Waking Up: A guide to Spirituality without Religion by Sam Harris

Rating:

/10

Big Ideas

Sam Harris' Waking Up is a rigorous, scientific exploration of consciousness as it relates to the human experience and spirituality. I found the book both sensible and profound. For those of you who can't ignore the flaws of traditional religions but remain skeptical of hand wavy, pseudoscientific new age belief systems, this will be an eye opening alternative to thinking about spirituality.

While Harris covers a lot of ground in this the main ideas were:

Your entire world and your experience of being alive is shaped by your consciousness and only your consciousness. Therefore it is worth investing the time to understand how your mind works and how consciousness relates to thoughts and feelings.
It is possible to reach states of consciousness that can help us address the inherent pain and struggle associated with life, even if only for short periods of time.
One of the best ways to access these states of mind is through the practice of meditation.
Meditation helps us see the nature of our consciousness and recognize the illusion of self. Access to this non-dualistic perspective of the world can aid in relieving much of our suffering and pain as well as function as a doorway to closer connection with the rest of nature and humanity.

Notes

Spirituality

"Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others."
"How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives."
"I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I know understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble."
"Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human. mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world."
"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."
"That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call "I" is an illusion."

The Search for Happiness

"The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath - and out needs and desires seem to multiply by the hour."
"We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus the question naturally arises: is there more to life than this? Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense of better) than on tends to feel?"
"Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such questions could well be 'yes'. And a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self."

Religion, East and West

"We are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same: All teach the same ethical principles; all urge their followers to contemplate the same divine reality; all are equally wise, compassionate, and true within their sphere - or equally divisive and false, depending on one'e view."
"No serious adherents of any faith can believe these things, because most religions make claims about reality that are mutually incompatible."
"In one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address the same reality - because people of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths."
"This merely indicates that human cognition and emotion run deeper than religion ... It does not suggest that all religions understand our spiritual possibilities equally well."
"There is now little question that how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds - and lives - are largely shaped by how we use them."
"Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle, available to everyone ... only buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta ... have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment."

Mindfulness

"It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth."
"The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world."
"But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth - overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain - and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running."
"The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as "mindfulness", and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant."
"Cultivating the quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness."
The four foundations of mindfulness are:
~The body (breathing, changes in posture, activities)
~Feelings (the sense of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and neutrality)
~The mind (in particular, it's moods and attitudes)
~Objects of the mind (which include the five sense but also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture, equanimity, and even mindfulness itself.)
"The goal [of meditation] is to come out of the trance of discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present."

The Truth of Suffering

"So what did the Buddha mean when he spoke of the "unsatisfactoriness" (dukkha) of life?"
Obvious suffering is all around us, in hospitals, in crime, in tragedy and violence etc.
Wealth and fame do not protect you from suffering, as we can see by all the unhappy and suffering wealthy and famous people
"Yet the unsatisfactoriness of the good life runs deeper than this. Even while living safely between emergencies, most of us feel a wide range of painful emotions on a daily basis."
"And then there is death" about which there are three ways to think about
~Ignore and pretend doesn't exist and will never happen (most atheists)
~Deny that it is real because of the existence of an afterlife (most religions)
~Another way (the subject of this book)

Enlightenment

"The true goal of meditation is more profound than most people realize ... It is quite possible to lose one's sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness - to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos. This says a lot about the possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large."
"It sheds no light at all on the relationship between mind and matter."
"So what would a spiritual master be a master of? At a minimum, she will no longer suffer certain cognitive and emotional illusions - above all, she will no longer feel identical to her thoughts."
"The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present."
"The moment we admit the possibility of attaining contemplative insights - and of training one's mind for that purpose - we must acknowledge that people naturally fall at different points on a continuum between ignorance and wisdom."
While the implication is controversial it also means that it is a skill that can be refined and learned.
"It is your mind, rather than your circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it."
"In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life."

The Mystery of Consciousness

"Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion."
"The reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself - and directly, through first-person experience. It follows, therefore, that rigorous introspection - "spirituality" in the widest sense of the term - is an indispensable part of understanding the nature of the mind."

The Mind Divided

In split brain patients, patients who've had the right and left hemispheres of their brain surgically separated, "it becomes difficult to say that the person whose brain has been split is a single subject, for everything about his behavior suggests that a silent intelligence lurks in his right hemisphere, about which the articulate left hemisphere knows nothing".
It's worth noting that the left hemisphere is responsible for language and therefore all verbal communication originates only from the left side.
"The duality of the mind is further demonstrated by the fact that these patients can simultaneously perform separate manual tasks."
"What is most startling about the split-brain phenomenon is that we have every reason to believe that the isolated right hemisphere is independently conscious."

