Peter Russell: Meeting Exponential Change with a Quiet Mind

Peter Russell: And so I see us moving towards a world in which we have technology beyond our dreams, with a world that’s really breaking at the seams. And how do we live with both of those together?

Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Peter Russell, author, speaker, and leading thinker on consciousness and contemporary spirituality, with a first-class honors degree in theoretical physics and psychology, along with a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge, England.

Peter also studied meditation in India, and he’s been a teacher of meditation for more than five decades. One of the things he emphasizes in the way he teaches meditation is complete effortlessness, and we’re going to hear more about that. You may have heard of Peter Russell from the work he created in the 1980s. He coined the term “global brain” with his bestseller by the same name, in which—ready for this—he predicted the internet and some of the impacts it would have on our collective connectivity. In addition to writing The Global Brain, Peter is the author of more than ten other books, including a new book. It’s a special Eckhart Tolle edition, and Eckhart writes a foreword to the book. It’s called How to Meditate Without Even Trying. Peter, welcome.

Peter Russell: Lovely—thank you. Lovely to be with you again.

Tami Simon: Most people associate your name with your work on the global brain, and I wanted to start there to understand how that work is evolving in your own mind over the past many decades.

Peter Russell: Yes. That book—let me go back. It came out of the work you mentioned. I have a master’s degree in computer science, and my thesis was on the networking of computers, which was a very new thing. We had two computers joined by a cable—a stick’s length apart—getting them to talk to each other. And I could see that the future of computing wasn’t going to be just bigger and faster computers, but also linking computers together. I was thinking about humanity. James Lovelock had just come out with the Gaia hypothesis, saying that every species on the planet was living together in one big ecological system. And I said, well, what’s humanity doing here? We can say the rainforest is a bit like the lungs, the oceans are like the circulatory system—what’s humanity doing here, this young upstart? And I realized: we are the information processors. That’s what we’re good at. So I had this vision that, just as in a fetus after it’s conceived there’s a rapid growth of nerve cells that then start connecting together, we’d had this rapid growth of population, and now maybe the connectivity of computers was what was going to start connecting us together into a single global brain. And that’s where the book came from.

In those days, it was very simple networking—just text and things. And so I’ve been privileged to watch that go from there into the worldwide web, linking everything together, going into social media, and now of course into AI. I feel where we are now is a really significant step in the evolution of the global brain. I would say now we have the global mind, because we have the global brain—the infrastructure is there. Anything being digitally published is on the internet, and AI is just accessing our collective knowledge. That to me is a huge step. Where it’ll lead—the pros and the cons—is a whole big debate. But this is as significant to me as the beginning of networked computers: having AI able to look at and use the collective knowledge of humanity.

Tami Simon: So, Peter, I want to pick up on one thing you said. You asked this rhetorical question of what is the role of humans in the world in terms of the global brain. You were talking about information processing as our role, but what do we humans have to contribute, especially in the world of AI that’s so much better at processing information than we are?

Peter Russell: What we bring is a whole other realm of experience. We have feelings, we have intuitions. We can dive within and look at our own consciousness. AI is not conscious—I don’t think it’ll ever be conscious. Some people debate that, but I don’t think so at all. Life has evolved on this planet into self-conscious beings such as ourselves, able to begin to explore our own minds, explore our own consciousness. And that, my feeling is, AI will never be able to do. AI can help us do that in many ways—it can help teach us—but it will never do that in itself. So to me it’s an adjunct, a tool we can use and use very well to help us. But it’s not the end of all things for me at all.

Tami Simon: Can you clarify something for me? You said in your view we’re moving from the global brain to the global mind. What’s the difference?

Peter Russell: That’s just loose terminology I’m using. For me, the global brain was the coming together of human beings being linked through digital technology. Now much of the world is on their cell phones—we have become linked together. That is, if you like, the physical infrastructure. What has happened with that infrastructure is that we have collected together a huge amount of information. Almost everything that human beings know has been digitized and is on the internet. AI is trained on the whole of that information that human beings have, so it’s able to access it. It makes mistakes at times, but it has augmented our knowledge.

