Part 3 of the review of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris
Read Part 2
Other Religions and Non-duality
It is not at all obvious why ‘religion’ should be so disparaged. He recognizes “the needless confusion and harm that inevitably arise from the doctrines of faith-based religions”. The literal meaning of ‘religion’ is ‘joining back’, from the Latin ‘re ligare’. Its essential aim (and, I suggest, one rather more worthy) has nothing to do with psychology or personal happiness but with the nature of reality itself. It is difficult to understand how someone could place more value on a drug-induced experience than upon use of reason applied to scriptural revelation.
Even Harris’ perennial complaints about religions in general would lose their bite if he only recognized that most religions have an esoteric element which is only made available to those who are sufficiently qualified. Thus, Hinduism has Advaita, Islam has Sufism, Christianity has the Gospel of St. Thomas, Judaism has the Kabbalah, China has Taoism and Zen. The point is that one has to understand them before one can justifiably criticize them. Otherwise, it is no better than the mediaeval church condemning the early scientists. Harris states that “the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam rule out of bounds (the metaphysical claims of those schools of Buddhism and of Advaita which ‘explicitly transcend dualism’)”. Religions are in such a mess today because of centuries of Chinese Whispers; with people who have personal agendas responsible for propagating their misunderstandings. The so-called ‘science’ of non-dualism is in this state from the outset!
Here is an early statement which illustrates the profound depths of misunderstanding of the topic about which Harris claims to be writing: “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.”
I am not going to say much about Buddhism here, since I freely acknowledge that I know little about it – my area of expertise is Advaita. (However, I do know that the Advaita philosophers Gaudapada and Shankara systematically refuted the various Buddhist philosophies, which even contradict each other, in around the 8th – 9th CE.)
He appears to advocate Dzogchen Buddhism as being similar to, but better than, Advaita. It is better because “it makes it absolutely clear that one must practice this insight (i.e. into the nonduality of consciousness’)”. How could any practice be non-dual? The story which follows implies that it is all to do with absence of thought. But enlightenment has nothing to do with absence of thought. Both thought and action will (apparently) continue at the empirical level irrespective of whether the supposed subject is enlightened or not.
He clearly has little respect for either Buddhism or Advaita, when he says that his purpose in writing the book is to encourage contemplative insights “without accepting the metaphysical ideas that they inspired in ignorant and isolated peoples of the past”. And he claims he is not being arrogant!
Meditation
Another myth propagated by Harris is that ‘being in the moment’ is somehow key to ‘enlightenment’. This idea almost certainly stems from Ramana and Poonja. Its relevance is that only if one is present, and not partly day-dreaming or conducting an internal discussion with oneself, can one pay attention to a guru and assimilate the teaching. It is a practice which should precede self-inquiry; it is not equivalent to self-inquiry. No matter how much one may ‘be in the present’ or do meditation, one is never going to realize the truth that there is only Consciousness and that ‘I am That’.
Harris spends a significant portion of the book extolling the value of meditation as prescribed by the Buddhist ‘Mindfulness’ technique and with this I have no complaint. It sounds very similar to techniques with which I am familiar and I can corroborate his stated benefits. Anyone following the guidelines and practicing regularly (twice per day for a number of years) would be certain to see physical and psychological benefits, reduction of stress and so on… but zero spiritual benefits, according to a correct understanding of that term.
We do it, he suggests, because we want to ‘improve our experience’! And maybe that is true for the majority of so-called spiritual seekers. But, if they are ever to ‘find’ anything, this mistaken notion has to be abandoned. “The deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self”, he says. I guess what he means is ‘freedom from the dominion of the ego’, but he then says that seeking such freedom, “as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one’s apparent bondage.” There is some truth here – we are already free – but still much confusion. The one who begins the search is the ego. There is a mistaken belief that ‘I’ am suffering, ‘I’ need to get out of this etc. But the end of seeking, the gaining of Self-knowledge, is the discovery that the real ‘I’ was mistakenly identifying with the body and mind and is not suffering at all. Indeed, the real ‘I’ is eternally free and unlimited.
There is no denying that much of the book makes interesting reading, although ‘interest’ is of course not the same as knowledge. For example, he gives an interesting ‘thought-experiment’ of a man teleporting to Mars. The man is ‘scanned’ and the data transmitted. As soon as the reconstruction has completed on Mars, the source data is deleted (i.e. the man on Earth is destroyed). And he asks whether ‘you’ are killed, since an identical copy is now walking around on Mars. But his debate on the topic totally ignores the point made by Advaita that who-the-man-really-is is neither the one left on Earth nor the one appearing on Mars, and that it is not possible for anyone to be ‘killed’ since no-one was ever born in the first place. He identifies ‘my’ consciousness with ‘this’ mind and this is precisely the error that we all make and which Advaita sets out to correct. Enlightenment is all about dispelling this wrong notion.
This is a pity because his general descriptions of the mystery of ‘who I am’ and personal consciousness are very good; both observant and helpful. I loved the quote “Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.” But they are useful in the context of improving one’s quality of life and mental equanimity; they have nothing to do with Self-knowledge. There are some perceptive insights but one feels that he is missing the background knowledge to be able to rationalize these and convert them into explanations that would aid true understanding. For example, he could have turned the sections on thought, consciousness and self into something really useful if he had encountered the concept of chidAbhAsa. (The ‘self’ (or ego) of the mind is not who we are; it can be understood as a ‘reflection’ of the real Self. The ‘mind’ is a phenomenon associated with a brain which has evolved to a particular degree, enabling it to reflect (and thereby ‘manifest’) Consciousness. Despite this, it is in itself inanimate, and only exhibits life whilst ‘animated’ by Consciousness.)
He devotes quite a few pages to the experiments of Douglas Harding. These are useful for alerting the ordinary person to the possibility of there being more to self and world than is normally considered. If such a person also happens to be generally dissatisfied with life and his or her unsatisfactory pursuits of happiness, then he/she may just become a seeker. Harris’ metaphor of using the window as a mirror is also a good one in this context. But no amount of practical effort and ‘looking’ will ever reveal that ‘I am Consciousness’ and ‘Everything is Consciousness’. Someone has to tell you this and then answer all of your doubts to your satisfaction.
Then he strays into the domain of Out-of-body experiences, ‘rubber hands’ and the like. This is another field which, though undoubtedly interesting, only tells us about the brain. The brain is an instrument. Neuroscience will tell us nothing about the self that is using it. And none of this has anything to do with the title of the book.
*** Go to Part 4 (conclusion) ***