“Waking Up” by Sam Harris

I can’t sleep. This is not a frequent occurrence for me, but after lying in bed in the dark for a while, trying to be still and quiet and wishing for sleep to return, I finally decided I might as well get up and use my wide-awake mind for reading. And in this situation, what better book to choose than one called Waking Up?

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, is known as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism.”  He spent several years of his early adulthood in India and Nepal, studying meditation with Buddhist and Hindu masters, but his approach to spiritual insight is independent of religious beliefs. Sam (my Sam, rather than Sam Harris) read this book first; he has become interested in meditation, and Harris’s areligious approach appealed to him. He thought I would find this book interesting as well. 

He was kind of wrong. I struggled my way through most of this book, forcing myself to read five minutes at a time. The ideas that self is an illusion and that we can experience “having no head” remain foreign to me. In fact, the aptness of the title wasn’t what really caused me to reach for this book in the middle of the night: it was the expectation that it would lull me back to sleep. 

But I was wrong too. I found the final quarter of this book to be the most interesting part of it. The bulk of the last 50 pages is a chapter on gurus (none are perfect, or perfectly enlightened), death (near-death experiences don’t tell us anything about what we can expect to experience in actual death), and drugs (where Harris recommends a good trip on psilocybin or LSD, while acknowledging that a bad one can be an “extremely unpleasant and destabilizing experience”).

My favorite part of this book doesn’t have much to do with meditation. It was a single line in the paragraph that initiated the discussion of drugs (“The Spiritual Uses of Pharmacology”) and when I read it I paused, then re-read it several times, savoring this perspective I’d never really considered before:

“We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts.”