by Sam Harris
You know I have to have a very high regard for Mr. Harris to read a whole book exhorting me to consider Buddhism and meditation. And I do. He presents an empiricist’s take throughout.
I still really need to sit down with somebody who practices these things and ask all my questions.
I guess first off, WHY. Why do you want to transcend the self in the first place? The self is all we have. Harris’ main claim however is that the self is an illusion. Well, so is free will; but do you wake up every morning and lay there doing nothing, saying, let’s see what I do today?
And if you can alter your consciousness and see that the self is an illusion, if this is a way to mitigate anxiety and bad feelings, doesn’t it get rid of the good feelings too? Why would you want to live that way?
It’s sold as a way to get off the hedonic treadmill. We are constantly chasing pleasure, avoiding pain, bounced around among our emotions, seeking something that can never be permanent. Yup. That’s called the HUMAN CONDITION. The pursuit of happiness… it’s what life is ABOUT. I don’t get why you’d want to spend the effort fighting human nature, eliminating the joy that comes from achieving goals and looking forward to the future and looking back at happy times, in exchange for some steady state of emotion-free selflessness.
I know I’m not getting it entirely. That’s why I need to sit down with somebody.
I really do appreciate Harris’ efforts here. He is against every form of faith-based religion and claims nothing that is not empirically testable. My readings here and elsewhere about meditation and psychedelic use have ‘opened my mind’ a bit – to the extent I actually can read about Buddhism and meditation without running away screaming (much).
One exercise I did enjoy much was about “having no head.” You can’t see your head. Try pretending you don’t have one. Just pretend for a moment, don’t dwell on it. Look around. How does the world look? Douglas Harding: “This hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing… It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything: room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills…” Trippy. Drawing of headlessness by Ernst Mach:
Tytania 