Nonfiction: Waking Up, Sam Harris

Waking Up: A guide to spirituality without religion
Sam Harris
ISBN: 9781451636017
Read Sept 10, 2014
Nonfiction: neuroscience, atheism, meditation practice, altered consciousness, the "self"

I don't think I've ever been proselytized by a hard atheist before.

I don't exactly know what to do with this book.  I want to like it, but I come away from it much like you would a conversation with a "true believer" or the seriously drug-addicted ("seriously, man... just try it, man... It'll open your EYES, man!").  Harris very much believes what he's saying, and he believes that the evidence supports him, and he believes that if we try meditation, we'll understand it also.  It's cool, man, I don't need any koolaid right now, thanks.

It's hard tho - he really does strenuously think that this is all about science and understanding the mind, but then he spends the majority of the book furiously pointing out how science doesn't have a clue (mainly because trying to figure out consciousness is like looking for the Big Bang or the Garden of Eden (depending on your allegiances) - you're working from echoes and ripples and consequences and shadows.)  So here's this concept that he wants to present as scientific, but the science isn't there yet, but he's really really passionate about it, so he's just going to present his own personal experiences instead... and that's where it gets a little iffy.

Because anecdotes aren't data.  They never will be, they just can't be.  For all the time he spent drilling Dr Eben Alexander's "near death experience" (and don't you think for a minute that I didn't enjoy that section IMMENSELY more than any good-hearted person should have - and as a side-note, someone (ahem, Harris) going on about the benefits of boundless love and a sense of oneness with all people should perhaps not seem to enjoy himself quite so much in the process of skewering another fallible human...) he doesn't seem to see that he's done much the same thing with this book: he's presented his own experiences (and to be precise, lots of other people's experiences) as data points.  You just can't have it both ways and be fair.

Still, I greatly enjoyed the interesting and quite literal mind-blow that was learning about the precarious nature of consciousness and sense of self.  I think it's an interesting quirk of humanity's evolution, and wouldn't it be a laugh if the only thing keeping us from being a species of telepaths and empaths is this strange factory default where we only think that we're all alone inside our heads because our wires run that way?

So, final verdict: I'm glad I read it, but it's more of a polemic than a treatise.  Which I think is a bit of a shame, personally.