Waking Up

The endnotes for Sam Harris's first book, "The End of Faith," contain several positive references to Ken Wilber's work in transpersonal/integral psychology, plus an endorsement of Terence McKenna's psychedelic-fueled "exquisite ravings."So it's been obvious for over a decade, for anyone who wishes to see, that there was a "New Age Atheist" in Harris waiting to come out, and that he would eventually write a book like "Waking Up."In speaking of his early experiences with MDMA (i.e., Ecstasy), Harris thus reveals:"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."It is likely that the Buddha did indeed exist in flesh and blood. So score one for Harris on that point.His view of Lao Tzu, however, fares less well:"In the mid-twentieth century, a consensus emerged among scholars that the historicity of the person known as Laozi is doubtful and that the Tao Te Ching was 'a compilation of Taoist sayings by many hands'"--Wikipedia.And regarding Jesus, the historian Richard Carrier has recently calculated (in  On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt ) that the odds against a "minimal Jesus" ever having existed are more than 12,000-to-1. (That minimal historical Jesus was simply a preacher who was crucified by the Romans, and around whom a cult arose after his death. Any other claims about Jesus would only make the existence of that new composite even less likely.)So, to the extent to which a person who never even existed was indeed neither an epileptic, a schizophrenic, nor a fraud, Harris is not wrong--though the non-existence of even a minimal historical Jesus makes St. Paul's vision (i.e., hallucination) of him on the road to Damascus correspondingly *more likely* to be the product of epilepsy or the like. (Nowhere in Paul's epistles, genuine or forged, does he speak of a flesh-and-blood Jesus. All of those epistles predate the Gospels; so it is likely that early Christians, in all sects, regarded Jesus only as a celestial being, not an earthly one.)When you are defending the mental health of two of the world's "greatest sages" (out of three) who never even existed, and comparing their "experiences" to your own (on MDMA), you are not off to a good start."Throughout my twenties, I studied with many teachers who functioned as gurus in the traditional sense, but I never had a relationship with any of them that I find embarrassing in retrospect or that I wouldn't currently recommend to others. I don't know whether to attribute this to good luck or to the fact that there was a line of devotion I was never tempted to cross."And then, very shortly after referencing one of my own online/free books ("Stripping the Gurus"), Harris pointedly opines:"I believe that too much can be made of the failures of specific spiritual teachers or of the pathologies found among their followers, as though such *pratfalls* [!] discredit the guru-disciple relationship in principle.... I have known many people who learned a great deal by spending extended periods of time in the company of one or another spiritual teacher. And I have learned indispensable things myself."Note how Harris there elides blithely from "spiritual teachers" to "guru-disciple relationship" and then quickly back to "spiritual teachers" again, as if the terms were synonymous. They're not (and he knows it).The sages in question may well have "functioned as gurus in the traditional sense" to their disciples, but Harris's relationship with them was merely that of a student to his teacher(s), not of a disciple to a guru. The difference is roughly the same as between "playing the field" in casual dating, versus literal "'til death do us part" marriage: the spiritual aspirant can have many teachers, but only one guru. Further, that spiritual marriage (to the guru) traditionally demands complete obedience on the part of the disciple, with any questioning of the guru's dictates by the disciple being the product only of "ego" and thus making one a bad disciple.Few would argue against the idea that it is possible to "learn a great deal by spending extended periods of time in the company of one or another spiritual teacher." People who have meditated for years can indeed be fully expected to have valuable things to teach others *on that subject*. But there again, "extended periods of time" spent as a student, who can walk away at any time, are not the same as the experiences one has after crossing the "line of devotion" which is involved in becoming a disciple. As such, Harris's experiences "from a safe distance" cannot be used to defend "the guru-disciple relationship in principle": they can only be used to defend the *teacher-student relationship*.Shortly after the publication of "The End of Faith," Harris guested on Ken Wilber's Integral Naked forum, in an online interview. None of kw's dozens of interviews with spiritual leaders and thinkers were adversarial: they were all given from a bully-pulpit, with people who substantially endorsed his ideas, and vice versa. Correspondingly, Harris's participation