#3 — WAKING UP — Chapter One
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Summary
Sam Harris describes his first experience with solitude, and how it changed his life forever. He explains how the experience changed the course of his entire life, and the lessons he learned along the way, about how we should live our lives in the present moment, rather than in the past or the past, and about the importance of being present in the here and now. This episode is the first part of a two-part conversation with Sam Harris about his first encounter with solitude and the impact it had on his life and the life of those around him. The second part of the conversation will be released later this month. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships and use coupon code: MONDREAMS to receive 10% off your first purchase when you sign up for MONDETOMETRY. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, it s made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, who are the ones making the podcast possible. Thank you for being a supporter of the podcast and making it possible for us to keep making sense of it all. Please consider becoming a supporter by becoming a patron. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. You'll get access to the full-length episodes of Making Sense Podcasts, unlimited access to all our premium episodes, plus a 20% discount when you become a patron! Subscribe, rate and review discount, and get 20% off the price of your first month, plus free shipping throughout the rest of the month! You get 10% discount on the entire month of the year, plus an additional 3 months of the entire year, including VIP membership when you upgrade your ad-plan, plus 3 months, and an additional 2 months for a year of your choice of the MONDETA membership gets you access to The Making Sense podcast, plus two months of VIP membership, and a FREE shipping offer, for the choice of 1-month of VIP access to VIP membership and VIP access, and 7 months for two months only that gets you gets you get a discount of $40/month, and two months, plus they get full-choice of the Making Sense starts only $50/choice, and all other places that get full service, plus VIP access and a discount offers, plus all other options, plus 7 months get $5/place that starts in-depth pricing.
Transcript
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I once participated in a 23-day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado.
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If the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the
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world's mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day.
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What was in essence a forced march through hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated
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in a ritual known as the Solo, where we were finally permitted to rest, alone on the outskirts
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of a gorgeous alpine lake, for three days of fasting and contemplation.
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I had just turned 16, and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother's
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After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the lake, the promising young man I
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imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and boredom.
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I filled the pages of my journal not with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher,
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or mystic, but with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant
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Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution
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had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate
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I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and starlight
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with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence to be a source of perfect misery
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for which I could not see so much as a glimmer of my own contribution.
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My letters home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any written at Shiloh or
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So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our party, most of whom were a decade
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older than I, described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational
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I simply didn't know what to make of their claims to happiness.
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How could someone's happiness increase when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction
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At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me.
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And I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were
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This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in
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need of improvement, when your goals are unrealized, when you are struggling to find a career, or
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Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.
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Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved.
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If you're perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere,
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it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life, you won't enjoy any
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Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that
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But what is the real significance of every item on such a list?
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Everything we want to accomplish, to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better
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job, is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy
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I'm not denying the importance of achieving one's goals, maintaining one's health, or
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But most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying
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Each of us is looking for a path back to the present.
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We're trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
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Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play
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How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience,
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Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages, but a growing body of scientific research
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A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the winter of 1987, I took the
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drug 3,4-methylene-dioxy-N-methylamphetamine, MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, and my sense
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of the human mind's potential shifted profoundly.
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Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at dance clubs and raves in the 1990s, at that time I
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didn't know anyone of my generation who had tried it.
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One evening, a few months before my 20th birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug.
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The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the conditions of Dionysian abandon under
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We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and
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engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked its way into our heads.
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Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar, marijuana and alcohol, MDMA produced
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In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that
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However, at that age, I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my
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Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly
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seemed as profound as they now seem pedestrian on the page.
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That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside
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In fact, the inside appeared to restructure my mind.
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My capacity for envy, for instance, the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success
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of another person, seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a
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I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own
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What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was?
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If I could have bestowed these gifts on him, I would have.
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Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.
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A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but the general feeling
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remained one of absolute sobriety and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had
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It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life, and yet
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the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward.
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I was simply talking to my friend about what I don't recall, and I realized that I had ceased
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I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment,
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ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention
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I was no longer watching myself through another person's eyes.
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And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life
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I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that
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if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully
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Love was at bottom impersonal, and deeper than any personal history could justify.
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Indeed, a transactional form of love, I love you because, now made no sense at all.
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The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by
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I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love.
