Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion

by Sam Harris

Our minds are all we have.

many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition.

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything.

My experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists. It is possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time.

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.

If there exists a source of psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying one’s desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness should be available to a person who has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced her career and material possessions, and gone off to a cave or some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations.

there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness.

We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life than this?

Hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas—the law of karma and rebirth, a multiplicity of gods—that almost every other major religion decries.

In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding.

To get started as a Christian, however, one must first accept a dozen implausible things about the life of Jesus and the origins of the Bible—and the same can be said, minus a few unimportant details, about Judaism and Islam.

If one should happen to discover that the sense of being an individual soul is an illusion, one will be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the Indus.

One can speak about Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. The same cannot be said of Christianity or Islam.3

There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.

Only Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.9

As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless.

My purpose in writing this book is to encourage you to investigate certain contemplative insights for yourself, without accepting the metaphysical ideas that they inspired in ignorant and isolated peoples of the past.

There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.

Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali word sati. The term has several meanings in the Buddhist literature, but for our purposes the most important is “clear awareness.”

The four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and attitudes), and the objects of mind (which include the five senses but also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture, equanimity, and even mindfulness itself).

The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts.

But there is another path, and it seems the only one compatible with intellectual honesty. That path is the subject of this book.

The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of well-being that is imperturbable—or if perturbed, easily regained.

The near goal, therefore, is to have an increasingly healthy mind—that is, to be moving one’s mind in the right direction.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

only 25 percent of Americans believe in evolution (while 68 percent believe in the literal existence of Satan).28

Consciousness—whatever its relation to neural events—is divisible.

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?

the unconscious mind exists, and our conscious experience gives some indication of its structure. Recent advances in experimental psychology and neuroimaging have allowed us to study the boundary between conscious and unconscious mental processes with increasing precision.

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.

When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these fe...

emotionally charged terms are more easily recognized than neutral ones (sex can be presented more briefly than car), which further demonstrates that the meanings of words must be gleaned prior to consciousness.

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 also what gives our lives a moral dimension.

The Taliban’s destruction of the 1,500-year-old standing Buddhas of Bamiyan was wrong not from the perspective of the statues themselves but from that of all the people who cared about them (and the future people who might have cared).

Why would it be wrong to painlessly kill every man, woman, and child in their sleep? Because of all the possibilities for future happiness that would be foreclosed. If you think such actions are wrong primarily because they would anger God or would lead to your punishment after death, you are still worried about perturbations of consciousness—albeit ones that stand a good chance of being wholly imaginary.

I’ve spent many years practicing meditation, the purpose of which is to cut through the illusion of the self.

Just consider the unfortunate case of someone with advanced dementia: He is physically but not psychologically continuous with the person he used to be.

There is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.

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.

And the fact that people report losing their sense of self to one or another degree suggests that the experience of being a self can be selectively interfered with.

Christianity, in particular, presents impressive obstacles to thinking intelligently about the nature of the human mind, asserting, as it does, the real existence of individual souls who are subject to the eternal judgment of God.