Thoughts?

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>>8865013

>mfw I can't wake up

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>>8865013
Spirituality without religion? I mean, you at least have to read the religious texts.

>>8865028
It's about being spiritual without the dogmatic stuff.

frank yang-tier, aka retard tier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VHmmonSMEc

>>8865013
I too am spiritual without god. Whenever I smoke a huge goddamn bowl of weed and watch Looney tunes I have quite the experience.

People ask me why I support the death penalty. Well, because people like Sam Harris are still alive.

Nobody criticizing this book on /lit/ has read it.

how can you be spiritual without believing in all the ooga-booga hocus pocus?

He essentially defines spirituality as the search for the most transformative and meaningful experiences the human mind is capable of producing. Since these experiences have historically been interpreted in the context of religion, Harris is trying to strip these experiences of any metaphysical baggage. He describes meditation and the experiences and insights it can lead to,

>>8865251

The main insight that he's interested in is the "no-self" of Buddhist philosophy.

>>8865233
>Reading Sam "I don't understand Hume but I will propose a moral framework nonetheless" Harris
He is a complete hack.

>>8865358

Your comment indicates that you have either never read him or that you are an idiot. He never argues that Hume was wrong in his assertion that you can't derive an ought from an is. What he pushes back on is the idea that there is a complete distinction between facts on one hand and values on the other. This is a position taken by other moral philosophers, such as Hillary Putnam. Harris' argument is essentially that the is/ought gap doesn't stop us from practicing science or medicine (why ought we value truth or health?), and it shouldn't stop us from trying to find out what makes conscious creatures happy.

Quoting Hume as an argument against Harris is something a first year philosophy student, or worse, would do, and it is the exact kind of thoughtlessness that he tries to combat.

>>8865251
It's just some structuralist, absolutist project. What the fuck is going on with Scientism that they are attempting to boil history and culture off the bones of humanity? Nietzsche and Marx tried to explain the same things outside of a speculative and theoretical framework, but it turns out that to do that you need to actually read history and not just hide behind some idea of a priori value or fundamental principle of the good life.

It's the same thing Kant tried to do by stripping Christian values of their history with the categorical imperative, but for woo-woo shit like meditation supported by a tentative grasp on neuroscience AKA the new woo-woo.

There are people writing pop culture philosophy anthologies about Final Fantasy and Hume or Descartes' relationship to The Simpsons that know more about philosophy than Sam "The Man with the Autistic Plan" Harris.

>>8865388
Look what I understood from Harris is that his answer to the question "How should we act?" he answers "By using science to demonstrate what is the best way".

That's clearly violating the is/ought dichotomy. Tell me where I'm wrong. I don't want to read him.


On another hand, this guy has been wrong all year (and for the future to come) on Trump/Hillary. Arguing that he is against thoughtlessness is laughable by now.

>>8865410

Meditation works, it's not "woo woo". I don't know how your comments about history and culture are relevant to the possibilities of human experience.

>>8865419
I'm saying Sam Harris isn't stripping things of their metaphysical baggage so much as he's trying to create a new metaphysics ignorant to the concrete social and cultural foundations of things like enlightenment, asceticism, and general spirituality. Against the tangible roots of what these human experiences mean in context he is trying to leverage something atemporal and universal, but in the end that only ever leads to self-help bullshit.

History and culture = the possibilities of human experience

>>8865415

You're allowed to have an ought conclusion if you have an ought premise. The fact that we all can't help but value things is the ought premise that we start off with. If we didn't have values we wouldn't act at all, we'd just stand where we are until we died.

If we value certain things, which we can't help but do, we can ask what else should we value to get those things. For example, if we value truth, we should also value reason, evidence, and logical consistency. This is not deriving an ought from an is because we already start with an ought - the fact that we can't help but value truth.

The same can be said of wellbeing. We can't help but value positive experiences, and dislike negative experiences, and if this is true then there are right and wrong ways to act. Harris argues that just as we can use science to tell us the truth about the universe, or use medicine to help us be healthy, we can and should learn what behaviours reliably lead to wellbeing. Once we accept that we value wellbeing, and can't help but do so, science can tell us what else we ought to value to maximise it.

There are some criticisms that can be leveled at his reasoning. You could ask "why should the wellbeing of conscious creatures be the main concern of morality?" One response he has given is that moral theories other than utilitarianism, such as deontology or virtue ethics, actually smuggle in consequences and concern for welfare even if they profess not to.