in that forum was not of the status of a normal interview, where appearing as an expert would not imply endorsement of the organization or person doing the interviewing. Yet by 2007, former members of Wilber's community were openly regarding it as a "cult." Around the same time, Wilber was shown, conclusively, to have brutally and consistently misrepresented his academic sources, in the creation of his "integral psychology" edifice. (For the details, see my online/free book, "'Norman Einstein': The Dis-Integration of Ken Wilber.")None of that pathology was evidently easy to spot, even for an experienced seeker like Harris. Either that, or he saw the problems with Wilber's Integral Institute, but was willing to overlook them and *implicitly give his imprimatur to kw*, in order to sell a few extra copies of his first book.Further, in "Waking Up," Harris refers several dozen times to his own "remarkable master of meditation" teacher H.W.L. Poonja-ji (always with the unnecessarily respectful "ji" suffix). He mentions a trivial incident in which Poonja was trying to find a husband for his niece, and had her skin lightened by a photographer, as an example of Poonja not yet being "perfect." But a much more damning imperfection and misuse of power, not mentioned by Harris, is that Poonja later reportedly fathered a child via a blond, female Belgian disciple.If Harris didn't wind up pregnant from the same "meditation master," and has never had an experience with a spiritual *teacher* that he "wouldn't currently recommend to others" it's not just luck, in him supposedly never having followed a *bad* teacher. It's also because he's not a hot blonde.Likewise, consider Harris's presentation of Ramana Maharshi--"arguably the most widely revered Indian sage of the twentieth century," and Poonja's own guru. While Harris acknowledges that "Ramana ... would occasionally say something deeply unscientific," and that Maharshi claimed to have a "mystical connection" with Mount Arunachala, he leaves us wondering what the exact nature of that connection was. Maharshi himself left no such doubt, saying: "In visions I have seen caves, cities with streets, etc., and a whole world in it.... All the siddhas ['perfected beings'] are reputed to be there."Sam knows about both of those issues: They are documented in my book "Stripping the Gurus," which he cites in Chapter 5, Endnote 9 of "Waking Up." But of course, to mention that Poontang-ji knocked up one of his obedient blond followers would have made it difficult for Harris to continue with the "ji" suffix and not look like a complete fool, not to mention casting no small shadow on Sam's later statement that "Poonja-ji claimed to be perfectly free from the illusion of the self--and by all appearances, he was."Likewise, Ramana Maharshi's notions about his beloved Mount Arunachala are every bit the equal of L. Ron Hubbard's volcanic Thetan/Xenu claims. The difference is just that Maharshi *saw* those cities in vision/hallucination, and fully believed that they existed; whereas Hubbard was creating explicit science-religious fiction for his own financial benefit. As such, the truly nutty Hubbard was in *better mental health* than was the "most respected sage of the twentieth century." For, Maharshi's claims in that regard are not merely "deeply unscientific," they are deeply *delusional*.If you are going to gleefully mock the "pratfalls" of laughable gurus like Chogyam Trungpa, as Harris does, is it too much to ask that you have the guts and basic honesty to not gloss over the most damning behaviors and claims from *your own* most highly respected teachers?Indeed, one wonders whether Harris, as a teacher, would encourage his readers to apply his own advice regarding spiritual teachers, to himself; and if not, why not:"Generally speaking, you should head for the door at any sign of *deception on the part of a teacher*."Nor is the risk of being "married" to an abusive (or horny) guru the only danger in all that. This is from Michael Murphy's book, "The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation":"Long-term meditators reported the following percentages of adverse effects: antisocial behavior, 13.5%; anxiety, 9.0%; confusion, 7.2%; depression, 8.1%; emotional stability, 4.5%; frustration, 9.0%; physical and mental tension, 8.1%; procrastination, 7.2%; restlessness, 9.0%; suspiciousness, 6.3%; tolerance of others, 4.5%; and withdrawal, 7.2%."Those numbers apply to practitioners of Transcendental Meditation. Nevertheless, there is every reason to expect similar risks to pertain to any other form of transformative spirituality. In all cases, when the techniques are practiced intensively, we are tweaking our brains and nervous systems to do things they didn't evolve to do. And just as physical athletes take risks with their bodies when training and competing intensively, so too do "spiritual athletes" take corresponding risks of mental and physical injury. (The negative reports from practitioners of kundalini yoga, for example, are