
(5,484 words. Printable version.)
Sam Harris believes that we can derive many of the
benefits people cite as reasons for subscribing to one religion or another from
non-religious practices and modes of thinking, ones that don’t invoke bizarre scriptures
replete with supernatural absurdities. In The
Moral Landscape, for instance, he attempted to show that we don’t need a
divine arbiter to settle our ethical and political disputes because reason
alone should suffice. Now, with Waking Up,
Harris is taking on an issue that many defenders of Christianity, or religion
more generally, have long insisted he is completely oblivious to. By focusing
on the truth or verifiability of religious propositions, Harris’s critics
charge, he misses the more important point: religion isn’t fundamentally about
the beliefs themselves so much as the effects those beliefs have on a
community, including the psychological impact on individuals of collective
enactments of the associated rituals—feelings of connectedness, higher purpose,
and loving concern for all one’s neighbors.
Harris
likes to point out that his scholarly critics simply have a hard time
appreciating just how fundamentalist most religious believers really are, and
so they turn a blind eye toward the myriad atrocities religion sanctions, or even
calls for explicitly. There’s a view currently fashionable among the more
politically correct scientists and academics that makes criticizing religious
beliefs seem peevish, even misanthropic, because religion is merely something
people do, like reading stories or playing games, to imbue their lives with texture
and meaning, or to heighten their sense of belonging to a community. According
to this view, the particular religion in question—Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism,
Christianity—isn’t as important as the people who subscribe to it, nor do any
specific tenets of a given faith have any consequence. That’s why Harris so
frequently comes under fire—and is even accused of bigotry—for suggesting things like
that the passages in the Koran calling for violence actually matter and that
Islam is much more likely to inspire violence because of them.
We can forgive Harris his
impatience with this line of reasoning, which leads his critics to insist that
violence is in every case politically and never religiously motivated. This
argument can only be stated with varying levels
of rancor, never empirically supported, and is hence dismissible as a mere
article of faith in its own right, one that can’t survive any encounter with
the reality of religious violence. Harris knows how important a role politics
plays and that it’s often only the fundamentalist subset of the population of
believers who are dangerous. But, as he points out, “Fundamentalism is only a
problem when the fundamentals are a problem” (2:30:09).
It’s only by the lights of postmodern identity politics that an observation this
banal could strike so many as so outrageous.
But
what will undoubtedly come as a disappointment to Harris’s more ardently
anti-religious readers, and as a surprise to fault-seeking religious apologists,
is that from the premise that not all religions are equally destructive and
equally absurd follows the conclusion that some religious ideas or practices
may actually be beneficial or point the way toward valid truths. Harris has
discussed his experiences with spiritual retreats and various forms of meditation in past works, but now with Waking Up he goes so far as to advocate
certain of the ancient contemplative practices he’s experimented with. Has he
abandoned his scientific skepticism? Not by any means; near the end of the
book, he writes, “As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to draw
conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences—no
matter how profound they seem” (192). What he’s doing here, and with the book as
a whole, is underscoring the distinction between religious belief on the one
hand and religious experience on the other.
Acknowledging that some practices
which are nominally religious can be of real value, Harris goes on to argue
that we need not accept absurd religious doctrines to fully appreciate them. And
this is where the subtitle of his book, A
Guide to Spirituality without Religion, comes from. As paradoxical as this
concept may seem to people of faith, Harris cites a survey finding that 20% of
Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (6). And he argues
that separating the two terms isn’t just acceptable; it’s logically necessary.
Spirituality
must be distinguished from
religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have 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 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.
(9)
People of faith frequently respond to the
criticism that their beliefs fly in the face of logic and evidence by claiming
they simply know God is real because they have experiences that can only be
attributed to a divine presence. Any failure on the part of skeptics to
acknowledge the lived reality of such experiences makes their arguments all the
more easily dismissible as overly literal or pedantic, and it makes the
skeptics themselves come across as closed-minded and out-of-touch.
On
the other hand, Harris’s suggestion of a “deeper principle” underlying
religious experiences smacks of New Age thinking at its most wooly. For one
thing, church authorities often condemn, excommunicate, or execute congregants
with mystical leanings for their heresy. (Harris cites a few examples.) But the
deeper principle Harris is referring to isn’t an otherworldly one. And he’s
perfectly aware of the unfortunate connotations the words he uses often carry:
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. (11)
You can’t expect people to be convinced their
religious beliefs are invalid when your case rests on a denial of something as perfectly
real to them as their own experiences. And it’s difficult to make the case that
these experiences must be separated from the religious claims they’re usually
tied to while refusing to apply the most familiar labels to them, because that
comes awfully close to denying their legitimacy.
*****
Throughout
Waking Up, Harris focuses on one
spiritual practice in particular, a variety of meditation that seeks to
separate consciousness from any sense of self, and he argues that the insights one can
glean from experiencing this rift are both personally beneficial and
neuroscientifically sound. Certain Hindu and Buddhist traditions hold that the
self is an illusion, a trick of the mind, and our modern scientific
understanding of the mind, Harris argues, corroborates this view. By default,
most of us think of the connection between our minds and our bodies
dualistically; we believe we have a spirit, a soul, or some other immaterial essence
that occupies and commands our physical bodies. Even those of us who profess
not to believe in any such thing as a soul have a hard time avoiding a
conception of the self as a unified center of consciousness, a homunculus
sitting at the controls. Accordingly, we attach ourselves to our own thoughts
and perceptions—we identify with them. Since it seems we’re programmed to
agonize over past mistakes and worry about impending catastrophes, we can’t
help feeling the full brunt of a constant barrage of negative thoughts. Most of
us recognize the sentiment Harris expresses in writing that “It seems to me
that I spend much of my life in a neurotic trance” (11). And this is precisely
the trance we need to wake up from.
To
end the spiraling chain reaction of negative thoughts and foul feelings, we
must detach ourselves from our thinking, and to do this, Harris suggests, we
must recognize that there is no us
doing the thinking. The “I” in the conventional phrasing “I think” or “I feel”
is nowhere to be found. Is it in our brains? Which part? Harris describes the
work of the Nobel laureate neuroscientist Roger Sperry, who
in the 1950s did a series a fascinating experiments with split-brain patients,
so called because the corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers connecting the two
hemispheres of their brains, had been surgically severed to reduce the severity
of epileptic seizures. Sperry found that he could present instructions to the
patients’ left visual fields—which would only be perceived by the right
hemisphere—and induce responses that the patients themselves couldn’t explain,
because language resides predominantly in the left hemisphere. When asked to
justify their behavior, though, the split-brain patients gave no indication
that they had no idea why they were doing what they’d been instructed to do.
Instead, they confabulated answers. For instance, if the right hemisphere is
instructed to pick up an egg from among an assortment of objects on a table,
the left hemisphere may explain the choice by saying something like, “Oh, I
picked it because I had eggs for breakfast yesterday.”

As
weird as this type of confabulation may seem, it has still weirder
implications. At any given moment, it’s easy enough for us to form intentions
and execute plans for behavior. But where do those intentions really come from?
And how can we be sure our behaviors reflect the intentions we believe they
reflect? We are only ever aware of a tiny fraction of our minds’ operations, so
it would be all too easy for us to conclude we
are the ones in charge of everything we do even though it’s really someone—or
something else behind the scenes
pulling the strings. The reason split-brain patients so naturally confabulate
about their motives is that the language centers of our brains probably do it
all the time, even when our corpus callosa are intact. We are only ever dimly
aware of our true motivations, and likely completely in the dark about them as
often as not. Whenever we attempt to explain ourselves, we’re really just
trying to make up a plausible story that incorporates all the given details,
one that makes sense both to us and to anyone listening.
If
you’re still not convinced that the self is an illusion, try to come up with a valid
justification for locating the self in either the left or the right hemisphere
of split-brain patients. You may be tempted to attribute consciousness, and
hence selfhood, to the hemisphere with the capacity for language. But you can
see for yourself how easy it is to direct your attention away from words and
fill your consciousness solely with images or wordless sounds. Some people
actually rely on their right hemispheres for much of their linguistic
processing, and after split-brain surgery these people can speak for the right
hemisphere with things like cards that have written words on them. We’re forced
to conclude that both sides of the split brain are conscious. And, since the
corpus callosum channels a limited amount of information back and forth in the
brain, we probably all have at least two independent centers of consciousness
in our minds, even those of us whose hemispheres communicate.
What this means is that
just because your actions and intentions seem to align, you still can’t be sure
there isn’t another conscious mind housed in your brain who is also assured its
own actions and intentions are aligned. There have even been cases where the
two sides of a split-brain patient’s mind have expressed conflicting beliefs
and desires. For some, phenomena like these sound the death knell for any
dualistic religious belief. Harris writes,
Consider
what this says about the dogma—widely held under Christianity and Islam—that a
person’s salvation depends upon her believing the right doctrine about God. If
a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere accepts the divinity of Jesus, but the
right doesn’t, are we to imagine that she now harbors two immortal souls, one
destined for the company of angels and the other for an eternity of hellfire?
(67-8)
Indeed, the soul, the immaterial inhabitant of the
body, can be divided more than once. Harris makes this point using a thought
experiment originally devised by philosopher Derek Parfit. Imagine you are teleported
Star Trek-style to Mars. The teleporter creates a replica of your body,
including your brain and its contents, faithful all the way down to the
orientation of the atoms. So everything goes black here on Earth, and then you
wake up on Mars exactly as you left. But now imagine something went wrong on
Earth and the original you wasn’t destroyed before the replica was created. In
that case, there would be two of you left whole and alive. Which one is the
real you? There’s no good basis for settling the question one way or the other.

Harris
uses the split-brain experiments and Parfit’s thought experiment to establish
the main insight that lies at the core of the spiritual practices he goes on to
describe: that the self, as we are programmed to think of and experience it,
doesn’t really exist. Of course, this is only true in a limited sense. In many
contexts, it’s still perfectly legitimate to speak of the self. As Harris
explains,
The
self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject
of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts
inside one’s head, the sense of being
an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to
appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus
exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are
identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you
almost certainly feel like an
internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it,
this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of
experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a
totality. However, its absence can be
found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears. (92)
The implication is that even if you come to
believe as a matter of fact that the self is an illusion you nevertheless
continue to experience that illusion. It’s only under certain circumstances, or
as a result of engaging in certain practices, that you’ll be able to experience
consciousness in the absence of self.
****
Harris
briefly discusses avenues apart from meditation that move us toward what he
calls “self-transcendence”: we often lose ourselves in our work, or in a good
book or movie; we may feel a diminishing of self before the immensities of
nature and the universe, or as part of a drug-induced hallucination; or it
could be attendance at a musical performance where you’re just one tiny part of
a vast pulsing crowd of exuberant fans. It could be during intense sex. Or you may of course also experience some
fading away of your individuality through participation in religious ceremonies. But Harris’s sights are set on one specific method for achieving
self-transcendence. As he writes in his introduction,
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. (10)
This is music to the ears of many skeptics who
have long suspected that there may actually be something to meditative
techniques but are overcome with fits of eye-rolling every time they try to
investigate the topic. If someone with skeptical bona fides as impressive as
Harris’s has taken the time to wade through all the nonsense to see if there
are any worthwhile takeaways, then I imagine I’m far from alone in being eager
to find out what he’s discovered.
So
how does one achieve a state of consciousness divorced from any sense of self?
