For the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s new book is a guide to meditation as a rational spiritual practice informed by neuroscience and psychology.
From multiple New York Times bestselling author, neuroscientist, and “new atheist” Sam Harris, Waking Up is for the 30 percent of Americans who follow no religion, but who suspect that Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and the other saints and sages of history could not have all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. Throughout the book, Harris argues that there are important truths to be found in the experiences of such contemplatives—and, therefore, that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow.
Waking Up is part seeker’s memoir and part exploration of the scientific underpinnings of spirituality. No other book marries contemplative wisdom and modern science in this way, and no author other than Sam Harris—a scientist, philosopher, and famous skeptic—could write it.
I enjoyed reading it I imagine the book will come under a barrage of criticism, either from “skeptics” who find the spirituality side of the book unpalatable (“Sam Harris goes native!”) and also from the “spirituality” side of the spectrum, which similarly might find the stretches of scientific or logical argument (or attitudes to most religions) grating. However I found the book to be both original (in a broad field of other secular mindfulness/spirituality books), sincere and clear. I…
An important milestone along the road to perfecting a rational understanding of the essence of spirituality. If anything uncontroversial can be said about Sam Harris, it’s that his work never fails to inspire strong and colorful opinions from just about everyone who encounters it. Depending on whom you ask, he may be one of the more brilliant thinkers around, a complete hack, or any of a mind-boggling array of subtle gradations in between. All of these views have arguable merit, and there will be many who go into Waking Up with a panoply of preconceived notions about what they might find here. Much…
Sam Harris Has Real Guts This is an important book in many ways. Perhaps most important because Sam Harris has, for the past several years, been a strong and outspoken critic of organized religion of all stripes. And one thing Harris can do better than almost anyone else, is make his case both clearly and powerfully without any added garbage.If you’ve watched his many videos on YouTube, you know the man can make an argument and stand his ground without wavering one iota. And the depth of his research is…