I wanted to take a moment to welcome you to Waking Up, and to share a bit more about why I decided to build this app.

When I was in my teens, after the deaths of two people very close to me, I suddenly became interested in esoteric questions like: What is the nature of consciousness? What is the self? What is the connection between the human mind and reality? And how should our answers to such questions inform how we live?

These topics didn’t just interest me philosophically or scientifically—I wanted to explore them directly, through firsthand experience. I wasn’t looking merely to know more or to believe new things; I wanted to live differently.

So, after my sophomore year of college, I dropped out of school—for what became a full decade. In the late 80s and 90s, I made many trips to India and Nepal, where I got the chance to study with some of the greatest meditation teachers alive at that time. I spent around two years on silent retreats, ranging in length from one week to three months. I also read very widely in the literature of philosophy, religion, and contemplative spirituality, East and West.

All of this served to change my perspective on what was possible for minds like ours. I came out of these years of seeking a very different person. And, in many ways, I found the experiential answers I was looking for.

Eventually, I went back to school—where, perhaps unsurprisingly, I majored in philosophy. Still fascinated by core questions about the mind and its connection to reality at large, I followed up my undergraduate degree with a Ph.D. in neuroscience.

As I was just beginning my doctoral research, though—studying belief, disbelief, and uncertainty using fMRI—the September 11th attacks occurred. Having spent the previous decade deeply immersed in religious literature, my concerns about the threat of fundamentalism were already well-formed.

So I stepped away from my research and published two books—The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation—both arguing that faith and reason were in conflict. Together with the biologist Richard Dawkins, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the writer Christopher Hitchens, I became known as a “New Atheist,” and as one of the “Four Horsemen” of a new wave of opposition to organized religion. The resulting skirmishes in the culture war kept me away from the lab for nearly four years.

However, I’ve always been bored by politics and most interested in those first questions that sent me to Asia, and into the silence of retreat. These questions—about consciousness, the self, reality—are, for me, not at all divorced from everyday concerns. In fact, they directly relate to the most fundamental causes of happiness and suffering, and to the larger question of what it means to live a good life. (And, ironically, they keep bringing me back to politics.) How can we all live together in such a way as to maximize the chance that humanity will thrive, now and in the future?

Waking Up is where I most fully explore this conceptual and experiential terrain—and where I share the practices and insights that transformed my own life for the better.

The purpose of Waking Up isn’t just to help you meditate. It’s to help you live a more examined, fulfilling life altogether—to help close the gap between the person you want to be and the person you seem to be in this moment.

Waking Up is run as a subscription business. However, we provide free membership to anyone who can’t afford it. Our business philosophy is pretty simple: we want to grow as a company and build wonderful things, but we never want money to be the reason why someone can’t benefit from our work. (We also give a minimum of 10 percent of our profits to the most effective charities—and this wider commitment to reducing suffering and existential risk has always been central to our mission.)

We continuously hear from members that Waking Up has profoundly changed their lives. I hope it has the same impact on you.