Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
By Sam Harris
4/5
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About this ebook
From Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of numerous New York Times bestselling books, Waking Up is for the twenty percent of Americans who follow no religion but who suspect that important truths can be found in the experiences of such figures as Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and the other saints and sages of history. Throughout this book, Harris argues that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow, and that how we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the quality of our lives.
Waking Up is part memoir and part exploration of the scientific underpinnings of spirituality. No other book marries contemplative wisdom and modern science in this way, and no author other than Sam Harris—a scientist, philosopher, and famous skeptic—could write it.
Sam Harris
Sam Harris is the author of the bestselling books The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, and Lying. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction and his work has been published in more than 20 languages. He has written for the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Economist, the Times (London), the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, the Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.
Read more from Sam Harris
Free Will Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Waking Up
347 ratings26 reviews
What our readers think
Readers find this title to be a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of consciousness and spirituality. The author, Sam Harris, combines his expertise in meditation and Eastern spiritualism with a rational and scientific approach. The book challenges readers to question their understanding of the self and offers practical tools for exploring consciousness directly. While some reviewers found certain parts to be dragging, overall, the book is praised for its readable philosophy, well-referenced content, and the different perspectives it provides on spirituality. It is recommended for those on a path of self-discovery and contemplation.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The text is the result of the authors lifelong quest to understand the human mind. The core assertion is that the "self-feeling" (i.e., the feeling of being an individual that is the author of ones actions) is an illusion. Convincing reasons are given to substantiate this claim and at that it is helpful that the author has a PhD in neuroscience. Spirituality is defined as the quest to overcome this illusion of "self-feeling", but detailed descriptions of exercises to do so are sparse. However, meditation is considered a relevant exercise and a general discussion of meditation is provided.The book is mostly written in a calm and serious style. There were only a few paragraphs that remained unintelligible gibberish to me; a problem that seems unavoidable when discussing meditation/spirituality. Sometimes the author has strong opinions but not so strong that I would have considered it awkward; others surely will.I believe that I really learned something from the book. I know of no other text that identifies a unique purpose of meditation/spirituality so clearly.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It was interesting and well referenced, but dragging in some parts. Gives you different perspectives on spirituality that are realistic, and must be considered if you're on this path.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Simple easy bite. loved it!
a glance over many intriguing subjects regarding consciousness and ways of perception. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Liked this book a lot. Harris wasn't as overbearing as usual, and the subject matter (consciousness) is something I'm really interested in.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Seems a bit muddled and unfocused, with several shots at organised religion which don't really advance his argument. Enjoyed the chapter on Neuroscience and the criticism of the idea of a 'soul' from that perspective though.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I typically do not read books like this but I thought I would give it a shot after enjoying listening to Sam Harris' podcast. There was a lot of interesting thoughts in the book about how to think, act and set spiritual goals without the need to be tagged to any religion. I enjoyed some so Sam's anecdotes about his spiritual travels and the book showed me new ways of thinking about meditation and spirituality. Would likely want to read another of The author's books at some point.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5After having seen interviews with Harris, had to read this:Convoluted, confusing, incoherent. Using false dilemmas to make points. Using outliers as examples why non-outliers need to be seen different. Wordy and unconvincing. All in all, very disappointing, discouraging.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Readable philosophy. That is a true achievement. Great book filled with anecdotes to make his points.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sam Harris’s Waking Up is a thoughtful account about how to tap into one’s consciousness. The author who is a neuroscientist discussed the right and left brain dichotomy. Our right brain functions quite differently from the left, but still they are complimentary.Harris discussed many topics that have to do with the brain, thinking, and feeling. Some of these are reflections of the mind, hallucinations, near death experiences, and the role of drugs. And the author made trips to the Far East to have experiences from gurus. But he ended up not being impressed with some of their meditational practices. As a scientist the author evaluated a variety of practices while attempting to explore consciousness. For him people didn’t have to be religious to reap these benefits. But Harris’s own approach to meditation had to be subjected to scientific scrutiny. That is why as an atheist he didn’t think much about the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that based many of their beliefs on faith.Harris’s book will shake up what believers think about their religion. And although the writer found benefits in meditation, still he exposes some of the Far Eastern gurus that were nothing more than charlatans. So Waking Up isn’t a book that is promoting any religious belief, but its contents are geared to those who wish to reap the benefits of meditation without a religion. So this guide to spirituality without religion should be read by believers and non-believers alike, who wish to tap into consciousness by submerging “I” in their thinking, and showing compassion towards others.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For me, this is one of those books that change your view of the world and offer additional tools to experience existence in a richer and more contemplative way.