legion, from Gopi Krishna on down.)Elsewhere in "Waking Up," we find Harris still gushing over the ravings of Terence McKenna--indefensibly imagining that the "undeniably brilliant" McKenna's psychonautical "books are well worth reading," when they are rather *not even wrong*, and cannot reasonably be taken as anything more than the pseudoscientific products of a hopelessly wasted (in both senses of the word) imagination.Harris also claims:"Buddhism without the unjustified bits is essentially a first-person science."Well, sort of. But consider that in a review of Ken Wilber's  The Marriage of Sense and Soul  in "Skeptical Inquirer" magazine, the reviewer noted that Wilber "implicitly accepts the reality of mystical experiences, and it is sufficient for him that his scientific mystics test their internal experiences against nothing more than each other's internal experiences. How this would eliminate group bias or error is not discussed."Meditators are attempting to do "first-person" science without double-blinding or placebo controls, and frequently even without randomization in the assignment of the subjects into active vs. control groups. As such, the studies concerning its claimed benefits tend to be chock full of selection bias and expectation effects.Harris again:"Many users of DMT report being thrust under its influence into an adjacent reality where they are met by alien beings who appear intent upon sharing information and demonstrating the use of inscrutable technologies. The convergence of hundreds of such reports, many from first-time users of the drug who have not been told what to expect, is certainly interesting."To whatever extent those experiences are really not the product of information leakage and corresponding expectation effects, it is noteworthy that David Jones, in his book  An Instinct for Dragons , proposes that, just as children everywhere are hard-wired to be afraid of snakes (even if they have never seen the writhing shape before), we may also be hard-wired to believe in dragons. In that view, the "three predators who most threatened our ancestors--the eagle, the leopard, and the snake--merge in mythology to become a single creature, the dragon." (Jones's particular ideas are probably wrong, simply because the dragon-motif is in no way as widespread and uniform throughout the world as he presents it.) In  The Way of the Shaman , under the influence of ayahuasca (active ingredient: DMT), Michael Harner relates his own similar and common "not been told what to expect" perceptions of "dragon-like creatures."Which is to say, if it's not information leakage, look for something hard-wired in our neurology, comparable to the inborn fear of snake-like objects.In that regard, check out Oliver Sacks' first book ( Migraine ) sometime, for an analysis of Hildegard von Bingen's art in terms of form constants--gratings, lattices, fretworks, filigrees, honeycombs, chessboards, cobwebs, tunnels, funnels, alleys, cones, and spirals, all of which come straight out of the structure of the human visual cortex, and some of which were already being modeled decades ago in computer arrays of simulated neurons. And then ponder how elaborations of "scintillating scotomas" and geometric form constants could hardly avoid leading one straight into McKenna's "machine elves" and similar imaginations.For decades, the evolving understanding of why meditation works has been skewed by quasi-Buddhists convinced that their fave techniques of meditation are the best--skirting the question of the reality and details of any mystical experiences by focusing instead on the "witnessing Self" within which all experiences arise.In the days of Alan Watts, D. T. Suzuki, and early Ken Wilber, it was all naively explained in terms of the conceptualization of one's sensory gestalt into dualistic opposites. Wilber shortly improved upon that transparently nonsensical situation by borrowing (without attribution) Jung's distinction between pre-rational and trans-rational states, to create his "Pre/Trans fallacy." (One of Harris's endnotes in "The End of Faith" mentions exactly that idea, specifically referencing Wilber's books.)Fast-forward thirty-to-fifty years, however, and the scientific/neurological support that Harris adduces for vipassana meditation can just as readily be sourced for other transformative spiritual paths.Andrew Newberg's books, for example, don't restrict spiritual practice to merely "looking for (or with) a self that isn't there," but rather consider the role of the entire brain and nervous system in the production of mystical experiences. To write an entire book on the scientific/neurological basis of spirituality without even mentioning Newberg's name (years after he appeared in Bill Maher's  Religulous ) would hardly have seemed possible; but Harris has done it.William Broad's  The Science of Yoga  likewise references studies showing significant increases in GABA levels among hatha yoga practitioners. He also notes that yoga produces genuine effects in the