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Sam Harris leads 4000 atheists in a guided meditation

This might be my favorite of all the Sam Harris talks I’ve seen to this point. It takes some moxie to ask a group of 4000 atheists to close their eyes and practice mindfulness meditation for ten minutes. Harris was speaking at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia. The title of this talk is “Death and the Present Moment,” and in it Harris attempts to answer the following question (among others): “What does atheism have to offer in the face of death?” Below is a mishmash of quotes and paraphrasing:

Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations. The challenge is to get people to engage in these conversations, given the seemingly irreconcilable differences between believers and non-believers.

What people are really worried about is death. When we’re arguing about teaching evolution in schools, we’re really arguing about death. The only reason for a religious person to care about evolution is because they know that if their holy books are wrong about our origins, then they’re very likely wrong about our destiny after death. So when you say to someone that “you are a fool for not believing in evolution” or “you are a fool to think the universe is 6000 years old,” I think that gets translated as “You are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with God” — and that is a very different communication.

[Note from Bob: A Gallop Poll just released on June 1st found that: “Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”]

How can people make sense of tragedy? Religion provides an answer — not a good one, but an answer that most people think they need. Belief in God is very consoling in the face of tragedy and death. Atheism doesn’t offer real consolation on this point.

Holidays, architecture, music, humility, awe, profundity — this is not what we necessarily lose when we jettison religion. All of that can be had within the purview of reason, and it can be had without lying to ourselves–or to our children, or other people and their children–about the nature of reality. The thing that gets lost, for which there is no real substitute, is total consolation in the face of death. If we want to build a bridge to a rational world that the better part of humanity can cross, then we have to deal with this fact.

People who face death are often struck with the realization or regret that when life was normal, their attention was too often bound up in petty concerns. There will come a day, for all of us, when we will look back at the kinds of things that captured our attention and think, “What was I doing?” We tend to live tacitly as if we will live forever, wasting time on things we don’t really care about. People who don’t believe in an afterlife have a particularly compelling reason to make the most of the present moment.

So what is the point of life? Is anything sacred? Do such questions even make sense? These questions do make sense and there are answers to them, but the answers are not about getting more information. The answer is a change in attitude. There are ways of experiencing life as sacred without believing anything, and certainly without believing anything on insufficient evidence. There are ways to really live in the present moment.

As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind, in fact I think there is probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that, if you want to be happy in this world.

You must know that I don’t want to stand in front of 4000 atheists and do my best impression of Lao Tzu :0)

This is not a matter of new information or more information. It requires a change in attitude, in the attentiveness you pay to your experience in the present moment.

How can we be truly fulfilled in life, given that our lives come to an end?

There are techniques available to deeply explore the present moment: I want to try a little experiment with you. Please close your eyes… [Sam then leads the group through a mindfulness meditation exercise, at about the 29:32 mark.]

We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment and a good enough reason to just be happy here. The practice of meditation I just showed you (mindfulness meditation) is just a trick for doing that, a trick for setting aside your to-do list (if only for a few moments) and actually locating a feeling of fulfillment in the present.

The conversation we have with ourselves every minute of the day comes with a cost. Discursive thought can be useful, but it is also the mechanism by which most of our suffering is inflicted — the sorrow, the self-doubt, the anxiety, the fear. And yes, the fear of death. Thinking is useful, but being perpetually lost in thought isn’t. Being the mere hostage of the next thought that comes careening into consciousness, isn’t useful. If there’s an antidote to the fear of death and the experience of loss, that’s compatible with reason, I think it’s to be found here.

The purpose of life is pretty obvious, beyond mere survival. We invest so much in culture and relationships because we are constantly trying to create and repair a world that our minds want to be in. Religion is not a good way to do this, and so we have to start a new conversation.

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Michael Daniels on Transpersonal Psychology

I was combing through and updating all the links on this site earlier today when I stumbled upon this video of Michael Daniels on his Transpersonal Science site. I like Dr. Daniels’ critical approach to transpersonal psychology, a field too often bogged down by fuzzy thinking and/or cultish attachment to particular schools of thought:


“Retrospective and Challenges for Transpersonal Psychology”. Michael Daniels PhD talks on the history, status, criticisms and future of Transpersonal Psychology. Keynote paper delivered at the British Psychological Society Transpersonal Psychology Section 15th Annual Conference, Cober Hill, Scarborough, 17th September 2011.