Sam Harris is a rationalist that constantly uses his understanding of the scientific method to derive new meaning and understanding. This is the key aspect that drew me to his ideas from the very beginning of the book. Consider this: we are talking about spirituality here, and in the way Sam frames it, science is not a contradiction but a complement.
The premise of the book is that consciousness and its contents is all there is. From this premise he proceeds to ask, given that all of our experience of life is about the subjective experience of consciousness and the variety of contents that can be drawn upon it, why not to explore them directly? - Through meditation and a contemplative framework.
This book is for those who wants to explore the ideas behind meditation and is curious about what to make of it. Sam is a truth seeker, honestly looking for a deeper understanding of life, he is a good guide. Totally recommend this book and also the companion app, WakingUp. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This took me a while to get through, considerably so with that it's not the biggest tome or that its super laden with jargon as some philosophical or scientific books can be. And you definitely get out of this exactly what you expect from the cover "Spirituality without Religion".
I have a hard time placing my thoughts on where this should fall (2 stars, 3 stars, 4 stars, somewhere in between, a mixture of all three?). Because there is some good in here, and there is some real bad in here. Firstly, it's by Sam Harris, one of the upmost atheist commentators alive today (like Hitchens, Dennit, Maher, etc.), and he definitely spends a fair bit of time taking more or less pot-shots at religions (all of them, even gurus like Ginsberg's, etc.). While these are unnecessary, its not out of the realm of expectations going in considering its Harris and the format of the book, but its still pretty needless. Now, while this is needless, I don't find it too problematic (given my bent and given my knowledge of Harris going in), but I can see how this would be a turnoff for some people reading it.
I think his views on ego, and the self, and consciousness is.... a bit .... un-erudite but trying to be erudite? (See what I did there?) He overly poses things scholarly at times with some things that don't have a scholarly background, which I can get his attempts at doing -- trying to make scientific that which never was before. Thats fine and noble... but you need to do a lot more than anecdotal (ie. [not verbatim] this one time I had a bad LSD trip on a boat off shore in Kathmandu, but all of my prior times were perfectly great on it). He does have a very lengthy list of sources and many of them look interesting to look up, but a fair bit of what he speaks of is about his times with this guru or that meditation center, or this learning, or that learning. And while that's all interesting, and fascinating, it doesn't provide the depth to what he's trying to pass off as it should - or maybe as he thinks it should. And I think thats a bit of where Harris's ego comes into play with this, because he's definitely one of the many notable writers with an ego that works into his writings, (see his friend Hitchens), so because of his ego he assumes we should take his views as scientific fact immediately, and due to that ego we (as readers) almost view it in the opposite light (insofar at least I do).
I definitely think I was expecting a little bit (maybe a lot?) more out of this than there was, and it wraps up and ends rather quickly without a huge concrete conclusion. The overall thesis of it is a bit muddled and his thoughts are good... but it does go downhill as the work progresses.