practitioner's body simply by placing pressure on particular nerves (e.g., in the neck) which suppress the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, and on glands (e.g., the adrenals, and gonads).August L. Reader's paper, "The Internal Mystery Plays" (Google for it), is still the best explanation of the physiology underlying inner perceptions of expanding white light, in near-death and meditative experiences.In greater detail, consider this:It has been known for decades that vipassana/witnessing meditation has different effects on the brain than do trance-producing content/kundalini techniques. That is, vipassana meditators perform better (IIRC) on tests that measure attention to external stimuli (e.g., motion detection)--not surprisingly, since they spend years practicing exactly that form of attention. Conversely, it's no surprise that the most-impressive performances on things like voluntary regulation of one's skin temperature come from yogis whose techniques maximize one-pointed (sympathetic, alert) concentration and (parasympathetic) relaxation simultaneously--along with their focus on breath control, which acts as a remarkable regulator on the sympathetic nervous system.We all breathe faster in the throes of passion, as an unconscious method of exciting the sympathetic nervous system and "getting ourselves over the hump," to the proverbial slippery finish line. We also occasionally "take a deep [and hence slow] breath" to relax; it takes little effort to appreciate that breathing from two to five times a minute for hours on end (especially in a carbon dioxide-rich environment like a cave or stuffy closet) would have significant "spiritual calming" (and nervous system-tweaking) effects.(Stan Grof's  Holotropic Breathwork  can have similar effects as meditation and psychedelics, in terms of launching one into transpersonal states of consciousness. Its practice simply involves breathing deeper and faster than normal, for several hours.)Further, as Reader notes, focusing one's eyes on the point between the eyebrows, or otherwise crossing them, will subtly invoke the body's oculocardiac reflex, decreasing one's heart rate.The same is true of a kundalini-yoga technique like *jyoti ["light"] mudra*, where the little fingers of one's hands are used to press lightly on the outside whites of the eyeballs: Such physical pressure doesn't merely cause the perception of photisms, it simultaneously invokes the oculocardiac reflex response.The internal repetition of mantras, too, is likely to produce comparable effects to those produced by repetitious shamanic drumming, in rhythm-entraining the brain into trance states.As such, those techniques have very real (non-paranormal) effects, in producing relaxation/calmness (and ultimately "transcendent spiritual experiences") in the practitioner.Harris notes, with unintentional relevance:"Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self--not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body, behind the eyes, inside the head. The feeling that we call 'I' seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will."The kriya (kundalini) yoga taught by Paramahansa Yogananda involves focusing one's eyes at the supposed "spiritual eye" chakra between the eyebrows, and practicing *jyoti mudra* after the kriyas proper. Each kriya involves a slow inhalation and exhalation, with two kriyas being performed per minute. All of which is done following a period of the internal chanting of "Om."As such, that yogic path probably really is the "jet plane" route to ... well, to tweaking one's nervous system to the point where it goes haywire, and one begins seeing and hearing things that don't really exist.At any rate, witnessing Buddhists have no monopoly on the dissolution of the subject-object duality: the end-point of the kundalini-yoga path, too, is a state of "Knowing, Knower, Known, as One." Further, in Yogananda's path and experience that unitary state is realized simultaneously with an "all-pervading bliss"--a state otherwise simplistically denigrated by Harris as being "rather like a heroin addict or an onanist who has transcended the use of his hands."As an aside, it is probably no accident that the imagined cerebrospinal chakras roughly coincide with the major nerve plexuses, and thus sources of physical sensation, in the body: the genitals, the full bladder, the stomach, the heart and its mysteriously thumping beat--having no apparent relation to the circulation of blood, prior to recent centuries of medical research--the throat and its tangible vibrations when speaking, and the sense of self as being located "behind the eyes, inside the head." Even farther aside, the association of the seven chakras with the colors of the rainbow, in sequence from red at the base of the spine to violet or related colors at the crown, dates back only to the 1970s, being first proposed in Christopher Hills' book "Nuclear Evolution." Originally of course, in Tantric yoga, there were only five chakras, with those having no