Structure and Function

"Most evidence suggests that the two hemispheres differ in temperament, and it now seems uncontroversial to say that they can make different (and even opposing) contributions to a person's emotional life."
This raises the question then of which side of the brain should be considered "you".
"Consciousness - whatever its relation to neural events - is divisible."
The unity of consciousness and subjectivity seems to be entirely dependent on the tissue connecting the left and right hemispheres."

Are Our Minds Already Split?

Some research has found that certain types of information cannot pass across the corpus callosum (the bridge between left and right hemispheres).
"Given this partitioning of information, how can our brains not harbor multiple centers of consciousness even now?"
"All brains - and persons - may be split to on or another degree. Each of us may live, even now, in a fluid state of split and overlapping subjectivity."

Conscious and Unconscious Processes

"The unconscious mind exists, and our conscious experience gives some indication of its structure."
"We know that at least two systems in the brain - often referred to as "dual processes" - govern human cognition, emotion, and behavior."
~"One is evolutionary older, unconscious, and automatic"
~"The other evolved more recently and is both conscious and deliberative."
"Clearly we are not aware of all the information that influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions."

Consciousness Is What Matters

"Consciousness is also what gives our lives a moral dimension."
"I have never come across a coherent notion of bad or good, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable that did not depend upon some change in the experience of conscious creatures."
"It is not easy to nail down what we mean by 'good' and 'bad' - and their definitions may remain perpetually open to revision - but such judgements seem to require, in every instance, that some difference register at the level of experience."
"Our notions of meaning, morality, and value presuppose the actuality of consciousness (or its loss) somewhere."

The Riddle of the Self

"My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion - and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment."
"Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation."

What Are We Calling "I"?

"Obviously, there is something in our experience that we are calling 'I', apart from the sheer fact that we are conscious; otherwise, we would never describe our subjectivity in the way we do."
"Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint just what it is we take ourselves to be."
"While you are in many ways physically and psychologically continuous with the person you were at age seven, you are not the same."
"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."
"However, it's absence can be found - and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears."

Consciousness Without Self

Unfortunately, access to these perspective on consciousness is not always easily accessible and we must use our focus and attention in order to access these insights.
"Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts - as transient appearances in consciousness - and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time. This may sound simple enough, but actually accomplishing it can take a lot of work."

Lost in Thought

"Every moment of the day - indeed, every moment throughout one's life - offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily."
"We can address mental suffering of this kind on at least two levels"
~"We can use thoughts themselves as an antidote"
~"Or we can stand free of thought altogether"
"I am not advocating that we be irrationally detached from the reality of our lives. If a problem needs fixing, we should fix it. But how miserable must we be while doing good and necessary things?"
"Our habitual identification with thought - that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness - is a primary source of human suffering."
"From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment."
"If you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are."
"The practice of meditation is a method of breaking the spell of thought."
"One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts- that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self."
What you are calling 'I' is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle."

The Challenge of Studying the Self

"We must distinguish between the self and the myriad mental states - self-recognition, volition, memory, bodily awareness - with which it can be associated."
Using examples of people who have lost their continuity of consciousness i.e. someone with amnesia, still has a sense of self
Someone who has an out-of-body experience still retains a sense of self
Research has shown that people can be compelled to associated external objects, (fake body parts etc.) as parts of their self
Therefore it's difficult to pin down what components strictly constitute a self in the traditional sense.

Self-Recognition

Some primates cannot recognize themselves in a mirror. They have a limited sense of self as a concept distinct from the rest of the world.
However we would still argue that this entity has a sense of self distinct from their ability to recognize themselves

Theory of Mind

"One of the most important things we do with our minds is attribute mental states to other people."
"It may be that awareness of other minds is a necessary condition for an awareness of one's own. Of course, this does not suggest that the feeling we call 'I' will disappear when we are alone."
"We have seen that the sense of self is logically and empirically distinct from many other features of the mind with which it is often conflated."

Penetrating the Illusion

"As a matter of neurology, the sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion, because it is built upon processes that, by their very nature as processes, are transitory and multifarious."
"The sense that we are unified subjects is a fiction, produced by a multitude of separate processes and structures of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious control."
"The claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self - that there is no rider on the horse - seems to be on firm ground neurologically."

