For the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s latest New York Times bestseller is a guide to meditation as a rational practice informed by neuroscience and psychology.
From Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of numerous New York Times bestselling books, Waking Up is for the twenty percent of Americans who follow no religion but who suspect that important truths can be found in the experiences of such figures as Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and the other saints and sages of history. Throughout this book, Harris argues that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow, and that how we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the quality of our lives.
Waking Up is part memoir and part exploration of the scientific underpinnings of spirituality. No other book marries contemplative wisdom and modern science in this way, and no author other than Sam Harris—a scientist, philosopher, and famous skeptic—could write it.
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“Neuroscientist Harris draws from personal contemplative practice and a
growing body of scientific research to argue that the self, the feeling
that there is an ‘I’ residing in one’s head, is both an illusion and the
primary cause of human suffering. Through meditation, this illusion can be extinguished, resulting in a
deep sense of personal well-being…The reality of
such self-transcendence has been hitched to unwarranted claims about the
nature of the universe by persons of faith and denied outright by most
atheists and skeptics. The great value and novelty of this book is that
Harris, in a simple but rigorous style, takes the middle way between
these pseudoscientific and pseudo-spiritual assertions, cogently
maintaining that while such contemplative insights provide no evidence
for metaphysical claims, they are available, and seeing them for
ourselves leads to a profoundly more salubrious life.”
—
Publishers Weekly