Sam Harris

A guide to meditation as a rational spiritual practice informed by neuroscience and psychology considers how to learn from the examples of religious sages and saints from a secular and philosophical perspective without formally committing to religion. 100,000 first printing.

A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Waking Up

Timeo Williams

As the title implies, the book looks at spirituality without the lens of religion. 

I spoke with someone the other day that mentioned that religion fills in the void of explaining phenomena that occurs in deep meditative states, or during a session of LSD. 

Sam brings to view a cleaner/scientific view of spirituality and conscientiousness. 

The conclusion: yes, one can be spiritual without religion. In fact there are secular versions of Buddhism that are devoid of religion, but embrace spirituality. Sam also details ways to spot fake gurus, ext.

Heiki Riesenkampf

The book mostly helps with calling yourself spiritual and providing an easy explanation why it has nothing to do with religion. I found the book to be slightly too over the place, but despite that a good primer for understanding spirituality.

Some interesting perspectives in here, but I can’t help feeling like I was expecting more overall at the end. The book investigates some topics more deeply than I expected or wanted while leaving some stones unturned—sometimes as though they’re a matter of fact when they may not be for the reader. I might have had a different reaction if I were at another, earlier point in my own journey, though. It’s more of an apologetic on non-faith based spirituality than a guide, personal reflection, or example of someone who has led such a life. In being that, however, it still offers some solid points. After reading, I have less of a big takeaway or pivotal a-ha, and more a number of specific quotes that might be worth revisiting from time to time.

Cat Carter

For the millions of people who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris's new book is a guide to meditation as a rational spiritual practice informed by neuroscience and psychology. From bestselling author, neuroscientist, and "new atheist" Sam Harris, Waking Up is for the increasingly large numbers of people who follow no religion, but who suspect that Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and the other saints and sages of history could not have all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. Throughout the book, Harris argues that there are important truths to be found in the experiences of such contemplatives-and, therefore, that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow. Waking Up is part seeker's 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 sceptic-could write it.

Gavin

Most people who believe they are meditating are just thinking with their eyes closed.

 Forces of digestion and metabolism are at work within me that are utterly beyond my perception or control. Most of my internal organs may as well not exist for all I know of them directly, and yet I can be reasonably certain that I have them, arranged much as any medical textbook would suggest. The taste of the coffee, my satisfaction at its flavor, the feeling of the warm cup in my hand—while these are immediate facts with which I am acquainted, they reach back into a dark wilderness of facts that I will never come to know.

... Where am I, that I have such a poor view of things? And what sort of thing am I that both my outside and my inside are so obscure? ...Am I inside my skull? Let’s say yes for the moment, because we are quickly running out of places to look for me. Where inside my skull might I be? And if I’m up there in my head, how is the rest of me me?
 
Surprisingly humble and sincere. Some readers feel tricked - feel that Harris is smuggling in science under soft, false pretences. This isn't fair; he has done this stuff for decades, visited lamas in Tibet, put in the work. It's implausible that he would do so much insincerely; whatever his other failings, he is actually trying to bridge the two kinds of seekers.* (That said, this book design is a masterpiece of camouflage. Look at the soft colours, the sunny logo, the sans-serif purity, the unthreatening subtitle. Compare his other books!)

However: consider all the things people mean by "spirituality":
1. subjective knowledge of ultimate / immaterial reality
1b. gaining supernatural abilities as a result
2. one's deep moral or existential values
3. personal growth
4. feeling of awe-inspiring beauty
5. introspection; close contact with one's own "inner dimension"
6. "the ability to step a little back from your emotions and thoughts, observe them as they are without getting swept up in them, and then evaluating them critically"
7. sense of love towards (all) others
8. the quest to see the ego and the self as illusory

With so much popular support - with so much baggage - it's not possible to throw out the word or concept; instead we have to try and reform it. This is Harris' mission - though in fact he focusses almost exclusively on (5) -> (8), the standard Buddhist therapy of not being hurt by distraction, bad luck, frustrated desires. 

He rejects (1) straightforwardly, in favour of psychologising the whole practice. Paraphrased: 'Instead of making you experience Reality, meditation lets you experience your mind; instead of strengthening your insubstantial soul, you're strengthening your mind.' This is a healthy kind of reconstruction in my view, but it certainly leads him to make controversial claims like "The deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self". Metaphysically profligate readers will have no fun here. (But they knew that already.)

