Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

I’ve followed Sam Harris since his 2004 book End of Faith. This book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion was written in 2014. Harris has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Stanford and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. The man is a remarkable thinker. Essentially, this book explains the scientifically proven benefits of meditation, and it provides encouragement to learn to use one’s brain in a healthier manner.

This is a five-chapter book: Spirituality, The Mystery of Consciousness, The Riddle of the Self, Meditation, and Gurus, Death, Drugs, and Other Puzzles. Given that I’m a psychoanalyst who has spent much of my career thinking about the unconscious mind, it’s a challenge when Harris essentially demeans the importance of that. It’s his opinion that Freud “erected an impressively unscientific mythology.” And, for the most part, I agree with Harris who acknowledges that there is much that goes on beneath consciousness and in fact argues that most of our functioning is at an unconscious level. In support of his idea that consciousness is more important, he writes, “As a matter of your experience, you are not a body of atoms, molecules, and cells; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents, passing through various stages of wakefulness and sleep, from cradle to grave.” He offers this clarification: “Consciousness is simply the light by which the contours of mind and body are known.” Regarding the self, a term that is central to psychoanalytic thought, Harris opines that “the conventional sense of self is an illusion – that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.” You should know that expert and lifelong meditators have a resistance against the thinning of the prefrontal cortex which is seen in Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of cognitive decline. Harris’ information on the conmen involved in the spirituality game is particularly enjoyable. He wrote, “Of course, charlatans haunt every walk of life. But on spiritual matters, foolishness and fraudulence can be especially difficult to detect. Unfortunately, this is a natural consequence of the subject matter…. For our purpose, the only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.”

Ultimately, for me, this is a difficult book to summarize and review. It is currently on the New York Times bestseller list, and in my opinion, deservedly so. The reading is a bit thick and my vocabulary has grown in the process of taking my time with the book. At minimum, it is worth reading Harris’ concluding paragraph: “We are always and everywhere in the presence of reality. Indeed, the human mind is the most complex and subtle expression of reality we have thus far encountered. This should grant profundity to the humble project of noticing what it is like to be you in the present. However numerous your faults, something in you at this moment is pristine – and only you can recognize it. Open you eyes and see.”