And I think where AI is going, it’s going to help us solve problems—that’s going to be the big thing it does for us, which it’s already doing for smaller problems. I think that is going to be what is significant. It’s going to help us in our problem solving, which I think is probably as significant as the emergence of language, whatever that was, 40,000 years ago or something.

Tami Simon: There’s so much to talk about, Peter, and I want to focus on your visionary nature and what you see as the narrative for our time that will best serve us. I can talk to a lot of people who will tell me that AI is going to be the end of civilization as we know it. We can talk to other people who say humanity’s awakening—we’re at a tipping point—or who say we’re splitting into two different species. What narrative are you holding in your heart of where you see us now and where we could go?

Peter Russell: Personally, on one level, I have no idea where we’re going—I don’t think anybody really does. For me, it’s something that is going to be augmenting us, allowing us to become, I think, more of who we can truly be. There are dangers, but I think there are ways in which it can help us in some ways become more fully ourselves. That’s what I’m holding. Through this there’s going to be a lot of hiccups, but I see it as something that can empower and inspire us. I use it myself—not just for looking at what other spiritual teachers are saying or where things are going philosophically, but as a resource. People talk about agents; it’s an agent that can help me in what I’m doing.

And at a personal level—where it’s going in science, I think it’s a whole new world that just isn’t talked about much. People talk about AI as ChatGPT, which is just the public face of a bit of AI. What it’s doing in terms of science—molecular biology, materials structures—it’s pushing the fields of knowledge so far ahead, so fast. I think it’s going to spur technological development in ways we could hardly see at the present time.

Tami Simon: In researching the work you’ve done since The Global Brain, I discovered a book you published in 2023 called Forgiving Humanity: How the Most Innovative Species Became the Most Dangerous, and I found it extraordinarily interesting. Share with us the thesis underneath Forgiving Humanity.

Peter Russell: Firstly, I need to point out it’s not about forgiving individual human beings—there’s a lot that people have done which is despicable and should not be forgiven in the normal sense. It’s about forgiving the species for the point at which we’ve arrived in time, where we see on one hand so many potential disasters unfolding, and on the other so much happening scientifically and technologically.

The basic thesis of the book has to do with accelerating change—how that’s been going on really since the beginning of life on Earth, with each stage making it possible for the next stage to happen faster and more efficiently. It’s what I call positive feedback. We human beings are just 1% of 1% of 1% of Earth’s history, and civilization is just 1% of that, because each new development fosters future development. We’re seeing that in our own lives—how much faster things are going just in having to adapt to new software, new developments coming online. This has been going on, and it’s inevitable. Things are bound to get faster and faster and faster. And AI is going to push this ahead much, much faster still.

Now, there are several things here. One: the human mind can’t really grasp exponential change. We always think in linear change—that’s just the way we’re designed. We’ve never had to really understand exponential change, and where it’s leading. Five years from now things are going to be so much faster than they are now, and beyond that, even faster and faster. We cannot handle that.

But secondly—and I think this is a side that often isn’t looked at in terms of exponential change—there’s also a cost to accelerating development. It’s putting costs on the planet in terms of pollution, resource extraction, and systems having to adapt. Stress, one definition has it, is a failure to adapt. The side we don’t see of exponential change is how, as well as things going faster and faster, we are going to see increasing crises. Climate change, for example, is a direct result of exponential growth—the exponential growth of our consumption of energy, and particularly of fossil fuels. So it’s not just people making wrong decisions; it’s something which is probably inevitable in one way or another. I see most of the disasters facing us as an inevitable result of accelerating change. The point is, there’s no blame for that. We can blame individuals for certain routes where we’ve gone wrong, but ultimately I think this is the fate of any technologically empowered species—it winds itself up faster and faster and faster, while at the same time the stress upon our systems—personal, economic, planetary—also increases faster and faster and faster. And so I see us moving towards a world in which we have technology beyond our dreams, with a world that’s really breaking at the seams. And how do we live with both of those together?

