Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

by Sam Harris

it can be a powerful tool for self-regulation and self-awareness.

It is possible to become more focused, patient, and compassionate than one naturally tends to be,

This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. 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.

I am attempting to lead the reader along a middle path between these extremes—one that preserves our scientific skepticism but acknowledges that it is possible to radically transform our minds.

According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist. This is stressful—and

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.

Investigating the nature of consciousness itself—and transforming its contents through deliberate training—is the basis of spiritual life.

it will be useful to briefly examine why consciousness still poses a unique challenge to science.

the philosopher Thomas Nagel asks us to consider what it is like to be a bat.1 His interest isn’t in bats but in how we define the concept of “consciousness.” Nagel argues that an organism is conscious “if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something that it is like for the organism.”

He is simply asking you to imagine trading places with a bat. If you would be left with any experience, however indescribable—some spectrum of sights, sounds, sensations, feelings—that is what consciousness is in the case of a bat. If being transformed into a bat were tantamount to annihilation, however, then bats are not conscious.

Either the lights are on, or they are not.

Whatever the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter, almost everyone will agree that at some point in the development of complex organisms like ourselves, consciousness seems to emerge. This emergence does not depend on a change of materials, for you and I are built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. Instead, the birth of consciousness must be the result of organization: Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.4 Nevertheless, Nagel was right to observe that the reality of consciousness is, first and foremost, subjective—for

If you think the important part of consciousness is its link to speech and behavior, spare a moment to consider the problem of “anesthesia awareness.”

Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—and all my memories are false, and all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least). This is all that is required for me (or any other sentient being) to fully establish the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.

Authors struggling to link spirituality to science generally pin their hopes on misunderstandings of the “Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,” which they take as proof that consciousness plays a central role in determining the character of the physical world.

But what counts as “observation” under the original Copenhagen view was never clearly defined. The notion has been refined since, and it has nothing to do with consciousness.

It seems certain, therefore, that anyone who would base his spirituality on misinterpretations of 1930s physics is bound to be disappointed.

We know, of course, that human minds are the product of human brains.

Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence for it in the universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to.

First there is a physical world, unconscious and seething with unperceived events; then, by virtue of some physical property or process, consciousness itself springs, or staggers, into being.

To simply assert that consciousness arose at some point in the evolution of life, and that it results from a specific arrangement of neurons firing in concert within an individual brain, doesn’t give us any inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence actually means—and I don’t think anyone else does either.

I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have suggested that perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms.

Any attempt to understand consciousness in terms of brain activity merely correlates a person’s ability to report an experience (demonstrating that he was aware of it) with specific states of his brain. While such correlations can amount to fascinating neuroscience, they bring us no closer to explaining the emergence of consciousness itself.

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.

Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains.

Unfortunately, efforts to locate consciousness in the brain generally fail to distinguish between consciousness and its contents.

This is not to say that our understanding of the mind won’t change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There may be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience.

If spirituality is to become part of science, however, it must integrate with the rest of what we know about the world. It has long been obvious that traditional approaches to spirituality cannot do this—being based, to one or another degree, on religious myths and superstitions.

By sequencing a wide variety of genomes, we have finally rendered our continuity with the rest of life undeniable. We are such stuff as yeasts are made of. Of course, only 25 percent of Americans believe in evolution (while 68 percent believe in the literal existence of Satan).28 But we can now say that any conception of our place in the universe that denies we evolved from more primitive life forms is pure delusion. Neuroscience has also produced results that are equally hostile to the traditional idea of souls—and, therefore, to any approach to spirituality that presupposes their existence.

The right and left hemispheres of all vertebrate brains are connected by several nerve tracts called commissures, the function of which, we now know, is to pass information back and forth between them. The main commissure in the brains of placental mammals like ourselves is the corpus callosum, the fibers of which link similar regions of the cortex across the hemispheres.

the normal functioning of these connections. Without them, our brains—and minds—are divided.

The split brain was brought to the world’s attention half a century ago by Roger W. Sperry and colleagues.

Once patients recover from this surgery, they generally appear quite normal, even on neurological exam.

34—two principal findings emerged. First, the left and right hemispheres of the brain display a high degree of functional specialization. This discovery was not entirely new, because it had been known for at least a century that damage to the left hemisphere could impair the use of language. But the split-brain procedure allowed scientists to test each hemisphere independently on a variety of tasks, revealing a range of segregated abilities. The second finding was that when the forebrain commissures are cut, the hemispheres display an altogether astonishing functional independence, including separate memories, learning processes, behavioral intentions, and—it seems all but certain—centers of conscious experience.

Everything that falls in the left visual field of each eye, for instance, is projected to the right hemisphere of the brain, and everything in the right visual field is projected to the left hemisphere. The same pattern holds for both sensation and fine motor control in our extremities. Thus, each hemisphere relies on intact commissures to receive information from its own side of the world.

The classic demonstration of hemispheric independence in a split-brain patient runs as follows: Show the right hemisphere a word—egg, say—by briefly flashing it in the left half of the visual field, and the subject (speaking from his language-dominant left hemisphere) will claim to have seen nothing at all.

When the lateralization of inputs to the brain is exploited in this way, it becomes difficult to say that the person whose brain has been split is a single subject,

For instance, a person whose brain is functioning normally will find it impossible to draw incompatible figures simultaneously with the right and left hands; divided brains accomplish this task easily, like two artists working in parallel. In the acute phase after surgery, patients’ left and right hands sometimes engage in a tug-of-war over an object or sabotage each other’s work.

To ask the left hemisphere what it is like to not know what the right hemisphere is thinking is rather like asking a normal subject what it is like to not know what another person is thinking: He simply does not know what the other person is thinking

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.

If complex language were necessary for consciousness, then all nonhuman animals and human infants would be devoid of consciousness in principle.

The consciousness of the right hemisphere is especially difficult to deny whenever a subject possesses linguistic ability on both sides of the brain, because in such cases the divided hemispheres often express different intentions.

The question of whether the right hemisphere is conscious is really a pseudo-mystery used to bar the door to a great one: the uncanny fact that the human mind can be divided with a knife.

In humans, the left hemisphere generally makes a unique contribution to language and to the performance of complex movements.

People usually show a right-ear (left-hemisphere) advantage for words, digits, nonsense syllables, Morse code, difficult rhythms, and the ordering of temporal information, whereas they show a left-ear (right-hemisphere) advantage for melodies, musical chords, environmental sounds, and tones of voice.

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.43 In a divided brain, the hemispheres are unlikely to perceive self and world in the same way, nor are they likely to feel the same about them.

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. This fact poses an insurmountable problem for the notion that each of us has a single, indivisible self—much less an immortal soul.

But the split-brain phenomenon proves that our subjectivity can quite literally be sliced in two.

Like most such surgeries, you could be kept awake, because there are no pain receptors in the brain. There is also no reason to think that you would lose consciousness during the procedure, because a person can have an entire hemisphere removed (hemispherectomy) without loss of consciousness.

Given that each hemisphere in your divided brain would have its own point of view, whereas now you appear to have only one, it is natural to wonder which side of the longitudinal fissure “you” would find yourself on once the corpus callosum was cut.