Brief Thoughts on Waking up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris

In some ways I wish this book would have been published a year earlier, because so much of what I have experienced and thought about in the last year aligns almost perfectly with the themes in this book. It could have given me a head start on the path I was taking. Reading this book now, it seems thoroughly familiar.

To explain: last year at this time I began meditating and taking an interest in spiritual experience divorced from the burden of maintaining unverifiable beliefs (I had previously been actively religious). I took an interest in Vipassana meditation, using techniques from the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition and following the "stages of insight" laid out originally in the Visuddhimagga. I also became interested in Advaita Vedanta and self inquiry and struggled to reconcile the two paths in my mind (gradual vs. sudden). I  experimented with the "having no head" approach to perception that he describes and have taken hallucinogenics, considering their role on the spiritual path. I have read neuroscience books debunking the "illusion of self" from a naturalist point of view, and have considered the idea of brains being filters of universal mind. I could go on and on. 

I think the value of this book for me is that it beautifully weaves together and confirms what I had already found to be true. There is an intimacy to knowing that other people are reading this and being exposed to practices and ideas that have so enthralled me. 

There are a couple of quibbles that I have.

For one, I think he slightly misconstrues the Vipassana approach. While the means of Vipassana is cultivating concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity, a gradual process which implies somebody who is practicing (i.e. dualistic in a sense), the whole point is to more clearly and directly recognize the "three marks of existence", i.e., that all sensations and thoughts, including the ones normally thought to comprise the self (like the sensations behind the eyes), are inherently impermanent, unsatisfactory, and impersonal. According to my understanding and experience, if done correctly, it is just as "direct" as the other approaches he describes; in fact it all boils down to the same basic thing, just coming from a slightly different perspective. 

He also doesn't address the fact that, despite its evanescent nature, the sense of self obviously evolved over time through natural selection because it provided an evolutionary advantage at some point. It may very well be true that it is no longer useful to thrive in the 21st century, but to dismiss it out of hand and call it an illusion, without placing it in a historical context, is kind of misleading.