Tami Simon: I think most of us can sense the moment that you’re describing right now. I want to slow this down a little bit for someone who says, “I’m not a hundred percent sure I understand the difference between exponential change and linear change.” Can you briefly describe that?

Peter Russell: Linear change is steady change. It’s like: if there’s been so much progress in the last 50 years, there’ll be so much progress in the next 50 years, and then 50 years after that—things keep going at a steady rate. Exponential change means that things go faster and faster. The same amount of change that happened in the last hundred years may now take just 20 years, and the amount of change that happened in 20 years may happen in just five. It’s changing faster and faster.

An analogy people often relate to with exponential change is money invested at compound interest. If you just invest at a flat rate, after one year it’d be worth $1.10, two years $1.20, and so on. But if it’s compounded, then after 10 years it’s worth around $2.50, and then it goes faster and faster—after 50 years, something like $700. It just expands so fast. And that’s what we can’t get our heads around: how things take off with exponential change.

Tami Simon: And part of what you’re saying, if I understand correctly, is that as a technologically empowered species—which is how you described us—we will be involved in exponential change because of our connection with technology. Is that correct?

Peter Russell: Yes. It’s because technology is increasing at an exponential rate, and so is science. Each new development makes it easier for the next stage. Going back in information technology, the transistor—developed about 80 years ago—made it much easier to produce integrated circuits for computers, which pushed the computer revolution much further ahead. Then networking computers pushed it further, and we could gather knowledge faster and faster. So each development makes it more efficient and easier for the next stage to be built. And what we’re seeing with AI is it going faster and faster still. It’s basically inevitable in any development that the more we have established, the more we can establish and the faster we can do that. It’s not about us making things go faster—although we do that to some extent, we are wedded to efficiency—but this is something different from that. It’s just the nature of development.

Tami Simon: I imagine someone listening who’s saying, “Yeah, I get this, Tami, come on.” And I think—but the reason I want to emphasize this understanding is that you mentioned stress as our challenge to adapt to exponential change. And I think right now people are crumbling under the acceleration of change. I wonder if you can speak to that specifically.

Peter Russell: Yes. Having to cope with this—it’s hard. And the change is not going to go away, that’s for sure. This is where I think it comes back, to some extent, to how we manage our own lives. I’ve just done something which I’m in a fortunate position to do: take a digital detox for a few days, being completely away from computers and phones. There’s a sort of relief and refreshment there. Now most people don’t get that opportunity. We need to, in a way, manage how we relate to technology so that we don’t add even more stress to it. But it is going to be increasingly stressful. So how we manage stress is going to be more important—how we take time for ourselves, how we notice when we’re getting stressed, how we can begin to see what’s underneath it, how we can work with it. I think these are all important things. But it’s not going to go away, unfortunately.

Tami Simon: Which brings us to your work on How to Meditate Without Even Trying, and to understanding the connection, if you see one, between the increased interest in and valuing of profound states of being—as a way to recalibrate our nervous system during a period of change that is so exponential we don’t even know how to metabolize it. How do you see the connection between these two things?

Peter Russell: I think what we all need is to be able to come back. Coming back to the present moment, the here and now, is a place where we can actually relax and refresh ourselves mentally. And the sorts of consciousness that many of the great teachers have pointed out over the years is almost a fundamental reason for being here. So for me, meditation is more and more necessary in the world today. We all need it—partly to cope with the stress, but partly to get in touch with ourselves in this crazy, busier world.

Now, there are many different sorts of meditation, some very complex and some involving a lot of discipline. What I’m primarily interested in is just very simple practices that allow us to come back to actually being here in the present moment—letting go of tensions, letting go of our thoughts, and just returning to the ease and quiet of being here in this moment, just for a short while, and then going out with greater stability into the world, refreshed, having had a break from the turmoil that is happening around us. I think this is absolutely essential. I know it’s been essential in my own life. And I’ve just decided at this stage in my life that I want to make available everything I’ve discovered that makes meditation easier.