I'm still not sure how to fully think about this or to summarize it even, I am definitely planning on checking out some of his sources, and I really do think there is a lot more to go (scientifically as a community) on our research into the 'ego' and conscious [brain] and consciousness, especially in the mind/self departments.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Hmm. Something's off. It took me a while to figure it out but this reminds me of when I was into Ayn Rand and then transitioned to existentialism, humanistic psychology and Nietzsche (many eons ago). So, if you're into "Waking Up," head on over and read Jay Garfield's "The Fundamental Wisdom of The Middle Way" - an immortal translation of Nagarjuna's classic text. Your mind will first thank you and then deconstruct you AND your entire world. Sam Harris seems to be caught in an incurable view of anatta (no self). This is extraordinarily dangerous (especially to scientific types) since emptiness of self SHOULD always be accompanied by emptiness of phenomena as Nagarjuna makes clear (via Garfield and others). If you practice emptiness of self and think this means that the brain and its processes are "all that's really going on," that's an incurable view (with Dennett and company waiting to drag you down even further).
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5With Harris there's always a bit of an edge any time 9/11 and fundamentalism are mentioned, even this book might have lines that could be seized upon by those who see Harris as an Islamaphobe. But, that's not what this is about, and he's really very good at summarizing the position of consciousness in our incomplete understanding of the mind-brain relationship. This would be an intriguing read if only descriptive; it's also prescriptive though, and makes strong arguments for why spirituality is not only for new age incense sniffers but belongs in the realm of science and philosophy.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Some may find this a surprising work from famed atheist writer, Sam Harris. Spirituality? I found it insightful and clear (and a wonderful invitation into meditation practice). Harris points to some of the places where he and his "horsemen" companions (e.g. Dennett, Hitchens) disagree, and this helps to illuminate his own take on spirituality. "Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound." Amen.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I found this book interesting and, in some cases, enlightening. I certainly did not expect to take in as much information or find it as readable as I did. Reading this book as someone who was curious about the subject matter, but did not feel a belief or pull in one direction or the other, I am surprised how much I got out of reading it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If you're already a fan of Sam Harris, then you'll certainly want to check out Waking Up. It's as close to a defense of spirituality by a sincere atheist as you will likely ever encounter. It's also a veiled peek into the life of Harris himself, providing a little background info on why the man ticks the way he does.If you've never heard of Sam Harris, but are curious about the confluence of two seemingly opposite realms, spirituality and atheism, then expect Waking Up to be a mixed bag. The discussion will range from technical descriptions of neurology to philosophical/metaphysical pondering of the self. Some chapters will yield much more appeal than others. Just not all of it, I'm guessing.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Keep repeating his own rebuttal without demonstrating anything. This book is poorly written and organised.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Referred to by Pico Iyer and Michael Krasney, July 30, 2015, on Forum, KQED.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is not, as the blurb suggests, a "guide to meditation." There is almost no instruction in this book, though he'll string you along for 150 pages before telling you that. Chapter One is pretty much the only part that I found worthwhile. The author explains that religion isn't just a scam or a means of social control. Many people have very special, deep, liberating experiences by sitting through extended periods of deep thought. Fortunately for those of us who've been put off by organized religion, Buddhist literature provides detailed guidance for having these experiences, and none of it requires a belief in the supernatural.
Chapters 2 and 3 are basically Harris trying to explain to us that whatever we think of as our self, our spirit, our identity, the person who inhabits our body, it doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. We can't pinpoint any place in the brain where such a thing exists or would exist, and there are plenty of cases of people seeming to have multiple conflicting selves in the same body. Therefore there is no "self" independent of our stream of consciousness, and the purpose of spiritual practice (which I guess is the same for everybody?) is to verify this for ourselves.
In Chapter 4 he talks about a few schools of Buddhist meditation. Here is where he says there will be no how-to component, but fortunately all you have to do is hop a plane to south Asia and get some face time with either of two specific gurus. That's important, because if you get the wrong guru you'll be led astray and waste a lot of time without gaining any real enlightenment.
That last sentence sounds bad, but in Chapter 5 reminds us that it's important to keep a healthy sense of skepticism. Blindly following a guru is no better than blindly following a holy book or a political party.