Meditation

The human mind tends to wander and one study indicated that "people are consistently less happy when their minds are wandering, even when the contents of their thoughts are pleasant."
A wandering mind is represented by elevated activity in the "default-mode-network" (DMN)
Focus and meditation have been shown to
~Reduce the activity of the DMN
~Introduce structural changes
~Subjectively reduce stress
~Improves immune function, and reduces blood pressure, cortisol levels, anxiety, depression, neuroticism and emotional reactivity

Gradual versus Sudden Realization

The paradox of spiritual pursuits is that while the goal is freedom from the illusion of the self the seeking of such freedom as if it was a future state to be obtained reinforces the identity of the self.
What do we do then?
~Gradually improve ourselves to get closer to a more spiritual understanding?
~Accept that true enlightenment must arise as a moment of transformation and seek out that transformation?
"The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds. It must, therefore, be available in the context of ordinary sights, sounds, sensations and even thoughts. Peak experiences are fine, but real freedom must be coincident with normal waking life."
"Being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one's spiritual journey, not its end."

Dzogchen: Taking the Goal as the Path

"The practice of Dzogchen requires that one be able to experience the intrinsic selflessness of awareness in every moment."
With practice and the help of a good teacher one can become more skilled at experiencing the non-duality of the world i.e. the illusion of the subject-object relationship, taking the subject as the self and the object as the world.
"It may take years of observing the contents of consciousness - or it may take only moments - but it is quite possible to realize that consciousness itself is free, no matter what arises to be noticed. Meditation is the practice of finding this freedom directly, by breaking one's identification with thought and allowing the continuum of experience, pleasant and unpleasant, to simply be as it is."
"It is important to realize that true meditation isn't an effort to produce a certain state of mind - like bliss, or unusual visual images, or love for all sentient beings."

Having No Head

"Selflessness is not a 'deep' feature of consciousness. It is right on the surface. And yet people can meditate for years without recognizing it."
The analogy of a window which can also be used as a mirror is perfect. Until your perspective shifts and you are able to see the mirror it can be very hard to explain what the mirror effect is like because of everything that's visible through the window.
Meditation is all about learning to see the window
Because it is easily accessible there is a danger of someone who has spent little time on the spiritual journey to recognize this phenomenon and say "so what?".
The practice and training of meditation therefore serve two functions:
~To see the window i.e. to recognize the illusion of self
~"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"

The Paradox of Acceptance

"It would seem that very few good things in life come from our accepting the present moment as it is." i.e. practice and training and living into the future can produce great "results", prevent future "suffering" etc.
"Embracing the contents of consciousness in any moment is a very powerful way of training yourself to respond to adversity."
"However, it is important to distinguish between accepting unpleasant sensations and emotions as a strategy - while covertly hoping that they will go away - and truly accepting them as transitory appearances in consciousness."
"The paradox is that we can be wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves."

Gurus, Death, Drugs

"I have never encountered a spiritual teacher who I thought was fully enlightened in the sense that many Buddhists and Hindus imagine is possible - that is, stably free of the illusion of self and endowed with clairvoyance and other miraculous powers."
"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."
He uses the example of marriage by pointing out that simple looking at failed marriages doesn't necessarily discredit the entire institution
Basically the summary here is that there are a lot of gurus who are/were inconsistent in their behavior and had many problems. Many, if not outright corrupt and abusive, wrap their teachings in destructive or useless rituals and practices. This has unfortunately poisoned the perception of the spiritual teachings they espouse.

Mind on the Brink of Death

This chapter discusses "near-death experience" (NDE) and whether or not they lend any credibility to the argument that there is a spirit or self that transcends the material brain.
"The possibility that experimenter bias, witness tampering (however unconscious), and false memories" impact collections of NDEs makes them dubious at best.
"Such is the perennial problem with reports of this kind. Some people are so desperate to interpret the NDE as proof of an afterlife that even those whom would expect to have a strong commitment to scientific reasoning toss their better judgement out the window."
"The truth is that, whatever happens after death, it is possible to justify a life of spiritual practice and self-transcendence without pretending to know things we do not know."

The Spiritual Use of Pharmacology

"Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness."
"Drugs are another means towards this end."
"One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting and for what purpose and which are not. The problem, however, is that we refer to all these biologically active materials by a single term, drugs, making it nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the psychological, medical, ethical and legal issues surrounding their use."
"The brain does exclude an extraordinary amount of information from consciousness. And, like many who have taken psychedelics, I can attest that these compounds throw open the gates."
"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 may seem."
"The power of psychedelics, however, is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime."