Making Sense with Sam Harris - #3 — WAKING UP — Chapter One

Episode Date: August 21, 2014

This is the complete first chapter of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris. To purchase the audiobook: http://amzn.to/1v1NEIK To purchase the print edition: http://amzn.to/1mqiAKL If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

I once participated in a 23-day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world's mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day. What was in essence a forced march through hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a ritual known as the solo, where we were finally permitted to rest, alone on the outskirts of a gorgeous alpine lake, for three days of fasting and contemplation. I had just turned sixteen, and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother's womb. It proved a sufficient provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the lake, the promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages of my journal not with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher,

or mystic, but with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and starlight, with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence, to be a source of perfect misery, for which I could not see so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any written at Shiloh or Gallipoli. So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our party, most of whom were a decade older than I, described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply didn't know what to make of their claims to happiness.

even transformational terms. I simply didn't know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could someone's happiness increase when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me. Only my life did, and I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to change. Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement, when your goals are unrealized, when you are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But it's the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.

Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you're 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. Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that need to be solved. But what is the real significance of every item on such a list? Everything we want to accomplish, to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job, is something that promises that if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope. I'm not denying the importance of achieving one's goals, maintaining one's health, or keeping one's children clothed and fed.

But most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present. We're trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience, and therefore the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages, but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out. A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the winter of 1987,

I took the drug 3,4-methylenedioxin-n-methylamphetamine, MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind's potential shifted profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at dance clubs and raves in the 1990s, at that time I didn't know anyone of my generation who had tried it. One evening, a few months before my 20th birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug. The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often consumed. We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked its way

into our heads. Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar, marijuana and alcohol, MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear. In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn't have surprised me. He was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age, I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now seem pedestrian on the page. I wanted him to be happy.

That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the inside appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance, the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person, seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed these gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.

A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life, and yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend about what I don't recall, and I realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer and I realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought

or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person's eyes. And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal, and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love, I love you because, now made no sense at all. The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love.

The insight had more the character of a geometric proof. It was as if having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all. The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily communicated. My friend got the point at once. All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit. The experience was not of love growing, but of its being no longer obscured.

Love was, as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages, a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again? It would take me many years to put this experience into context. Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But now I knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be

found in the rubble. 20% of Americans describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously. Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn. And yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support. Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word as in referring to meditation as a spiritual practice, I hear from

fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I've committed a grievous error. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is the translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning breath. Around the 13th century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well. We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle, or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many non-believers now consider all things spiritual to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns. Yes, to walk the aisles of any spiritual bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term, apart from the even more problematic mystical, or the more restrictive contemplative, with which to discuss the efforts

that people make through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present, or to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives. Throughout this book, I discuss certain classically spiritual phenomenon, concepts, and practices in the context of our modern understanding of the human mind, and I cannot do this while restricting myself to the terminology of ordinary experience. So I will use spiritual, mystical, contemplative, and transcendent without further apology. However, I will be precise in describing the experiences and methods that merit these terms. For many years I've been a vocal critic of religion, and I won't ride that same

hobby horse here. I hope that I've been sufficiently energetic on this front that even my most skeptical readers will trust that my bullshit detector remains well calibrated as we advance over this new terrain. Perhaps the following assurance can suffice for the moment. Nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith. Although my focus is on human subjectivity, I am after all talking about the nature of experience itself. All my assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your own life. In fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that. Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes. Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience,

assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind, parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky. In this vein, one finds Einstein's amazement at the intelligibility of nature's laws described as though it were a kind of mystical insight. New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road. They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and other contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology

or quantum mechanics, and that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his identity with the one mind that gave birth to the cosmos In the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science Few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of introspection In fact, most doubt that such abilities even exist. Conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know nothing about science. But there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom, and it is more direct than most people suppose.

Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind. 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. There is now large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain. This field of research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of self-awareness and related mental phenomena. Given recent advances in neuroimaging technology, we no longer face a practical impediment to investigating spiritual insights in the context of science. Spirituality must be distinguished from religion, because people of

every faith and none have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, or a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work. That principle is the subject of this book. The feeling that we call I is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a minotaur in the labyrinth of this book. The feeling that we call I is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is, the sense

of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself, can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of self-transcendence are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing in principle irrational about them. From both a scientific and philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that understanding and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self is what is meant by spirituality in the context of this book. Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available. The landscape of human experience includes deeply transformative insights about the nature of one's own consciousness, and yet it is obvious that these psychological states must be understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and related fields.

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines, such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

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 that we call I. I have not set out to describe all the traditional approaches to spirituality and to weigh their strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond there, and I have devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating it, but getting it in hand requires that we remain true to the deepest principles of scientific skepticism. Where I do discuss specific teachings, such as those of Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, it isn't my purpose to provide anything like a comprehensive account.

Readers who are loyal to any one tradition or who specialize in the academic study of religion may view my approach as the quintessence of arrogance. I consider it, rather, a symptom of impatience. There is barely time enough in a book, or in a life, to get to the point. Just as a modern treatise on weaponry would omit the casting of spells and would very likely ignore the slingshot and the boomerang, I will focus on what I consider the most promising lines of spiritual inquiry. My hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see the nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this

book is to offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves. The Search for Happiness One day you will find yourself outside this world, which is like a mother's womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words, God's earth is vast, name this region from which the saints have come. Jalal ad-Din Rumi. I share the concern expressed by many atheists that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences, but about reality at large. Far too often these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk

of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false, but the fact that most atheists will view a statement like Rumi's as a symptom of the man's derangement grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our least rational opponents. The human mind does indeed contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover. And there is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to the grave. Perhaps I should speak only for

myself here. It seems to me that I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. 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. Most cultures have produced men and women who have found that certain deliberate uses of attention, meditation, yoga, prayer, can transform their perception of the world. Their efforts generally begin with the realization that even in the best of circumstances, happiness is elusive. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones.

We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside, and the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment. Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having one's favorite foods available,

or friends and loved ones within arm's reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend? 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? We are all in some sense living our answer to this question, and most of us are living as though the answer were no. No, nothing is more profound than repeating one's pleasures and avoiding one's pains. Nothing is more profound than seeking satisfaction, sensory, emotional, and intellectual, moment after moment. Just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road. Certain people, however, come to suspect that human existence might encompass more than this.

Many of them are led to suspect this by religion, by the claims of the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated figure. And such people often begin to practice various disciplines of attention as a means of examining their experiences closely enough to see whether a deeper source of well-being exists. They may even sequester themselves in caves or monasteries for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would a person do this? No doubt there are many motives for retreating from the world, and some of them are psychologically unhealthy. In its wisest form, however, the exercise amounts to a very simple experiment. Here is its logic. 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 would 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 to some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations. One clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement, which is essentially what we're talking about, is considered a punishment inside a maximum security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant time alone in a room. And yet contemplatives in many traditions claim to have experienced extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while living in isolation for vast stretches of time.

How should we interpret this? Either the contemplative literature is a catalog of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the name of spirituality and mysticism for millennia. liberating insights under the name of spirituality and mysticism for millennia. Unlike many atheists, I have spent much of my life seeking experiences of the kind that gave rise to the world's religions. Despite the painful results of my first few days alone in the mountains of Colorado, I later studied with a wide range of monks, lamas, yogis, and other contemplatives, some of whom had lived for decades in seclusion doing nothing but meditating. and other contemplatives, some of whom had lived for decades in seclusion doing nothing but meditating. In the process, I spent two years on silent retreat myself, in increments of one week to three months, practicing various techniques of meditation for 12 to 18 hours a day.

I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else, not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness, one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice. I believe that such states of mind have a lot to say about the nature of consciousness and the possibilities of human well-being. Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves. There is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness.