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The insight had more the character of a geometric proof.
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It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood
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The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered that this epiphany about
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the universality of love could be readily communicated.
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All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that
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It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without
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The experience was not of love growing, but of its being no longer obscured.
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Love was, as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages, a state of being.
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It would take me many years to put this experience into context.
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Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition
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But now I knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had
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not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds.
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I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous
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But I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.
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20% of Americans describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.
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Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality
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from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
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It is to assert two important truths simultaneously.
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Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn.
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And yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture
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One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support.
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Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual.
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Whenever I use the word as in referring to meditation as a spiritual practice, I hear from fellow skeptics
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and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error.
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The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is the translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning
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Around the 13th century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural
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We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle, or of certain volatile
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Nevertheless, many non-believers now consider all things spiritual to be contaminated by medieval
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Yes, to walk the aisles of any spiritual bookstores to confront the yearning and credulity
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But there is no other term, apart from the even more problematic mystical, or the more restrictive,
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contemplative, with which to discuss the efforts that people make through meditation, psychedelics,
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or other means to fully bring their minds into the present, or to induce non-ordinary
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And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.
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Throughout this book, I discuss certain classically spiritual phenomenon, concepts, and practices
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in the context of our modern understanding of the human mind.
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And I cannot do this while restricting myself to the terminology of ordinary experience.
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So I will use spiritual, mystical, contemplative, and transcendent without further apology.
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However, I will be precise in describing the experiences and methods that merit these terms.
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For many years, I have been a vocal critic of religion, and I won't ride that same hobby horse here.
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I hope that I have been sufficiently energetic on this front that even my most skeptical readers
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will trust that my bullshit detector remains well-calibrated as we advance over this new terrain.
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Perhaps the following assurance can suffice for the moment.
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Nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith.
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Although my focus is on human subjectivity, I am, after all, talking about the nature of
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experience itself, all my assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your own life.
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In fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that.
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Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of
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Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that
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it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind, parental love, artistic inspiration,
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In this vein, one finds Einstein's amazement at the intelligibility of nature's laws, described
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New-age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road.
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They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective
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experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics.
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Here we are told that the Buddha and other contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology, or quantum
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mechanics, and that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his identity
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with the one mind that gave birth to the cosmos.
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In the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science.
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Few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of introspection.
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In fact, most doubt that such abilities even exist.
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Conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know nothing about science, but there is a
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connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom, and it is more direct than most people
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Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe,
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they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind.
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Positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills.
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And the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.
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There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation.
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Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain
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perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.
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This field of research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of self-awareness and
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Given recent advances in neuroimaging technology, we no longer face a practical impediment to
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investigating spiritual insights in the context of science.
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Spirituality must be distinguished from religion.
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Because people of every faith, and none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences.
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While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious
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Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, or a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy,
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bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence and support of their traditional beliefs.
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Because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another.
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There is no discrete self or ego living like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain.
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And the feeling that there is, the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes,
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looking out at a world that is separate from yourself, can be altered or entirely extinguished.
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Although such experiences of self-transcendence are generally thought about in religious terms,
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there is nothing in principle irrational about them.
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From both a scientific and philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of
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the way things are. Deepening that understanding and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the
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self is what is meant by spirituality in the context of this book.
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Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available.
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The landscape of human experience includes deeply transformative insights about the nature
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of one's own consciousness. And yet it is obvious that these psychological states must be
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understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and related fields.
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I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and
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everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines, such as the idea that
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Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or the death in defense of
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Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion,
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moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true
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repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience
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in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is. This book is by turns a
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seeker's memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a
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philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives,
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the feeling of self that we call I. I have not set out to describe all the traditional approaches
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to spirituality and to weigh their strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the diamond
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from the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond there, and I've devoted a fair amount of
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my life to contemplating it. But getting it in hand requires that we remain true to the deepest
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principles of scientific skepticism. Where I do discuss specific teachings, such as those of
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Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, it isn't my purpose to provide anything like a comprehensive account.
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Readers who are loyal to any one tradition or who specialize in the academic study of religion
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may view my approach as the quintessence of arrogance. I consider it rather a symptom of
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impatience. There is barely time enough in a book or in a life to get to the point. Just as a modern
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treatise on weaponry would omit the casting of spells and would very likely ignore the slingshot
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and the boomerang, I will focus on what I consider the most promising lines of spiritual inquiry.