Tami Simon: I mentioned in the introduction that this is a special Eckhart Tolle edition of the book, and one of his early ideas—kind of like the global brain when you were writing that—was Eckhart starting to talk about the flowering of human consciousness back in the eighties. Sounds True started working with Eckhart then. The flowering of human consciousness was this idea that spiritual awakening—awakening to the power of now, as his language described it—would start flowering like early flowers: at first only a few on the planet, and then more and more and more. So my question to you, Peter, is how do you see a connection between accelerating technological change and the flowering of human consciousness, if you do see one.

Peter Russell: Yes, I do. And I think the flowering of human consciousness is on a similar exponential curve, for similar reasons. When I was at Cambridge in the eighties—just before Eckhart was—there was one bookstore that had a shelf about this long of books on alternative spirituality, besides Christianity and Judaism. That was it, in one bookstore. Now you go into any bookstore and they have their own spirituality sections; there are online courses, video content. It’s just growing faster and faster and faster—because technology has grown, but also because more and more of us are actually making our own discoveries.

Back in the eighties, there were just a handful of authors people were reading—Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, who did a lot of work in that area. Now thousands and thousands of us have been on our path and have been growing and finding things we want to share. Eckhart is one case—he had his own flash of awakening, though it confused him at first, and he became a major influence teaching others. And you can say the same of many contemporary teachers, whether it’s Adyashanti, Rupert Spira—I can name many. They’re all people who have been learning from each other. So you have this positive feedback again, which means that our understanding of the essence of spirituality is growing faster and faster, and the numbers involved are growing faster and faster.

Now, corporations in Silicon Valley love to say they include meditation in their work. When I started teaching meditation in corporations in the eighties, I was told: “Don’t tell anyone you’re doing this”—they were scared of what would happen to their stock price. I think these are some of the signs of just how fast this is going. And that gives me hope. I mean, you’ve probably seen this yourself, just in the growth of Sounds True over the years.

Tami Simon: Well, I have, and I talk to people a lot who say, “Tami, I am so tired of hearing from you and others about the growth of spiritual awakening in the world. When I look around and see what’s happening, it’s still just a drop in the bucket. Maybe it’s growing exponentially, but that exponential growth is not significant enough, really in our time, to make the kind of difference we need. It’s minuscule.”

Peter Russell: Yeah, and I would agree with that. The global brain—I would say, looking back on it, I was naive in thinking this is going to change the world. I still think it’s something we can all benefit from and that influences how we go out into the world, but although the interest has grown, most people aren’t deeply involved in practice. They may meditate when they come home, and then get on with their kids, but they aren’t deeply involved in spiritual practice. So I agree—the flowering is happening, but it’s not changing society en masse.

Tami Simon: One of the ideas you introduced in Forgiving Humanity—if I understand correctly, and if not, please correct me—is something I’ve been thinking about ever since I was introduced to it. As human beings, we don’t necessarily focus on our own death. We know it’s going to happen. As an individual, I know I’m going to die. As I get older, I start thinking about it more—noting you’re 79 now, so you may be thinking about it more; I’m 63 and I certainly am. But there’s still a way it has an unreality to it to some degree, even when contemplated a lot.

And as a species—this is something I felt you were pointing to—we haven’t really taken in that as an information-empowered species involved in this accelerated change, at some point we will also go extinct. It’s going to happen. And we’re not looking at that death. The final point I want to make—and then I’d love to hear you comment—is that I’ve known some people who have gotten a terminal diagnosis of one kind or another, and it dramatically changed them, really changed them. It accelerated their inner life’s flourishing in ways I couldn’t have ever known except that I witnessed it. And I started thinking: I wonder if we as a species accepted our extinction at some point down the line, if that might change us in some way.

Peter Russell: I think so, yes. And what I’m saying in the book is that our extinction may be coming a lot sooner than we imagine. People think, “Oh, in a thousand years’ time I wonder what humanity will be doing, or a million years’ time.” That’s all very linear thinking. When you take the acceleration into account, it’s more like: what will we be doing in 10 years’ time, or 25 years’ time? Things like climate change, if they continue on some of the runaway courses, the planet may become uninhabitable for major mammals. We don’t know.

