Something that Sam Harris and Deepak Chopra can agree on

In a recent conversation with Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra explained why meditation has nothing to do with religion:

There are breathing meditations in every tradition. There are body-awareness meditations in every tradition. And there are variations of mantra meditation. It has nothing to do with belief or ideology or doctrine. It’s a simple mental technique to go to the source of thought.

Though the idea of a mental technique going “to the source of thought” seems to have Chopra’s characteristic fuzziness, I appreciate that it seems as if everyone—from Sam Harris to Deepak Chopra—can agree that meditation is a secular practice.

I’ve never done it myself, though I’ve considered it once or twice. Sam Harris, writing on the topic, says:

The quality of mind cultivated in [the meditation practice of] vipassana is generally referred to as “mindfulness” (the Pali word is sati), and there is a quickly growing literature on its psychological benefits. Mindfulness is simply a state of open, nonjudgmental, and nondiscursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to modulate pain, mitigate 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.

I’ve argued before that religion is far more than just a sterile series of metaphysical prepositions that are either true or false. Religions have power as social institutions, moral communities, and shapers of cultural practice which might be unrivaled by anything that exists in the secular sphere. These aspects of religion can have benefits that extend far beyond the question of whether or not god exists, so it’d be hasty and shortsighted at best to condem these aspects without taking a serious look at what structures and practices we can beneficially apply to secular living.

I think this idea has a lot of promise, even though it’s come under a lot of scrutiny—one need only look at the response among atheist bloggers after Alain de Botton’s TED talk and subsequent book, Religion for Atheists, was released last year. But it was that type of thinking that led me to try out Lent as a willpower hack for veganism, and, though I’m still working on making the transition, I’m much further along than I otherwise may have been. This exact same logic applies to Sam Harris’s efforts to take spirituality and meditation to a more mainstream, less mystical place.

To me, these can only be good things. There may be a tendency among atheists to overcorrect for the harms they see in religion, but there’s no reason to cut off our collective noses to spite our face. Sam Harris wrote on the topic of spirituality that “[w]e must reclaim good words and put them to good use.” The same holds for good practices.

Sam Harris and Deepak Chopra debated “Does God have a future?” on ABC’s Nightline in 2010.

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.