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My hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see the nature of their own minds in
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a new light. A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and
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from the lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to offer readers a clear
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view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves.
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One day you will find yourself outside this world, which is like a mother's womb.
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You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that
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the words, God's earth is vast, name this region from which the saints have come.
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I share the concern expressed by many atheists that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to
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make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences, but about reality at large.
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Far too often these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and
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intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of
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spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposter, or self-deception. This is
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a problem because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical
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seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences
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are false. But the fact that most atheists will view a statement like Rumi's as a symptom of the
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man's derangement, grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our least rational opponents.
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The human mind does indeed contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.
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And there is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention,
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as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to the grave.
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Perhaps I should speak only for myself here. It seems to me that I spend much of my waking life in a
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neurotic trance. My experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists.
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It is possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time.
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Most cultures have produced men and women who have found that certain deliberate uses of attention,
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meditation, yoga, prayer, can transform their perception of the world. Their efforts generally
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begin with the realization that even in the best of circumstances, happiness is elusive. We seek
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pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We
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surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food.
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But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional
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success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day,
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but then they subside, and the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other
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unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment. Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis
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for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source
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of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance
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of pain? Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having one's favorite foods available,
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or friends and loved ones within arm's reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to
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on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one's desires are gratified,
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in spite of life's difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?
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We are all, in some sense, living our answer to this question, and most of us are living as though
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the answer were no. No, nothing is more profound than repeating one's pleasures and avoiding one's
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pains. Nothing is more profound than seeking satisfaction, sensory, emotional, and intellectual,
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moment after moment. Just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road.
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Certain people, however, come to suspect that human existence might encompass more than this.
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Many of them are led to suspect this by religion, by the claims of the Buddha or Jesus or some other
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celebrated figure. And such people often begin to practice various disciplines of attention as a means
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of examining their experiences closely enough to see whether a deeper source of well-being exists.
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They may even sequester themselves in caves or monasteries for months or years at a time to
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facilitate this process. Why would a person do this? No doubt there are many motives for retreating from
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the world, and some of them are psychologically unhealthy. In its wisest form, however, the exercise amounts
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to a very simple experiment. Here is its logic. If there exists a source of psychological well-being
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that does not depend upon merely gratifying one's desires, then it should be present even when all
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the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness would be available to a person who
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has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced her career and material possessions,
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and gone off to a cave or to some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations.
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One clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement,
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which is essentially what we're talking about, is considered a punishment inside a maximum
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security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most people still prefer
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the company of others to spending any significant time alone in a room. And yet contemplatives in many
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traditions claim to have experienced extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while living in
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isolation for vast stretches of time. How should we interpret this? Either the contemplative
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literature as a catalog of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people
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have been having liberating insights under the name of spirituality and mysticism for millennia.
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Unlike many atheists, I have spent much of my life seeking experiences of the kind that gave rise to
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the world's religions. Despite the painful results of my first few days alone in the mountains of
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Colorado, I later studied with a wide range of monks, lamas, yogis, and other contemplatives,
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some of whom had lived for decades in seclusion doing nothing but meditating. In the process,
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I spent two years on silent retreat myself, in increments of one week to three months,
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practicing various techniques of meditation for 12 to 18 hours a day.
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I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time,
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doing nothing else, not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort
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to observe the contents of consciousness, one has experiences that are generally unavailable to
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people who have not undertaken a similar practice. I believe that such states of mind have a lot to
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say about the nature of consciousness and the possibilities of human well-being. Leaving aside
00:23:40.440
the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have
00:23:45.220
discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we
00:23:49.940
are having with ourselves. There is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that
00:23:54.520
pops into consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional illusion of the
00:23:59.400
self. Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between self-transcendence and living
00:24:05.880
ethically. Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely
00:24:11.140
exist. I have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily good just before
00:24:16.700
they detonate themselves in a crowd. But there are also forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically
00:24:21.800
ethical. As I indicated earlier, for some states of consciousness, a phrase like boundless love does not
00:24:27.540
seem overblown. It is decidedly inconvenient for the forces of reason and secularism that if someone
00:24:33.120
wakes up tomorrow morning feeling boundless love for all sentient beings, the only people likely to
00:24:38.080
acknowledge his experience will be representatives of one or another Iron Age religion or New Age cult.