So I think we need to face the possibility, and in the book I draw an analogy with the stages of grief. The first stage is denial: “No, it can’t be true.” I think we’re in the stage of denial as a culture—that humanity could be at risk. I’m not saying humanity will definitely become extinct, but I think it’s a possibility. Then we move into anger—anger at what corporations are doing, what politicians have done. Then bargaining: “Well, perhaps if we all drove electric cars, we could mend the world.” Then depression—and I think there are a lot of people in that cycle. I know therapists who say more and more people are coming to them about the state of the world rather than the state of their marriage.

The final stage is acceptance. And I think this is where we need to work towards—accepting, just as when somebody has died and we need to get on with our life, accepting that we are in these dire circumstances, and that we may not be here much longer. So how can we live with that acceptance?

For me, when I got to that acceptance, I still wanted to do whatever I could to make the world a better place and particularly help other people. But I had somehow let go of the idea of saving the planet, which I was very much involved in through the eighties and nineties. It’s more like: okay, things are crumbling, and at the same time we are gaining the inner capacity to deal with that. How can I be involved in that in a way that’s helping other people through these momentous times?

Tami Simon: You mentioned that in retrospect, when you wrote The Global Brain and had the view you held then, perhaps you were naive. Can you tell me what you think the naivety was, and what shifted for you?

Peter Russell: The naivety was this idea that if we all just meditate and get our act together, we can bring in a brave new world. That’s what I was wrapped up in myself in those days. What changed was about 20 years later, when another book—Waking Up in Time—was published and I was traveling around giving lectures. There was a bit of me that wasn’t quite happy with what I was saying. I’d come off a talk and think, “I don’t quite feel easy about this.” And I realized: here am I, whose meditation has been a steady practice in my life. Am I enlightened? No way. Am I a bit better a person? I would hope so. But I’m just one of the few people interested in this among thousands and thousands who aren’t doing this and who aren’t going to have that kind of impact. And then the realization: even if they did, would it really make a difference?

That was when I let go of the idea that we are going to bring about peace on Earth through meditating, to put it very simply. What it led me to at the time—I was working with Shell Corporation in London on scenario planning, where every three years they look 25 years ahead to see how the world is going to be and what that means for where they invest money. I was involved in one particular loop of that scenario planning. One of the scenarios we had under the table was: it’s too late. But this wasn’t a scenario you could put to the board—they didn’t want to hear that. So we put the other scenario to the board, but at the back of my mind, that one was there.

And so I was saying to myself: okay, if we’re not going to save the world through meditating, what does that mean for me? What should I be doing in my life? And it came back to exactly the same things. What are people going to need? They’re going to need compassion, they need to be more in touch with themselves, with their intuition. And I realized it didn’t matter which way things went—the work was exactly the same. The work was working with myself, my own journey of awakening, becoming a better human being, and helping other people do the same. So it was an interesting shift: I let go of that reason for doing the work and shifted to doing exactly the same work, but for a different reason—to help us navigate these crazy times.

Tami Simon: And in terms of—once more I’m going to raise the potential extinction of our species, without knowing when that could happen but understanding exponential change—is it inevitable, from your study of history and evolution, that at some point our species will go extinct? Let’s just embrace that. It’s going to happen, yes?

Peter Russell: Very, very likely. By which I mean—who knows? We may develop the technological means to keep going for millions or billions of years, as some futurists suggest. I think that’s extremely unlikely. Yes, I’d say sooner or later we’re going to go extinct.

Tami Simon: Okay. And so interestingly, all of your various reflections—even contemplating the end of our species at some point—all brought you to the same place, if I understand, in terms of where you can be empowered and helpful now. We’re going to dig into that in terms of your new book, How to Meditate Without Even Trying. But tell me—when you reflect on that, how can Peter Russell be most effective and helpful right now? What comes up for you?

