Book Review: The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

https://mogambospeaks.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/book-review-the-moral-landscape-by-sam-harris/

We've arrived at the point where even #SamHarris gets the point (and that's usually a sign that it's quite late in the game):

https://samharris.substack.com/p/american-fascism-ep-456

#US #Trump #fascism

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.
-- Sam Harris

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #SamHarris #Atheism #Belief #Religion

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Kayaks #Everglades #Florida

Ground Swell

In almost all types of contemplative practice that depend upon a simple quietness, whether Centering Prayer, vipassana meditation, zazen according to the Sōtō Zen tradition, or whichever, there is a sense that comes to arise of an open field of attention, not unlike a crystalline expanse within, or coterminous with, the visual field (whether one’s eyes are open or closed). Keeping still, it is apparent that this clear space, the ground of one’s consciousness, is not other than the ground from which things appear – sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions, whatever – and pass. Somehow it cannot be different from the ground of becoming itself.

There is a line from the Heart Sutra, “Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness” that expresses the quality of this perception better than anything else I’ve read. And yet this realisation, if that’s the word, like the practice within which it occurs, is not a religious thing at all. Sam Harris writes,

I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language. Religion is a term like sports: Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free solo” rock climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

The same could be said of spirituality. The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same underlying reality—and when they do, they don’t do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them…

Of course, it is true that specific Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Advaita, but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been regularly exiled or killed.

Harris, Sam. Waking Up (pp. 19-20, 22). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

The pause in religious communities coming together for worship caused by the current pandemic is widely touted as making a permanent difference to church attendance, and to the conduct of public worship in future months and years (Zoom worship, blended online and in-person services, and so forth) but for me at least it has had a far more fundamental effect. I have come to realise, as I wrote recently on The Mercy Blog, that “In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I have begun to sense that the ‘social-cultural system’ of religion is something quite separate from the ‘experimental faith’ (cf. Quaker faith & practice 19.02) of contemplative practice, and crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.”

This blog is intended, at least in part, to chart that exploration.

#contemplative #practice #QuakerFaithPractice #religion #SamHarris #stillness

What’s It All About?

What is the point of contemplation? What does it even mean to call oneself a contemplative? Merriam Webster’s dictionary’s first definition is as follows: “1 a: concentration on spiritual things as a form of private devotion. b: a state of mystical awareness of God’s being”, which is about the best of the dictionary definitions that appear in an online search.

Sam Harris, who has a way of nailing spiritual realities outside of conventional religious language, writes:

I believe that [contemplative] states of mind have a lot to say about the nature of consciousness and the possibilities of human well-being. Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that 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.

(Harris, Sam. Waking Up (p. 14). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)

William Blake wrote, in a book published in 1790, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” (The passage has inspired many works and attributions, notably the name of Jim Morrison’s band The Doors, and Aldous Huxley’s 1954 study of the spiritual implications of the use of psychedelics.)

In my experience, limited by my own personal abilities and failings, and lack of formal training, cleansing the doors of perception is precisely the core function of contemplation. As Huxley pointed out, the human brain (or more precisely, the mode of consciousness operative for most of our waking lives) can act as a reducing valve that restricts our minds to the mundane and acquisitive level where most of us spend most of our time. Huxley’s critics, including Thomas Mann and Martin Buber, pointed out that the effects of psychedelics are too subjective and transient to be considered equivalent to direct mystical experience, and I tend to agree with them. Interestingly, Harris’s early experience with MDMA (op. cit., p. 3) did help to point him in the direction of genuine contemplative practice and its fruits – as did my own experience, at about the same period of my life, with both LSD and, more strikingly, mescaline.

It was hard for me, in the early 1970s, to disentangle the idea of actual contemplative practice from the religions within which it had developed. Uncomfortable as I was, at least on paper, with the idea of becoming a Buddhist, with all the ritual and special language and texts that that seemed to entail, it was the nearest I could find to the spiritual and metaphysical yearnings with which I was filled, and which promised perhaps to provide an adult context for my childhood experiences while recovering from serious illness.

It was not until some years later that I met real live Christian contemplatives, at the SSM Priory at Willen, and became aware that there was still a living contemplative tradition within Christianity, and that texts like The Cloud of Unknowing, and Julian of Norwich’s Showings, were more than curiosities for scholars of the medieval church. Before I realised it, I found I was launched on a lifetime of contemplation in the context, mostly, of the Anglican church, and based on the practice of the Jesus Prayer…

But suppose that contemplative practice were seen as an end in itself, rather than as a means to deepen one’s involvement in the life and dogma of a religious institution? Suppose the aim were in actual fact simply the cleansing of the doors of perception, quite apart from the scriptural and social context of a community based on the mythos of a culture far removed from our own in time and worldview?

