Review: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Review of Sam Harris’s Waking Up

This book wasn’t written for me, but it is awfully interesting, and I respect it for the influence it’s had on some people I really respect. (Shout out to my brother Ed!)

To begin with, I’m frustrated by the frame of Harris’s project. As his subtitle suggests – “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion” – he’s trying to justify his interest in spirituality to an audience inclined to be skeptical of it. I get the impression that his ideal audience for this part of the book is the late Christopher Hitchens, whom Harris acknowledges as a friend and influence. If you are an avowed atheist, as Harris and Hitchens are, then you no doubt look on most interrogations of the spiritual as intrinsically flawed. If you insist always on logic and reason, then there’s a lot to be suspicious about when someone starts talking about consciousness and the illusion of the self.

In his first chapter or so, Harris rehearses a quick set of reasons to dismiss traditional religion entirely. As he sees it, it’s a series of “myths, superstitions, and taboos,” a set of harmfully distracting fairy tales. As he makes that case, though, he relies on a lot of assumptions among his target audience. Hitchens would no doubt nod in agreement with such a phrase, but what about the rest of us? (It doesn’t help, by the way, that Harris seems to have little understanding of the crucial and nuanced ways in which Judaism is different from the other Abrahamic traditions he speaks about. For that matter, I suspect he’s mistaken about Islam and its Sufi traditions as well as Christianity and many of its esoteric strains.)

There’s no reason for me to rehearse the argument here – in brief, I’d argue that Harris conflates what I think of as a crisis of literalism, the misapprehension by contemporary “faithful” of texts that previous generations understood more poetically, with what we’d both agree is something like idolatry. But I’d argue as well that there’s no reason Harris needs to rehearse this argument here either. He frames his thoughtful discussion of spirituality and meditative practice with this quick, and in many ways condescending, overview. It’s like a devotee of Picasso and Matisse trying to explain why there might be something worth valuing in a comic book, or a classically trained dancer explaining why we should pay attention to hip-hop dance. Those metaphors fail, though, because there are thoughtful “highbrow” thinkers who find a way to value both types of art. Harris seems to feel he has to start from the sense of religion as flawed and harmful before he can try to extract elements of value from it.

All that’s just the frame, though. The main thrust of Harris’s book is a thoughtful take on what spirituality is and how we might come to study it through the tools of self-reflection and meditation. Starting from his background as a neuroscientist, one who has spent much of his life trying to learn from practitioners of meditation across the world, he bolsters his description of what it means to meditate with what’s taking place inside the brain. (There remains a trace here of what I call the “error of his frame.” It’s as if he’s trying to tell the Hitchens of the world that – don’t worry, bro’ – there’s still a lot of science behind the soft sounding stuff.)

As I read all this, I am intrigued by what it would be like to be a successful meditator, and I am led to think more carefully about reports from a couple good friends who say that regular meditation has improved the quality of their lives. That part of this book strikes me as meaningful, and I’m not sure anyone else could have written it – certainly no one else I’m aware of.

And, if it feels like I might be quibbling with what I call the “frame,” I find myself resisting the thrust of this part on a more thoughtful level.

The fact is, I’m a bad meditator. I enjoy yoga, but I have learned it’s agonizing for me to do it without a sense of how time is passing. (In fact, I have to sneak a watch in with me. So long as I know where I am in the hour, I can relax. When I lose sight of that, I feel a vague panic that time might have stopped. It’s “against the rules,” but I enjoy the experience only when I am hyper-conscious of time rather than lost within it.)

And, while I acknowledge the value of others’ experience, I don’t apologize for my own resistance. Good for others – and I mean that without condescension or sarcasm – if they can find strength and calm in discovering that the self is an illusion. I find comfort in the idea that I’m called always to better my “self,” however illusory that notion may be. I respect traditions that push toward a sense of the self as quantum, but I also respect the Western philosophical tradition founded on Socrates’s challenge to “know thyself.” When I write in the essay tradition of Montaigne, I understand myself as limning my own self, my own experience, and I value the experience of encountering others attempting the same thing. In that light, I think of Kurt Vonnegut, who was famously hostile to meditation and its practices (supposedly because his first wife got “lost” in such experience as he saw it). Instead, Vonnegut insisted that there was a “Western” practice of meditation. It was, he said, called reading, and he understood it as the experience of discovering (as opposed to losing) a sense of self through its similarities and contrasts with others.

I’m not dismissing what Harris is arguing here, and I don’t want to do him the disservice of casting his arguments as absolute. While he focuses here on the power of meditation, he’s also clearly spent much of his life pursuing science and other forms of intellectual inquiry. Still, I can’t help but put the end-frame on my own take on his work:

I have heard a number of times, but most movingly at my nephew’s bar mitzvah, the story of a rabbi who used to insist that we carry notes in our left and right pockets. On one he’d write, “I am the center of the universe.” On the other, “I am meaningless before the divine.” The idea was to strike a balance between a sense of self as all-encompassing and a sense of it as, to steal from the traditions Harris valorizes, illusory. It was also, I like to think, an effort to strike a balance between means of inquiry. It takes doubt – a doubt that Harris admirably uses through his application of science and reason to these questions – but I believe as well that it takes faith – a kind of faith that I think Harris too readily disdains – to accept the other crucial half of our place within the world.

I admire Harris for shining doubt on aspects of spirituality, for reclaiming them for the Hitchens of the world for whom they would otherwise be inaccessible. I also think he misses a big part of the picture in his seeming inability to look through the lens of faith at the same phenomena.




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