• Full Title: Waking Up : A Guide To Spirituality Without Religion
• Author: Sam Harris
• Year: 2014
• Genre: Self-help, Meditation
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• ISBN 978-1451636017, 978-1451636024
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Summary

The title is a more-or-less accurate description of this book’s con­tents, depending on how specifically you take the word “guide”. Author Sam Harris, known either for being the son of famed TV producer Susan Harris (creator of The Golden Girls, Soap, and Benson, among others) or for being one of the “Four Horsemen Of Atheism” — depending on one’s field of interest — is a lifelong atheist who nevertheless has found “spiritual” meditation practices to be useful and worthwhile. This book is his attempt to explain the topic to the more skeptical among us.

Like many in my generation (Harris is five years older than I am), he meandered on his way to a college degree, but unlike most of us he finished with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience. While studiously avoiding any implication of an argument from authority fallacy, he does bring his academic weight to bear in this (relatively) short book — barely over 200 pages.

Harris spends much of the book defending the idea that “spirituality” is a real thing, as well as describing many pitfalls in the world of meditation — especially in Western culture. Very little of the book details any practical methods for achieving the ends he asserts are real. This is why I say one’s opinion of title might hinge on how one thinks of the word “guide”. I was expecting more instructions, explanations of practice, and so on, rather than what I got: mostly apologetics.

 

What I Liked Least About It

I found little to dislike about this book aside from my mistaken expectation mentioned above. Perhaps my primary complaint, which arose before reading, was the use of the word “spirituality”. This alone made me hesitant to read the book in the first place, and I only did due to Harris’ stature as a confirmed skeptic. Usually when someone says “I’m spiritual but not religious”, they mean they still believe in God; they just don’t go to church anymore. I think most people take “spiritual” to imply having to do with the spiritual world (as opposed to the physical world). Even people who don’t believe in God usually use “spiritual” and related words to refer to things like souls, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible and undetectable beings that almost certainly don’t exist.

Harris explains very clearly why he, a lifelong atheist, chose to use the word — see the quotation below. Still, it grates on me that we can’t find a better word.

“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...

“I do not share their semantic concerns. 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, psychadelics, 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.

“...So I will use spiritual, mystical, contemplative, and transcendant without further apology. However, I will be precise in describing the experiences and methods that merit those terms.””

— pages 6 and 7

One other thing bugged me early, and that was the privilege oozing from the narrative. Harris mentions that he once spent two years “on silent retreat”, in increments of “one week to three months”, during which he practiced med­itation for 12 to 18 hours a day. He goes on to discuss how doing so can provide “experiences that are generally un­available to people who have not undertaken a similar practice” (pg. 14). Thinking back over my adult years, I am hard-pressed to think of any way I could have done such a thing. I think it’s a rare person who has the kind of life where they can simply walk away and somehow survive while spending 12 hours a day meditating. Most of us have bills to pay, children to rear, things to fix, and so on. But, as I said, this was a momentary gripe. The book didn’t dwell on it, and so neither did I. Clearly, meditation takes time, so just as clearly anyone considering the practice must also con­sider the cost.

 

What I Liked Most About It

My primary praise for this book is the crisp writing style. Harris rarely minces words. The paragraphs are thick with well-chosen syllables; every turn of phrase has a specific meaning that was clearly mulled over. Within a couple of pages, this alone had me hooked.

And despite my complaint above about the word “spiritual”, Harris easily and clearly explains early why he uses the word. Very succinctly, there simply isn’t another English word that conveys what he’s trying to convey.

Further, I like that Harris clearly struggles with the overtly religious nature of many (most?) schools of thought surrounding meditation. He’s sharply aware that his brand of “spirituality” is rare indeed, and he goes to great lengths to point this out.

 

Further Discussion

The one topic where I kept failing to see clearly while reading this book is what Harris meant by “the illusion of self”. Repeatedly, he asserts that there is no “I”, whatever that means. For example:

“...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”.

— pg 9

Perhaps ironically, the way to clearly understand this (Harris says) is to engage in the meditation he describes. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this sounded to me like the circular reasoning religionists use. “How do I know the Bible is true? Because it says so in the Bible!” So the reason I should engage in meditation is to realize that my “self” is an illusion, an assertion I can’t begin to understand until after I’ve mastered meditation?

At times, he talks about this like he’s trying to disprove dualism — in which case I understand him completely. I don’t believe in souls or spirits. There’s no evidence that any part of human consciousness exists outside the body’s nervous system, especially prior to the brain’s development in utero or after death.

But at other times his phrasing seems to refer to consciousness itself — which clearly exists (even Harris proves this later in the book). For example, he says (phrased variously throughout the book) to “look closely for what you are calling ‘I’, and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness — free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents” (page 129). The problem here, for me, is that is very field of consciousness is what I have always called “I” or my “self”. Yet Harris seems to be saying that the ‘self” is something else, something people think they have but don’t, besides this field of consciousness. That is something I’ve never heard of, so I have no reason to be convinced it doesn’t exist.

 

Conclusion

Overall, this book was enlightening (pun definitely intended). I learned things, not only about Harris himself in the autobiographical passages, but about the methods and practices to which he subscribes. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a greater understanding of secular meditation, any skeptic looking for peace.

I can’t say I am going to change my life over it. I have been irregularly practicing one form of meditation or another for much of my life, and purely secular meditation ever since reading Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil (1970) in the 1990s. (There is a passage where the protagonist teaches himself/herself to meditate using the famed “om mani padme hum” phrasing and measured breathing.) And I will likely continue to do so. It’s calming for my hyperactive brain. But I don’t think I will ever cease to see my “self”, because I clearly define that differently than Harris does.

 

Note: A shorter version of this review is available on Goodreads, here.

 

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