The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understa… - Sam Harris

Yes. This gradual walk toward not taking human suffering seriously anymore is something we experience in context-dependent ways already, and when you think of the global implications it’s scary to consider how malleable our experience might be. I’m thinking of a few local cases, like how surgeons and ER doctors need to inure themselves to the constant evidence of other people’s suffering, because otherwise they can’t get the job done. And every parent knows what it’s like to understand that the suffering of one’s three-year-old who bursts into tears over a lost toy is not something that needs to concern you as much as an adult bursting into tears over something else, and yet that suffering is no less vivid for the child. You can imagine that kind of immunity to the evident pain of other, seemingly conscious systems, growing over time. Life could seem more and more like a video game where everyone else becomes a prop.

Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience — self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light — constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.

I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else — not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness — one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice.