Sam Harris is a renowned neuroscientist with a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of California. He is the New York Times best-selling author of five books and host of the Making Sense Podcast. In Waking Up, Harris argues that there is an empirical foundation for spiritual practices that can be accessed by secularists and atheists alike. The book explores the nature of spirituality in the light of secular thought, covering various topics such as psychedelics, meditation, and consciousness, and their verifiable benefits for human flourishing.

In the winter of 1987, Harris and his friend took the drug ecstasy. As the two men conversed, waiting for the drug to take effect, Harris' understanding of the potential of the human mind expanded. Suddenly he became acutely aware of an ordinary feeling—love for his best friend. Though it sounds unremarkable in writing, Harris felt a clear yet profound desire to make his friend happy. The desire was so powerful that it seemed to have restructured his mind. All instincts for jealousy, judgment, or self-defense vanished. His friend’s happiness became his own. Though these realizations were euphoric, Harris felt that he had never experienced a more sober-minded clarity about his emotions and moral responsibility. 

Then Harris realized that their boundless love for each other could be extended to any person who walked into the room—even a stranger. The nature of love that was obscured before was now utterly obvious. Love was impersonal and did not depend on a person’s background or interpersonal transactions. Indeed, love abounded without limits. 

Religious and secular people differ in their interpretations of experiences such as the one described above. Both views are equally damaging. Religious people mistakenly see these experiences as signs that justify their own beliefs, however egregious those beliefs are. These individuals often claim such experiences are signs of a life after death, or an omnipresent entity that watches over all of us. That people of a variety of faith backgrounds—whether Muslim, Christian, Athiest, or Hindu—can experience self-transcending love or contemplative insight tells us there must be a common denominator unrelated to any specific dogmatic belief, such as resurrection, reincarnation, or the afterlife. 

Secular and scientific schools of thought, on the other hand, tend to rob themselves of spiritual experiences altogether because they believe people who claim to have them are crazy, psychotic, or simply lying.

To advance into a future where we no longer suffer the consequences of religion's extreme doctrines but still experience the benefits of spiritual life, we need to find a balance somewhere in the middle. Love, morality, and compassion do not verify fictitious beliefs. They do, however, attest to the potential of people to flourish via the innate abilities of our minds. Our best hope is for science to offer a perspective on these subjects, free of dogma. The fields of neuroscience and psychology have already shown that practices like meditation can help us improve our attention, emotional regulation, and cognition. To keep flourishing, we must begin to think of these experiences in rational and scientific ways—instead of explaining them away with religious doctrines or writing them out as sentimental superstition.

The things that bring happiness to our lives are all unreliable. Because the world is always changing, we will never be able to achieve satisfaction if we seek to find our happiness in it. One desire after another, we move through experiences, objects, and relationships with the sole goal of increasing our pleasure. As we attain one thing we begin to crave another and no matter what we do, the craving continues. To escape this loop, religious institutions often create a theology that changes our understanding of the world. 

There is one spiritual practice that does not require us to accept any faith-based assumption about the world but still allows us to escape the loop of suffering and cravings—namely, meditation. Though sometimes meditation is taught through the lens of contemplative traditions such as Buddhist philosophy, the practice is, at the core, functional and scientific. 

Meditation cultivates a state of being commonly referred to as “mindfulness.” Mindfulness is a form of introspection that helps us reach “a state of clear, nonjudgmental attention to the contents of consciousness,” however pleasant or unpleasant. Science has shown mindfulness reduces anxiety and depression. It also boosts cognitive function and improves the gray matter density in areas of the brain related to emotional regulation, self-awareness, learning, and memory. Any person who meditates can attest to these benefits.

Most of the time our thoughts flow automatically from our brains. We are not aware of what we are thinking about or even that we are thinking. Through mindfulness we can learn to pay total, undisturbed attention to everything we experience: sounds, images, sensations, thoughts, and emotions. It helps us notice all these things appear and disappear dispassionately, without being critical of them. Mindfulness helps us to no longer be reactionary to pain or pleasure or to flashing thoughts. It leads us in the path of true freedom from the conditions of life that make us suffer and crave. Mindfulness stills us and teaches us that nothing is more true and real than the present moment. It helps us control our impulses and make informed decisions that are clear, compassionate, and patient.

When we interact with others, we all subliminally agree that we are aware—we are conscious. Consciousness is fundamental for every human being and it is also the only thing we can claim that is definitely not an illusion. Still, the origin of consciousness remains a great mystery. No matter how we try to understand where and how consciousness came to be, we land on the same conclusion every time: Though we can be confident that we know what being alive is like, we don’t know why we know that. The only proof we have of consciousness is that we experience it ourselves—nothing else. 

How consciousness and the physical world are related remains entirely a mystery. Scientists will, for the most part, agree that consciousness seems to develop somewhere in the evolution of our species. If this is true, consciousness did not appear from a transformation of atomic materials (since we are made of the same atoms as any other physical object). Instead, it developed from a unique arrangement of these atoms. This particular organization may have given that group of atoms the self-awareness to know that they exist and are alive, but exactly how this happened still leaves us dumbfounded. Saying that consciousness came out of a special structuring of unconscious physical atoms does not really explain how it gained awareness of being. If we can accept that consciousness is a mystery, we can refrain from implying its origin is tied to some religious fiction, or a reductive scientific observation. 