On Trump it remains to be seen if he was wrong. The next four years will tell.

>>8865251
>Spiritual experiences have always been described using religious terms
>Let's get rid of it and try something new
Talk about throwing the baby with the bathwater.

I would argue that you can only rediscover what has been already expressed (though confusingly) by 10-20000 years of oral tradition.

>>8865429

I think I disagree. The kinds of spiritual experiences Harris is interested in are typically experienced by people who have removed themselves as much as possible from culture and other people. If spiritual experiences are easier to come by sitting in a cave in complete isolation I don't think culture and history has much to do with it.

>>8865445

He sees himself as trying to rescue the baby thrown out with the bathwater. The baby is the experiences themselves. He's not trying to get rid of the experiences, only the unjustified metaphysical beliefs that go along with them.

>>8865035
>>It's about being spiritual without the dogmatic stuff.
found the liberal hedonist

For those who don’t know Harris, he is a neuroscientist who became most well known for publishing The End of Faith, a book promoting the idea that what we believe influences how we behave, and that faith-based beliefs lead to rather irrational behavior. Like flying planes into buildings. He’s dry, technical, but funny and obviously not afraid of controversy. Apparently people really like that combination, because The End of Faith stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over 30 weeks. Harris quickly moved from obscure neuroscientist to intellectual sensation, and was lumped in with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett as the leading edge of a revitalized post-9/11 atheist movement described as “new atheism.” Together they were ironically dubbed the “four horsemen.”

But Harris is an odd fit among the horsemen. While Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins all rail against the privileged position that eastern spirituality seems to have among western intellectuals, Harris openly disagrees with them, making the case that despite the woo-woo clearly at work in the offerings of Deepak Chopra, The Secret, and similar new age flim-flam, there is something valuable to be found in the spiritual traditions of Asia that is being obscured, rather than revealed, by pop spirituality. He uses his public platform to urge people to dig a little deeper.

It turns out he is speaking from experience. Waking Up is not just an introduction to Buddhist meditation and the liberation that it leads to, it is a spiritual memoir told from the perspective of a consummate rationalist and skeptic. One who stumbles upon enlightenment.

After a few chapters of fleshing out why some spiritual practices are fruitful human endeavors and others are not, and correlating the claims of mystics with modern neuroscience, Harris gets down to the memoir part of his book and dishes on his own experiences. I was thrilled to read that Harris begins his spiritual search in U Pandita’s meditation center, where he practices a rigorous form of insight meditation. Harris is told that he is working through the progress of insight toward “cessation,” and will attain his first taste of awakening upon that strange moment of non-occurrence. For readers of my site, or fans of insight meditation, this should all sound very familiar.

When I read this part of the book I was rooting for Harris, excited to hear what he makes of the shift in consciousness that occurs after cessation. I looked at how many pages were left and anticipated that there would be a detailed account of how he reconciled his own encounter with nibbana with cutting edge brain science. This, I thought, is the book I’ve been waiting for.

So imagine my disappointment, shock really, when on the same page he reports that he couldn’t do it, and gave up.

No cessation. No stream entry. Zilch.

Something, I thought, went horribly wrong.

>>8865465
And if isolation is only a potent concept because it stands in contrast with society as its negative?

Even Buddhism stresses community and educating oneself by socializing with the world.

>>8865487


It is not exactly clear from the book what happened. In retrospect he reasons that moving toward a goal (cessation) did not feel like the right path to enlightenment, and that truth can be glimpsed no matter where one is on the path, and truth is not found in a state, cessation is not necessary and… his explanation started to feel fishy as I read it. Frankly, this sounds like a rationalization after the fact. Indeed, it sounds identical to what he was taught by the teachers and traditions that he encountered after he left Pandita’s center (Advaita and Dzogchen). So what was he really thinking and feeling at the time he threw in the towel?

A hint can be found in his description of the wall he hit during a year-long retreat:

“But cessation never arrived. Given my gradualist views at that point, this became very frustrating. Most of my time on retreat was extremely pleasant but it seemed to me that I’d merely been given the tools by which to contemplate the evidence of my non-enlightenment. My practice had become a vigil. A method of waiting, however patiently, for a future reward.”