Peter Russell: This book—that’s why I wrote it. I wanted to share things I’ve discovered in my own practice and teaching that really make meditation easier and more enjoyable, and to share that with other people. I think it’s a skill we can all benefit from. I’m 79—I don’t know how long I’ve got—but I didn’t want to leave this realm without actually sharing it. So right now, I think that’s the most valuable thing I can be doing.

Tami Simon: One of the insights you offered in the book that I thought was really helpful has to do with how, when we’re not trying in meditation, we can let go in deeper and deeper ways—and you reframe “letting go” in a way that I found really useful, and I think our listeners would benefit from. It’s this notion that instead of thinking about letting go as something we’re efforting to do, we can first let in, then let be. Can you talk about those two steps?

Peter Russell: A number of people have talked about “letting be” as a step in letting go—don’t fight it, just allow it to be. But what I found in my own work was that I often didn’t know what it was I needed to let be. Let’s take feeling angry about something. “Let it be” would just mean: okay, allow yourself to feel angry. But that wasn’t doing much. I was accepting it—not acting it out by going and punching people—but just accepting it as the reality. Then I realized I didn’t actually know what I was really feeling. So “letting in” was like: okay, what’s going on inside me? Mainly in my body—because feelings, emotions, are also body feelings. What’s going on? And just opening up: ah, there’s a tightness in my jaw, a quivering in my stomach. Just noticing what is there.

Letting that in, and allowing that to be, rather than “I’m angry at so-and-so for doing this”—it’s letting in the actual sensations. And also the story, because with any emotion there’s a story: “This stupid so-and-so, why did they do that?” Letting the story in and just seeing it—it’s just a story. Who knows how true it is? Just letting the story in and letting it be can allow it to begin to dissolve. But most importantly, coming to what is actually going on in the body—when I do that, what’s going on tends to lessen, and sometimes just disappear completely.

My view is that a lot of our distress, whether physical or emotional, is a call for attention. It’s the body’s system saying: “Hey, attention, please. Something here needs attention.” What we tend to do—because we don’t want to feel pain, distress, or upset—is push it away to the edge of our mind where we won’t notice it. “I’ll take my mind off it, I’ll think about something else.” To me, it’s a call for attention. By letting it in, by seeing what it is that’s calling my attention, we’re giving it what it wants. And this seems to—I talk about it sometimes as metabolizing the emotion. When I give it my attention, it tends to naturally unwind, and the letting go happens without my needing to do anything to let go. Even with simple things like having a headache: okay, what’s going on here? Just allow it to be there. And so often it shifts.

Tami Simon: What would you say to someone about a subtle level of tension or holding that I think many people feel in their body and that doesn’t seem to go away, even when they attend to it—like some kind of slight vigilance or holding that isn’t associated with anything specific necessarily?

Peter Russell: What I’ve found is that the process does apply. I notice such things at times—some holding, some discomfort I can’t name, where I’m not completely comfortable in my body. What I’ll do is pause, get quiet, and just ask: what does it feel like? I know it’s discomfort, but what is it actually? It might be, oh, there’s a thickness in my head, a dullness. So I’ll get into that. Explore it. What does that actually feel like? Almost get to know it. Not just “there’s a dullness in my head,” but: okay, what is that actually like? And get into it, explore it with curiosity.

What I usually find is that it begins to release or let go, or some shift happens, or I discover something else. I had this just a few weeks back—I couldn’t name what it was. I like to go to dance because for me it’s a form of meditation. I started off and said to a friend, “I’m not really in it today.” I just started dancing, feeling what was going on, noticing this feeling in my head. And just suddenly, as I got more and more into it: “Oh, I’m tired. I’m tired.” And just by tuning into that discomfort, it became clear what it was. In fact, I came home and slept for 14 hours—I needed it, but I hadn’t realized it. So just by tuning into discomfort, not trying to change it, just being with it and seeing what was there, it showed me what I needed to do. Even with things we can’t particularly name, I find that just being with them, letting them in, exploring what is there—it takes curiosity. What is actually going on here?