Overall, I felt the book rambled without making any real point. His central thesis seems to be that meditation allows us to explore ourselves, but for the next 100 pages he wants to drill into us that there is no "me" at the core of our experiences. Why not provide some guidance or resources so we can observe that for ourselves? To point out the mental health benefits of meditation, he uses studies where people were asked to perform breath-focused meditation for a few minutes a day, but then he dismisses those practices as unproductive in our quest to lose our sense of self. Perhaps most importantly, Harris never really explains why losing the self is helpful or beneficial. It just is, because this is the Truth that's truer than other Truths.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The first chapter is great. Others, not so much. (:
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed reading this book despite its obvious flaws. The chapters seem disconnected from each other as if the connecting thread has broken. About half way through I started wondering whether I was reading a different book. And, near the end, it seemed that Harris had moved a long way from his emphasis on scientific evidence to support claims that are made about spirituality. But there's lots of ideas to think about. Harris communicates clearly (mostly) with wit and incisive critique of that with which he disagrees. I particularly appreciated his debunking of so-called near death experiences (NDEs) and charlatan gurus. Definitely worth a read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I think what Sam provides here is a translation. He calls from his thorough experience in meditation/Eastern Spiritualism and communicates it in the manner we are familiar from Sam: A rigorous (possibly sometimes stepping into tedious necessity, but necessity nonetheless), skeptical, logical, dare I say Western language for his audience. I deeply recommend this text especially to readers of Harris. I expect you find, as I did, an integrity with his other work. Well, well worth the read.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5As a behavioral scientist myself, I don't disagree with anything factual he says in this book, neither with his assertions about consciousness. I listened to an audiobook of this title, and the author was the reader. His interpretation, as well as his words, came off decidedly preachy and superior-sounding. I had similar self-investigations of consciousness alteration when young, as well as subsequent years of disciplined research with scientific methods on topics of psychopharmacology, behavior, and learning. He discloses that he seems to have spent much of his slightly more than four decades with eastern GURUS LOOKING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT! I spent a bit more time actually studying other people who were a either more normal than his gurus or people with developmental differences and arrived at much the same place with respect to his main subjects. Of course, everybody takes a unique journey. Fortunately, the book was short.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very intriguing reading - found myself wanting to underling many passages in the book. Harris' main thesis is that self-transcendence what spirituality is all about, and that it can be achieved through meditation and/or through pharmacology. Not sure that I follow his arguments well or at all sometimes, but I do think he's worth keeping an eye on and re-reading over time. I'm probably not ready for this book yet.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The self is an illusion. As with other topics, Sam carefully but conclusively approaches this one both with personal experience and an understanding of arguments--logical, scientific, philosophical, historical, religious--laid to bear before him. Where he seems quiet on a subject, he's quick to point the reader to the very reasons for his apparent summary or to related texts. As a bonus, Sam provides practical approaches to seeing for oneself the illusion of the self.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Don't be deceived by the title as I was. This is meditation mumbo jumbo cast in the claimed trappings of secularism. I didn't think I ever thought something I'd read from Sam Harris would be a waste of time. Engaging? Usually. Annoying? Occasionally. But this claptrap? Seems a lot of people read this expecting something enlightening about meditation and were disappointed. I read it NOT expecting anything about meditation (silly me) and was disappointed. I'm not sure if I'll be able to read else anything by him in the same way as I did before reading this. I'm having a hard time not docking him credibility points after this ... interesting ... subject.
Now, I should allow that I started reading this in a "mood", and the mood was exacerbated by just finishing Buddhist Boot Camp. I was hoping that Harris could banish that silliness with some intellectual discourse worth considering. Maybe lead me in a good direction on a troubling question of mine: what is the secular equivalence of "spirituality"? Had I not known his particular position with respect to religion, his protestations and assurances that he was not speaking in such terms throughout this book would have appeared to be lip service. This is fuzzy stuff unbecoming a critical thinker. And this is a meandering essay on the "illusion of self" and alleged benefits of mediation and...