And how does this experience help us escape the neurotic trance most of us are
locked in? Harris describes some of the basic principles of Advaita, a Hindu
practice, and Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist one. According to Advaita, one can
achieve “cessation”—an end to thinking, and hence to the self—at any stage of
practice. But Dzogchen practitioners insist it comes only after much intense
practice. In one of several inset passages with direct instructions to readers,
Harris invites us to experiment with the Dzogchen technique of imagining a
moment in our lives when we felt positive emotions, like the last time we
accomplished something we’re proud of. After concentrating on the thoughts and
feelings for some time, we are then encouraged to think of a time when we felt
something negative, like embarrassment or fear. The goal here is to be aware of
the ideas and feelings as they come into being. “In the teachings of Dzogchen,”
Harris writes, “it is often said that thoughts and emotions arise in
consciousness the way that images appear on the surface of the mirror.” Most of
the time, though, we are tricked into mistaking the mirror for what’s reflected
in it.
In
subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent
image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise,
however, the next thought will seem to become what you are. (139)
This is what Harris means when he speaks of
separating your consciousness from your thoughts. And he believes it’s a state
of mind you can achieve with sufficient practice calling forth and observing
different thoughts and emotions, until eventually you experience—for moments at
a time—a feeling of transcending the self, which entails a ceasing of thought,
a type of formless and empty awareness that has us sensing a pleasant
unburdening of the weight of our identities.

Harris
also describes a more expeditious route to selflessness, one discovered by a
British Architect named Douglas Harding, who went on to be renowned among New
Agers for his insight. His technique, which was first inspired by a drawing
made by physicist Ernst Mach that was a literal rendition of his first-person
viewpoint, including the side of his nose and the ridge of his eyebrow,
consists simply of trying to imagine you have no head. Harris quotes at length
from Harding’s description of what happened when he originally succeeded:
What
actually happened was something absurdly simply and unspectacular: I stopped
thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came
over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once,
words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I
was, my name, manhood, animal-hood, all that could be called mine. It was as if
I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories.
There existed only the Now, the present moment and what was clearly given it.
(143)
Harris recommends a slight twist to this
approach—one that involves looking out at the world and simply trying to
reverse your perspective to look for your head. One way to do this is to
imagine you’re talking to another person and then “let your attention travel in
the direction of the other person’s gaze” (145). It’s not about trying to
picture what you look like to another person; it’s about recognizing that your
face is absent from the encounter—because obviously you can’t see it. “But
looking for yourself in this way can precipitate a sudden change in
perspective, of the sort Harding describes” (146). It’s a sort of out-of-body
experience.
If
you pull off the feat of seeing through the illusion of self, either through
disciplined practice at observing the contents of your own consciousness or
through shortcuts like imagining you have no head, you will experience a
pronounced transformation. Even if for only a few moments, you will have
reached enlightenment. As a reward for your efforts, you will enjoy a temporary
cessation of the omnipresent hum of anxiety-inducing thoughts that you hardly
even notice drowning out so much of the other elements of your consciousness. “There
arose no questions,” Harding writes of his experiments in headlessness, “no
reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the
sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden” (143). Skeptics reading
these descriptions will have to overcome the temptation to joke about
practitioners without a thought in their head.
Christianity,
Judaism, and Islam are all based on dualistic conceptions of the self, and the
devout are enjoined to engage in ritual practices in service to God, an
entirely separate being. The more non-dualistic philosophies of the East are
much more amenable to attempts to reconcile them with science. Practices like
meditation aren’t directed at any supernatural entity but are engaged in for
their own sake, because they are somehow inherently rewarding. Unfortunately, this leads to
a catch-22. Harris explains,
As we
have seen, there are good reasons to believe that adopting a practice like
meditation can lead to positive changes in one’s life. But the deepest goal of
spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and 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. (123)
This paradox seems at first like a good
recommendation for the quicker routes to self-transcendence like Harding’s.
But, according to Harris, “Harding confessed that many of his students
recognized the state of ‘headlessness’ only to say, ‘So what?’” To Harris, the
problem here is that the transformation was so easily achieved that its true
value couldn’t be appreciated:
Unless
a person has spent some time seeking self-transcendence dualistically, she is
unlikely to recognize that the brief glimpse of selflessness is actually the
answer to her search. Having then said, ‘So what?’ in the face of the highest
teachings, there is nothing for her to do but persist in her confusion. (148)
We have to wonder, though, if maybe Harding’s underwhelmed
students aren’t the ones who are confused. It’s entirely possible that Harris,
who has devoted so much time and effort to his quest for enlightenment, is
overvaluing the experience to assuage his own cognitive dissonance.
