Dan Harris - 10% Happier - How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

This was the first rational explanation I’d heard for enlightenment yet. I found myself sitting there, nodding my head in agreement, stunned by the fact that I was doing so. I could barely believe it, but I was actually thinking, Should I be gunning for stream-entr y ? Perhaps this was another arena in which I needed to up my game?

To make sure I wasn’t losing my mind, I called the most skeptical person I knew, Sam Harris. Lo and behold, he, too, said enlightenment was real, although he used a different analogy. Just as it’s possible for humans to train to be fast or strong enough to compete in the Olympics, he argued we can practice to be the wisest or most compassionate version of ourselves. In fact, he said he had personally achieved something roughly analogous to stream-entry, the earliest stage of enlightenment—that he had “seen through the ego in a way that is decisive.” Although he quickly added, “That’s not the same thing as being a Buddha, where you’re no longer capable of being a schmuck.”

To top it off, Sam told me he thought it was entirely possible that some people could become suddenly enlightened with no meditation at all. Specifically, he was referring to Eckhart Tolle. “I don’t have any reason to doubt his story,” he said. He added that there’s something more “authentic” about people like Tolle, who have accounts of breakthroughs that come out of the blue without any formal training—“because they’re not getting it from anywhere else.” This was a bitter pill to swallow. Mockery of Tolle had been my one true north on this journey. Now, as the Buddhists say, maybe I had to let it go. I went back and read that first Tolle book, the one that kicked off my whole “spiritual” odyssey, and while it still struck me as flowery and bizarre, it made a lot more sense to me now than it did five years ago. When I first read A New Earth , I had rolled my eyes when Tolle rather immodestly promised that his book would “initiate the awakening process” in the reader. Now I had to admit that, in my case, the weird little German man was, in a sense, right.

Here’s where I’ve come down on this, for now: I don’t know if it’s possible to be enlightened, either through meditation, or through a Tolle-style sudden awakening. I’m agnostic—but not with the deadening incuriosity that characterized my stance before I began this whole trip. I now realize that on the issue of enlightenment I was blinded by my own skepticism. All the poetic language about the Buddha sitting under a tree and reaching “the beyond,” “the deathless,” “the very hard to see,” and so forth had provoked a sort of intellectual gag reflex. I had, in essence, inverted the normal quandary that spiritual seekers face. Instead of a Meat Puppets–esque “open your mind, in pours the trash,” I had closed my mind prematurely. This whole experience had been a process of my seeing over and over that many of my assumptions were wrong. Enlightenment was perhaps the latest example.

I do know one thing for sure: there’s much more for me to do. Whether or not 100% happy is achievable, I can definitely be more than 10% happier—and I’m excited to try. I often think about a quote from a writer I admire named Jeff Warren, who called meditation “the next frontier of human exploration.” It’s insanely encouraging to see that my Jew-Bu friends, all a full generation older than me, are still as excited about this stuff as when they were in their twenties. Mindfulness, happiness, and not being a jerk are skills I can hone the rest of my life—every day, every moment, until senility or death. And the payoff is less reactivity, less rumination, and—who knows?—maybe stream-entry. I have willingness and curiosity. I have confidence and trust. I guess another word I could use is . . . faith.

The next update is more down-to-earth.

The other day—on October 7, 2013, at eleven A.M., to be exact—Ben asked me to meet him on the set where we shoot most of our major broadcasts. He stuck out his hand and offered me a job as one of the co-anchors of Nightline . I said yes, and then he gave me a hug. My face only came up to his solar plexus. (It’s worth mentioning here that Ben recently started meditating and loves it. Diane Sawyer is also now meditating. So is George Stephanopoulos. Even Barbara Walters recently tried it, although it apparently didn’t stick.)

True to the Buddhist principle of suffering, by the time I got the job I’d coveted for years, the show had been moved back to a later time slot. However, as my colleague David Wright, the correspondent I used to compete against when we were both younger and more uppity, wrote me in an email, “It’s still the best perch in network news.” I heartily agree. Nowhere else in television do journalists have the kind of freedom and airtime that we enjoy at Nightline . A few days after Ben gave me the job, the news was announced in front of the show’s full team. As I stared out at the faces of my friends on the staff—which I consider to be among the best in all of news—I was engaging in a positive version of prapañca , picturing all the adventures we could have, stories we could tell, and bad guys whose days we could ruin. Meanwhile, I convinced the bosses to let me keep doing weekends on GMA, a job I am enjoying more than ever. On most mornings, I’m actually excited when the alarm goes off at four A.M.

So, now that I have these two amazing gigs, am I finally fully satisfied? Have I truly arrived? Am I like a shark that no longer needs to keep moving? I don’t know—probably not. But for now, at least, I’m not thinking about what I can do next, only about how I can keep my current circumstances from changing.

In any event, while the promotion was a huge deal for me, a more significant moment actually came a few months before.

I was in Rio de Janeiro, shooting a piece about police efforts to clean up the city’s drug-ravaged slums before the 2016 Summer Olympics. One night, my crew and I found ourselves in a small concrete structure, down a dark and filthy back alley, filming members of a drug gang as they prepared marijuana for sale. All of a sudden, a tank of a man came charging in, with an entourage of teenaged henchmen. This guy was carrying a semiautomatic rifle and wearing layers of gold chains in a style reminiscent of Mr. T. When he shook my hand, it actually hurt. He was the leader—or “don”—of the gang, and he was willing, he said, to grant us a rare interview, as long as we promised not to show his face. We hastily set up our cameras, with the don’s heavily armed lieutenants looming over my producer’s shoulder, peering into the viewfinder to make sure we didn’t compromise the boss’s anonymity.

When the interview got under way, I asked him, “Would you describe your work as dangerous?”

“ Your job is dangerous,” he said. “What if I decided to kill or kidnap you right now?”

Awkward silence.

I was 97 percent sure the don was kidding, but the remaining 3 percent was enough to throw me into a funny headspace. What followed was what I’m calling, for lack of a better term, a moment of clarity. Again, nothing mystical—just a series of thoughts, realizations, and entreaties that arose in a flash.

It began with an internal plea: Dear Drug Lord, please don’t kill me just when I’ve finally gotten my shit together.

This was followed by a sort of stock-taking, a review of how far I’d come since my bad old days of mindlessness—the days when I might have come face-to-face with a drug dealer under entirely different circumstances. It struck me that the voice in my head is still, in many ways, an asshole. However, mindfulness now does a pretty good job of tying up the voice and putting duct tape over its mouth. I’m still a maniacally hard worker; I make no apologies for that. I still believe firmly that the price of security is insecurity—that a healthy amount of neuroticism is good. But I also know that widening my circle of concern beyond my own crap has made me much happier. Paradoxically, looking inward has made me more outward-facing—and a much nicer colleague, friend, and husband to the wonderful Bianca (who, when she hears that I’ve gotten myself into this situation with the drug lord is probably going to threaten to kill me herself). And while I still worry about work, learning to “care and not to care,” at least 10% of the time, has freed me up to focus more on the parts of the job that matter most—such as covering great stories like this one.