We just culturally learn it. So you display your life on Instagram and in conversations as if you are the Chief Marketing Officer of Me, not trying to get other people to buy anything other than the idea that we’re awesome and worthy of envy ourselves.You know?She realized something was wrong when she heard one day through the grapevine that somebody was envious of her, and she was thrilled.I am ashamed to tell you that, she said.Rachel didn’t want to be this way.Like me, she’s a strong proponent of skepticism and rationality, so she looked for techniques that scientific studies had suggested might have some basis in fact.And she discovered an ancient technique called sympathetic joy, which is part of a range of techniques for which there is some striking new scientific evidence.It is, she says, quite simple.You close your eyes and picture yourself.You feel the joy that would come from that.You let it flow through you.Then you picture somebody you love, and you imagine something wonderful happening for them.You feel the joy from that, and you let that, too, flow through you.You imagine something wonderful happening to her.Then it gets harder.You picture somebody you don’t like, and you try to imagine something good happening for that person.And you try to feel joy for that person.You try to feel the same joy you’d feel for yourself, or for somebody you love.You imagine how good they’d feel, and how moved they’d be.And you try to feel joy for them.When you’re meditating, you may not feel that way at all.It might actually be almost killing you to say those things, she explained.For the first few weeks, Rachel thought it felt pointless.But then she started to notice, over time, I don’t feel that same churning punch in the gut.It’s just not there. She felt the toxic feelings slowly abate.Envy wasn’t puncturing her several times a day in the same way.The longer she did it, the more these feelings ebbed.Thinking about the relative she had a particular problem with, she says, It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel envy at all about her ever again.I think it works on you below the level of ordinary consciousness.As she kept on practicing, she started to feel something more.Part of the point of sympathetic joy meditation is that you feel less envy, but an even more important part is that you start to see the happiness of others not as a rebuke, but as a source of joy for yourself, too.One day Rachel was in a park and she saw a bride in her wedding dress, with her groom, posing for pictures.Before, she would have felt envy, and comforted herself by finding some flaw in the bride or groom.This time, she felt a rush of joy, and it really lifted her for the rest of the day.She didn’t start mentally comparing this bride to how she looked on her own own wedding day.She would never see this couple again, but her eyes welled up with sympathetic joy.I asked her what it feels like.It’s almost like people become your children.That same tender, warm happiness you have for your child when they’re having fun and they’re happy or they get something they like, you can feel that for a complete stranger, and it’s quite incredible.It’s almost like looking at them through the eyes of a loving parent that just wants someone they love to be happy and have good things, and there’s a tenderness to it for me.She was surprised that she could change in this way.You think that certain things aren’t malleable, she says, but they completely are.If you can be happy for others, there’s always going to be a supply of happiness available to you.Vicarious joy is going to be available millions of ways every single day.If you want to look at other people and be happy for them, you can be happy every single day, regardless of what’s happening to you.As she began to practice this, she realized it was really a radical break with what she’d been taught.You’ll lose your edge.You’ll fall behind in the constant race for success.But Rachel thinks this is a false dichotomy.Why can’t you be happy for other people and for yourself?Why would being eaten with envy make you stronger?Who’s envious of someone else’s good character?Who’s envious of somebody else’s wonderful treatment of their spouse?You’re not envious of that.You might admire that.You’re not envious of it.They’re not what matters.I think this concept could help tons of people with depression, Rachel said, pointing me to the scientific evidence, which I then studied in detail.The largest scientific study of using meditation as a treatment for depression found something really interesting.Other studies have found that meditation is similarly helpful for people with anxiety.But I was especially keen to read the scientific evidence about the particular style of meditation Rachel had been teaching me, to find out whether it actually changes people.If you were in the first group, you did a style of meditation similar to Rachel’s every day for a few weeks.Then, at the end, both groups were tested.You didn’t know that some of the people taking part were in fact actors.During the games, subtly and unexpectedly, one of them would drop something, or clearly need help in some other way.And that in turn would lead to greater connection to other people.Then, up to now, I’ve been talking about the environmental or social changes that might be able to help us.But what Rachel was teaching me was something different.She was proposing a psychological change.There are other kinds of psychological changes people can try, too.Even if you really believe you are trapped and you genuinely can’t change your environment, some of these