****
The penultimate chapter of Waking Up gives Harris’s more skeptical fans plenty to sink their
teeth into, including a thorough takedown of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s
so-called Proof of Heaven and several
cases of supposedly enlightened gurus taking advantage of their followers by,
among other exploits, sleeping with their wives. But Harris claims his own
experiences with gurus have been almost entirely positive, and he goes as far
as recommending that anyone hoping to achieve self-transcendence seek out the
services of one.
This is where I began to have issues with the larger project
behind Harris’s book. If meditation were a set of skills like those required to
play tennis, it would seem more reasonable to claim that the guidance of an
expert coach is necessary to develop them. But what is a meditation guru
supposed to do if he (I presume they’re mostly male) has no way to measure, or
even see, your performance? Harris suggests they can answer questions that
arise during practice, but apart from basic instructions like the ones Harris
himself provides it seems unlikely an expert could be of much help. If a guru
has a useful technique, he shouldn’t need to be present in the room to share
it. Harding passed his technique on to Harris through writing for instance. And
if self-transcendence is as dramatic a transformation as it’s made out to be,
you shouldn’t have any trouble recognizing it when you experience it.
Harris’s
valuation of the teachings he’s received from his own gurus really can’t be
sifted from his impression of how rewarding his overall efforts at exploring
spirituality have been, nor can it be separated from his personal feelings
toward those gurus. This a problem that plagues much of the research on the
effectiveness of various forms of psychotherapy; essentially, a patient’s
report that the therapeutic treatment was successful means little else but that
the patient had a positive relationship with the therapist administering it. Similarly,
it may be the case that Harris’s sense of how worthwhile those moments of
self-transcendence are has more than he's himself aware of to do with his personal retrospective
assessment of how fulfilling his own journey to reach them has been. The view
from Everest must be far more sublime to those who’ve made the climb than to
those who were airlifted to the top.
More
troublingly, there’s an unmistakable resemblance between, on the one hand, Harris’s efforts to
locate convergences between science and contemplative
religious practices and, on the other, the tendency of New Age philosophers to
draw specious comparisons between ancient Eastern doctrines and modern theories
in physics. Zen koans are paradoxical and counterintuitive, this line of
reasoning goes, and so are the results of the double-slit experiment in quantum
mechanics—the Buddhists must have intuited something about the quantum world
centuries ago. Dzogchen Buddhists have believed the self is an illusion and have
been seeking a cessation of thinking for centuries, and modern neuroscience
demonstrates that the self is something quite different from what most of us
think it is. Therefore, the Buddhists must have long ago discovered something
essential about the mind. In both of these examples, it seems like you have to
do a lot of fudging to make the ancient doctrines line up with the modern
scientific findings.
It’s
not nearly as evident as Harris makes out that what the Buddhists mean by the
doctrine that the self is an illusion is the same thing neuroscientists mean
when they point out that consciousness is divisible, or that we’re often
unaware of our own motivations. (Douglas Hofstadter refers to the self as an
epiphenomenon, which he does characterize as a type of illusion, but only
because the overall experience bears so little resemblance to any of the
individual processes that go in to producing it.) I’ve never heard a cognitive
scientist discuss the fallacy of identifying with your own thoughts or
recommend that we try to stop thinking. Indeed, I don’t think most people
really do identify with their thoughts. I for one don’t believe I am my thoughts; I definitely feel like I
have my thoughts, or that I do my thinking. To point out that
thoughts sometimes arise in my mind independent of my volition does nothing to
undermine this belief. And Harris never explains exactly why seeing through the
illusion of the self should bring about relief from all the anxiety produced by
negative thinking. Cessation sounds a little like simply rendering yourself
insensate.
