Why Sam Harris Snaps His Fingers while Telling You to Look for the Looker

December 5, 2021 Dennis Junk

Image by Canva’s Magic Media

Sam Harris has revealed that users of his Waking Up meditation app struggle with the instruction to “look for what’s looking” more than any other. The confusion arises partly from the figurative use of the word look. You’re not literally looking with your eyes, obviously. You’re instead looking in the sense of searching. But that only raises more questions. How exactly do you conduct this search? And what does Sam mean by “the looker,” i.e., what the hell are you supposed to be searching for?

Some time ago, I arrived at an insight that got me most of the way toward answering these questions. In meditation, you’re shifting from your usual mindset of living thought-to-thought. That is, you’re ceasing to experience consciousness through concepts—words, abstractions, narratives—and instead engaging with the world through sensations. “The looker,” which Harris often refers to as “the seat of attention” or “the center of consciousness,” is that sense we all have that we’re directing our attention toward one thing and not another. It’s the sense that we’re here, pulling the strings of our mental dynamics, while whatever we’re attending to is over there—even if over there is no farther away than our own nostrils. We have that sense, but are we really sensing it?

What my new grasp of the distinction between the thinking and feeling modes helped me understand is that the way to look for the looker is to scan your body, particularly your head, for a sensation associated with being in control of your attention. Ask yourself what it feels like to be here and directing your attention over there? Where exactly do you experience that feeling? In what part of your body? If you’re like me, you’ll first realize that it really does feel like you’re aiming a spotlight at the world from some place behind your eyes, but when you turn that spotlight around there’s nothing for it to illuminate. In other words, you search for the sensation of being in control of your attention and you realize your head is empty of any such sensation. You look where you think you’ll find this center and instead discover nothing there.

This amounts to a discovery in its own right. The feeling of there being a center of consciousness—a self—arises not from any bodily sensation, but from our habitual application of concepts to every aspect of our experience. The sense of self, in other words, is a thought, not an experience. It’s in this sense that meditators say the self is an illusion. Once you disrupt this illusion, there’s just a flow of perceptions arising and falling away. Some we direct our attention to, but the decision to do so is as mysterious to us, as inaccessible to consciousness, as the source of any particular thought that pops into our minds.

Okay, so what? Why is this insight into the centerlessness of consciousness so important? If you’ve ever managed to reach this stage, no matter how briefly, even if only peripherally, then you know there’s a mental state that comes in the wake of looking and failing to find the looker. Breaking the spell changes the nature of experience. For me, it was nothing vivid enough to take much notice of at first, just a minor break in my usual chain of concept linked to concept. It felt like being momentarily dazed, without the anxiety that attends moments of disorientation. The more I practice, though, the more prolonged this mental state becomes, and the more profound the feeling becomes.

I had already been experiencing this state for intervals of ten or fifteen seconds when I first heard Harris suggest that his app users look for the looker in the space of a finger snap. Confused, I wondered if I’d been doing the whole thing wrong all this time. Then I recalled that the first several times I’d reached the empty, dazed state after looking for the looker, the shift had occurred in the space of a few seconds. The longer I practiced, though, the more gradual the transition seemed (and the longer it lasted). So I reasoned that maybe the finger snap technique is to help people at an earlier stage of their practice. But I still didn’t get how it was supposed to work.

Then I considered the finger snap in light of my insight into the distinction between experiencing consciousness conceptually and experiencing it sensuously. Each of these modes of experiencing the world has its own inertia. Concepts breed concepts ad infinitum. That’s how we get lost in thought. A big part of the game in meditation is to disrupt this momentum—to derail the train of thought, as it were, so we can get into the mode of feeling the world instead of thinking about it. Therein lies the difficulty of following the instruction to look for the looker. As soon as you hear it, you can’t help trying to parse it conceptually. You start to think. Thought follows thought until you’re giving up in frustration. Next, you’re writing an email to Sam Harris asking what the hell this look-for-the-looker nonsense is supposed to mean.

The finger snap is probably in part an acknowledgment that the first few times you pull off the technique, the effect is going to last only a few seconds, wearing off so fast you’ll be left wondering if it even really happened. You’ll wonder, was that it? It doesn’t seem earthshattering. It’s not even pleasant—though it’s not unpleasant either. But that initial inkling is just the first step. The main thing the finger snap is designed to do, though, is prevent you from thinking—because there’s not much thinking you can do in the amount of time it takes for Harris to make the sound.

The focus of Vipassana meditation is attending to the breath. Most of us spend most of our waking hours in thinking mode, so to derail our trains of thought we focus on something that’s both physical and timebound. This gets us out of thinking mode and into feeling mode, out of the realm of concepts and into the realm of sensations. The idea is that with enough practice, you’ll be in feeling mode most of the time, so when you have a thought, you’ll key into what it feels like to think instead of pursuing the thought as it ramifies. Harris has talked about how he struggled with this transition when he was using Vipassana techniques alone. His breakthrough came when he took up Dzogchen practices, including the pointing out instruction—the cue to look for the looker. That’s why this instruction is emphasized so much in his app.

While the pointing out instruction helped Harris, though, he knows it comes with a risk. Even as beginning meditators are working to build momentum with the feeling mode, you’re giving them a prompt which is almost guaranteed to get them thinking. Notice that Harris seldom instructs us to look for the looker without first having us focus on the breath or in some other way helping us get into feeling mode. What he’s hoping is that since we’re already in feeling mode, his instruction to look for the looker might not get wrapped up in thought the way it normally would. But just in case, he encourages us to do it quickly, in the span of a snapping sound, again because he wants you to experience the shift, not think about it.

Unfortunately, it seems these techniques aren’t sufficient to get many of the app users over the hump. So, I figured a little more conceptual understanding might be helpful. Just remember, though, no amount of thinking will get you to the mind state you’re after. Again, the experience comes from being in feeling mode—even though it leads to a third state that transcends both thinking and feeling. It’s cultivation of this third state that’s the goal of continuing meditation practice, insofar as you can say there’s a goal to a practice that entails disconnecting from thoughts of the future. Buddhists call it non-dual awareness, anatta, or selflessness. I experience it for fifteen or twenty seconds at a time, maybe twice a week now. As I get more skillful at getting into this state, and better able to maintain it, I’ll report back on my experiences.