00:24:45.320
Most of us are far wiser than we may appear to be. We know how to keep our relationships in order,
00:24:50.460
to use our time well, to improve our health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and to solve
00:24:57.080
many other riddles of existence. But following even the straight and open path to happiness is hard.
00:25:03.580
If your best friend were to ask you how she could live a better life, you would probably find many
00:25:07.840
useful things to say, and yet you might not live that way yourself. On one level, wisdom is nothing
00:25:13.500
more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice. However, there are deeper insights to be had
00:25:18.800
about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of
00:25:23.480
religion, and therefore have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history.
00:25:29.660
The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath, and our needs and
00:25:34.220
desires seem to multiply by the hour. To spend any time in the presence of a young child is to witness
00:25:39.680
a mind ceaselessly buffeted by joy and sorrow. As we grow older, our laughter and tears become less
00:25:45.640
gratuitous, perhaps, but the same process of change continues. One roiling complex of thought
00:25:51.560
and emotion is followed by the next, like waves in the ocean. Seeking, finding, maintaining, and
00:25:58.360
safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which we are all devoted, whether or not we choose
00:26:03.160
to think in these terms. This is not to say that we want mere pleasure or the easiest possible life.
00:26:09.160
Many things require extraordinary effort to accomplish, and some of us have learned to enjoy the struggle.
00:26:15.720
Any athlete knows that certain kinds of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. The burn of lifting
00:26:20.820
weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is
00:26:25.980
associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and
00:26:31.260
emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about
00:26:36.180
it. And we always face tensions and trade-offs. In some moments we crave excitement and others rest.
00:26:42.740
We might love the taste of wine and chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. Whatever the context,
00:26:48.420
our minds are perpetually moving, generally toward pleasure or its imagined source, and away from pain.
00:26:53.780
I am not the first person to have noticed this. Our struggle to navigate the space of possible
00:27:00.820
pains and pleasures produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong our
00:27:06.020
health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness, aging, and death. All forms of media
00:27:11.460
cater to our thirst for information and entertainment. Political and economic institutions seek to ensure
00:27:17.140
our peaceful collaboration with one another, and the police or the military is summoned when they fail.
00:27:22.900
Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its
00:27:28.500
states. We are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in.
00:27:34.980
And wherever we look, we see the evidence of our successes and our failures. Unfortunately,
00:27:39.540
failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin,
00:27:45.540
and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them.
00:27:50.420
Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment,
00:27:53.780
it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph, not merely in the end,
00:27:58.340
but in every moment. Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very
00:28:03.620
nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or
00:28:09.860
feelings of discomfort. You can't get enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment,
00:28:14.500
you find that you are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon. And yet,
00:28:18.660
by some quirk of physics, you still have room for dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a few
00:28:23.700
seconds, and then the lingering taste in your mouth must be banished by a drink of water.
00:28:28.260
The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing.
00:28:33.380
A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little
00:28:38.020
too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let's take a look. Yes, there it is. You're warm now,
00:28:44.100
but you notice that your sweater is seeing better days. Does it make you look carefree or disheveled?
00:28:49.460
Perhaps it's time to go shopping for something new. And so it goes.
00:28:55.140
We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting.
00:28:59.300
Thus the question naturally arises. Is there more to life than this? Might it be possible to feel much
00:29:05.700
better, in every sense of better, than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment
00:29:12.420
despite the inevitability of change? Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that
00:29:18.020
the answer to such questions could well be yes. And a true spiritual practitioner is someone who
00:29:23.060
has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few
00:29:27.380
moments at a time. And that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the
00:29:32.260
self. Those who have never tasted such peace of mind might view these assertions as highly suspect.