The problem that brings
about the neurotic trance so many of us find ourselves trapped in doesn’t seem
to be that people fall for the trick of selfhood; it’s that they mistake their most neurotic
thinking at any given moment for unquestionable and unchangeable reality.
Clinical techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy involve challenging your
own thinking, and there’s relief to be had in that—but it has nothing to do
with disowning your thoughts or seeing your self as illusory. From this modern
cognitive perspective, Dzogchen practices that have us focusing our attention
on the effects of different lines of thinking are probably still hugely
beneficial. But what’s that go to do with self-transcendence?
For
that matter, is the self really an illusion? Insofar as we think of it as a
single object or as something that can be frozen in time and examined, it is
indeed illusory. But calling the self an illusion is bit like calling music an
illusion. It’s impossible to point to music as existing in any specific
location. You can separate a song into constituent elements that all on their
own still constitute music. And of course you can create exact replicas of
songs and play them on other planets. But it’s pretty silly to conclude from
all these observations that music isn’t real. Rather, music, like the self, is a
confluence of many diverse processes that can only be experienced in real time.
In claiming that neuroscience corroborates the doctrine that the self is an
illusion, Harris may be failing at the central task he set for himself by
making too much obeisance to tradition.
What
about all those reports from people like Harding who have had life-changing experiences
while meditating or imagining they have no head? I can attest that I
immediately recognized what Harding was describing in the sections Harris
quotes. For me, it happened about twenty minutes into a walk I’d gone on through
my neighborhood to help me come up with an idea for a short story. I tried to
imagine myself as an unformed character at the outset of an as-yet-undeveloped
plot. After only a few moments of this, I had a profound sense of stepping away
from my own identity, and the attendant feeling of liberation from the
disappointments and heartbreaks of my past, from the stresses of the present, and
from my habitual forebodings about the future was both revelatory and exhilarating.
Since reading Waking Up, I’ve tried
both Harding’s and Harris’s approaches to reaching this state again quite a few
times. But, though the results have been more impactful than the “So what?”
response of Harding’s least impressed students, I haven’t experienced anything
as seemingly life-altering as I did on that walk, forcing me to suspect it had
as much to do with my state of mind prior to the experiment as it did with the
technique itself.
For
me, the experience was of stepping away from my identity—or of seeing the
details of that identity from a much broader perspective—than it was of seeing
through some illusion of self. I became something like a stem cell version of
myself, drastically more pluripotent, more free. It felt much more like
disconnecting from my own biography than like disconnecting from the center of my
consciousness. This may seem like a finicky distinction. But it goes to the
core of Harris’s project—the notion that there’s a convergence between ancient
meditative practices and our modern scientific understanding of consciousness. And
it bears on just how much of that ancient philosophy we really need to get into
if we want to have these kinds of spiritual experiences.
Personally,
I’m not at all convinced by Harris’s case on behalf of pared down Buddhist
philosophy and the efficacy of guru guidance—though I probably will continue to
experiment with the meditation techniques he lays out. Waking Up, it must be noted, is really less of a guide to spirituality
without religion than it is a guide to one particular, particularly esoteric,
spiritual practice. But, despite these quibbles, I give the book my highest
recommendation, and that’s because its greatest failure is also its greatest
success. Harris didn’t even come close to helping me stop thinking—or even
persuading me that I should try—because I haven’t been able to stop thinking
about his book ever since I started reading it. Perhaps what I appreciate most
about Waking Up, though, is that it
puts the lie to so many idiotic ideas people tend to have about skeptics and
atheists. Just as recognizing that to do what’s right we must sometimes resist
the urgings of our hearts in no way makes us heartless, neither does
understanding that to be steadfast in pursuit of truth we must admit there’s no
such thing as an immortal soul in any way make us soulless. And, while many
associate skepticism with closed-mindedness, most of the skeptics I know of are
true seekers, just like Harris. The crucial difference, which Harris calls
“the sine qua non of the scientific attitude,” is “between demanding good reasons
for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones” (199).