Harris is describing an insight practice that has stalled out in one of the stages along the progress of insight. In another passage he points out that his movement through the progress of insight wasn’t very clear and although he had many interesting experiences he did not know if he was making any progress at all. Why didn’t he know?

What concerns me most about this is that Harris does not describe what would have been the best, most natural, and sensible antidote for his struggle: someone simply telling him where he was on the path and what to do to move on. I wonder what kind of book Waking Up would be if someone had simply taken him aside at that time and said “hey, relax, you are in lower equanimity. It goes on for a while and can sometimes feel uneventful. Here’s what you can do about it…”

>>8865494

Insight meditation, as a culture, is often one of information-restriction rather than transparency. A nascent movement, pragmatic dharma, has emerged largely in reaction to this, but it is still in its infancy and does not have much of a voice in mainstream meditation centers and media outlets (yet). The most traditional approaches still hold the biggest sway, and they are usually hierarchical, with the teacher knowing the details of the insight stages and which one the student is currently developing. The student’s role is to follow the instructions faithfully and not become too wrapped up in where they are on the path and when the cessation will come. There are many reasons why this approach developed, and many of them are very good reasons. But I don’t think these reasons work anymore, and Harris’s case is an example of why we can no longer afford to have an approach to insight meditation modeled on the norms of pre-modern hierarchical culture. It just doesn’t work very well. A few hundred years ago Harris may have stuck it out, not because it was a special time full of special people, but because his options would have been limited. In today’s world, he simply had better choices and felt empowered to pursue them. The important point is that Harris wasn’t failing as a meditator, he was most likely in a state of information-hunger about what was happening in his own mind. He deserved to know more. And as insight meditation grows and establishes itself in the west, we need to keep in mind that we can do a lot better than this.

I would recommend Harris’s book for a number of reasons. The skeptical approach to awakening, denuded of the dogma and superstition, is wonderful. It’s as if a portal into the future opened up and the reader can see what an approach to awakening will look like when we move beyond religion. The presence of neuroscience in a book about awakening is nothing new, but it is rarely presented so soberly and carefully (although the caution led to a lack of integration with the rest of the book). And finally, it is clear that Harris knows what awakening is from direct experience, and can discuss it as a field of human endeavor every bit as legitimate and practical as any art or science.

The book is a high wire act in a sense, where he balances between the assumptions of secular materialists on one hand and religious ideologues on the other. He invites each to see something in their direct experience that fails to fit into any dogma, and he does so with an understanding of both positions that is refreshing. I’m often frustrated with authors who are so intoxicated by spirituality that they’ve lost their mental footing and have succumbed to a kind of cognitive free fall, but equally odious are authors so rigidly skeptical that they refuse to look at the miracle of their own consciousness. Harris successfully creates an island in the gulf between the two perspectives. Hopefully, it will grow as others follow suit.

>>8865444
>We value positive experiences, and dislike negative experiences, and if this is true then there are right and wrong ways to act.
Right and wrong as working/not-working or moral/immoral?

Because delayed gratification and personal interests are completely outside of the moral framework (example: liking jazz or painting), yet completely depends on wellbeing. Science can't tell an individual what to do in that sense.

The moral framework is also another issue. Ethics won't allow you to see if rape is better than not raping for instance. Also saying "it doesn't work because science said so" is definitely a backwards way to look at stuff, evolutionary psychology is a way more accurate at predicting future behavior thanks to past behavior. I don't know if you can put evopsych in the science category because you hit the consciousness problem and no one understand that one yet. So I would argue that science can't help in this case too.

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If you want spirituality without dogma then read someone who can actually write

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>>8865522

>Spirituality = Retarded Asceticism

Nigga...

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>>8865522

>being a depressed Kantian Buddhist
>not being a based drumbanging Shaman instead

>>8865415
If I recall correctly, he opposed Trump all along, which is to say he's been right all year.

>>8865845
>some lefties are still in denial
Comedy gold.

>>8865444

>If we value certain things, which we can't help but do, we can ask what else should we value to get those things.

What you are describing is the capacity for human reason to derive ends from premises. That can be practical in the sense of - I need to eat food in order to not die, or ethical in the sense of I think human life is valuable so we should do what we can to preserve it.