And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional illusion of the self. Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between self-transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist. I have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd. But there are also forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically ethical. As I indicated earlier, for some states of consciousness, a phrase like boundless love does not seem overblown. It is decidedly inconvenient for the forces of reason and secularism that if someone wakes up tomorrow morning feeling boundless love for all sentient beings, the only people likely to acknowledge his experience will be

representatives of one or another Iron Age religion or New Age cult. Most of us are far wiser than we may appear to be. We know how to keep our relationships in order, to use our time well, to improve our health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and to solve many other riddles of existence. But following even the straight and open path to happiness is hard. If your best friend were to ask you how she could live a better life, you would probably find many useful things to say, and yet you might not live that way yourself. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice.

However, there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of religion and therefore have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history. The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath, and our needs and desires seem to multiply by the hour. To spend any time in the presence of a young child is to witness a mind ceaselessly buffeted by joy and sorrow. As we grow older, our laughter and tears become less gratuitous, perhaps, but the same process of change continues. One roiling complex of thought

and emotion is followed by the next, like waves in the ocean. Seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which we are all devoted, whether or not we choose to think in these terms. This is not to say that we want mere pleasure or the easiest possible life. Many things require extraordinary effort to accomplish, and some of us have learned to enjoy the struggle. Any athlete knows that certain kinds of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable.

Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it. And we always face tensions and trade-offs. In some moments we crave excitement and in others rest. We might love the taste of wine and chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. Whatever the context, our minds are perpetually moving, generally toward pleasure or its imagined source, and away from pain. I am not the first person to have noticed this.

Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong our health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness, aging, and death. All forms of media cater to our thirst for information and entertainment. Political and economic institutions seek to ensure our peaceful collaboration with one another, and the police or the military is summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human mind summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its states. We are ever in the process of creating and

repairing a world that our minds want to be in. And wherever we look, we see the evidence of our successes and our failures. 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. Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph, not merely in the end but in every moment. Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can't get enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment,

you find that you are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon, and yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have room for dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste in your mouth must be banished by a drink of water. The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let's take a look. Yes, there it is. You're warm now, but you notice that your sweater is seeing better days. Does it make you look carefree or disheveled? Perhaps it's time to go shopping for something new. And so it goes. 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? Might it be possible to feel much better, in every sense of better, than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change? Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such questions could well be yes. And a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self. Those who have never tasted such peace of mind might view these assertions as highly suspect. Nevertheless,

it is a fact that a condition of selfless well-being is there to be glimpsed in each moment. Of course, I'm not claiming to have experienced all such states, but I meet many people who appear to have experienced none of them, and these people often profess to have no interest in spiritual life. This is not surprising. The phenomenon of self-transcendence is generally sought and interpreted in a religious context, and it is precisely the sort of experience that tends to increase a person's faith. How many Christians, having once felt their hearts grow as wide as the world, will decide to ditch Christianity and proclaim their atheism? Not many, I suspect. How many people who have never felt anything of the kind become atheists? I don't know, but there is little

doubt that these mental states act as a kind of filter. The faithful count them in support of ancient dogma, and their absence gives non-believers further reason to reject religion. This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers and listeners will have no idea what I'm talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences, and might assume that the assertions I'm making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge. They may think they know exactly what I'm describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both of these attitudes present impressive obstacles to

understanding spirituality in the way that I intend. I can only hope that, whatever your background, you will approach the exercises presented in this book with an open mind. you will approach the exercises presented in this book with an open mind. Religion, East and West We are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same. All teach the same ethical principles. All urge their followers to contemplate the same divine reality. All are equally wise, compassionate, and true within their sphere, or equally divisive and false, depending on one's view. No serious adherents of any faith can believe

these things, because most religions make claims about reality that are mutually incompatible. Exceptions to this rule exist, but they provide little relief from what is essentially a zero-sum contest of all against all. The polytheism of Hinduism allows it to digest parts of many other faiths. If Christians insist that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, for instance, Hindus can make him yet another avatar of Vishnu without losing any sleep. But this spirit of inclusiveness points in one direction only, and even it has its limits. Hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas,