Wikipedia defines religion as “a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements.”

Contemplation, understood as a settling-out, a clearing of experience and perception, is at root a kind of inner seeing, an experiential encounter with the ground of being that gives rise to, and sustains, all that is – which, of course, is what my own long-ago metaphysical intuitions were leading me towards.

The enforced solitude of these unusual times, when all our habits and assumptions have been overturned by the present pandemic, is proving oddly fruitful. I should not be surprised to learn that there are many, cut loose from religious roles and commitments by the suspension of normal corporate worship, and maybe as unconvinced as I am by their sometimes desperate online simulacra, who are coming to similar conclusions. Some may of course drift into a kind of virtual New Age, “cyberseeker” mentality; but many more may come to realise that there is a cleanness, a directness, about a contemplative practice which can stand in the light of its own truth, without the excuses or scaffolding of dogma.

#AldousHuxley #contemplation #contemplative #psychedelics #religion #SamHarris

Metaphysics?

The term “metaphysics” seems to make many writers on what might broadly be called secular spirituality nervous: “Metaphysics is a distraction. By ‘metaphysics’ I mean that which is beyond physics… ideas that can’t be experienced here and now in the world and that we can’t know directly.” (Lambert); “Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that… there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness.” (Harris) “I’m not talking about the “supernatural” or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism…” (Wright)

Now, I’ve no wish to take issue with writers such as Lenorë Lambert, Sam Harris or Robert Wright, and I have quoted their work often enough here and elsewhere. I recognise as clearly as any of them the difficulty, described so well both by Wright and by Susan Blackmore, of a Western person encountering an elaborate, occasionally almost baroque, system of theologies, demonologies, geographies of life, death, and aeons of rebirth, prevalent especially in parts of the Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions.

But I will keep on using the term “the ground of being”, and if that doesn’t sound metaphysical I’m not sure what does. It’s a term if not coined, then certainly made familiar by Paul Tillich. Tillich describes the ground of being as not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction, as “Being-itself” – which always reminds me of Meister Eckhart’s use of the term Istigkeit, “isness“.

For me, this isness is precisely that which can be known directly in contemplation. I am not talking here of an idea, a common factor in a Huxley-like perennial philosophy, but of a repeated and very direct experience of what Quakers have referred to as “the light”, as described for instance by Emilia Fogelklou (she writes in the third person): “Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ’empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.”

This kind of experience can of course not be described terribly clearly, nor can it be communicated directly, and any attempt is likely to fall into superlatives such as Fogelklou’s. But the experience is as real and direct as any sensory experience, perhaps more so, and it has a curious undeniable quality, a great lifting and healing of the heart, that can catch the breath and fill the eyes with tears. I use Tillich’s term for it not because I have any particular attraction for that as an idea, but because it seems to get closer than anything else I have read to the encounter itself. There is a visual analogue that sometimes occurs in meditation – and which can lead to the experience I am trying to describe – of the visual field itself, seen through closed eyes, extending suddenly through and beneath what ought to have been the observing mind, but which is no longer there.

Now, I have long enough experience in contemplative practice to know that experiences are not things to hang onto, still less to seek after, and I would not be happy if any words of mine sent anyone on a quest for experiential chimeras. Yet the experience itself, with all its indelible affect, has occurred so often over the years, since childhood, that I find myself referring to it over and over again, and it remains a kind of lodestone in my own unknowing of being and nothingness.

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is not in fact to worry too much about explanations, and certainly not about ideas, but just to practice, and to be true to what we find there.

#AldousHuxley #contemplation #contemplative #EmiliaFogelklou #experience #LenorëLambert #metaphysics #RobertWright #SamHarris #SusanBlackmore

Looking for a language

All contemplative traditions seek, in one way or another, to look past the shifting pattern of thoughts and emotions which we take to to be ourselves, and to know directly that which is unthinkable, and is.

But thinking is what we always do, if only to find some way of pointing out the ineffable, of showing others the beginning of the way to this unconditioned treasure. But it is always difficult, and painfully easily misunderstood, as contemplatives have long found to their cost in their dealings with religious authorities.

I think the reason why most contemplatives are in fact allied with some religion or another may be that, not only do we ourselves find the way to our own contemplative practice within a religious tradition, but within that tradition we find a path that others have walked, a thread others have followed, and a language with which to talk, and more importantly to think, about contemplation and its purpose. In many traditions contemplative practice is seen and experienced as a form of prayer, which comes with its own questions, and its own ways to think and talk about them.

