Waking Up by Sam Harris: A Complete Review and Guide

What Is Waking Up?

Published in 2014, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion is Sam Harris's attempt to claim the genuine insights of contemplative practice for people who cannot accept the supernatural claims of organized religion. Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, and prominent atheist, argues that the "spiritual but not religious" formulation is usually vague and unsatisfying, while the religious traditions that have preserved genuine contemplative knowledge have bundled it with dogma and tribalism that thoughtful secular people rightly reject.

His project is to separate the genuine insight from the supernatural wrapping, and to argue that meditation, approached as a rigorous first-person investigation of consciousness, can deliver what religion promises, without requiring any of what religion demands you believe.

The book is part memoir, Harris recounts his own early experiences with MDMA and meditation, his studies with Tibetan Buddhist teachers, and his struggles with the conventional self, and part philosophical and scientific argument for why the experiences he describes matter and what they tell us about the nature of mind.

Spirituality Without Religion

Harris's central argument is that the word "spiritual" need not imply anything supernatural. He defines spiritual experience as the direct recognition of states of mind, including non-dual awareness, the dissolution of the sense of self, profound equanimity, and the experience of love or compassion without a specific object, that traditional religious contexts have described and cultivated, but do not own.

His claim is that these states are real, that they are available through specific practices, that they are genuinely valuable, not merely pleasant but epistemically significant, revealing something true about consciousness, and that they do not require belief in gods, souls, karma, or afterlives.

This puts Harris in an interesting position relative to both sides of the religion-atheism debate. He is more willing than most atheists to take spiritual experience seriously as data about the nature of mind. He is more insistent than most religious believers that the supernatural claims religious traditions attach to these experiences are not warranted by the experiences themselves.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times noted that the book "caught his eye because it is so entirely of this moment", written for the growing number of people who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" but want more substance than that phrase usually delivers.

The Illusion of the Self

The philosophical core of Waking Up is the claim that the ordinary sense of self is a construction of the brain, a useful fiction rather than an accurate representation of what is actually happening in consciousness.

Harris draws on Buddhist philosophy's concept of anatta (no-self), on the neuroscientific evidence that the brain is not a unified processor but a collection of parallel systems whose outputs are retrospectively stitched together into the narrative of a unified experiencer, and on the split-brain research of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga, which showed that patients whose corpus callosum had been severed could behave as two partly separate minds with partially incompatible beliefs and preferences.

The sense of being a subject located behind the eyes, looking out at the world, what Harris calls "the feeling of being you", is, he argues, generated by the left hemisphere's narrative processing rather than actually present in experience. When that narrative processing is interrupted or suspended, what remains is not nothing but a different and arguably more fundamental mode of awareness: open, present, and no longer organized around the fiction of a separate self.

Harris is careful to distinguish this claim from the common misunderstanding that no-self means nothing exists. The claim is not that experience disappears when the self drops away but that what was previously experienced as a subject observing experience is revealed to be part of the content of experience rather than its container. Awareness itself remains, but without the sense of ownership that the conventional self imposes on it.

The Science of Meditation

Harris devotes considerable space to reviewing the scientific literature on meditation, particularly the work of neuroscientists Antoine Lutz, Clifford Saron, and Richard Davidson, whose collaborations with the Dalai Lama's Mind and Life Institute produced some of the first rigorous studies of experienced meditators.

The research shows that long-term meditation practice produces measurable changes in brain structure and function: increased gray matter density in regions associated with attention and interoception; reduced activity in the default mode network (associated with mind-wandering and self-referential processing); enhanced gamma wave synchrony in experienced practitioners; and improved performance on attention tasks even outside of formal practice.

Harris is careful not to overstate these findings. He notes that much meditation research has methodological weaknesses, small sample sizes, lack of active control conditions, self-selection of experienced meditators, and that the field is still establishing basic findings. But he argues that even the preliminary evidence strongly suggests that meditation produces genuine and important changes in the brain, consistent with the subjective reports of practitioners.

He also engages with the research on psychedelics and consciousness, noting that MDMA, psilocybin, and DMT can produce states that are phenomenologically similar to advanced meditation experiences, ego dissolution, non-dual awareness, oceanic boundlessness, in much shorter timeframes. This raises questions he finds genuinely interesting: if similar states can be induced through very different mechanisms, what does this tell us about the underlying neuroscience of mystical experience?

Dzogchen and the Direct Path

One of the most distinctive sections of Waking Up concerns Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist practice that Harris encountered through teachers including Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and, later, Tsoknyi Rinpoche. He found Dzogchen more direct and efficient than the gradual mindfulness approach that dominates Western meditation instruction.

Conventional mindfulness meditation, as Harris describes it, involves training attention to return repeatedly to a chosen object (usually the breath), gradually developing concentration, and using that concentration to investigate the nature of experience. It is effective, but it involves building something up, a skill, a capacity, which means the recognition it produces can feel distant and hard-won.

Dzogchen takes a different approach: rather than developing a capacity to eventually recognize the nature of mind, it attempts to point directly at the nature of mind as it already is. The Dzogchen teaching is that the open, luminous awareness that is the basis of all experience, rigpa, is always already present, not something to be constructed through practice. The teacher's role is to help the student recognize what was always there, rather than to help them build something new.

Harris found this approach more immediately effective. After working with a Dzogchen teacher, he reports a direct recognition of the openness and clarity of awareness that remained available in daily life in a way that the gradual mindfulness approach had not produced for him. He devotes significant effort to explaining this approach for readers who may not have access to Dzogchen teachers.

