Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

by Sam Harris

THE SPIRITUAL USES OF PHARMACOLOGY

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. This book has been my attempt to begin such a conversation.

At its best, religion is a set of stories that recount the ethical and contemplative insights of our wisest ancestors. But these stories come to us bundled with ancient confusion and perennial lies.

Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events.

A middle path exists between making religion out of spiritual life and having no spiritual life at all.

and we know nothing about how consciousness itself comes into being,

There is no place for a soul inside your head.

The sense, therefore, that we are unified subjects—the unchanging thinkers of thoughts and experiencers of experience—is an illusion.

And we need not become masters of meditation to realize its benefits.

For all my books, my mother’s notes are among the most important, but for Waking Up I owe her a special debt: The time I spent in India and Nepal in my twenties—and in silence at various meditation centers around the world—was made possible by her support.