Part 4 (conclusion) of the review of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris
Drugs
Many pages are devoted to a discussion of Near Death Experiences, although the reason for this is unclear – it is quite disproportionate, given the supposed topic of the book. He rightly condemns them as having nothing to do with spirituality, since they are merely the result of a cocktail of naturally produced chemicals in the brain. But then, inexplicably, he lauds hallucinogens as a mechanism for artificially inducing spiritual experiences, when all that they do is introduce a cocktail of man-made chemicals into the brain! You know full well (afterwards) that any experience you might have had was chemically created and therefore unreal. How can it possibly teach you anything useful? This is the height of irresponsibility and should have been rejected by the publisher.
He says that “everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness”. No it isn’t! You cannot alter consciousness. So-called ‘states’ of consciousness are still only non-dual Consciousness reflected in the mind in slightly different ways. You can change your state of consciousness and the condition of the mind also changes, but it is the same Consciousness that pervades all the states.
Hallucinogens cannot be compared with meditation. The former induce a state of mind which is totally beyond our control while, with the latter, we are always completely in control. And this is the point! The purpose of meditation is not to promote feel good states of ‘oneness with the universe’ but to enable us to cultivate mental discipline and discriminatory faculties so that we may follow a proven teaching methodology and gain Self-knowledge.
Some Misunderstood Definitions
Harris fails to understand some of the most basic concepts in ‘spirituality’; as soon as he switches from neuroscience to metaphysics, explanations become very confused:
. ‘Omniscient’ in reference to one who is ‘enlightened’. He makes sarcastic remarks about their scientific and quiz-performance abilities. Advaita uses the term sarvaj~na in this context, meaning literally ‘all-knowing’. But it does not mean knowing ‘things’; indeed it means knowing that there are no things at all. It means knowing that everything is non-dual Consciousness; as the Upanishads put it, ‘knowing That, knowing which all else is known’.
. He does not seem to appreciate the ‘goal’ of spirituality, certainly not as far as Advaita is concerned. He says that, as regards ‘the true goal of meditation’, it “encompasses many of the experiences that traditional mystics claim for themselves.” As already pointed out, self-realization has nothing to do with experience. Nor does it have anything to do with mystics who claim experiences. So-called mystics who have experiences or extraordinary ‘powers’ (siddhi-s) are not Advaitins at all but (probably) followers of Yoga philosophy. Being “endowed with clairvoyance and other miraculous powers” does not indicate someone to whom one should look for spiritual guidance! “Losing one’s sense of being a separate self” and “experiencing a kind of boundless, open awareness; feeling at one with the cosmos” probably means that one is on psychedelic drugs. Certainly such a person is not indicated as having Self-knowledge! Those who practice the Buddhist technique of metta meditation or those who take MDMA may well experience ‘self-transcending love’ (whatever that might be) but one is bound to ask: ‘So what?’ They will discover nothing about the nature of reality thereby.
. The key term ‘enlightenment’ is not understood at all. He says, for example, that he knows (‘from experience!) “that it is possible to be far more enlightened than I tend to be”. Self-knowledge is binary – you are either enlightened or you are not. I very much doubt that “in one sense, the Buddhist concept of enlightenment really is just the epitome of ‘stress reduction’” but this is emphatically not the Advaita concept! It has nothing to do with happiness or suffering, love, compassion, pleasure, pain, being in the moment… nothing to do with life’s problems. The body has physical problems; the mind has intellectual and emotional problems; the physical body is born and dies. Who-I-really-am is not born and will not die; it is unlimited, non-dual Consciousness. At one point, he implies that it is ‘the experience of self-transcendence’, whatever that means – it sounds like samAdhi. Even worse than this, he says that “if… you take the right drug, you will know what it is like to be enlightened”! This is a deplorable claim and shows how completely the author has failed to understand what it does mean. Virtual reality is NOT reality!
What has a beginning in time will also have an end – samAdhi is not Self-knowledge. He asks “Is true freedom even possible?” It is already the case, as anyone who knows Advaita would appreciate.
. It is not possible for there to be a more important term than ‘Consciousness’, since (according to Advaita) that is all that there is in reality. Harris says that “Investigating the nature of consciousness itself – and transforming its contents through deliberate training – is the basis of spiritual life.” Advaita tells us that Conciousness (Brahman) is partless, attributeless, changeless, eternal. Accordingly, the quoted sentence is quite meaningless. Talking about the process of acquiring knowledge, he says “these processes occur outside consciousness”. Nothing occurs outside Coonsciousness: he means ‘awareness’. He says that “Consciousness is the substance of any experience.” This is actually true, though not in the way that Harris means – Consciousness is not experienced; it is what enables us to have experiences!
Conclusion
The way in which Harris sees Enlightenment, and the manner of gaining it, are possibly best explained by what he says under ‘The Paradox of Acceptance’: “The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves.” This seems to be the aim of the book – and it probably succeeds better than many of the ‘self-help’ books around today. But it takes the reader no nearer to finding out who he/she really is. And it does a great disservice to Advaita Vedanta by totally misrepresenting its aims and teaching.
This has been a ‘hard-hitting’ review of the book and it might be thought unfair, since it is actually quite good in the ‘self-help’ category that is typical of the typical High Street bookstore. But its title claims that it is a ‘guide to spirituality’ and its author claims to know Advaita and on those grounds it must be condemned, since demonstrably neither is true. The book is intelligent and well-written but unfortunately lacks understanding.
*** End of Review ***