{"id":2108,"date":"2014-09-29T11:38:22","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T15:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/intentchopra\/?p=2108"},"modified":"2014-09-29T11:38:22","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T15:38:22","slug":"can-sam-harris-wake-us-up-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/intentchopra\/2014\/09\/can-sam-harris-wake-us-up-part-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Can Sam Harris Wake Us Up? (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of us recognized ourselves in the mirror this morning.\u00a0 The person looking back at us has a familiar name, a family, a job.\u00a0 He (or she) carries around a long menu of likes and dislikes, along with a personal history from the moment we emerged from the womb. It would amaze the vast majority of the human race to be told that this person in the mirror is an illusion. Sam Harris\u2019s new book,\u00a0Waking Up<\/em>, delivers this startling notion loud and clear, and his aim, in a nutshell, is to debunk the illusion of the personal self, which he says is the key to becoming real.<\/p>\n

No one can predict if the message will stick. \u201cNo self\u201d has been around for centuries as a basic tenet of Buddhism. (Refer to Part 1 of this post <\/a>for more details.) Harris dresses it up in brain science, but looking for Buddha in the brain is as futile as looking for Mozart in a piano. It\u2019s obviously specious reasoning, but in Harris\u2019s profession of neuroscience, everything comes down to the brain. Devout Christians find sermons in the stones; brain scientists find them in the anterior cingulate.<\/p>\n

Harris would be a more persuasive thinker if he weren\u2019t so dogmatically a materialist. His biases make\u00a0Waking Up\u00a0<\/em>a troubling read at times:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has long been obvious that traditional approaches to spirituality [are] based, to one or another degree, on religious myths and superstition.\u201d (p. 62)<\/p>\n

\u201cNeuroscience has also produced results that are equally hostile to the traditional idea of souls.\u201d (p. 62)<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people are so desperate to interpret the [Near Death Experience] as proof of an afterlife that even those whom one would expect to have a strong commitment to scientific reasoning toss their better judgment out the window.\u201d (p. 186)<\/p>\n

None of these haughty opinions is good science. And it\u2019s ironic that someone with such a closed mind is now in favor of unbounded awareness.<\/p>\n

As for his area of expertise Harris is quite impressive. He makes much of intriguing findings on the brain\u2019s unreliability, wandering thoughts, and confused perceptions. Some of this is over-interpreted. Harris states, for example, that \u201cThere is no region of the brain that can be the seat of a soul\u201d (p. 116), but there is no region of the brain that tells us where experience comes from, why the color red is red, how one thought is connected to the next, or how electrical activity in the neuron produces the sight, sound, and texture of the three-dimensional world. Until these basic problems are solved, assertions about higher reality based on neuroscience, whether pro or con, are meaningless.<\/p>\n

Yet there\u2019s no getting around the fact that the illusion of \u201cI, me, and mine\u201d lies at the heart of Eastern spirituality.\u00a0 It\u2019s not the special province of Buddhism. Harris\u2019s challenge to the personal self, which is the best part of his book, would be echoed by a Taoist, a Hindu, a Jain, and countless other varieties of Eastern belief. They all hold that you cannot be enlightened as long as you have a personal stake in the world. This is a radical claim, all but unknown in the Christian West, and the Buddhist strategy of \u201cego death\u201d is possibly the most radical of all.<\/p>\n

The reason for such strong common agreement is this: suffering, ignorance, and self-destructive behavior are the product of the conditioned mind. It\u2019s not the brain that forces us to feel pain and sorrow, to act out of anger, to possess low self-esteem. It\u2019s how the brain got trained. Who did this bad training? The mind. Therefore, the mind must find a way out. Only through self-awareness can old conditioning be confronted. The job isn\u2019t done overnight, yet thousands of years of spiritual experience attest to the possibility of waking up.<\/p>\n

Viewed sympathetically, Harris\u2019 book gives the reader many good reasons to step on to the spiritual path.\u00a0 If the path leads you to God or the soul, Harris holds that you\u2019re a fool. If it leads you to the purity of perfect detachment, he holds that you\u2019ve won the golden ring.\u00a0 Either way, the personal self isn\u2019t going down without a fight. While neuroscience is busy drawing better brain maps, life goes on, enticing us to be good and bad, loving and hateful, real and deluded. The allure of \u201cI, me, and mine\u201d is very strong, always present, and nearly impossible to resist.<\/p>\n

I believe something a medical school professor used to tell his students: \u201cIf you want to understand consciousness, don\u2019t go into neuroscience.\u201d Otherwise, you\u2019ll mistake the map is the territory. God isn\u2019t in our neurons, but neither is Nirvana. \u00a0The fact that Harris is standing by the side of the road shouting \u201cNo Self!\u201d actually compounds the problem. If \u201cI, me, and mine\u201d is a trick of brain training, who is to say that \u201cno self\u201d isn\u2019t just another trick? Harris turns the brain into the villain of one story (my self is real) and the hero of another (my self is an illusion). He wants to have his cake and eat it too.<\/p>\n

Here we get to the heart of the matter. Buddhism, contra Sam Harris, will never be about the brain. Buddhism is about the mind beyond the brain. Transcendence is the key. It has to be. As long as mind = brain, we are trapped. The same would be true if music = piano.\u00a0 Obviously you could destroy all the pianos in the world and music would still exist. What Harris believes, along with neuroscience in general, is that if every brain was destroyed, mind would no longer exist. The Buddha taught the exact opposite. Mind is universal. Awareness is the foundation of reality. Worlds come and go, but mind remains unchanged.<\/p>\n

Harris doesn\u2019t address the most crucial fact about enlightenment: In order for the mind to transform itself, reality must change altogether. \u00a0If \u201cI\u201d is unreal, so is the world that \u201cI\u201d believes in. \u00a0A materialist view is lost before it even begins, because it forces you to accept the physical world as a given.\u00a0 Harris relies heavily on the unreliability of perception. But the brain can\u2019t unravel our mistaken perceptions because the brain is itself a perception\u2014it\u2019s caught in the very net it wants to untangle.<\/p>\n

Each of us will have to choose our own way, of course. For the moment, skewed science and half-digested spirituality are serving Sam Harris well. He is as partisan, strong-minded, and absolute as ever. Despite its lack of even-handedness, though, this stimulating book is worth reading whether you agree with it or not.\u00a0 Harris has crossed a divide and now has more in common with spiritual seekers than he does with noisy atheists.<\/p>\n

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers including\u00a0Super Brain<\/a>, co-authored with Rudi Tanzi, PhD. He serves as the founder of The\u00a0Chopra Foundation<\/a>\u00a0and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Coming soon,\u00a0The Future of God<\/a>\u00a0(Harmony, November 11, 2014)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of us recognized ourselves in the mirror this morning.\u00a0 The person looking back at us has a familiar name, a family, a job.\u00a0 He (or she) carries around a long menu of likes and dislikes, along with a personal history from the moment we emerged from the womb. It would amaze the vast majority…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,1],"tags":[1130,1132,1131,1128,1129,1133],"class_list":["post-2108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-consciousness","tag-waking-up","tag-illusion-of-self","tag-neurological-self","tag-sam-harris","tag-spiritual-self","tag-unbounded-self"],"yoast_head":"\nCan Sam Harris Wake Us Up? 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