I finished Sam Harris' new book, and am up for discussing any parts of it with people here who have also read the book. It should go without saying that in addition to the folks whose posts I never read period (none of whom are likely to have the attention span or humility to read this book anyway), I will engage with no one who hasn't "done the homework" of actually having read the book. But it's a good book IMO, and opens up many questions for discussion, among people open to actually learning new things.
As an overview, I think it was an ambitious task that he managed to pull off fairly well. It isn't the easiest thing in the world, after all, to "pitch" the value of meditation and spirituality to people who have not the least bit of interest in Woo Woo or religious dogma, and in fact are pretty averse to those concepts. But I think he did a good job of it. For those whose only interest in such things is their own self-importance, i.e., "Did he mention TM?," no, I don't think he did. He mentioned some research on meditation, but mainly on vipassana-mindfulness-based secular meditations. Personally, I don't think he'd even consider TM to *be* meditation, based on his descriptions of what he considers meditation to be. After all, in TM most people are sitting there *most of the time* lost in a sequence of reactive thoughts. This is exactly what his idea of meditation hopes to *avoid*. So no, even if TM weren't full of religious ideas and Woo Woo that he'd dislike, he'd probably not consider it "real" meditation. Speaking to more open-minded people, and to actual scientists (as opposed to Woo Woo Newagers who spout "quantum" this and "unified field" that without having any idea what they're talking about), I think Sam does a good job of presenting a case for investigating the spiritual side of life through meditation. His "pitch" is based pretty strongly on the need for self-knowledge, and for determining who that mysterious "I" that you consider your "self" is, and that's not going to appeal to everyone. But I think he mentions enough of the real-world, tangible benefits of meditation that a few people are going to undertake it, based on his book. He even gives a few intro techniques, which I cannot disagree with. I think that for most people his simple mindfulness technique would produce more tangible benefits after a few weeks of practicing it than TM would. And of course Sam's version is free, included in the first chapter he put online to give people a taste of the book. As a writer and as a personality, Sam Harris is NOT gonna be everyone's cuppa tea. For a person whose mantra (so to speak) is "self is an illusion," he seems to have the strongest, most opinionated, and outspoken self I've encountered in years. :-) He's not only unafraid to say what he thinks of certain traditions and teachers, he does so occasionally for effect, to poke and prod people who are heavily invested in those traditions or teachers. I found that absolutely *nothing* he said in this book offended me in any way, but I'd be willing to bet that many long-term TMers and religionists here would be in pretty much a perpetual state of faux outrage if they actually tried to read the book. Fortunately for them, they'll never even try, because that would imply (horrors!) that they think they might have something to learn from an atheist. :-) If I have nitpicks with the book, they are, in fact, nitpicks...passages that I would have phrased differently, because I'm even more of a stickler for precision in language than he is. As an example, here's a passage from the book...try to figure out in advance what I disagree with, and how I would change it to make it better: "Although many Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an ordinary human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind. Buddha means 'awakened one'—and Siddhartha Gautama was merely a man who woke up from the dream of being a separate self.' I think honestly that Sam Harris is FAR more hung up on proving that there is no such thing as self than he needs to be. *For him* that's important...for me, not so much. So even in this descriptive phrase I would say "...who woke up from the dream of being *only* a separate self." That's more precise IMO, because it doesn't imply that having no-self is in any way "better" than having one. No-self/self are for me just two sides of the same coin. IMO the thing about self is that many who claim that there isn't one (for example...duh...Sam Harris) sound just as didactic and just as fanatical as those who claim there is. I don't tend to hang with absolutists, of *any* stripe. My bet is that the original Buddha didn't much give a shit whether he had a self or not...he was just awake, and in the moment. In some of those moments, he had a self; in others, not so much. And *none* of those moments were superior to any other. There were sections of the book I enjoyed immensely -- his descriptions of meditation, his discussion of gurus and the potential dangers of following them vs. the possible benefits of doing so, and even his occasional ego-rants, in which he cannot resist dumping on someone he thinks is abusing science, like Eben Alexander, who wrote a *terrible* but best-selling book about NDEs. There was even a section I liked in which he finally clarified what he's talking about as a 'self' that cannot be found once one starts looking for one: "What does it mean to say that the self cannot be found or that it is illusory? It is not to say that people are illusory. I see no reason to doubt that each of us exists or that the ongoing history of our personhood can be conventionally described as the history of our “selves.” But the self in this more global, biographical sense undergoes sweeping changes over the course of a lifetime. While you are in many ways physically and psychologically continuous with the person you were at age seven, you are not the same. Your life has surely been punctuated by transitions that significantly changed you: marriage, divorce, college, military service, parenthood, bereavement, serious illness, fame, exposure to other cultures, imprisonment, professional success, loss of a job, religious conversion. Each of us knows what it is like to develop new capacities, understandings, opinions, and tastes over the course of time. It is convenient to ascribe these changes to the self. That is not the self I am talking about. "The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears." Anyway, I'll stop rapping about the book now, and wait to see whether anyone else enjoyed it enough to want to discuss it. I think it would be nice if we could keep one thread about this book and its author somewhat positive and on-topic. Maybe those who can only react to ideas that push their buttons by trying to diss the author and turn everything into an insult-fest could do this somewhere else, and allow those of us who actually read the book to enjoy discussing it here. Most of these people are already on my personal Don't Read list anyway, and thus their yammering won't bother me because I'll never see it. But it would be nice if they took their ego-posturing neuroses elsewhere and didn't bother people who might want to actually discuss the book.