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Dr. Charles T. Tart on defining “Meditation”

Dr. Charles T. Tart is one of the founders of Transpersonal Psychology, and was also one of my professors at the California Institute of Integral Studies. I love the way Dr. Tart writes (and talks) – always careful to avoid jargon and to define his terms plainly and clearly. In this recent blog post Dr. Tart invites us to consider what we mean by the term “meditation”, a term that can mean quite different things in different spiritual traditions. Like Dr. Tart, I have gone on many a “semantic crusade” over the years, especially when it comes to the realm of “spirituality”. You see, I can’t even use that word without putting quotes around it! I strongly prefer the term “transpersonal” (as I’ve mentioned before) when talking about the depths of human consciousness, but unfortunately I usually find myself falling back into the vagueness of “spirituality” in order to find common ground for dialogue. Dr. Tart concedes that perfectly clear definitions of subtle inner experiences may be ultimately elusive, but he also points out that the clearest possible terms can be quite helpful as we experiment with how to direct our inner resources:

The old Zen saying, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the Moon,” is so true! But the finger pointing at the moon may be helpful. If the moon is in the west and we’re looking toward the east, the finger pointing toward the west may get us to turn around, and that certainly increases our chances of seeing the moon. Or we may stare at the finger……

Dr. Tart often uses the term “controlled attention practices” to describe various meditative techniques. If we ever hope to articulate our first-person, phenomenological, inner realities in ways that transcend our cultural and individual idiosyncrasies, we will need to get clear on our terms, and Dr. Tart has done as much as anyone in this regard. Check out the links below for more of Dr. Tart’s perspective on these matters:

That Word “Meditation:” What Does it Mean?
“Mindfulness 101” with Charles Tart

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The Spiritual Atheist: Sam Harris’s “Experiments in Consciousness”

There are so many terms in the English language that fall flat from the weight of excessive baggage and unfortunate associations, but we’re especially hampered when discussing what theologian Paul Tillich called our “ultimate concern”—namely religion/spirituality. You see I’ve already blown it, putting the words together like that with a slash. Of the two, I prefer the word “religion”, because of its etymological elegance [re (again) + ligare (bind, connect) = “to reconnect”]. “Spirituality” evokes images of ghosts and New Age bookstores, and to me sounds a bit wishy-washy and disembodied. But then again, in terms of common usage (and practice), “religion” hardly seems connected at all to the cultivation of rarefied states of being.

For my money, the best adjective we have available when talking about experiences of the farthest reaches of human consciousness is not religious, spiritual, or mystical, but rather transpersonal—a term probably first used by William James, but nonetheless later associated with the likes of Abraham Maslow and Carl Jung. Unfortunately, Maslow’s bold vision of establishing a fully rational yet visionary branch of psychology to explore what he called peak experiences has, in my opinion, failed to live up to its promise. As in the human potential movement in general, once the originators and visionaries of humanistic and transpersonal psychology (Maslow, Rogers, Jung, et al) passed away, those who took the baton lost their grip and fumbled it. Perhaps they’ve gone too far in their commitment to define themselves as “outside the mainstream”, but whatever the case, the field has come to embrace too many fuzzy-minded New Age theories and practices, making it hard for a hyper-rational guy like me to stand behind it. But that’s another blog post.

Ironically, one of the people who I think is doing the best job of articulating a rational approach to transpersonal experience is the “New Atheist” Sam Harris. Harris has appeared so often in the media since his book The End of Faith came out in 2005, it’s easy to form an opinion about him without having actually read this signature work of his. But those who have read it will have noticed his strong affirmation of transpersonal experience in the book’s final chapter (Experiments in Consciousness). What I appreciate most about Harris’s approach is the way he demystifies spiritual experience by talking about in terms of attention and well-being:

“At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition; it is possible to have one’s experience of the world radically transformed. Although we generally live within the limits imposed by our ordinary uses of attention—we wake, we work, we eat, we watch television, we converse with others, we sleep, we dream—most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible.”

So the distinction between our everyday personal experiences and the more extraordinary, deep, trans-personal experiences (experiences most of us have at least glimpsed and that give us the feeling of being connected to something greater than or beyond or transcendent to the confines of our personal egos) is simply a matter of how we use our attention. As Jon Kabat-Zinn has done in his work with mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), Harris articulates the essence of spiritual practice (namely Buddhist-style meditation, which Harris has studied and practiced for many years) in universal, common-sense terms, stripped of religious and traditional associations:

“[Meditation] merely requires that a person pay extraordinarily close attention to his moment-by-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed claims about the nature of our subjectivity. Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his experience with remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a variety of insights that people tend to find both intellectually credible and personally transformative.”

While Harris makes it clear that experimenting with different methods of modifying our habitual uses of attention is very much a worthwhile endeavor, he takes pains to stress that such a project does not, in principle, need to have anything to do with either religious or New Age belief systems:

“The history of human spirituality is the history of our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic plants. There is no question that experiments of this sort can be conducted in a rational manner. Indeed, they are some of our only means of determining to what extent the human condition can be deliberately transformed. Such an enterprise becomes irrational only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical evidence.”

So there you have it. One of the “Four Horsemen” (along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett) of the so-called New Atheist movement spent the final chapter of his religion-trashing opus validating spiritual—er I mean transpersonal—experience! In fact, the book’s concluding paragraph, from which the title was extracted, could have been written by Maslow himself. Well, except for maybe the final sentence:

“While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.”

I’m looking forward to reading Harris’s latest work, The Moral Landscape, as it promises to flesh out his vision of an appropriately 21st century pursuit of global well-being. Now that’s a project I have no trouble standing behind.