Well, let's just say I am annoyed that I read it through, hoping for something redeeming only to have my initial anticipation dashed and my disdain build through the reading.
Apart from my issues with the premise and text, I found some of the writing disturbing...example:“Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate”.
(Emphasis mine.) "given to us"??? By whom? Typical piss-poor choices of words like that from amateurs open the door for nutcases to distort and undermine intellectual discourse. It's worse when they come from one of Harris's particular pedigree. "Given" implies an outside agency. Maybe that's nitpicking, but even a favorable confirmation bias couldn't get past it.
So it turns out this is a mix of meditation nonsense and things I already knew about the brain. I'm (I assume obviously) not a neuroscientist, but I've read a bit on some of the research refuting Sperry with respect to his so-called "split brain" conclusions. Harris perpetuates them.
And meditation? What the hell is this supposed to mean? We wouldn’t attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn’t feel that something about our experience needed to be improved.
Really? I can't "contemplate" because I want to think about something? Almost set it aside again after that. But I persisted.
Harris also seems to have some strange love affair with philosophers. This jars my sensibilities, as my confirmation bias on that front is in complete opposition. I consider the career choice of thinking about thinking or some "meaning of life" an abrogation of intellect.
Now, his notes were good. I like well sourced writings with actual, direct references. Too many lazy authors don't source, or don't footnote, preferring instead to provide none or only as detached endnotes. So...one good point to recommend. And it keeps this from getting just one star.
I couldn't help wondering if maybe I had the wrong Sam Harris, but he references the writings of the Sam Harris I thought I was reading. Advocating not thinking? Jeez. I've read enough Buddhist BS on that nonsense to drive anyone with a brain nuts. Thinking is a moral imperative. Not thinking is an affront to the intellect. Reading Harris push it? Yeah...no.
I'm glad this is not the first Harris book I've read. Were it so, there would be no more. As it is, I have to keep looking for someone smarter on the subject of spiritual equivalency with religion. And I have docked him credibility points. A lot.
Don't mistake my generous two stars. This is not a book anyone should read.
Book preview
Waking Up - Sam Harris
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Spirituality
The Search for Happiness
Religion, East and West
Mindfulness
The Truth of Suffering
Enlightenment
Chapter 2: The Mystery of Consciousness
The Mind Divided
Structure and Function
Are Our Minds Already Split?
Conscious and Unconscious Processing in the Brain
Consciousness Is What Matters
Chapter 3: The Riddle of the Self
What Are We Calling I
?
Consciousness Without Self
Lost in Thought
The Challenge of Studying the Self
Penetrating the Illusion
Chapter 4: Meditation
Gradual versus Sudden Realization
Dzogchen: Taking the Goal as the Path
Having No Head
The Paradox of Acceptance
Chapter 5: Gurus, Death, Drugs, and Other Puzzles
Mind on the Brink of Death
The Spiritual Uses of Pharmacology
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
About Sam Harris
Notes
Index
For Annaka, Emma, and Violet
Chapter 1
Spirituality
I once participated in a twenty-three-day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world’s mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day. What was in essence a forced march through hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a ritual known as the solo,
where we were finally permitted to rest—alone, on the outskirts of a gorgeous alpine lake—for three days of fasting and contemplation.
I had just turned sixteen, and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother’s womb. It proved a sufficient provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the lake, the promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages of my journal not with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher, or mystic but with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake.
I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and starlight, with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence, to be a source of perfect misery—for which I could see not so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any written at Shiloh or Gallipoli.
So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our party, most of whom were a decade older than I, described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply didn’t know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could someone’s happiness increase when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me—only my life did. And I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to change.
Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement—when your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But it’s the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.
Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that need to be solved. But what is the real significance of every item on such a list? Everything we want to accomplish—to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job—is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope. I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and fed—but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out.
A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the winter of 1987, I took the drug 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA), commonly known as Ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind’s potential shifted profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at dance clubs and raves
in the 1990s, at that time I didn’t know anyone of my generation who had tried it. One evening, a few months before my twentieth birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug.
The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often consumed. We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked its way into our heads. Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear.
In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have surprised me—he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on the page: I wanted him to be happy.
That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.
A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety—and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend—about what, I don’t recall—and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.
And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love—I love you because . . . —now made no sense at all.
The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all.
The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily communicated. My friend got the point at once: All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit. The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured. Love was—as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages—a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again?
It would take me many years to put this experience into context. Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I now knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.
Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.
Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support.
Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a spiritual practice,
I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error.
The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning breath.
Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things spiritual
to be contaminated by medieval superstition.
I do not share their semantic concerns.¹ Yes, to walk the aisles of any spiritual
bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.
Throughout this book, I discuss certain classically spiritual phenomena, concepts, and practices in the context of our modern understanding of the human mind—and I cannot do this while restricting myself to the terminology of ordinary experience. So I will use spiritual, mystical, contemplative, and transcendent without further apology. However, I will be precise in describing the experiences and methods that merit these terms.
For many years, I have been a vocal critic of religion, and I won’t ride the same hobbyhorse here. I hope that I have been sufficiently energetic on this front that even my most skeptical readers will trust that my bullshit detector remains well calibrated as we advance over this new terrain. Perhaps the following assurance can suffice for the moment: Nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith. Although my focus is on human subjectivity—I am, after all, talking about the nature of experience itself—all my assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your own life. In fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that.
Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes: Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind—parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky. In this vein, one finds Einstein’s amazement at the intelligibility of Nature’s laws described as though it were a kind of mystical insight.
New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and other contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum mechanics and that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his identity with the One Mind that gave birth to the cosmos.
In the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science.
Few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of introspection—in fact, most doubt that such abilities even exist. Conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know nothing about science. But there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom, and it is more direct than most people suppose. Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.
There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain. This field of research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of self-awareness and related mental phenomena. Given recent advances in neuroimaging technology, we no longer face a practical impediment to investigating spiritual insights in the context of science.
Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. 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.
That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call I
is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of self-transcendence
are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by spirituality
in the context of this book.
Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available. The landscape of human experience includes deeply transformative insights about the nature of one’s own consciousness, and yet it is obvious that these psychological states must be understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and related fields.
I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines—such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.
This book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives: the feeling of self we call I.
I have not set out to describe all the traditional approaches to spirituality and to weigh their strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond there, and I have devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating it, but getting it in hand requires that we remain true to the deepest principles of scientific skepticism and make no obeisance to tradition. Where I do discuss specific teachings, such as those of Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, it isn’t my purpose to provide anything like a comprehensive account. Readers who are loyal to any one spiritual tradition or who specialize in the academic study of religion, may view my approach as the quintessence of arrogance. I consider it, rather, a symptom of impatience. There is barely time enough in a book—or in a life—to get to the point. Just as a modern treatise on weaponry would omit the casting of spells and would very likely ignore the slingshot and the boomerang, I will focus on what I consider the most promising lines of spiritual inquiry.
My hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see the nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves.
THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS
One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words, God’s earth is vast,
name this region from which the saints have come.
Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact that most atheists will view a statement like Rumi’s above as a symptom of the man’s derangement grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our least rational opponents. The human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.
And there is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to the grave. Perhaps I should speak only for myself here: It seems to me that I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. My experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists. It is possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time.
Most cultures have produced men and women who have found that certain deliberate uses of attention—meditation, yoga, prayer—can transform their perception of the world. Their efforts generally begin with the realization that even in the best of circumstances, happiness is elusive. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside. And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment.
Ceaseless change