00:29:37.780
Nevertheless, it is a fact that a condition of selfless well-being is there to be glimpsed in
00:29:42.580
each moment. Of course, I'm not claiming to have experienced all such states, but I meet many
00:29:47.300
people who appear to have experienced none of them. And these people often profess to have no interest
00:29:51.700
in spiritual life. This is not surprising. The phenomenon of self-transcendence is generally
00:29:57.540
sought and interpreted in a religious context. And it is precisely the sort of experience that tends to
00:30:02.740
increase a person's faith. How many Christians, having once felt their hearts grow as wide as the
00:30:08.260
world, will decide to ditch Christianity and proclaim their atheism? Not many, I suspect. How
00:30:14.340
many people who have never felt anything of the kind become atheists? I don't know, but there's
00:30:18.740
little doubt that these mental states act as a kind of filter. The faithful count them in support
00:30:23.460
of ancient dogma, and their absence gives non-believers further reason to reject religion.
00:30:28.420
This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers and
00:30:34.180
listeners will have no idea what I'm talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences,
00:30:38.740
and might assume that the assertions I'm making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present
00:30:44.260
a different challenge. They may think they know exactly what I'm describing, but only in so far as it
00:30:49.060
aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both of these attitudes present
00:30:53.940
impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend. I can only hope that
00:30:58.900
whatever your background, you will approach the exercises presented in this book with an open mind.
00:31:12.900
We are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same. All teach the same ethical principles.
00:31:18.340
All urge to their followers to contemplate the same divine reality. All are equally wise,
00:31:23.380
compassionate, and true within their sphere, or equally divisive and false, depending on one's view.
00:31:29.700
No serious adherence of any faith can believe these things, because most religions make claims
00:31:34.260
about reality that are mutually incompatible. Exceptions to this rule exist, but they provide
00:31:39.460
little relief from what is essentially a zero-sum contest of all against all. The polytheism of Hinduism
00:31:45.780
allows it to digest parts of many other faiths. If Christians insist that Jesus Christ is the son of
00:31:51.060
God, for instance, Hindus can make him yet another avatar of Vishnu without losing any sleep.
00:31:56.820
But this spirit of inclusiveness points in one direction only, and even it has its limits.
00:32:02.340
Hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas, the law of karma and rebirth, a multiplicity of
00:32:07.700
gods, that almost every other major religion decries. It is impossible for any faith, no matter how
00:32:14.420
elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another. Devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe
00:32:21.700
theirs is the one true and complete revelation, because that is what their holy books say of
00:32:26.340
themselves. Only secularists and New Age dabblers can mistake the modern tactic of interfaith dialogue
00:32:32.900
for an underlying unity of all religions. I have long argued that confusion about the unity of
00:32:39.460
religions is an artifact of language. Religion is a term like sports. Some sports are peaceful but
00:32:45.380
spectacularly dangerous, free solo rock climbing, for instance. Some are safer but synonymous with violence,
00:32:52.340
as in mixed martial arts. Some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower, like bowling.
00:32:59.780
To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do,
00:33:04.820
or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing?
00:33:10.580
Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful. The same could be said of spirituality. The esoteric
00:33:18.660
doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights, nor are they
00:33:24.020
equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don't always point to the same underlying reality,
00:33:30.820
and when they do, they don't do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export
00:33:36.260
beyond the cultures that first conceived them. Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply
00:33:42.020
unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports
00:33:47.380
violence in a way that Jainism doesn't, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated empirical approach
00:33:52.740
to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such
00:33:57.220
understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of
00:34:03.060
bigotry. In one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address the same reality, because
00:34:10.100
people of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths. Any view of consciousness in the cosmos that
00:34:15.860
is available to the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone. It is not surprising,
00:34:21.620
therefore, that individual Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists have given voice to some of the same
00:34:26.740
insights and intuitions. This merely indicates that human cognition and emotion run deeper than
00:34:31.860
religion. But we knew that, didn't we? It does not suggest that all religions understand our spiritual
00:34:37.620
possibilities equally well. One way of missing this point is to declare that all spiritual teachings
00:34:43.780
are inflections of the same perennial philosophy. The writer Aldous Huxley brought this idea into
00:34:48.820
prominence by publishing an anthology by that title. Here is how he justified the idea.
