First published in 2014, this book by the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris was reprinted in this new edition last year. Subtitled “Searching for Spirituality without Religion”, the book attempts to persuade readers that they can have all the benefits of meditation without the necessity of religious belief.
Harris is hostile to religion, which he sees as a collection of “myths and superstitions”. He is drawn to Buddhist and Hindu meditation techniques which he has practised for many years and which he assures readers do not “require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs”.
Having long experimented with ways to detach himself from the stresses and sorrows of daily life, Harris has a missionary zeal to explain how to cut through “the illusion of the self”. Indeed, “being able to stand perfectly free from the feeling of self is the start of one’s spiritual journey”. His goal is “self-transcendence”, the way to escape the “usual tides of psychological suffering – fear, anger, shame”.
Harris experimented with ecstasy when he was 20 and never forgot the ecstatic sensation of universal wellbeing that it afforded him. He felt suffused with a feeling of benevolence towards mankind. This, as Christians know, has nothing to do with real charity, which means a daily struggle against selfishness, not basking in a temporary blissful illusion of philanthropy. Harris does not seem to realise there is no shortcut to moral character or virtue. All that pills or Eastern meditation techniques will do is to help one escape from the problems one should be facing and wrestling with, helped by grace.
Grace is not something that can be measured by neuroscientists, even one as knowledgeable as Harris. His search for “spirituality” without God merely helps those committed to “secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism and all the other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable faith” to feel they are more than hard-nosed materialists. Of course they are – but Harris himself has not yet woken up to the profounder truth behind human existence.
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