thought that keep us from recognizing that it’s possible to be really at ease in the present, and happy before anything happens. I mean, to have happiness that’s not contingent upon the next good thing that’s going to happen, but to just actually be at rest with what is happening right now.

Recorded on: July 4, 2007.