00:34:54.660
Philosophia Perennis, the phrase was coined by Leibniz, but the thing, the metaphysic that
00:34:59.220
recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds, the psychology that
00:35:05.140
finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine reality, the ethic that places
00:35:11.140
man's final end in the knowledge of the imminent and transcendent ground of all being, the thing is
00:35:16.180
immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the
00:35:20.820
traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed
00:35:25.700
forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this highest common factor
00:35:31.140
in all proceeding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than 25 centuries ago,
00:35:36.900
and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again from the standpoint
00:35:41.700
of every religious tradition and in all principal languages of Asia and Europe.
00:35:48.100
Although Huxley was being reasonably cautious in his wording, this notion of a highest common
00:35:52.580
factor uniting all religions begins to break apart the moment one presses for details.
00:35:57.940
For instance, the Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith-based.
00:36:02.500
In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the human soul is conceived as genuinely separate from the
00:36:07.620
divine reality of God. The appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance
00:36:13.220
is some combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of God's love and grace
00:36:19.220
provide some relief, but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from and in
00:36:24.660
relationship to a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about his supremacy.
00:36:30.500
The Eastern tradition represents a very different picture of reality, and its highest teachings,
00:36:37.620
found within the various schools of Buddhism and the nominally Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta,
00:36:42.820
explicitly transcend dualism. By their lights, consciousness itself is identical to the very
00:36:48.180
reality that one might otherwise mistake for God. While these teachings make metaphysical claims that any
00:36:53.860
serious student of science should find incredible, they center on a range of experiences that the doctrines of
00:36:59.300
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rule out of bounds. Of course, it is true that specific Jewish,
00:37:05.140
Christian, and Muslim mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Advaita,
00:37:10.580
but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that
00:37:15.700
Western mystics have always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk. Given their
00:37:22.020
proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies for which Jews, Christians,
00:37:25.860
and Muslims have been regularly exiled or killed. Like Huxley, anyone determined to find a happy
00:37:32.260
synthesis among spiritual traditions will notice that the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart often sounded
00:37:37.060
very much like a Buddhist. Quote, the knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they
00:37:43.060
should see God as if he stood there and they hear. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.
00:37:49.780
End quote. But he also sounded like a man bound to be excommunicated by his church, as he was. Had
00:37:56.420
Eckhart lived a little longer, it seems certain that he would have been dragged into the street and burned
00:38:00.820
alive for these expansive ideas. That is a telling difference between Christianity and Buddhism.
00:38:07.700
In the same vein, it is misleading to hold up the Sufi mystic Al-Halaj as a representative of Islam.
00:38:14.020
He was a Muslim, yes, but he suffered the most grisly death imaginable at the hands of his
00:38:18.580
co-religionists for presuming to be one with God. Both Eckhart and Al-Halaj gave voice to an
00:38:24.340
experience of self-transcendence that any human being can in principle enjoy. However,
00:38:29.140
their views were not consistent with the central teachings of their faiths.
00:38:34.020
The Indian tradition is comparatively free of problems of this kind. Although the teachings of
00:38:38.660
Buddhism and Advaita are embedded in more or less conventional religions,
00:38:42.340
they contain empirical insights about the nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith.
00:38:47.380
One can practice most techniques of Buddhist meditation, or the method of self-inquiry of
00:38:51.780
Advaita, and experience the advertised changes in one's consciousness without ever believing in
00:38:56.500
the law of karma or in the miracles attributed to Indian mystics. To get started as a Christian,
00:39:02.180
however, one must first accept a dozen implausible things about the life of Jesus and the origins of
00:39:06.740
the Bible. And the same can be said minus a few unimportant details about Judaism and Islam.
00:39:13.060
If one should happen to discover that the sense of being an individual soul is an illusion,
00:39:17.780
one will be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the Indus.
00:39:23.620
There's no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences and suitable
00:39:27.940
minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based and probably delusional practice,
00:39:33.300
whatever its effects, isn't the same as investigating the nature of one's mind absent any doctrinal
00:39:38.900
assumptions. Statements of this kind may seem starkly antagonistic toward Abrahamic religions,
00:39:44.180
but they are nonetheless true. One can speak about Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational
00:39:49.540
assumptions. The same cannot be said of Christianity or Islam.
00:39:56.180
Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at least as far as Alexander's campaign in
00:40:01.060
India, where the young conqueror and his pit philosophers encounter may be said.
00:40:06.020
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