Waking Up - A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)

OVERVIEW

If you’re an atheist interested in learning about secular spirituality (what it is, how we might define it), your options are limited. But there is Sam Harris’s “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.” The most important thing Harris sets out to do is define spirituality from a secular perspective – what might constitute a rational spiritual practice, what self-transcendence is when divorced from religious thinking, and what can be said about spiritual experience that isn’t some species of pseudoscientific metaphysics. Here’s a good introduction to Harris’s thoughts on “spirituality:”

“…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, psychedelics, 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.”

What spirituality isn’t

Spirituality is wholly distinguishable from religion, or any other belief system (including fuzzy New Age beliefs about universal consciousness, reincarnation, spiritual “energy,” etc.). Spirituality must be distinguishable from these belief systems because people of every faith and of no faith have had similar encounters. Millions of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists have experienced what they describe as universal love, bliss, inner light, ecstasy, etc. As Harris says, “some deeper principle must be at work.” And this deeper principle speaks not to reality at large, but to the mind’s ability to generate these types of experiences. To describe a secular spiritual experience must be to describe its quality, but not to take it as evidence in favour of a particular faith-based belief system. How could it be evidence? Believers with logically incompatible belief systems and non-believers alike have these same experiences.

We may have grounds for wrestling spirituality away from faith, but why should atheists have any interest in spirituality to begin with? First, we must define what spirituality is, and then offer why a spiritual practice is worth pursuing.

What spirituality is

Think of how a spiritual experience is usually described – we speak of self-transcendence, a sense of expansiveness, of the line blurring between ourselves and others; of a feeling of vastness, of unity, of oneness. If you’re religious, you interpret these events in a religious context, but we needn’t add that layer  – the core principle is secular. Spiritual experience is self-transcendent experience, and so a spiritual practice is one devoted to transcending the self.

Fans of Harris will have prepared for the coming distinction, which is that the self is an illusion, and so, if we can refine our position, what all spiritual experiences have in common is that they cut through the illusion of the self. This is an important point. Harris argues that the true nature of consciousness is self-less; you may feel yourself to be the thinker of your thoughts – to be an “I,” an autonomous observer that sits somewhere behind your eyes – but subjective and objective evaluation do not support this conception. Experienced meditators have noted for millennia that there is no “I,” no “self” to be found when you examine your mind closely. Modern day neuroscience confirms this observation. Thoughts simply arise in awareness, there is no “self” that generates them. The fact that we identify ourselves as being the thinkers of our thoughts appears to be a cognitive quirk (one that no doubt was evolutionarily advantageous)… and it’s an illusion that can be dispelled. For Harris, the impetus to self-transcendence, to dispelling this illusion, is not faith-based. Spiritual practice is the pursuit of a more honest worldview, a more rational perspective. Observing the intrinsic selflessness of your consciousness is, simply, to see more clearly.

“Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book.”

The basis of spiritual life is waking up to the true nature of your consciousness.

Spiritual practice

We can similarly revise our initial definition of spiritual practice from ‘an exercise devoted to transcending the self’ to ‘an exercise devoted to transcending the illusion of the self.’ Harris relates his personal experience with psychedelics, but of course a more gradual (and legal) way of achieving self-transcendence is through meditation – a mindfulness practice that allows you to explore the self-less nature of your consciousness. We may swap out the terms and define this as a contemplative practice, but meditation is not about thinking more clearly, it’s about experiencing more clearly. Harris elaborates:

“The promise of spiritual life – indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this book – is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.”

Self-transcendence is not religious, it is rational. We pursue spirituality not because it reveals some underlying religious truth, but because it is the most rational experience of the world. If you permit me to extrapolate from here: a sense of unbounded love, of kinship with other living beings, of oneness with life, can be possessed by everyone, and is truly the most honest account of our situation. There is no “you,” and so there is no you vs. me. The stuff you are made of is the stuff everything else is made of. The Golden Rule is now imperative, for where is the boundary that exists between me and you? It would seem that compassion and selflessness are the most honest qualities we can strive to embody, and these are the product of a spiritual practice.

In close

We can justify “a life of spiritual practice and self-transcendence without pretending to know things we do not know.” There is nothing specious about spirituality. Spiritual people need not believe in God, or ghosts, or seances, or near-death experiences, they need only commit to more objectively exploring the nature of reality by exploring their own minds.

We consider one final question, which is why it’s important for atheists to talk about secular spirituality. The spiritual experiences of universal love, or bliss, or ecstasy, or self-expansion, tend to increase a person’s faith, because they’re interpreted in a religious context. While we can’t prevent every religious interpretation, we non-believers do ourselves no favours by offering only a hostile context for interpretation. Atheists have, on the whole, offered little more than patronizing smirks for those claiming to be “spiritual.” We believe we’re far superior in having overcome this credulity. But our hubris is misplaced, and it’s counterproductive. As we’ve seen, self-transcendent experience can be (and should be) interpreted in a secular context. You can keep your ecstasy, your warmth, your glow, your bliss. You can keep your overwhelming feelings of universal love and oneness, your impetus to charity and selflessness. Atheism does not need to antagonize these encounters – it should embrace them.

“How many Christians, having once felt their hearts grow as wide as the world, will decide to ditch Christianity and proclaim their atheism? Not many, I suspect.”

“Spirituality remains the great hole in secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism, and all the other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable faith. People on both sides of this divide imagine that visionary experience has no place within the context of science – apart from the corridors of a mental hospital. Until we can talk about spirituality in rational terms – acknowledging the validity of self-transcendence – our world will remain shattered by dogmatism.”

WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)

Meditate

Harris followers won’t be surprised at this “to-do.” A spiritual practice, for Harris, is a meditation practice – and more specifically, a meditation practice that seeks to investigate the self-lessness of consciousness. “Waking Up” was published in 2014, prior to the Waking Up app being available, so Harris’s guided meditations aren’t called out in the book. But there are now dozens of guided meditations available through his app of the same name. Check them out.

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? Yes

If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Spirituality for atheists.

Who should read this book? Secular protagonists and (especially) antagonists of spirituality.