Tami Simon: I know you started in the world of transcendental meditation—TM—and I’ve never been a TM meditator, but my understanding of the approach is that you work with a mantra you’re given, and that’s your object of concentration, and you go back to the mantra when you find yourself distracted. I’m curious to know your progression—and of course I could be misrepresenting TM here, so please correct me—to the kind of effortless meditation approach you’re offering now.

Peter Russell: First of all, I would like to correct you, because I think that’s a very common understanding of TM, but I think it’s a misunderstanding. Yes, TM uses mantras, but not to concentrate on—it’s almost the opposite. It’s not like mantra japa, where you’re trying to keep the mantra there as a regular repetition. It’s almost the opposite. It’s somewhere to place the attention. The Maharishi called it a vehicle for the attention. In meditation, you’re meditating, you go off on some thought, you realize you’ve been thinking, and you come back to the present—and then you just remember the mantra.

The basic instruction is often given as “think the mantra,” but I think that’s the wrong instruction. What it actually means is: any thoughts come effortlessly, just let the mantra be there effortlessly. For me, the best word for that is just: hear it. Listen to it. We’re not producing or creating the mantra. The idea is that because it has no meaning, it doesn’t set off other trains of thought. If you’re just aware of it in a very relaxed way, it allows the thinking mind to quiet down, and eventually to go beyond thought—hence “transcendental,” to transcend thought.

My experience over the years has been that once I got into it, I really enjoyed it, and I found a lot of the practical benefits—being calmer in life, perhaps increased health. Where it’s led me in my own personal practice is that I’ve become so familiar with the transcendental state—the silent mind where there is no thought—that when I sit to meditate, I don’t need to do the TM practice. I will occasionally, but I can just say, “Ah, there you are,” and just drop in and feel the stillness, the silence. It’s almost like I don’t need the technique anymore.

In fact, I remember one teacher saying—about 20 years ago—”The purpose of all techniques is to take you to a place where you don’t need techniques.” I think that’s been true in my case. Of course, I now write a book with various hints and things about how to make meditation easier. But hopefully that will take people to the place where they don’t need a book or meditation instruction.

Tami Simon: And you offer them as tips and refinements, but you’re very clear not to engage in an effort-based technique.

Peter Russell: Yes.

Tami Simon: I do want to ask one question, though—one of many I could ask—which is: when I think of being effortless but yet being upright and alert—you mentioned not letting yourself be so relaxed that you’re falling asleep—there is a level of effort, even just in sitting up.

Peter Russell: I think it’s semantics—what we mean by effort. By “not trying” I mean not trying to get a particular state, not trying to do anything in the mind. There is the intention to sit upright, because it helps to keep us alert and awake—comfortably alert, not putting yourself in some difficult yoga position unless it’s really comfortable for you. But yes, there is the intention to sit up, and that might take some effort.

Tami Simon: Okay. And then you go on, and one of the chapters is about noticing the tension in thinking. Can you speak to that?

Peter Russell: I find that a really important bit. There’s tension in thinking for various reasons. Sometimes, if we’re focusing on a thought, trying to work something out, trying to solve a problem, that will make the mind tight—because whenever the attention is focused on something, there’s a slight constriction of consciousness. And what we’re focusing the attention on in our thoughts can create their own tension, their own worries. This is quite normal.

Now, the point in meditation is that we go off on a thought, and after a while we come back, we’re present again, and we get on with the meditation. But what I’ve found is that I’m no longer following that particular thought, yet that thought created a little bit of tension—a slight constriction of consciousness, nothing you’d really notice, but just a very slight tightening of the mind. It’s easy then to come back to the mantra or whatever your meditation is—the breath, or anything—but that residue of tension is still there, and you’re bringing it into the rest of the meditation.

So what I like to do, particularly when I’ve been off on a thought for a while and I realize I’ve been thinking, is—before continuing with the practice—just pause and ask myself: could there possibly be some little remnant of tension, some residue from the thought, some slight constriction in the mind? And often I notice: oh yes, there is, there was that slight constriction. And just the noticing of it—it just goes. Awareness releases it. I find that a really useful way of keeping a level of relaxation going throughout the meditation.