association whatsoever with the rainbow colors.To whatever extent the perception of auras is more than imagination, it is probably rooted in synesthesia:"The ability of some people to see the colored auras of others has held an important place in folklore and mysticism throughout the ages. Although many people claiming to have such powers could be charlatans, it is also conceivable that others are born with a gift of synesthesia"--skepdic.com, "aura" entry.In fact, at least one published clairvoyant (Cynthia Sue Larson) has related her own synesthesia to her perception of auras:"I mention synesthesia in my book,  Aura Advantage , because it's a very important part of sensing energy fields around us. When I was an infant, all my senses seemed interconnected, especially sight and hearing. This way of experiencing the world is known as 'synesthesia,' a Greek word that means 'perceiving together.' Sudden noises would appear as sharp bursts of color that would flash through the house, sometimes even just a bit before the sound itself was heard. Waves of color would wash around my mother and father, so I could see their moods from the colors even before I could focus on the details of their faces. We can intuitively see, hear, smell, taste, and feel things around us that coincide with our other senses, and discover important additional information about our surroundings this way."So, practice vipassana/witnessing, or content/kundalini meditation techniques; or hatha yoga; or intensive (shamanic) dancing to overload your sympathetic nervous system until it flips into a quiescent, parasympathetic-dominated state. All are just ways of tweaking our brains and nervous systems; and as such, they are all very likely to have real (non-paranormal) effects on our physical bodies and our embodied minds, beyond mere expectation effects or self-selection in the groups of practitioners. But they also typically have unacknowledged risks, even aside from sexually/emotionally abusive gurus and their communities.If you still think Sam Harris is peddling more than selection-biased snake oil, consider  The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?  by Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm. (Wikholm has provided a concise summary of their research online, in the article "Seven common myths about meditation.")In the book, they give this example of the risks of intensive meditation:"[Louise] had taught yoga for more than twenty years, stopping only when something unexpected happened that changed her life forever. During one meditation retreat (she'd been on many), her sense of self changed dramatically. 'Good,' she thought initially, 'it must be part of the dissolving experience.' But she couldn't help feeling anxious and frightened.""'Don't worry, just keep meditating and it will go away,' the meditation teacher told her.""It didn't. She couldn't get back to her usual self. It felt like something was messing with her sense of identity, how she felt in her body, the very way she looked at the world and at other people. The last day of the retreat was excruciating: her body shook, she cried and panicked. The following day, back at home, she was in pieces--her body was numb, she didn't want to get out of bed. Louise's husband took her to the GP and, within hours, she was being seen by a psychiatrist. She spent the next 15 years being treated for psychotic depression; for part of this time, she had to be hospitalized."To his credit, Harris does manage to acknowledge (though only in a mere endnote) that meditation can precipitate psychological breakdowns, and credits Willoughby Britton as being "the first scientist to study this problem systematically."Yet even there, he manages to caveat it, as if only already-unstable persons might be adversely affected by an "extended, silent retreat" or the like:"I want to make it clear that the instructions in this book are intended for readers who are adults (more or less) and *free from any psychological or medical conditions that could be exacerbated by meditation or other techniques of sustained introspection. If paying attention to your breath, to bodily sensations, to the flow of thoughts, or to the nature of consciousness itself seems likely to cause you clinically significant anguish*, please check with a psychologist or a psychiatrist before engaging in the practices I describe."However, a person like Louise who had taught yoga for twenty years, and been on many meditation retreats without negative incident, would surely not typically be considered to be in that "high risk" category.Unlike Harris, the authors of "The Buddha Pill" have gone to the trouble of actually interviewing Britton:"Her interest arose from witnessing two people being hospitalized after intense meditation practice, together with her own experience after a retreat in which she felt an unimaginable terror....""Other unpleasant things happen, too, as Britton discovered through interviews with numerous individuals: arms flap, people twitch and have