One of the difficulties with treading a secular contemplative path is that these frameworks of tradition and language fall away. This is of course a great freedom, but it is easier perhaps to see what it is a freedom from than it is to see what it may be a freedom to, because of the sheer difficulty we have in finding new words for that which is beyond words, and in looking for ways to understand what we have perceived directly.

Happily, in most cases, bereft of a traditional Buddhist, Christian, or whatever language for contemplative experience, with all its baggage of doctrine and metaphysics, some have turned to Western philosophy, or to neuroscience, for paradigms. Those who are trained in these fields, Susan Blackmore, for instance, or Sam Harris, have made contributions that I for one find useful to say the least. Others, like Stephen Batchelor, seem to work more nearly by pruning the language of an existing tradition to express a secular practice, repossessing well-tried (in Batchelor’s case Buddhist) words to chart a secular path.

I am very late to the game. My four decades, more or less, of broadly Christian contemplative practice have left me missing their rich tradition of expression, and the depth of thought and teaching that underpins that tradition in both the Eastern and Western church, and in the great body of writing that predates the Great Schism of 1054, and, come to that, in the Quaker way since the 17th century in England.

I am finding it hard, as readers of this blog may have noticed, to pick up an alternative framework in which to think and write about practice and experience. I don’t have an alternative expert language, like the philosophers and the students of consciousness, and yet there is a sense that my own stream, my own practice and its fruits, has not gone astray so much as found a deeper bed on its way to the sea. The question is, how to talk about it?

#contemplation #contemplative #experience #faith #language #practice #religion #SamHarris #StephenBatchelor #SusanBlackmore #theWay

Beyond the fences

Many of our institutions are struggling to seem relevant these days, that includes the church in its various forms. There are many reasons for this.

One reason is that for a long time religious institutions, such as the church, have tried to maintain a monopoly on access to the spiritual. ‘Come here’ they say, ‘do this’ or ‘read that’ and you can access the divine; the spiritual realm. Institutions as gatekeepers.

One of the great shifts in recent years has been the growing realisation that spirituality is not confined by a set of walls or dogmas, increasing proportions of society have come to see that they can perceive or experience the spiritual beyond the confines that the institutions have appeared to present. Beyond the fences that they were told were unclimbable. This loss of monopoly has added to the difficulties experienced by other institutions, making some of the religious institutions that rely upon it appear as if they have no relevance beyond that of cultural belonging. Gatekeepers are pointless if fences are illusions.

Simon J Cross – Weekday meditation 2/7/2021

For far too long I have tended to believe in the gatekeepers and their narratives of the borderlines. For far too long I felt, albeit unconsciously, that access to the spiritual, or at least to meaningful spiritual practice, depended upon making the right choice of gateway, at least on finding the gateway that was right for me, a gate for whose lock I had the key.

Sufficient introspection would have told me I was wrong, but there never seemed to be a gap for sufficient introspection. Being part of a religious institution put constraints on that kind of introspection, kept me thinking in the well-worn tracks of the (in my case Christian) doctrine and praxis I knew so well, effectively limiting my conclusions to those that would fit within the fences they defined.

The past 16 months or so, with churches and the places where people meet largely closed, have proved those fences to be illusory. The barriers between the selves I have seemed to be have proved illusory also: there is no longer any unavoidable incompatibility between thought and experience, between hope and grace.

In an article on the Secular Buddhist Network Robert M Ellis writes, “I do not describe myself as a Buddhist, because that process of practical examination of what works is far more important to me than loyalty to any tradition. Instead, I describe myself as a ‘Middle Way practitioner’ – where the Middle Way is understood as a universal principle that can be found both in Buddhism and in many other places.”

I am not sure that I would even describe myself as a middle way practitioner (with or without capitals), still less a Buddhist, these days. (I rather like the way Sam Harris, in Waking Up, avoids handing his key to that gatekeeper.) There must be many of us Einzelgänger and Einzelgängerinnen out here now, beyond the fences, and I’m coming to suspect that we don’t need to form communities, adopt labels, and things like that. We will find each other if we need each other, and just as the current pandemic that has given so many of us space to breathe is a fact of our time, so too is the internet that enables me to publish this post at the click of a button.

#community #contemplative #grace #practice #RobertMEllis #SamHarris #SimonJCross #solitude

Keeping on

Maintaining any contemplative practice is an odd activity by any “normal” standards. It doesn’t work with goals or results, it has no measure of achievement, nor any scale of proficiency. We are all, always, beginners – we never get anywhere. And yet the effects of regular practice on the practitioner could hardly be more profound.

