I received this book through a goodreads sweepstakes. It came in the mail a few days ago. I couldn't put it down after I opened it. All finished reading it within three days. I was baptized Catholic and attended a Catholic school through 8th grade. I was later confirmed Catholic in high school because that was my grandmother's wish for me. The woman is my life, so I do as I'm told, but I never really felt like Catholicism was for me. Way too strict and judgmental. I went to a few other churches

I did not sleep much last night ---but I read this book during the dark hours --and finished it this morning! I'm inspired!!!!!On the bottom of page 43, Sam says, "I make no claims in support of magic or miracles in this book".[HE SHOULD!!!!]. 'Miracles' would manifest in the world if enough people read this book.On the same page (bottom of page 43) , Sam goes on to say, "However, I can say that the true goal of meditation is more profound than most people realize -- and it does, in fact, encomp...

A little disappointed with this one. Harris basically defines spirituality as the quest to see the ego and the self as illusions, and while that's certainly a worthy goal, it strikes me as a somewhat narrow definition for spirituality, as I personally find spirituality to also include things such as developing a sense of love and compassion towards other people.The book is subtitled "A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion". In practice, the guide parts consist of a few meditation instructions,...

First off, he’s an elitist and arrogant which made this book insufferable to read at times. He’s passive aggressive when it comes to anybody who doesn’t share his worldview. His ego just oozes page after page. He calls world religions intellectual ruins, yet practices a secularized form of Buddhism which has brought profound insight and mental composure to his life. He’s basically taken what’s useful and discarded what isn’t and is under the delusion that he’s separated himself from religion hen...

This book is bound to ignite another firestorm in the skeptic community around the word "spirituality," but it really shouldn't. As Harris makes clear from the outset, his interests still lie squarely within the bounds of rational inquiry. One need not entertain any spooky metaphysics in order to honestly interrogate the mind and its limits. What he does argue, however, is that consciousness is an object of study unlike any other in science - because it is both the subject of investigation and t...

I really wanted to like this book, but Sam Harris just can't resist taking so many cheap shots. At points, Waking Up was very interesting and engaging. However, other parts of the book were so bland, boring, and completely anti-religious that I could barely take it.

After enthusiastically starting this book, I gradually became annoyed, and eventually angry, as it slid on a downward slope to the end. This embarrassing work is far beneath what I would have expected from a scholar such as Harris. What a surprise it was to find details on the sexual malpractices of spiritual gurus and how to find one that matches your "tastes," among other awkward and simplistic information.I had been eagerly looking forward to reading Waking Up after its publication was announ...

Try devouring this Buddhist Parable:"A man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow. A surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life, but the man resists these ministrations. He first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrow’s shaft, the genus of the wood from which it was cut, the disposition of the man who shot it, the name of the horse upon which he rode, and a thousand other things that have no bearing upon his present suffering or his ultimate survi...

"A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" - sounds great. I feel spiritually stunted yet dread the involvement of religion.The book started out great, thoughts on the use of spirituality with some academic references.Sam then says that to be spiritual without religion you need to lose your sense of self. He then explores the psychology and brain physiology of self and thinks he shows that the self doesn't exist. I followed most of the science, but when the philosophy came into it I was lost.Alr...

This review concerns the MARKETING of the book, not the book. Serious ethical lapses are occurring in the marketing of this book. This is NOT a traditional spiritual book for "the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion" as the description states for Sam Harris has stated on numerous occasions that he DOESN'T BELIEVE in that type of spirituality. Still, this book is being marketed to spiritual people. VERY Disappointed in Sam Harris for putting profit over people and his eth...

Much of this was about becoming consciousness and not being distracted by thought, but most of the time I was thinking of other things.

It’s not long since I’ve first come across the word “spirituality”. I’ve mostly heard it from people who practice meditation. As a beginner I didn’t quite understand it. This book gave me some good ideas. Consciousness is at the core of the book. The hard question is this: What’s consciousness? And where does it come from? I really enjoyed Sam Harris’s reasons and responses to this fundamental question and the wisdom with which he promoted his ideas. His philosophical and scientific arguments re...

This book is not out yet, but Sam was nice enough to let me read the galley. It's fascinating. It will surprise a lot of people to learn that this often acerbic atheist in fact has a deep history of meditation practice. In this book - which is part polemic, part memoir, part pop-science - he makes the case for a "spirituality" (he doesn't like the word, per se, but points out that there are sadly no other options) divorced from religion. Whether or not, you agree with his views on faith, Sam mak...

1.0 star of 5.0 - "I did not like it" Waking Up - A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam HarrisAudiobook - 05:41 Hours - Narrator: Sam HarrisQuite some time ago in the early 2000's, Sam Harris hit the headlines for being one of the famous The Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse, as they were known, which included Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. I was devouring books about "New Atheism" at the time and I read "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror,

Sam could have made his argument in just a few pages. I do really like his writing style, so I still enjoyed reading this. I just kept waiting for him to really apply what he was writing about. He went on and on about how beneficial mediation is, especially dzogchen, and how important it is to be taught exactly how to do it, instead of being taught in metaphor. But then he never talked about how to actually do it. Maybe that was outside the scope of his book. I was also looking forward to the ch...

TL;DR the only benefit of meditation is investment justification.This book made me so very sad, because I like the idea of spirituality without religion. Really, this book is about Vipassana meditation and Buddhism. It's just awful, which I never would have expected from Sam Harris.Harris starts off with an accusation that "few scientists have developed strong skills of introspection". I've found the opposite to be true, both anecdotally in my personal life and in the biographical literature.The...

http://ensuingchapters.com/2014/09/29...Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without ReligionSam HarrisMy anticipation for the new Sam Harris book turned to anxiety when I learned it would be about spirituality. Was the firebrandtype philosopher and scientist—co-founder of Project Reason and author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation—changing teams?Nah.Perhaps a better title for this book, though, would be The Atheist’s Guide to Meditation.At its core, Waking Up is about mindfulne...

My first acquaintance with Sam Harris was through one of the many YouTube snippets in which logically reasoning and science advocating people debates different religious people about the existence of god (along with about a million sidetracks). Being Swedish, I found this fascinating for a while (very few Swedes would ever define themselves as 'atheists' - for quite similar reasons why most people do not define themselves as "non-elf-believers"). I watched a bunch of these, until my fascination

If we colonized the moon, people who lived there could ostensibly have a perfectly decent life. But based on our evolutionary inheritance as earthlings, we would, in all likelihood, crave gravity and greenery. This is an interesting analogy to living life as an atheist. We can live quite well without religion. But because so much of our history as humans has revolved around spiritual pursuits, there may be something akin to gravity and greenery that we atheists lack and long for and even need. P...

The hard question is "what is consciousness". In the past we had Leibniz's monads and Descarte's homunculus unsatisfactorily explaining consciousness. 'Cogito ergo sum' gave western thought the mistaken impression that there is a single self inside the brain. The author suggests another path for understanding the hard question namely gaining self awareness (of our non-existence) through meditation from which one can discover the illusion of the self which leads the individual to 'enlightenment'