Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

by Sam Harris

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.

If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.

It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit.

One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support.

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.

Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book.

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

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.

Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist.

Seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which we all are devoted, whether or not we choose to think in these terms.

Whatever the context, our minds are perpetually moving—generally toward pleasure (or its imagined source) and away from pain. I

Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them.

Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change?

enormously fat woman who was said to have wandered alone and undetected for seven years in the mountains

or the Koran, the difference is unmistakable: The Satipatthana Sutta is not a collection of ancient myths, superstitions,

Even for extraordinarily lucky people, life is difficult. And when we look at what makes it so, we see that we are all prisoners of our thoughts.

But it is your mind, rather than 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.

According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily.

According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

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.

Be in the present moment

Like fluidity, life is defined according to external criteria. Consciousness is not (and, I think, cannot be). We would never have occasion to say of something that does not eat, excrete, grow, or reproduce that it might be “alive.” It might, however, be conscious.22

Psychopaths generally do not show this right-hemisphere advantage for the perception of emotion; perhaps this is one reason why they are bad at detecting emotional distress in others.42

Much of what makes us human is generally accomplished by the right side of the brain. Consequently, we have every reason to believe that the disconnected right hemisphere is independently conscious and that the divided brain harbors two distinct points of view.

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.

Many people on earth at this moment can’t even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted.

In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.

Taking oneself to be the thinker of one’s thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.

The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.

Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.

Conversely, a longitudinal study of compassion meditation, which produced a significant increase in subjects’ empathy over the course of eight weeks, found increased activity in one of the regions believed to contain mirror neurons.23

What doesn’t survive scrutiny cannot be real.

Psychologists and neuroscientists now acknowledge that the human mind tends to wander, engaging in what has been called “stimulus-independent thought.”

Activity in the default-mode network (DMN) decreases when subjects concentrate on tasks of the sort employed in most neuroimaging experiments.2

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.

while covertly hoping that they will go away—and truly accepting them as transitory appearances in consciousness. Only the latter gesture opens the door to wisdom and lasting change.

That is what distinguishes SEAL training from actual torture. Cults, by contrast, often violate the principle of consent in many ways.

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts.