"The genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self ... I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me I had no self to transcend ... Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness.  This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being.  It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering - fear, anger, shame - in an instant. "

Sam Harris

Aussie adventure - family, positive psychology, friendship & (group) psychedelics

July 2, 2025

I'm over here in Australia for about three weeks. The first few days were spent with my older brother, Robert, and his wife, Jenny. Now I'm in Brisbane at the World Congress of Positive Psychology - https://ippaworldcongress.org/ - then I have a few days with (another) James, a dear old friend - and finally I run a two day training workshop for the psychedelic therapists on a research trial using MDMA-assisted therapy for community trauma after flooding. It's a busy time! I'm 75 and I haven't been on a really long air flight for some time. I was interested to see how it would go travelling from Scotland last week. The quick answer is 'rather boring at times, but basically fine'. Then a short internal flight from Sydney to Coffs Harbour, before being collected by my brother and heading up to Dorrigo, 60km or so inland. Rob is four years older than me and recently had a pretty tough encounter with prostate cancer. He has responded well to treatment, but ... with him in Australia & me in Scotland ... we're unlikely to spend much more face-to-face time in what years we have left. One of my regrets with our father is that I didn't feel I really tried to connect deeply with him emotionally before it was too late. Very good to be with Rob ... especially a gentle lunch we had together speaking about our family, our lives, ourselves. I don't know how it was for him, but for me ... a precious sense of connection, so hard to describe ... like two birds, usually so busy flying about our business, taking time to land and be gently side by side for a while. And now in I'm in Brisbane at the World Positive Psychology Congress. This morning I went to a pre-Congress workshop on "Harnessing the power of social connections for wellbeing: the social cure in action." This is based, to a large extent, on the work of Professor Alex Haslam & colleagues - see here, for example and three recent articles - Disorders of self-categorization: How and why a healthy social self-system is the cornerstone of mental health, Nothing is so impactful as good theory: Evidence for the impact of the social identity approach to health on policy and practice and even Social identity processes as a vehicle for therapeutic success in psychedelic treatment.