Sam Harris - 'Waking Up' A Guide To Spirituality Without Rel

Post Reply New Topic

This is one of those places where I have to agree with Sam and I'd give him a fair amount of props for what he's doing. Essentially we've been culturally boxed into a lot of really dumb narratives about subjective consciousness, items are grouped by cultural association rather than utility quite often, and it seems like the atheist/agnostic/theism camps still are subject something too similar to the "jocks where this brand of shoe, this brand of pants, listen to these two bands, drive this kind of car, and prefer this brand of serial, while skaters where this brand of shoe, this brand of pants..." etc. etc. etc. - dumb as rocks arbitrary conformity where people are forced to wear a whole hat rather than thinking critically on the items in under consideration. In essence I still feel like our collective search for truth is still hamstrung by the tribalistic and poltiical impulses and I'd love to think that this is a good example of that tribalism starting to relent.

I'll definitely want to keep up with this, see who else is perhaps working along similar lines, and I'm really hoping that one of these days I'll be able to get a meaningful Google hit for the words 'astral projecting atheist'. IMHO these are invaluable subjective experiences and they need more exploration with the right attitudes. Admittedly I've been willing to throw myself out in this direction and put on the faith to try and get myself to the point where I can stand within these experiences and give them a proper evaluation. I haven't watched the full video so I don't know if he's actually going to go past discussing basic mindfulness; my own goal is to get inside of and understand the kinds of results that the Hermetic Golden Dawn and various Rosicrucian orders have been talking about for years.

I don't understand what you just said.

You're talking about that atheist writer right? Hey? Thats about the bones of what I recognized within that post.

I've kind of given up on trying to communicate my ideas to other people, now I am mostly interested in understanding others.

Starting with you my good fellow.

A few people around here have told me that they can understand about every other sentence at best. I really chewed this one over to see if my communication is that atrocious and I have to conclude that the problem isn't my diction but the ideas that are off the beaten path. Seems like there's an easy-script for thought, theists yammering that atheists are going to hell as egotistical moral degenerates is part of that easy script, atheist of the type who'd say that people who have mystical experience must have been huffing paint (accidentally or deliberately), and as of recently one of my favorites - '______' politician is an ass! These are all on the easy script, which IMHO isn't thought at all but rather emotive reflex.

The trouble is, to move off that easy script (ie. the ideas people have heard or thought about thousands of times already) and get to thoughts and ideas that are reaching beyond that - the typical problem is just what you described. If someone broaches ideas from a new direction people will very easily draw a blank, give up, and their posts will be treated as lacunas in a thread or just lacunas in and of themselves.

That's not to say that there aren't people who post things that are just rambling incoherent, it happens all the time, just that equally you have coherent but - at least at our cultural present time - what are considered novel or out of the way lines of reasoning and, I hate to say it, a lot of people have a thing for easy accessibility. If you find yourself using really big words and realize that you lost everyone its easy enough to find analogs for what you were saying in 3rd or 5th grade vocabulary and fix the problem; when it's the ideas themselves it won't matter if you're writing a post-doctoral English thesis, writing at fifth-grade level, third grade level, and it won't matter how painstakingly you try to detail what you're saying either.

This is part of what I'm indicating that I admire about what Sam Harris is doing - he's deviating from the cultural easy-script in very important ways. What I mean is he's addressing the subjective layers of human life and identity, their value, and not just defending their legitimacy but promoting their value. I don't know that he's necessarily right in his broader metaphysical assertions but he's clearing an examination space for people who are properly reductive materialists and atheists to work with things like meditation and contemplation, take it into their lives, and examine it for it's potentialities rather than throwing away as new age tripe. To throw anything away just based on it's cultural associations is a pretty bad oversight and leap of faith and yet we do that all the time, partly because this is still a very tribal culture and we tend to take tribe (ie. group identity) affiliation over fact too often.

(that and - if you didn't watch the video that could be a very big part of why what I said wasn't clicking)

The meaning is lost in the message, right? What good is delivering news if the news makes no sense?

Is the OP saying that spirituality resides in the particular and not the universal? There is an interesting concept called "hacceity".

I see Sam Harris actually inspecting things that have been buried under cultural taboo and pejorative.

He's not just treating meditation as a way to defragment the mental hard drive or squeeze a stress-ball but really advocating the contemplative path as a broader endeavor. It's particularly refreshing to see, of all people, an anti-theist do that. As my OP indicated - he's peeling apart a lot of arbitrarily-stacked layers that help make the utility of introspect, contemplation, etc.. more apparent to people who aren't particularly religious and would never want to be. That helps give contemplation, meditation, etc.. back some of the credibility that they rightfully deserve.

I'm glad to see people splitting the arbitrary groups, the tribal crap, and getting to the nuts and bolts of things. THAT is how we get human progress done.