How can a scientist (or at least a pro-science talking head) boost a practice with the aim of rejecting thought? The trick is to distinguish thinking / experiencing (which are after all the locus of all value, and of decisions and creativity) from identifying with the stream of your thoughts, from being carried away, from being endlessly distracted. 

---

Does this stuff work? It probably does for stress reduction - at least like taking a nap does, or a valium, or sitting still and breathing deeply for a bit. And on the other end, it is definitely not the source of supernatural brain-juice-drinking power. So the truth is somewhere between these two limits, and we drift, deciding whether to spend time on it.

I'm an unpromising practitioner. For instance, this is kind of my jam. It's not the indescribability that bothers me - after all, any knowledge-how is indescribable (or rather describable only with millions of parameters). You can accept e.g. Hume or Parfit's reasoning - you can have the propositional knowledge, can know that "there is no self beyond my bundle of experiences". Meditation is supposed to be the know-how of nonessentialism, the skill of actually paying attention to the implications of this System-2 judgment.

But being 'nonconceptual' means no language, no premises, no reason, no jokes, no connection, no comparison, using none of my strengths, leaving none of my spoor. This is a great loss to me.

I don't know that I do suffer as a result of identifying with my thoughts; I don't think that dissatisfaction lurks in every sensation I ever experience or also my whole life in retrospect. But the old claim, similar to Marxist or feminist 'false consciousness', is that I am too owned to realise I'm being owned:

  
"beginning meditators... report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are."



Freedom from desire sounds much like death to me, for all that Harris and others argue that it can somehow coexist with passion against the suffering of others, with striving to be a better person, with chipping in to the Great Project of discovery, compassion, optimisation. Luckily the two projects - really feeling that you are not your thoughts, not a homunculus behind your eyes having them; vs not wanting things because wanting leads to disappointment - seem to be separable.

A consolation: there's a sense in which meditation, introspection and phenomenology are highly, maximally empirical - they involve very close attention and analysis of the raw data. It just happens that the raw data (the sense-data) are irreplicable, private, closed, and so not directly a matter for science. Empiricism before science, consciousness without self. And I like this. 

Mindfulness is billed as not just cool and true but useful - 

   No doubt many distinct mechanisms are involved - the regulation of attention and behaviour, increased body awareness, inhibition of negative emotions, reframing of experience, changes in your view of the 'self', and so forth - and each of these will have their own neurophysiological basis."


Well, I do love self-regulation!

The following argument isn't explicitly stated by Harris, but I find it helpful as an existence-proof for the usefulness of nonessentialism:
1. We are happy and perform well when we're in 'flow' states.
2. Flow states involve "losing" yourself in a task, in a concrete, unhesitating sequence of perceptions and actions.
3. Therefore losing yourself can be good and helpful.

Also

1. We do not directly apprehend the external world; we know it through sense-data plus massive computational modelling tricks in the brain.
2. We know that the brain computes the wrong thing sometimes. (Cognitive biases, optical illusions, top-down processing, hallucinations.)
3. So, if such a thing is possible, it could be helpful to attend to sense-data more closely, to rule out automatic-brain errors.

While I don't have a very clear philosophy of mind, I know I'm not a direct realist or substance dualist or identity essentialist, so I've no simple philosophical objections to breaking down the Self, either. Allons-y.

---

Even if I accept that mindfulness is a source of value, there's presumably still a tradeoff against clearer, quicker, more public sources: doing science or kindnesses or pleasures. 10 days spent in myself is 10 days not learning, not exercising, not enjoying, not helping, not meeting, in solitary. (And even on the contemplative axis it competes with Stoicism, with yoga, with writing, with psychedelics.)


How much work will it be? Some contemplatives freely admit that the cost is very high: some contemplatives are not just salesmen. I met someone who claimed to be capital-e-enlightened. (He was otherwise articulate and modest.) He said it took 6 years' work, at many hours a week. I asked him if he could say how valuable it is in other terms - 'What else has been as good?' He said: a decade of intense psychotherapy, or two philosophy degrees. (One ancient text teases us by setting 'seven years' as the required period, but in true troll-Buddhist style it then slowly walks back this helpful definite statement.)

---

On that note: I was looking forward to writing a gotcha paradox here, but Harris (and thousands of years of arhats and yogis) pre-empted me:

  
...the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self -[but] to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one's apparent bondage in each moment.

One [solution] is to simply ignore the paradox and adopt various techniques of meditation in the hope that a breakthrough will occur. Some people appear to succeed at this, but many fail... Goal-oriented modes of practice have the virtue of being easily taught, because a person can begin them without having had any fundamental insight...