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Sam Harris, Waking Up, Transworld Digital, p.206

If this is the kind of thing we can expect, then there is something extraordinarily wonky about the kind of priorities we are so often encouraged to accept as “getting somewhere in life”. Chris Niebauer, the neuroscientist, takes it further yet:

As a matter of background, contemporary neuroscience has one belief above and beyond all others, and that is that consciousness is localized in the brain. Because of this brain-specific localization, traditional neuroscience assumes that consciousness itself is also individual—that is, it exists separately in separate brains. In other words, I have “my consciousness” and you have yours, and in this sense the interpretive mind thinks and acts as if it “owns” consciousness…

…in spite of the best efforts and best technologies modern science has to offer, the neuroscience community has not located consciousness in the brain. Perhaps the simple reason for this is that consciousness is not there to be found. What if the brain is connected to, or a part of, consciousness—rather than a possessor of consciousness?

Chris Niebauer, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism, Hierophant Publishing, pp. 126, 129

One of the less expected correlatives of contemplative practice over time is just this direct realisation that the sense of self as an atomistic, separate individual is a simple illusion. There’s nothing there – we have mistaken the map for the terrain. The stillness of just sitting opens on to an awareness that has no boundaries as we have become used to them, no sense of beginning or ending either in time or in space – which have in any case become indistinguishable dimensions of no thing at all.

The odd thing about all this is that it is in its way the most ordinary of perceptions. It is not – for me, anyway! – accompanied by psychedelic bells and whistles of any kind, nor attended by celestial visitations or heavenly perfumes. It is as simple as breathing, and as close. Niebauer’s sense that consciousness is primary, not epiphenomenal, may sound exotic, but it is just how it feels.

#ChrisNiebauer #contemplative #practice #SamHarris

Frames

The spiritual life can be a difficult thing to live with. Once one realises for oneself the emptiness of the “universe of concrete things in eternal categories” (Brian McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed and the Disillusioned), of Newtonian mechanics and dualistically interpreted perceptions, the question of how to live arises in ways that are not only personally unsettling but potentially disruptive to the society in which most of us have grown up.

The Abrahamic religions in their popular, one might say political, forms provided a solid dualistic foundation for life and society – “God’s in his heaven–all’s right with the world” as Robert Browning had it – just as classical mechanics formed a solid, readily calculable foundation not only for physics but for all the sciences. As the revolution in mathematical physics initiated by Einstein and others, and the revolution in biology and paleontology initiated by Darwin, shook the scientific community, so the invasion of Eastern thought and practice (and the revival of the non-dualism inherent in the Christian contemplative tradition), together with the developing psychological disciplines, shook many of the foundations of Western self-understanding.

For those of us who grew up in the turmoil of the 60s the problem could easily become acute. Were we to cling to the imagined certainties of the past, or cast ourselves adrift on the foam of the psychedelic ocean? Were we to seek for no less imaginary certainties among the outward forms of Eastern religions, or were we to become Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin, tracing our own paths on the leaf-litter of philosophy and metaphysics?

It is easy, at times fatally easy, to fall into New Age formlessness on the one hand, or into some kind of fundamentalism on the other. Perhaps some of the cults and cult-like groups that have formed over the years have been failed attempts to blend these two incompatible directions.

I don’t wish to seem to condemn any of my fellow seekers after truth and insight. Once the medieval conception of a state-sponsored compulsory religion – such as still holds sway in some Muslim societies – has fallen away, choice becomes inevitable. (Even atheism and agnosticism are in this sense choices, albeit nominally negative ones.) The spiritual life needs teachers, though, and teachers often imply institutions, if only to validate their teachings. Many teachers of the spiritual life whom I most admire have remained within, or thrown in their lot with, traditional religions, from Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault in the Christian tradition, to Pema Chödrön and Brad Warner in the Buddhist. But there have been others who have not, whether like Jiddu Krishnamurti they rejected an institutional role, or like Sam Harris never adopted one outside of the academic community.

For myself, I feel that while I will always be grateful to the institutional teachers I have encountered over the years – in my case mostly within the Christian contemplative tradition – I have been happiest and most settled in myself outside religious institutions altogether. I wrote recently:

As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.

Despite the value of frameworks of doctrine as a protection from delusion and indiscipline, I am profoundly indebted to those who have sought to delineate the spiritual path outside those traditional frameworks, whether like Tara Brach or Stephen Batchelor they still call themselves Buddhists, or whether like Harris today or Alan Watts in the 60s, they reject such definitions. As I grow older, paradoxically perhaps, I feel less dependent on them myself.

#AlanWatts #BradWarner #community #contemplative #CynthiaBourgeault #PemaChodron #practice #RichardRohr #SamHarris #StephenBatchelor #TaraBrach #trust