convulsions; others go through euphoria or depression, or report not feeling anything at all--their physical senses go numb.""Unpleasant as they are, if these symptoms were confined to a retreat there wouldn't be much to worry about--but they're not. Sometimes they linger, affecting work, childcare and relationships. They can become a clinical health problem, which, on average, lasts for more than three years....""Meditation teachers know about it--Britton says--but meditation researchers are usually skeptical; they ask about the prior psychiatric history of meditators who develop mental health problems [exactly as Harris effectively does, except he does it pre-emptively, in a seriously inadequate attempt at separating high-risk from low-risk participants], as if meditation itself had little or nothing to do with it....""In 1992 David Shapiro, a professor in psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, Irvine, published an article about the effects of meditation retreats. Shapiro examined 27 people with different levels of meditation experience. He found that 63 per cent of them had at least one negative effect and 7 per cent suffered profoundly adverse effects. The negative effects included anxiety, panic, depression, increased negativity, pain, feeling spaced out, confusion and disorientation....""When Shapiro divided the larger group into those with lesser and greater experience, there were no differences: all the meditators had an equal number of adverse experiences. An earlier study had arrived at a similar, but even more surprising conclusion. Not only did those with more experience of meditating find themselves with negative symptoms--particularly anxiety, confusion and restlessness--they also had considerably *more* adverse effects than the beginners."Also consider Meera Nanda's classic deconstruction of Harris's brand of atheism, in her online article "Trading Faith for Spirituality: The Mystifications of Sam Harris":"By the end of ['The End of Faith'], I could not help thinking of him as a Trojan horse for the New Age....""[T]here is this nugget, tucked away in the end notes, which celebrates the prospect of revival of occult: 'Indeed, the future looks like the past.... We may live to see the technological perfection of all the visionary strands of traditional mysticism: shamanism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism) and all the other Byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are born of a longing for esoteric knowledge and a desire to excavate ... the mind--in dreams, in trance, in psychedelic swoon--in search for the sacred.'""It is hard to believe that the author of this stuff is the most celebrated rationalist of our troubled times."In closing "Waking Up," Harris expresses his gratitude:"As described in the text, I was privileged to learn from some remarkable masters of meditation: Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, H. W. L. Poonja, and Sayadaw U Pandita each provided a crucial piece of the puzzle."Presumably, Harris thus also considers Poonja to be one of the teachers of his acquaintance who "while still human, seemed to possess so much compassion and clarity of mind that they were nearly flawless examples of the benefits of spiritual practice.""So much compassion." "Clarity of mind." "Nearly flawless."And on the other hand, knocked-up blondes. (And where there's one, there'll be many, when it comes to the attractive female disciples of gurus.)Gotta love it.So you see, in the end Sam Harris is no different from anyone else with an ideology to peddle. Exactly as you'd expect, he holds other gurus up to (justified) ridicule and warning, but then remains utterly silent on the "pratfalls" (incl. effective rape and psychological incest) of his own most-respected teachers.Behavior like that is the *exact opposite* of compassion and integrity.

#Review of Waking Up by Sam HarrisThough I will focus on a point of departure I have with Sam Harris in this review, I want to point out that I think this is an important book and should be read by as many people as possible. And at the outset, I want to point out that I am probably more in agreement with Sam philosophically than with any other current or past thinker. His books on faith and free will are all wonderful and right on the money. I think it's safe to say that most freethinkers agree with him on faith and many, though fewer, agree with him on the concept of free will, that it is conceptually incoherent and a nonsense notion. I'm afraid with this new book he will meet with even less agreement among freethinkers. In current scientific and philosophical circles consciousness is almost universally seen as a product, perhaps emergent, of matter, consistent with materialism. Among those who see the impossibility of explaining consciousness is strictly material terms, the only view that has much traction is some form of dualism, such as that promoted by David Chalmers. Sam Harris, to his credit, isn't buying it. Perhaps because of his deep interest in