Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion review

Waking Up is Sam Harris' argument that the insights of contemplative traditions — particularly Buddhism's claim that the sense of self is an illusion — can be separated from religious metaphysics and investigated directly through meditation and introspection. Harris is a neuroscientist and one of the "New Atheist" thinkers, and his distinctive contribution is the claim that spiritual experience is real and important but does not require supernatural explanation. The word "spirituality" in the subtitle is deliberate and provocative for Harris' audience.

The book's first half makes the philosophical and empirical case that the conventional sense of a unified, continuous self is a construction rather than a discovery. Drawing on split-brain research, studies of meditation, and Harris' own practice under teachers in both Theravada and Dzogchen traditions, he argues that the experience of being a self is generated by specific neural processes and can be disrupted — both pathologically (in certain neurological conditions) and through meditation. The insight that there is no substantial self behind experience is not mere philosophy; it is, Harris argues, available as direct experience to anyone who practices carefully.