Tami Simon: Have you noticed that by focusing on releasing the tension from the thinking process when you’re meditating, it changes how you think when you’re not meditating?

Peter Russell: Yes, because the tension often channels one in a certain way. I notice it in daily life—I’ll notice a slight tension that’s come along, usually because something has its own sort of urgency. When I notice it and let it go, it’s like I am pretty much free to attend to what needs to be attended to, rather than what the ego mind is wanting me to do.

Someone once asked me: “How do you know if you are in the ego mind?” And I’d say: whenever you are in the ego mind, there’s always a slight tension associated with it. So by recognizing the tension, I can let that dissolve and I step out of the ego mind back into what I call the authentic self—not the pure cosmic self, but just the authentic self, the me that’s without the egoic conditioning.

Tami Simon: And one more question about the tips you give to people to help them meditate without trying: you offer some open inquiry questions that can be helpful. Share some of your favorites.

Peter Russell: I talk a lot about attention. I think a lot of what we call mental tension is actually a tightening of the attention. So one of the questions I pose, particularly when I’m in a quiet state of meditation, is: “Could my attention be more relaxed? Could my attention soften?” And nearly always there’s that sense of: oh, I could see I was holding my attention, very very faintly. The answer never comes as a verbal answer—the whole point of the question is not to try and answer it. It’s a seed. You pop the seed in and wait. And what happens is: oh yes, it could be more relaxed.

Another one—towards the end of the book I go into much deeper territory around what’s often called non-duality, the nature of the self, who am I. One of the questions I’ve found very helpful there is: “Am I not the one that is experiencing this?” Because we identify with the ego mind or persona. Just as a pointer, to come back to noticing: I am the one that is actually experiencing the sounds, the thoughts, the feelings. Just coming back to that level of I-am-ness that is always there. That’s a deeper way of using inquiry.

Tami Simon: You mentioned, Peter, that here at 79 you were inspired to make sure you shared with others—in a spirit of offering—the inner discoveries you’ve made about, I would say, how to be: how to meditate without even trying, the title of your new book. And my question has to do with what you’ve discovered inwardly about the connectivity we have as a species that might be different from what you wrote about in The Global Brain forty-some years ago. Maybe we call it something more like our interconnected heart, or global heart, or our cosmic universal heart. How would you name that connectivity?

Peter Russell: I name it as the universal essence—the common essence. You and I, everybody, we’re very different in terms of our thoughts, our values, all that stuff. But when I come down into that stillness in meditation, beyond thought, there is something there that isn’t particularly Peter Russell. There is just: here I am. I know that I am. And it gets involved in being Peter Russell, but it’s not who I am fundamentally.

It’s like I’m just this being, just this consciousness. And realizing that that’s what it’s like for everybody. When you touch into that stillness, it’s no longer Tami Simon’s stillness—it’s something which is beyond all that. It has no particular personal qualities. So for my thinking, it’s basically the same for all of us, or very, very similar—it may have its own slight flavors—but when we touch into that stillness, we’re all touching into a very similar quality. And so in that sense I know what it’s like to be you at the most fundamental level. That to me is where compassion comes from, that understanding. Deep down we are all the same; deep down we all want to be at peace, we all want to be loved. We are all the same at that fundamental level.

Tami Simon: And finally, Peter, you said that four-plus decades ago, you might have had the view that if we connect to this essence, it’s going to save our species, save the world. And that’s not your motivation today. What is your motivation today?

Peter Russell: To navigate this crazy world as it unfolds. To navigate better so that we can maintain our center, be more grounded, be able to help others better. To steer our way through with more grace and compassion.

Tami Simon: I’ve been speaking with Peter Russell. He’s the author of the new book How to Meditate Without Even Trying. Thank you so much, Peter. It’s great to connect with you in this way.

Peter Russell: Thank you. Lovely to be with you. Lovely conversation.