the nature of experience, he realizes that materialism has neither need nor explanation for subjective consciousness. No amount of structure and function/behavior explains why dynamic structures of any complexity would produce anything other than objective phenomena, nor why material evolution as we understand it would require any form of subjectivity. Materialism is a closed system, an apparently perfectly adequate explanatory construct for objective phenomena. Thus those wedded to materialism, such as Daniel Dennett, have no choice but to call subjective experience an illusion. Dualists who recognize the category error of Cartesian-style interactive dualism must resort to the concept of epiphenominalism, which suggests that consciousness is a real but wholly impotent byproduct of materialism. Sam's response is aligned with that of the New Mysterians, such as Colin McGinn, who believe that the mystery of consciousness is just too far above our ability to understand, at least for the foreseeable future, at least with current modes of thought, perhaps forever. Sam may well be right. But I would like to combine his insight of the explanatory inadequacy of materialism with a disagreement I have with him about the nature of the self, perhaps subtle, perhaps not. Sam argues, persuasively I believe, that not only is subjective consciousness real, but it is the only thing that ultimately matters. If a phenomenon does not now or ever impact the conscious experience of a sentient being, directly or indirectly, it has no importance morally or ethically, nor can it “matter" in any meaningful sense. I would go further and argue, in direct contradiction to Daniel Dennett, subjective experience is the one and only thing we know to exist without a shred of doubt. Do not mistake this to be saying that the contents of experience are real. That's the point. We are impressed with the apparent existence of the “self", of others, of the material world through the medium of our experience. In contrast, we know of the existence of experience because of experience itself, not its contents. The simple way to say this is this: It is incoherent to deny the reality of experience itself, but perfectly reasonable to question anything and everything that experience suggests about the self and the world. Think of the “brain in the vat” scenario, or simple illusion as ways we can be led astray. So what about the self? I agree with Sam that the notion of an enduring unchanging self, a self with specific attributes, defined attitudes and character traits, is inconsistent with what we appear to know about reality. However, the realization of the absolute reality of experience, that is, of subjective consciousness, argues for the existence of a self nonetheless. Specifically, it argues for a “subject" of that experience. And personal, first-person, subjective experience only gives us evidence of one subject, that is our “self”. It is not an enduring self, but rather a momentary self, a self in the “now”. And in the “now" there is a unity of consciousness, at any given moment. Sam says consciousness is divisible because of the example of spilt-brain patients. I disagree. These patients give the appearance of a divided brain and the apparent division of consciousness that ostensibly accompanies that division. But Sam has already (sensibly) rejected the idea that objective data can explain subjectivity. And experience is always and only “had” by one subject, in a specific moment. For Sam to propose a true division of consciousness he must imagine a subject experiencing consciousness, in the first-person, as divided, which is incoherent. Logic and experience both argue for this. Experience is first-person, so the observation of others can never be evidence of experience, split or otherwise. And at any given moment, a subject can have just one “experience”, however complicated or “divided” it might seem. Truly divided consciousness would require multiple “subjects”, and those separate subjects could not speak to reality of each other any more than I can speak to the reality of the consciousness of others. The appearance of split-brain subjects is coherent. The actuality of split-consciousness is not. But the absolute reality of subjective experience has more troubling implications as well. Dennett based his theory of the illusory nature of subjective consciousness on an absolute belief in materialism. But such a belief is unfounded, given the contingent nature of all knowledge gained through experience. But if subjective experience is unequivocally real, and dualism is incoherent, one is left with the troubling notion that perhaps matter is not real. Even more troubling is the implication that “others” and "the world" are not real. Since experience is inherently ”input" and passive, it is impossible (thus far for me anyway) to imagine how separate subjects of experience would actually relate or interact. Subjective experience doesn’t emit “data”, it only “receives”(experiences) the appearance of “data”.

"Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion" von Sam Harris ist ein bemerkenswertes Buch, das eine erfrischende Perspektive auf Spiritualität bietet, die unabhängig von religiösen Konzepten ist. Harris, bekannt für seine klare und rationale Herangehensweise an Themen, erforscht in diesem Buch den Kern der menschlichen Erfahrung und lädt uns ein, unsere Vorstellungen von Spiritualität neu zu definieren.Ein herausragender Aspekt dieses Buches ist die Klarheit und Präzision, mit der Harris komplexe philosophische Ideen und neurowissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse vermittelt. Er erklärt grundlegende Konzepte wie Meditation, Bewusstsein und Achtsamkeit auf eine zugängliche und verständliche Weise, ohne dabei an Tiefe und Bedeutung zu verlieren.Harris geht über die traditionellen religiösen Vorstellungen von Spiritualität hinaus und eröffnet eine alternative Perspektive, die auf wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen und persönlicher Erfahrung basiert. Er fordert uns auf, die Illusion von Trennung zu durchbrechen und ein tieferes Verständnis unserer eigenen Geisteswelt zu entwickeln.Ein weiterer bemerkenswerter Aspekt des Buches ist die Betonung der Praxis der Meditation. Harris erläutert die Vorteile und die wissenschaftliche Grundlage der Meditationstechniken und führt den Leser durch verschiedene Übungen. Diese Praxis kann dabei helfen, eine persönliche Erfahrung von Spiritualität und Selbsterkenntnis zu entwickeln, unabhängig von religiösen Dogmen.Die Stärke von "Waking Up" liegt auch in der Ehrlichkeit und Offenheit von Sam Harris. Er teilt persönliche Erfahrungen und Zweifel, was dem Buch eine authentische Note verleiht. Dabei ist er stets darauf bedacht, die Leser dazu zu ermutigen, selbst zu denken, zu hinterfragen und ihre eigenen Erfahrungen zu machen.Obwohl "Waking Up" herausfordernde Konzepte und Ideen enthält, ist es dennoch zugänglich und ansprechend geschrieben. Harris vermeidet komplexe Fachbegriffe und ermöglicht es Lesern, auch ohne Vorkenntnisse in das Thema einzusteigen.Insgesamt ist "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion" ein faszinierendes Buch, das eine erfrischende und aufschlussreiche Perspektive auf Spiritualität bietet. Sam Harris gelingt es, komplexe Ideen auf verständliche Weise zu präsentieren und regt den Leser dazu an, über die eigene Spiritualität nachzudenken und neue Wege der Selbsterkenntnis zu erkunden.

First 2 chapters interesting but then got progressively more tedious for me.I found the writing style rather dull and it often caused me to lose interest (maybe that’s just me).It is really good to see a secular stance taken on the matters that are the topic of this book, but I was hoping to find by the end of the book some better direction than typically found in texts of meditation and consciousness. Nothing really shined here.Overall I was rather disappointed, and having then turned to the internet to see the the mountain of material that Sam Harris has produced and the way it is done, ( with high monthly subscription fees for the meditation app) it just seems to me like just yet another money spinning American ‘guru’ franchiseSo, go ahead and read as there is some interesting perspectives but be prepared to have to persevere and don’t expect too much in the end!

If you want to read a book about how terrible religion is, then this book is for you. I agree that religion is flawed and not always a right path to a spiritual life but once you have made that decision, you want to move on. No need to to flog a dead horse and all that. If you want a book that shows you how to grow spiritually without following religion, stick to Eckhart Tolle who is enlightened but not religious or Matthieu Ricard, who is a Buddhist Monk but writes to include a secular audience and researches science backed results on meditation as part of his work.

The book that got meditation to finally "click" for me.I've been exposed to mediation and mindfullness based therapies for years professionally within psychology and always thought that they were both ineffective (despite a lot of research into mindfullness in particular) and horribly applied in clinical settings.I still feel that mindfullness is applied incorrectly in a clinical setting for the most part.But I feel that this is largely due to a failure to recognise the "end goal" of mediation practices.This was the book that FINALLY allowed me to understand the goal of mediation in a more practical sense (particular the section "on having no head").I'd strongly recommend checking out Sam's longer presentation on Free Will first as a bit of a primer too. It will definitely improve your understanding of this book.The only reason for the 4 stars and not 5 is that I think Sam gets caught too often and for too long on explaining the faults with the more religious and spiritual applications of meditation. Not because I think he is wrong in his characterisations but because I felt it was unnecessary in this book and ultimately detracts from the content rather than adds to it.Highly recommended. Particularly if you never really felt like you understood the point of meditation even if the practice was still appealing.

A strange book this. More science than spirit. The author is opinionated and seems more interested in his 'journey' then he is about conveying a spiritual message to help one's own journey - for me there is many interesting facts about the brain and neurological developments, but the whole thing seems emotionally empty. He does make some interesting points about following gurus blindly and the dangers of drugs. Overall a disappointment as it does nothing to encourage meditation except as a 'brain medicine'.