WakingUp
Waking Up (Sam Harris)
- Awesome ! Changed my life.
Our minds are all we have, they are the only things we will ever have and they are all we can give others.
Each of us is looking for a path back to the presence: we are trying to find reasons to be satisfied NOW.
How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience an the quality of our lives.
Happiness [BROKEN LINK: 56F11I1-8IK9-1MM1-6M56-M42M638435IK]
There is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.
Some well-established truths about the human mind:
- our conventional sense of self is an illusion
- positive illusions (compassion and patience) are teachable skills
- the way we think directly influences our experiences of the world
- The sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes looking out at the world can be altered or entirely extinguished.
- Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.
There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves; There is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional illusion of the self.
- Wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow ones own advice.
- Cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it. (see: lifting weights)
It is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.
- Unlike Buddhism, as manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and Koran are worse than useless.
- The purpose of the book is to encourage your to investigate certain contemplative insights for yourself, without accepting the metaphysical ideas that they inspired in ignorant and isolated peoples of the past.
It is always now. To realize this is liberating, there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in the world.
- We spend most of our lives forgetting this truth – overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy.
- There is nothing passive about mindfulness. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.
- The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.
- Mindfulness meditation is easy to describe, but hard to do. Practice is the only thing that will lead to success. Happily, the benefits of training arrive long before mastery.
- The goal is to come out of the discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant.
Conventional sources of happiness are unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions.
According to Buddhist teachings, humans have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually try to prop up and defend the ego that doesn't exist. By seeing things as they, are we cease to suffer in the usual ways and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.
- Investigating the nature of consciousness itself and transforming its contents through deliberate training is the basis of spiritual life.
- As a matter of experience you are not a body of atoms, molecules and cells; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents.
- Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.
- Only consciousness can know itself, directly through first person experience. Rigorous introspection – spirituality in the widest sense of the term – is an indispensable part of understanding they nature of the mind.
- Whatever the final lesson of the split brain will be, it thoroughly violates our commonsense intuitions about the nature of our subjectivity.
- The conventional sense of self is an illusion; spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.
An empirical claim: look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion.
- We must build our own telescopes to judge the empirical claims of contemplatives
Taking oneself to be the thinker of ones thoughts – that is not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness – is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.
- It is not enough to know, in the abstract, that thoughts continually arise or that one is thinking at this moment, for such knowledge is itself mediated by thoughts that are arising unrecognized. It is th e arising of these thoughts that produces the feeling of "I". One must pay attention closely to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts – Consciousness does not feel like a self.
- As a matter of neurology, the sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion, because it is built upon processes that are transitory and multifarious.
- A human mind is a wandering mind and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
- Paradox of spiritual life: the feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present.
The deepest goal of spirituality is to achieve freedom from the self, but to seek such freedom as if it were a future state to be attained is to reinforce the chains of ones apparent bondage. Two solutions to this paradox: -) ignore it and adopt techniques of meditation in hopes of a breakthrough.
- The path of gradual ascent is typical of Theravada Buddhism (and the Indian tradition) it is easy to teach.
-) Fully acknowledge it and concede that all efforts are doomed.
- The path of "sudden realization" appears impossibly steep. "non-dualistic" in that it refuses to validate the POV from which one would meditate or practice any spiritual discipline.
- Peak experiences are fine, but real freedom must be present in normal waking life.
- Gradualism says that one must climb the mountain so that freedom can be found at the top. However the self is ALREADY an illusion, and truth can be glimpsed directly at any point along the path.
- Dualistic mindfulness – eg: paying attention to the breath – proceeds on the basis of an illusion: one feels that one is the subject, locus of consciousness inside the head, that can pay attention to something. Could also directly be mindful of selflessness itself, but this requires recognizing how consciousness is, which can be difficult.
- Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. B/c ego is no entity it will vanish and reality will shine forth. This is the direct method.
- Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling "I", and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness – free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its always-changing contents. These are the simple truths that Poonja-ji taught.
- Tulku Urgyen Ronpoche: one of the greatest recent Dszogchen masters. Sam never met anyone who spoke about the nature of consciousness as precisely. Dzogchen closely resembles Advaita. The tradition seeks to provide an insight into non-duality of consciousness. Dzogchen makes it clear that one must practice to the point of stability without succumbing to the dualistic striving. Done through the "pointing out" instruction. Mindfulness is synonymous with dispelling the illusion of the self.
- This technique of Dzogchen was the most important thing that Sam has been taught by anyone. When you pay attention it is impossible for you to feel like a self at all: the implied center of cognition and emotion simply falls away, and it becomes obvious that consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows. That which is aware of sadness is not sad; That which is aware of fear is not fearful. However the moment you are lost in thought, you are just as confused as anyone else.
- The deeper purpose of meditation is to recognize that which is common to all states of experience, pleasant and unpleasant. The goal is to realize those qualities that are intrinsic to consciousness in every present moment, no matter what arises to be noticed. When you are able to rest naturally, merely witnessing the totality of experience, and thoughts themselves are left to arise and vanish on their own, you can recognize that consciousness is intrinsically undivided. Here, you will be completely relieved of the feeling that you call "I". The gesture that precipitates this insight for most people is an attempt to invert consciousness upon itself – to look for that which is looking. Here you notice in the first instant of looking. It is possible to look for the feeling you are calling "I" and fail to find it in a way that is conclusive.
- Selflessness is not a "deep" feature of consciousness; it is right on the surface.
- One of the first things you learn when you learn to meditate is that nothing is intrinsically boring – boredom is simply a lack of attention.
- Is true freedom possible? It certainly is in a momentary sense, as any mature practitioner of meditation knows, and those moments can increase in number and duration with practice. The ability to meditate – to rest as consciousness for a few moments prior to the arising of the next thought – can offer profound relief from mental suffering. We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.
- The general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into ones own skin and suffering less there.
- We can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life.
- We need not await any data from the lab to say that self-transcendence is possible. And we need not become masters of meditation to realize its benefits. It is within our capacity to recognize the nature of thoughts, to awaken from the dream of being merely ourselves, and to become better able to contribute to the well-being of others.