Review of Sam Harris's "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion"

The value of this book for me is that reading his words leading to "no self" suddenly clicked for me in terms of my own deeper sense of what this is about and being able to live in "no self" at any moment I want. Would I have gotten it without having years of daily meditation, self-remembering exercises, and periodic silent retreats sponsored by various spiritual organizations? I don't know. Perhaps it simply comes with maturity and time? I believe that some disciplines call Harris's "no self" the true Self with capital "S" or the "impersonal Self" shared by all beings. 

This book is a quick and easy read. Some of his high level remarks seem skewed, but he explains and elaborates later in the book, e.g. logical conflicts between religions. I believe that he occasionally confused poetic metaphor with assertion of facts, e.g. his critique of Gurdjieff's cosmology, the moon eats us, the old and new testaments of the Bible. He seems to be blind to the distinction between sermons for the students and sermons for the "coarse" folks (the "coarse" adjective from the Confessions of Saint Augustine). This same distinction has been made by commentators about the teaching of the Buddha, some sermons for the common folks, different sermons for the students.

Harris's discussions about neurology are fascinating. He stays in the essence of the problem. Many researchers, such as Daniel Dennett, Roger Penrose, get detoured into non-essential, but easier to access phenomena. On the other hand the only book I read by Dennett was "Consciousness Explained." Dennett suggested that if readers wanted to get to the really essential questions of consciousness, they should read his "The Intentional Stance." I haven't read this yet.