Sharing a similar viewpoint as philosopher Colin McGinn and psychologist Steven Pinker, Harris is sympathetic to the view that consciousness is unintelligible to human knowledge. As he sees it, every chain of reasoning must end somewhere. The final factor of this chain is not caused by anything else before it.   Similarly, attempts to explain consciousness lead us to circular arguments, we do not know what came before it or what causes it. As such, consciousness might be the end factor. 

Morality arises from our realization that other creatures like ourselves are conscious. Things are wrong or right insofar as they affect the conscious experiences of others. It is hard to define what “good” or “bad” means and what they entail unless considered in this framework. Even If we believe that the reason we do not hurt others is so that we do not anger God, subconsciously our true motivation will simply be an impulse to nurture other people's consciousness. 

Science can help us unravel the content of our consciousness though it may never discover its origins. Religion will try to explain away the mystery, assuming it has a direct association with various made-up doctrines. Though neither institution gives us concrete answers about the origins of consciousness, contemplative life calls us to nurture our awareness of it. The only thing that knows consciousness is consciousness itself—and that’s okay.

In the business of our lives, most of us can attest to feeling that we are individual subjects. Behind our eyes, there seems to be a driver in charge of witnessing and experiencing the world. We can refer to this feeling as the “I” or the “self:” the idea that each of us is a subject who moves and acts in the world. 

Science often studies this sense of self by associating it with other aspects of our experience, such as seeing, hearing, thinking, and memory. However, the self is not attached to any of these aspects. People with amnesia, for instance, totally forget their histories, relationships with loved ones, and who they are. They will often confess that they remember nothing at all. Harris illustrates, however, that if we asked a person with amnesia: “Where is your self?” The person would respond, “What do you mean? I am here too. I just don’t know who I am.”

Moreover, people who have out-of-body experiences often will say that their “self” leaves their body, which they can then see as a different entity lying down on a bed, asleep. The self, in both cases, is independent of all of these cognitive and physical factors. It is separate from the aspects we usually associate it with, like personality, emotion, and physical sensation. Even without these aspects, there always seems to be an “I” that can reference itself. 

Surprisingly, however, the self is also a conditional factor in the brain that we can turn off. We know that the self is an illusion because it disappears when we examine it closely. Imagine you see a snake twirling far away. As you move closer, you notice that the snake is not actually moving. Closer, and you notice it has no head. At last, you stand next to it and realize there is no snake but only a patterned rope. The illusion of a snake disappears as you look closer. The same happens with our sense of self during meditation. At its crux, mindfulness is the practice of realizing there is no self and of perfecting that realization. A meditator can achieve a blissful awareness that is completely unrelated to her body, thoughts, and senses. She no longer feels as if she is an individual looking out into reality. Instead, she reaches a state of selfless oneness with the world. As Harris points out, an experience of this kind does not imply anything about our connection with divine, metaphysical reality. The experience simply attests to the potential of our minds to reach a kind of enlightenment and freedom from illusions. 

Consciousness is like a mirror. Thoughts, ideas, and feelings appear in front of its glass, but the mirror merely holds their reflection. We would be remiss to confuse the mirror with the things it reflects. Sometimes thoughts we associate as the locus of our “self” are reflected by the glass of our consciousness, but this does not mean those thoughts are consciousness. They are all simply passing, reflecting on the mirror and then swerving away. Meditation reveals that we do not have to associate ourselves, or the idea of a self, with consciousness. When we look into the mirror, searching for the concept of the self, we will find that it is like all other objects reflected—merely an illusion. The mirror is the only thing that remains, the only common factor—total free consciousness.

Harris writes that consciousness “appears to have no form at all.” Language falters in describing what it is made of because any thought that tries to give it shape is never permanent. Simply put, consciousness is what is aware of life, the body, and the mind, but it is not those things. In many ways, it is the most stable unmovable aspect of reality. No matter what it reflects, it never changes, for better or for worse. The goal of contemplative life is to pursue an understanding and experience of this mystery of consciousness—mindfulness can help us nurture it. 

However, a paradox at the core of mindfulness needs to be addressed. Meditation proposes that we should accept the totality of life as it is in the present moment, without any judgment or emotion. But implicit in our concept of “the good life” is the impulse to become better people, i.e.,workers, parents, partners, and friends. There is an innate human desire to be more educated and to improve our physical health. So how do we reconcile the idea that we should embrace our experience as it is and yet improve it simultaneously? 

Though meditation depends on the total embrace of our present circumstances, we know that becoming stagnant is never a recipe for happiness. Perfecting this paradox is essential. We should observe and keep peace with the images,feelings, and experiences that arise in our lives while simultaneously pursuing improvement. We might be tempted to trick our minds into thinking that we are allowing and observing all the distractions of life, but actually only do this insofar as it serves our agenda for improvement. In this case, mindfulness will not work. The goal is to achieve both ends at the same time, entirely letting our thoughts and emotions appear as we are yet striving to be more compassionate and moral humans.