Psychedelics and Spiritual Experience

Harris writes candidly about his early experiences with MDMA and other substances, which he credits with opening his eyes to the possibility of profoundly altered states of consciousness before he encountered meditation. He does not advocate recreational drug use, but he argues that the research on psilocybin, LSD, and DMT, particularly the Johns Hopkins studies led by Roland Griffiths on psilocybin's effects on terminally ill patients, raises genuinely important questions about the nature of consciousness and the mechanisms of mystical experience.

The Griffiths research showed that a single high-dose psilocybin session produced experiences that volunteers described as among the most meaningful of their lives, with lasting positive effects on wellbeing, life satisfaction, and reduced death anxiety. These results are difficult to explain if mystical experience is merely a pleasant illusion. They suggest that the states themselves carry genuine information, about the nature of consciousness, about the grounds of meaning, about the relationship between self and world.

Harris draws a careful parallel: meditation and psychedelics can produce similar phenomenological states through very different mechanisms. This convergence suggests that the states themselves are real features of consciousness rather than artifacts of any particular method. Both reveal, through different pathways, what happens when the brain's ordinary self-model is suspended.

Consciousness and the Hard Problem

Harris engages seriously with the hard problem of consciousness, philosopher David Chalmers' formulation of why physical processes in the brain produce subjective experience at all. Why is there "something it is like" to see red, feel pain, or hear music, when all the relevant neural activity could in principle occur without any accompanying experience?

Harris argues that the hard problem is genuine, that consciousness cannot be fully explained by describing neural correlates, and that this fact has important implications for how we understand spiritual experience. If consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity without remainder, then the contemplative investigation of consciousness is not simply a form of brain self-monitoring. It is an investigation of something genuinely fundamental about the nature of mind and, perhaps, reality.

He does not argue for dualism or panpsychism, though he takes both seriously. His position is that consciousness is deeply puzzling in ways that materialism has not resolved, and that contemplative practice provides first-person data that should inform but not be subordinated to third-person neuroscientific investigation.

Harris and the Contemplative Traditions

Harris's deepest debt is to Theravada Buddhist mindfulness and Tibetan Dzogchen, with important influences from Advaita Vedanta (particularly the self-inquiry method associated with Ramana Maharshi). He is notably less sympathetic to the Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, arguing that their institutional forms tend to generate dogmatism, tribalism, and supernatural claims that obstruct rather than support genuine contemplative practice.

Critics have argued this is unfair. The Christian mystical tradition, from Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross to Thomas Merton and Simone Weil, contains descriptions of non-dual experience that map closely onto what Harris describes in Buddhist terms. The Neoplatonic tradition, from Plotinus through Dionysius the Areopagite, developed sophisticated accounts of the relationship between the One and individual consciousness that anticipate many of Harris's philosophical moves. The Sufi tradition within Islam produced some of the most technically sophisticated contemplative psychologies in any tradition.

Harris acknowledges some of this, but his primary concern is with his target audience, secular Western readers who are unlikely to arrive at genuine contemplative practice through Meister Eckhart, and for that audience, the Buddhist and Advaita frameworks he presents are probably the most accessible available.

Criticisms and Limitations

The main criticisms of Waking Up fall into three areas.

The dismissal of Western traditions. As noted above, Harris's preference for Asian contemplative frameworks leads him to give insufficient credit to the depth and sophistication of Western mystical traditions. This is a limitation for readers who are drawn to a more Western or Christian context for their practice.

The individualism of his approach. Critics including philosopher Jules Evans have argued that Harris's meditation framework is fundamentally individualistic, focused on the solo practitioner's private investigation of consciousness, and neglects the relational, communal, and ethical dimensions that traditional religious contexts provide. The sense of connection, belonging, and shared meaning that religion offers is not merely a side effect of supernatural belief; it is a genuine human need that Harris's secular spirituality does not adequately address.

The limits of the materialist framework. Philosopher and contemplative teacher Robert Forman argued that Harris's commitment to materialism, even the tentative, open materialism he expresses, may limit his ability to interpret the experiences he describes. If consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity, as Harris himself acknowledges, then the implications of the experiences he reports may extend beyond what a materialist framework can capture.

A Practical Guide for Readers

For readers who want to act on Waking Up rather than merely read it, Harris offers specific guidance.

Start with mindfulness. Begin with 10-20 minutes daily of basic breath awareness meditation: sit comfortably, close your eyes, and return attention to the sensations of breathing whenever the mind wanders. Harris is clear that concentration without insight is not enough, the goal is not a calm mind but a mind that can see clearly.

Look for the looker. Harris's most direct instruction, drawn from Dzogchen and Advaita, is to turn attention back on awareness itself. Rather than attending to the breath or any object, ask: what is it that is aware? Look for the observer. Harris argues that this inquiry, conducted honestly, will reveal that there is no observer to be found, only awareness, with no center.

Investigate the sense of self directly. When the conventional sense of self, the feeling of being a subject behind the eyes, is present, examine it directly. Where is it located? What does it consist of? Can you find the boundary between you and the experience you are having? Harris argues that careful attention to these questions produces the recognition that the self is constructed rather than given.

Find a teacher. Harris is honest that his most significant breakthroughs came from working with skilled teachers, particularly in the Dzogchen tradition. He created his Waking Up app partly to provide access to guided instruction for people who cannot easily access qualified teachers in person.

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