the law of karma and rebirth, a multiplicity of gods, that almost every other major religion decries. It is impossible for any faith, no matter how elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another. Devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe theirs is the one true and complete revelation, because that is what their holy books say of themselves. Only secularists and New Age dabblers can mistake the modern tactic of interfaith dialogue for an underlying unity of all religions. I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is

an artifact of language. Religion is a term like sports. Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous. Free solo rock climbing, for instance. Some are safer but synonymous with violence, as in mixed martial arts. Some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower, like bowling. To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

The same could be said of spirituality. The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights, nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don't always point to the same underlying reality, and when they do, they don't do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them. Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. 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. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry. In one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address the same reality, because people of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths. Any view of consciousness in the cosmos that is available to the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone. It is not surprising, therefore, that individual Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists have given voice to some of the same insights and intuitions.

This merely indicates that human cognition and emotion run deeper than religion. But we knew that, didn't we? It does not suggest that all religions understand our spiritual possibilities equally well. One way of missing this point is to declare that all spiritual teachings are inflections of the same perennial philosophy. The writer Aldous Huxley brought this idea into prominence by publishing an anthology by that title. Here is how he justified the idea. Philosophia Perennis, the phrase was coined by Leibniz, but the thing, the metaphysic that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds,

the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to or even identical with divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds, the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to or even identical with divine reality, the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the imminent and transcendent ground of all being, the thing as immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this highest common factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than 25 centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again

from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all principal languages of Asia and Europe. Although Huxley was being reasonably cautious in his wording, this notion of a highest common factor uniting all religions begins to break apart the moment one presses for details. For instance, the Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith-based. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the human soul is conceived as genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is some combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of God's love and grace provide some relief.

But the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about his supremacy. The Eastern tradition represents a very different picture of reality, and its highest teachings, found within the various schools of Buddhism and the nominally Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta, explicitly transcend dualism. By their lights, consciousness itself is identical to the very reality that one might otherwise mistake for God. While these teachings make metaphysical claims that any serious student of science should find incredible, they center on a range of experiences that the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rule out of bounds. Of course, it is true that specific Jewish,

Christian, and Muslim mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Advaita, but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been regularly exiled or killed. Like Huxley, anyone determined to find a happy synthesis among spiritual traditions will notice that the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart often sounded very much like a Buddhist. Quote, the knower and the known are one. Simple people

imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge, end quote. But he also sounded like a man bound to be excommunicated by his church, as he was. Had Eckhart lived a little longer, it seems certain that he would have been dragged into the street and burned alive for these expansive ideas. That is a telling difference between Christianity and Buddhism. In the same vein, it is misleading to hold up the Sufi mystic Al-Halaj as a representative of Islam. He was a Muslim, yes, but he suffered the most grisly death imaginable at the hands of his co-religionists for presuming to be one with God.

Both Eckhart and Al-Halaj gave voice to an experience of self-transcendence that any human being can in principle enjoy. However, their views were not consistent with the central teachings of their faiths. The Indian tradition is comparatively free of problems of this kind. Although the teachings of Buddhism and Advaita are embedded in more or less conventional religions, they contain empirical insights about the nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith. One can practice most techniques of Buddhist meditation, or the method of self-inquiry of Advaita, and experience the advertised changes in one's consciousness without ever believing in the law of karma or in the miracles attributed to Indian mystics. 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 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's soul is an illusion, one will be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the Indus. There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences and suitable minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based and probably delusional practice, whatever its effects, isn't the same as investigating the nature of one's

mind absent any doctrinal assumptions. Statements of this kind may seem starkly antagonistic toward Abrahamic religions, but they are nonetheless true. One can speak about Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. The same cannot be said of Christianity or Islam. Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at least as far as Alexander's campaign in India, where the young conqueror and his pet philosophers encountered naked ascents. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.