...The other traditional response is... to concede that all efforts are doomed, because the urge to attain self-transcedence or any other mystical experience is a symptom of the very disease we want to cure. There is nothing to do but give up the search.



I'm not actually worried by this, because I suspect the full-Buddhist anti-striving thing is unnecessary and... undesirable.

---


Why should an evolved creature have the power to inspect its own sense-data? If we are constantly distracting ourselves with reified thoughts, what evolutionary role did this play? At the top of this review is Harris' droll diss about people deluding themselves into thinking they are meditating - but how can we know that we, or anyone, is not deluded? (Brain scans of inhibited medial PFCs are interesting but merely suggestive.)

---

Most of the above isn't directly from Harris, I'm riffing off better rationalist reconstructions of this ancient one-weird-trick. (I actually don't know if this is any good, cos I don't know the area. Seems fine.)


* Much of their anger is about his chapter warning of the history of abuse by gurus and yogis and so on. But like it or not this is a public service.

For the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s latest New York Times bestseller is a guide to meditation as a rational practice informed by neuroscience and psychology. 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.

Morgan Holland

Stellar read, ones of those books that fundamentally changes how you interact with the world, highly recommend reading this before trying Sam's Waking Up mediation app

Michael Pejin

I've always been intrigued by the idea of meditation- to a degree some of the most free times I've spent is through playing music and at those moments of completely removing ones self from ones surroundings and surrendering to the moment- most musicians will understand this feeling. The emotional connection to everyone around you and to the music. It's exhilarating, and the only way I've managed to explain it properly to non musicians is to compare it to the moment of making love to someone, when the world disappears and your only goal is to merge with that person before you. The moment is all that matters, then and there.

Now what does this have to do with the book? Quite simply, through some of the meditative exercises 
Harris offered in this. I managed, whilst only briefly, to achieve a similar feeling. It lasted only seconds, but it was there- and these exercises, combined with music practice have been having some effect on personal anxiety and well being recently. 

It may not be for everyone, and this book really only serves as a basic introduction, but I'll definitely move forward and read more on the subject. Especially in light of reading some of the studies on the subject that Harris quoted in the book. The evidence towards mindfulness and meditation is growing, and being thoroughly explored within neuroscience and Psychology now- and in combination with stoic philosophy, I can see it have a positive effect personally.

I'd recommend this to anyone, like me, who is sceptical but interested in meditation and its benefits.

Kuba Milcarz

A deep dive into consciousness, mind, and mindfulness. Seems interesting but still I think I haven’t grown up to meditating yet. Mindfulness is something I wish I practiced but I haven’t ever got around starting it in the first place. But maybe as I’m discovering Stoicism, I will soon experiment with different mindfulness practices.

Irene Alegre

I think this was a kind of 'it's not you, it's me' thing where I was just too dense for the book, or maybe the book was too dense for me. I'm not sure. Either way, I didn't love it, but I wouldn't say it's bad either.

Ugis

I did like the book, but was expecting more. It felt more like a very long essay about spirituality/religion. I do share very similar view with Sam Harris, but not in all aspects. Not sure if I would really recommend it, but there are some good points in it. [reading time: 7h0m]

Ivaylo Durmonski

Most people consider spirituality to be a retarded activity. And I have to admit that I’m one of them. There are just too many things that don’t feel logical when someone speaks about spiritual awakening.

What Sam Harris tries to do in Waking Up is admirable. He aims to promote this metaphysical condition to ordinary people. Present the gains of meditation to people who have no idea what this is so they can live a better life.

To be honest, I liked a large part of the book. There are interesting sections in the book and taking the time to study what was mention can make a huge difference in your life. However, most of the text in the book disorganized. It’s part personal story, part a how-to-mediate guide, part drug confessions – yes, there’s a section where the author shares his experience when taking psychedelics to boost his concentration, part something else.

If I can summarize the book in one sentence I’d say this: We’re unhappy because we’re constantly filling our minds with thoughts, to feel better, we should practice mindfulness.

Key takeaway: True joy will happen when you tame the inner chatter and learn to experience the current moments as it unfolds.

Read more:
https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Lucas Coelho

Good introduction on Sam’s thoughts on consciousness, the self, free will, religion and spirituality.

If you been following Sam Harris form a while now via his podcasts and talks you probably already covered all the topics of this book.

Waking Up A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

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