methods might help.Until I had this experience with Rachel, I had been wary about meditation.There were, I realized, two reasons.The second is that I found many of the reasons why meditation has been promoted over the past few years problematic.But I now knew there are lots of different kinds of meditation.Rachel’s school of meditation is the opposite of this individualistic meditation that disturbed me.It’s not about dealing with the distress and strain of disconnection a little better.It’s about finding a way back to reconnection.The thing that most fascinated me about Rachel’s transformation was the way she talked about changing her relationship with her own ego.She had found a way to protect herself from it.What else could we do to shrink our egos and strengthen our connections?And yet I kept looking at the latest scientific results, and they were startling, so I went on a journey into this field.What I learned may sound weird to you at first.It sounded weird to me.Roland Griffith was trying to meditate, but he couldn’t do it.If he sat there for a few minutes, it would feel like hours, stretching out agonizingly before him.All he felt at the end of it was frustration, so he gave it up.He had been a young grad student when his attempts at meditation flickered out, and Roland was at the start of a stellar career in academic psychology.He rose through this field to become a leading professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland, one of the best academic institutions in the world.When I met him, he was one of the most respected figures internationally when it came to the study of drug use, especially the effects of caffeine.As we sat in his office, he explained to me that after twenty years of rising to this position, if I hadn’t been certifiably workaholic, I was pretty close to it.My career had gone well, he said, but he felt something was lacking.It was heresy in his field to think about the deep inner self.He was a specialist in a field of psychology that regarded all this as hippieish nonsense, and not something serious academic psychologists should think about at all.Unlike his attempts all those years before, he had somebody there to guide him in his meditation, and to talk him through how to do it.This time, he found he could meditate after all.That became, frankly, enthralling to me. The people he was meeting who had been meditating for years seemed to have a spiritual dimension to their lives that really benefited them in all sorts of ways.They appeared calmer, and happier, and less anxious.He asked himself some basic questions.What is happening when a person meditates?What changes in them?They see the world differently.Why, Roland wanted to know, would that be?The vast majority of people given the drug by doctors said that it made them feel this way, and that the experience seemed profound to them.As he read through this, Roland noticed one thing in particular.The way people described feeling when they took psychedelics was strikingly similar to the way people said they felt if they had a deep, sustained program of meditation.When all this research had been taking place, the scientists seemed to be discovering all sorts of benefits to giving people these drugs under clinical conditions.When it was given to chronic alcoholics,7 a startling number stopped drinking.When it was given to chronically depressed people,8 many of them felt radically better and left behind their depression.These scientific trials weren’t conducted according to the standards that we’d use today,9 and the results should be viewed with some caution, but they caught Roland’s eye.Yet across the United States, toward the end of the sixties, there was a panic about psychedelics.I have to say, frankly, that I was a skeptic, he said to me as we sat together in Maryland.And he didn’t think there would be many effects beyond that.So dozens of ordinary professional people were recruited in Maryland.We want you, they said, to do something unusual.Mark didn’t know what to expect as he walked through Roland’s lab12 into a room that had been decorated to look like a living room in an ordinary home.There was a sofa, and soothing pictures on the wall, and a carpet.It was a new study looking at spirituality, it said.He responded because he had gotten divorced from his wife and become depressed.In the year and a half since he stopped, he had become worried about himself.What I felt was missing in my life was an ability to connect with other people, he told me.I was just somebody who kept everybody at arm’s length.One day he was in pain and taken to the hospital, and as Mark watched him leave, he knew instinctively he would never see his father again.Mark’s mother had been so lost in her own grief that she couldn’t discuss the death with him, and nobody else did, either.I was left to my own devices to make sense of this and to get along in life, he said, and I think I just stuffed it all.As he got older, this sense of distance caused him a lot of social anxiety.If he made himself attend, he’d stand to one side, blushing.I was very careful about what I said, and just overmonitored myself, he says.Was that a dumb thing to say?What should you say next?And what will you say after that?His anxiety was understandably flaring that day as he lay on the sofa in the pretend lounge.It was to be the first of three sessions in which he was given psilocybin.Bill explained to Mark that he would be there all the way through the experience, to reassure him and to guide him.All Mark had heard about psychedelics when he was growing up is that they drive you insane.