Waking Up A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

I've gone into silence for a week and meditated 18 hours a day just to see what can be revealed through disciplined use of attention, through introspection and to see how it can inform the study of the mind.

I wrote a book on the topic called Waking Up and I have an app by that title where I and other people teach various techniques of meditation and talk about its connection to understanding the mind scientifically and just living an examined life altogether.

I have a book waking up and it touches, you know, it is my attempt to ground so-called spiritual experience, you know, experiences like self-transcendence and unconditional love and the kind of things people experience on, you know, various psychedelics.

He's written five New York Times best sellers The end of faith led her to a christian nation the moral landscape waking up and Islam and the future of tolerance.

I tell the story of the the Asian tourist and I think it was Norway do you remember this story yeah I don't want to bore people with you don't want to hear it but for me it's just it's the the best metaphor I ever came across for the kind of undercutting of the the false premise here it's this this I think was real I found this on the internet this is a purported to be a real story of an Asian tourist in I think it was Norway was on a tour bus and the bus stopped at a rest stop and everyone got off to enjoy the view and have a meal and and the tourists for whatever reason changed her clothing at the rest stop and then everyone got back on the bus and at some point someone stood up and said oh there's somebody missing there was this Asian woman who hasn't gotten back on the bus and because of language barriers and all the rest they woman didn't recognize that she what had been said there and she thought there was a missing tourist along with everyone the other people on the bus and they formed a search party and they went looking for the missing tourist and she joined the search party you know and this went long into the night and apparently you know helicopters were being ready for a dawn patrol to find the missing tourist and at some point in the middle of the night it was like you know three in the morning she recognized that everyone was looking for her right that she was the missing tourist and if you just got reflect on the logic of that what that epiphany was like and what it constituted it did not constitute the fulfillment of the search right like it's not like the missing tourist was ever found right or was ever missing right there's just there was a premise that was false and that just evaporated and something that was already the case was revealed because there was no one no one was lost right everyone was accounted for everyone everyone was present it was not like the stated problem was solved the problem really did evaporate and there's something there's something about that kind of phase shift in a direction you didn't even know was a possible direction that does some in some way capture the character of this insight which is that you know the the place from which you thought you were going to solve the problem was not the the angle of attack was wrong right and inspecting it sufficiently revealed that it was palpably false right like again I'm somewhat hamstrung by the words here but there's something to reflect on in that analogy it really does do some work for me yeah I agree does work for me as well and I look forward to getting further on this

There's a one section in waking up where I talk about an essay written by this philosopher Tom Clark really there's no substitute for reading his essay but he argued very much based on the impersonality of consciousness that the birth of any conscious being you know after your death is in some sense deeply analogous to your own rebirth given your identity as consciousness

I don't know if you read sam harris's book waking up he talks about how he was on some sort of teen retreat i don't think it was a meditation retreat but some sort of wilderness experience when he was a kid and there was a a lone part a solitary part of it and he said his letters home rivaled anything you would have seen from Gallipoli and uh you know a shylo just complete self-pity you know all this stuff because i don't think he was prepared the way you're preparing kids to be alone and and look at their mind

And Sam Harris coming back to Sam then who wrote a tremendous book waking up

and if you don't know Sam he's the host of the very very popular waking up podcast he's written a bunch of amazing books but in this context the most relevant one is called waking up which I highly highly highly recommend

three Sam Harris wrote an excellent book he's written many excellent books but this one's called waking up and he has an app by the same name full disclosure he's a friend and the book really is it excellent and science based reason based case for working with the mind

No it was um I think that launched me into Sam Harris's waking up. The book? Yeah which I'm still I think I'm on my fifth or sixth time and eventually I'll chew through it to actually get the um you know the essence out of because it's a lot.

I have read that book at least three times maybe maybe four times and every time I get something new out of it. It's a great book.

It's just a chuckful and nuts you can keep going back to something and put it on and go like oh yeah and then you still step back and say it's still very simple. You know what is this first line the mind is all we have it's all we'll ever have and I'm like oh yeah I can start there start there or can I do today...

Sam Harris your husband wrote a book with it where he gets deep into these practices of waking up which is the name of the app that he has it now I should say you have

and I love that book so much I've read it many many times

You write about this in a really compelling and often extremely funny way in your excellent book waking up which I've read maybe four or five times.

one of the main theses of the aforementioned excellent book waking up which is that we can that it is possible to have a kind of spirituality without religion

the principal thesis in waking up that that the self is an illusion

He called it waking up because that was actually a name of the name of another book he wrote that meditation was at the center of that book waking up as an amazing book I recommended highly and unreservally to everybody.

there's a funny um i don't know if you read sam harris's book waking up he talks about how he was on some sort of teen retreat i don't think it was a meditation retreat but some sort of wilderness experience when he was a kid and there was a a lone part a solitary part of it and he said his letters home rivaled anything you would have seen from Gallipoli

And he then wrote a book about that got into some of that and also some of the brain science he went off and became a neuroscientist as well so he writes about it with real authority both as a meditator and as a scientist called waking up which is phenomenal book I recommended heartily to everybody's also got a podcast called waking up that I also recommend to everybody.

Sam Harris for the uninitiated is an amazing writer and philosopher a podcaster and mutual friend of ours who he got me on my first meditation retreat.

Vipassana would be sort of old school Buddhist meditation which is quite different in technique from very different from transcendental meditation no mantra and much much much for me much much more difficult and Sam Harris coming back to Sam then who wrote a tremendous book waking up

and if you don't know Sam he's the host of the very very popular waking up podcast he's written a bunch of amazing books but in this context the most relevant one is called waking up which I highly highly highly recommend

You write about this in a really compelling and often extremely funny way in your excellent book waking up which I've read maybe four or five times.

the aforementioned excellent book waking up which is that we can that it is possible to have a kind of spirituality without religion

the principal thesis in waking up that that the self is an illusion

there's a funny um i don't know if you read sam harris's book waking up he talks about how he was on some sort of teen retreat i don't think it was a meditation retreat but some sort of wilderness experience when he was a kid and there was a a lone part a solitary part of it and he said his letters home rivaled anything you would have seen from Gallipoli

And he then wrote a book about that got into some of that and also some of the brain science he went off and became a neuroscientist as well so he writes about it with real authority both as a meditator and as a scientist called waking up which is phenomenal book I recommended heartily to everybody's also got a podcast called waking up that I also recommend to everybody

He wrote a book called the end of faith like he's written another book waking up. It was a guide to spirituality without religion.

I go into that, you know, much more depth in waking up, both the book and the app.

I go into that you know much more depth in waking up both the book and the app.

He's the host of the Making Sense podcast and the author of Waking Up, a guide to spirituality without religion.

One of your endeavors, as you mentioned a second ago, was a dedication to and a teaching of meditation. You have an app called Waking Up. You have a book by the same name, Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.