This has nothing to do with the establishment of a universal moral code. You can derive conclusions and practical prescriptions from a moral premise in a set of value-judgements, but these value judgements differ depending on culture and experience. There is no gods eye view that can tell us which set of value judgements are superior to another (especially not from science since its a descriptive discipline).

The most you can be is morally consistent, you can't claim that because you are acting in accordance to your chosen moral principles that your moral principles are universally the correct ones.

tl:dr ur stupid lol

>>8865845

Sam Harris has been wrong about everything, and with Trump he's no exception.

He's the most retarded of all the Four Horsemen.

>>8865024
kek

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>>8865024
>SAVE ME

>>8865487
Looked up the website. Is this you?

>>8865487
>>8866712
I want to add that whoever you are I appreciate the link to the site.

>>8865013
I think the attempt to integrate the 'spiritual' aspect of human experience into a secular/scientific worldview is admirable but I'm afraid religious people like their silly memes over all else.

When you look at something like even a Western Theravada community people go apeshit about doing all the little bows and offerings to their Buddha statue for example, they love it. They don't want just the profound part, they want the LARP the shit out of it.

>>8866813
>>>
Symbols have meaning to people and they can be a tool for fostering the "profound" bits.
It's not for everyone but it does have a purpose.

>>8866958
I agree, but a lot of people seem to almost accept the ideology itself because of the symbols rather than the other way around. Neopagans are a good example of that.

If one were to create new symbols for a secular spirituality it would likely be extremely lame and dead in the water though, kind of like the Esperanto of religion.

>>8865477

Interiorist approaches to Spiritual matters are generally associated with shunning Individualism and bodily pleasures.

>>8867111
pagans love sex, so bet on that

>>8866813
>>8866813
>I think the attempt to integrate the 'spiritual' aspect of human experience into a secular/scientific worldview is admirable but I'm afraid religious people like their silly memes over all else.


yeah, even the theravadan or vipassana people or monks who come from the west remain liberal by clinging to either ''more rights'' or ''more science of enlightenment''

Sam Harris is the definition of a hack. It is impossible for someone clasically educated to be impressed by him, regardless of their beliefs.

>>8865903
Tnk you senpai spoon feed it to them

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Gonna give everyone in this thread a little piece of excellent advice for free;

Never take advice on Spirituality from a Jew.

>>8865061
That's freaking awesome, oh wow! That's legitimately hilarious, if that was the first sentence of a book I'd want to read more immediately. Sweet!

>>8869689
>not emulating the master race

All the thoughts have bled from me and I can think no more

>>8865013
The one thing that impresses me about harris is how he's convinced his cult like following that he single handedly has solved morality and philosophy.

In reality he's some autistic rich kid who misunderstands pretty much the entire philosophical tradition, and makes money by appealing to the "I fucking love science" zeitgeist.

Religion is fundamentally incompatible with a modern 'scientific materialism', because most religions outright reject that framework of the world, and that rejection is fundamental to the religion.

Trying anyway always results in shit like 'secular Buddhism', which is just about as retard as Christian Atheism; always cobbled together by platitudes based on severe ignorance of the actual teachings of the religion in question.

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I am very spiritual. My joss sticks prove it.

What good has science ever done? Mathematics is the worst possible understanding of the world. It is so wrong don't even get me started how wrong it is. While you're still a young mind it tells you: this is logical thinking! Think this way! I am the queen of sciences! How embarrassing must THAT be amirite? I don't think the universe works that way. We shouldn't quantify it. It's really just a paranoid act of trying to restrain the absurd.
Science should not give itself the right to prove God, it should stick to the immanent and leave the transcendent to religion. Hey guess what the Bible is a book. But not only that, it is THE book

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>>8870556
>baiting this hard

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>I'm not religious but I'm spiritual.

>>8870625
It actually makes perfect sense. You can believe in the existence of something we may as well call "spirit", but you don't follow any traditional believe or rituals of an established religious group.

>>8865522
lol what.

>>8869243
I smell a no true Scotsman fallacy

It put me to sleep desu.

>>8870721
Not all such claims are fallacies

>guide
>spirituality
>no religion
There I woke you up yet?
Just look at that cover. It's a face in the sky. Godless tier

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RIP

>>8865013
>Sam Harris

stopped reading there

>>8870659
I completely agree. It's just that the kinds of people who say >>8870625 are typically into the most vapid sort of new agey, feminine claptrap.

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what is it with stemlords and harris?