Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

by Sam Harris

is tempting to conclude that your subjectivity must collapse to a single hemisphere. Once the surgery was over, it would be obvious that you can’t be on both sides of the great divide.

I think this riddle admits of a rather straightforward solution. Consciousness—whatever its relation to neural events—is divisible.

If my brain harbors only one conscious point of view—if all that is remembered, intended, and perceived is known by a single “subject”—then I enjoy unity of mind. The evidence is overwhelming, however, that such unity, if it ever exists in a human being, depends upon some humble tracts of white matter crossing the midline of the brain.

Given the immense amount of information processing that takes place in each hemisphere, it seems certain that even a normal human brain will be functionally split to one or another degree. Two hundred million nerve fibers seem insufficient to integrate the simultaneous activity of 20 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex, each of which makes hundreds or thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of connections to its neighbors.47 Given this partitioning of information, how can our brains not harbor multiple centers of consciousness even now?

Why is it that the right hemisphere is generally willing to bear silent witness to the errors and confabulations of the left? Could it be that the right hemisphere is used to it?

Take a moment to absorb how bizarre this possibility is. The point of view from which you are consciously reading these words may not be the only conscious point of view to be found in your brain. It is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain. It is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every move.

But whatever the final lesson of the split brain is, it thoroughly violates our commonsense intuitions about the nature of our subjectivity.

All brains—and persons—may be split to one or another degree. Each of us may live, even now, in a fluid state of split and overlapping subjectivity. Whether or not this seems plausible to you may not be the point. Another part of your brain may see the matter differently.

We now know that at least two systems in the brain—often referred to as “dual processes”—govern human cognition, emotion, and behavior. One is evolutionarily older, unconscious, and automatic; the other evolved more recently and is both conscious and deliberative.

Scientists have learned how to target System 1 through the phenomenon of “priming,” revealing that complex mental processes lurk beneath the level of conscious awareness.

Clearly, we are not aware of all the information that influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Amnesiacs, who can no longer form conscious memories, can still improve their performance on a wide variety of tasks through practice.

Your conscious memories of practicing a musical instrument, driving a car, or tying your shoelaces are neurologically distinct from your learning how to do these things and from your knowing how to do them now.

Consciousness is the substance of any experience we can have or hope for, now or in the future.

Consciousness is also what gives our lives a moral dimension. Without consciousness, we would have no cause to wonder how we should behave toward other human beings, nor could we care how we were treated in return.

We don’t have ethical obligations toward rocks (on the assumption that they are not conscious), but we do have such obligations toward any creature that can suffer or be deprived of happiness.

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.

Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself. That doesn’t leave much scope for conventional religious beliefs, but it does offer a deep foundation for a contemplative life. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished.

If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God or been touched by the Holy Spirit.

But I am simply someone who is making his best effort to be a rational human being. Consequently, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort. And yet, I glimpse what I will call the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness every day, whether at a traditional holy site, or at my desk, or while having my teeth cleaned. This is not an accident. I’ve spent many years practicing meditation, the purpose of which is to cut through the illusion 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.

we are all seeking fulfillment while living at the mercy of changing experience. Whatever we acquire in life gets dispersed. Our bodies age. Our relationships fall away. Even the most intense pleasures last only a few moments. And every morning, we are chased out of bed by our thoughts.

Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self—not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body, behind the eyes, inside the head.

And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished.

In a now famous thought experiment, the philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from Earth to Mars.

To most readers, this thought experiment will suggest that psychological continuity—the mere maintenance of one’s memories, beliefs, habits, and other mental traits—is an insufficient basis for personal identity.

One might conclude that personal identity requires physical continuity: I am identical to my brain and body, and if they get destroyed, that’s the end of me. But Parfit shows that physical continuity matters only because it normally supports psychological continuity.

it seems clear that the maintenance of psychological continuity is what we care about. And it is generally what we mean by a person’s “survival” from one moment to the next.

After all, in what way are you subjectively the same as the person who first picked up this book? In the only way you can be: by displaying some degree of psychological continuity with that past self. Viewed in this way, it is difficult to see how teleportation is any different from the mere passage of time.

Parfit’s view of the self, which he appears to have arrived at independently through an immensely creative use of thought experiments, is essentially the same as the one found in the teachings of Buddhism: There is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.

When talking about psychological continuity, we are talking about consciousness and its contents—the persistence of autobiographical memories in particular.

And anything that is unique to your experience of the world must appear amid the contents of consciousness. We have every reason to believe that these contents depend upon the physical structure of your brain.

We know, from experiments both real and imagined, that psychological continuity is divisible—and can, therefore, be inherited by more than one mind. If my brain were surgically divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds, both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this paragraph.

If, after years of living apart, my hemispheres were reunited, their memories of separate existence could, in principle, appear as the combined memory of a single consciousness. There would be no cause to ask where my “self” had been while my brain was divided, because no “I” exists apart from the stream. The moment we see this, the divisibility of the human mind begins to seem less paradoxical. Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. And the only thing relevant to the question of personal identity is psychological continuity from one moment to the next.

I can, for instance, reach for my cup of coffee or set it down, seemingly as I please. These are intentional actions, and I perform them. But if I look for what underlies these movements—motor neurons, muscle fibers, neurotransmitters—I can’t feel or see a thing. And how do I initiate this behavior? I haven’t a clue. In what sense, then, do I initiate it? That is difficult to say.

Am I my skull? Am I inside my skull? Let’s say yes for the moment, because we are quickly running out of places to look for me. Where inside my skull might I be? And if I’m up there in my head, how is the rest of me me

The pronoun I is the name that most of us put to the sense that we are the thinkers of our thoughts and the experiencers of our experience. It is the sense that we have of possessing (rather than of merely being) a continuum of experience.

Obviously, there is something in our experience that we are calling “I,” apart from the sheer fact that we are conscious;

Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint just what it is we take ourselves to be.

I suspect that this difference between Eastern and Western philosophy has something to do with the influence of Abrahamic religion and its doctrine of the soul.

What does it mean to say that the self cannot be found or that it is illusory? It is not to say that people are illusory. I see no reason to doubt that each of us exists or that the ongoing history of our personhood can be conventionally described as the history of our “selves.” But the self in this more global, biographical sense undergoes sweeping changes over the course of a lifetime. While you are in many ways physically and psychologically continuous with the person you were at age seven, you are not the same. Your life has surely been punctuated by transitions that significantly changed you:

Each of us knows what it is like to develop new capacities, understandings, opinions, and tastes over the course of time. It is convenient to ascribe these changes to the self. That is not the self I am talking about.

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,

Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself ...

Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. The problem with a claim of this kind, however, is that one can’t borrow another person’s contemplative tools to test it. To see how the feeling of “I” is a product of thought—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted by thought you tend to be in the first place—you have to build your own contemplative tools.

A few pharmacological shortcuts exist—and I discuss some of them in a later chapter—but generally speaking, we must build our own telescopes to judge the empirical claims of contemplatives.

we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. 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.

But we all talk to ourselves constantly—most of us merely have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. We rehearse past conversations—thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said. We anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear. We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our heads who required continuous narration to know what is happening: