The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
13 Padmasambhava, Self-liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness, trans. J. M. Reynolds (New York: Station Hill Press, 1989), 12.
14 Padmasambhava was an eighth-century mystic who is generally credited with having brought the teachings of Buddhism (particularly those of Tanta and Dzogchen) from India to Tibet.
15 No doubt, many students of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish esoterica will claim that my literal reading of their scriptures betrays my ignorance of their spiritual import. To be sure, occult, alchemical, and conventionally mystical interpretations of various passages in the Bible and the Koran are as old as the texts themselves, but the problem with such hermeneutical efforts-whether it be the highly dubious theory of gematria (the translation of the Hebrew letters of the Torah into their numerical equivalents so that numerologists can work their interpretive magic upon the text) or the glib symbol seeking of popular scholars like Joseph Campbell-is that they are perfectly unconstrained by the contents of the texts themselves. One can interpret every text in such a way as to yield almost any mystical or occult instruction.
A case in point: I have selected another book at random, this time from the cookbook aisle of a bookstore. The book is A Taste of Hawaii: New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific. Therein 1 have discovered an as yet uncelebrated mystical treatise. While it appears to be a recipe for wok-seared fish and shrimp cakes with ogo-tomato relish, we need only study its list of ingredients to know that we are in the presence of an unrivaled spiritual intelligence: snapper filet, cubed
3 teaspoons chopped scallions salt and freshly ground black pepper a dash of cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons chopped fresh ginger
1 teaspoon minced garlic
8 shrimp, peeled, deveined, and cubed
1/2 cup heavy cream; 2 eggs, lightly beaten
3 teaspoons rice wine; 2 cups bread crumbs
3 tablespoons vegetable oil; 2-1/2 cups ogo tomato relish
The snapper filet, of course, is the individual himself-you and I-awash in the sea of existence. But here we find it cubed, which is to say that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions of body, mind, and spirit.
Three teaspoons of chopped scallions further partakes of the cubic symmetry, suggesting that that which we need add to each level of our being by way of antidote comes likewise in equal proportions. The import of the passage is clear: the body, mind, and spirit need to be tended to with the same care.
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, here we have the perennial invocation of opposites-the white and the black aspects of our nature. Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfill the recipe for spiritual life. Nothing, after all, can be excluded from the human experience (this seems to be a Tantric text). What is more, salt and pepper come to us in the form of grains, which is to say that our good and bad qualities are born of the tiniest actions. Thus, we are not good or evil in general, but only by virtue of innumerable moments, which color the stream of our being by force of repetition.
A dash of cayenne pepper, clearly, being of such robust color and flavor, this signifies the spiritual influence of an enlightened adept. What shall we make of the ambiguity of its measurement? How large is a dash? Here we must rely upon the wisdom of the universe at large. The teacher himself will know precisely what we need by way of instruction. And it is at just this point in the text that the ingredients that bespeak the heat of spiritual endeavor are added to the list-for after a dash of cayenne pepper, we find two teaspoons of chopped fresh ginger and one teaspoon of minced garlic. These form an isosceles trinity of sorts, signifying the two sides of our spiritual nature (male and female) united with the object meditation.
Next comes eight shrimp -peeled, deveined, and cubed. The eight shrimp, of course, represent the eight worldly concerns that every spiritual aspirant must decry: fame and shame; loss and gain; pleasure and pain; praise and blame. Each needs to be deveined, peeled, and cubed-that is, purged of its power to entrance us and incorporated on the path of practice.
That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any text-and that they are therefore meaningless-should be obvious. Here we have scripture as Rorschach blot: wherein the occultist can find his magical principles perfectly reflected; the conventional mystic can find his recipe for transcendence; and the totalitarian dogmatist can hear God telling him to suppress the intelligence and creativity of others. This is not to say that no author has ever couched spiritual or mystical information in allegory or ever produced a text that requires a strenuous hermeneutica effort to be made sense of. If you pick up a copy of Finnegans Wake, for instance, and imagine that you have found therein allusions to various cosmogonic myths and alchemical schemes, chances are that you have, because Joyce put them there. But to dredge scripture in this manner and discover the occasional pearl is little more than a literary game.
16 For a recent scholarly treatment of the phenomenology of Buddhist meditation that is compatible with my usage here, see B. A. Wallace, "Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism," journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 5-7 (2001): 209-30. For extensive discussion of meditation by neuroscientists, see J. H. Austin, Zen and the Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), and C. deCharms, Two Views of Mind: Abhidharma and Brain Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1998).
17 I believe this metaphor comes from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, but I have forgotten where in his many discourses I read it.
18 It is often said that a person cannot learn these things from reading a book. In the general case, this is undoubtedly true. I would add that one is by no means guaranteed to recognize the intrinsic non-duality of consciousness simply by having an eminent meditation master point it out. The conditions have to be just right: the teacher has to be really delivering the goods, leaving no conceptual doubt as to what is to be recognized; and the student has to be endowed with sufficient concentration of mind to follow his instructions and notice what there is to notice. In this sense, meditation is undoubtedly an acquired skill.
19 The recognition of the non-duality of consciousness is not susceptible to a linguistically oriented analysis. While it is perfectly natural that men who knew only their thoughts would attempt to reduce everything to language, the efforts of Wittgenstein and his imitators in philosophy do not cut deeply enough to shed any light upon this terrain. Perhaps an intuition of these things could be read into Wittgenstein's celebrated statement "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." But the true mystery, whereof we cannot speak, can nevertheless be recognized.
20 Meditation has, in fact, been the subject of scientific study for many years. See J. Andresen, "Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine: The Story of Experimental Research on Meditation," Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, nos. 11-12 (2000): 17-73,Ior an exhaustive review. Much of this research has employed EEG and physiological measures and, in so doing, has not attempted to localize changes in brain function. Most studies that have utilized modern techniques of neuroimaging have not studied meditation relative to the self-sense per se. See A. B. Newberg et al., "The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during the Complex Cognitive Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study," Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging Section 106 (2000 and 2001): 113-22, for the results of a SPECT study. To my knowledge, only one group has begun working with meditators who are producing the specific, subjective effect of losing their sense of self; a preliminary report on these studies can be found in D. Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (New York: Bantam, 2003).
21 F. Varela, "Neurophenomenology," Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1996): 330-49, makes this point with regard to the scientific validity of "subjective" data: "The line of separation-between rigor and lack of it-is not to be drawn between first and third person accounts, but determined rather by whether there is a clear methodological ground leading to a communal validation and shared knowledge."
22 I would like to briefly address the concern that the
Those who would demand an independent measure of mental events should first consider two things: (1) many features of human experience are irretrievably private and, as a consequence, self-report remains our only guide to their existence: depression, anger, joy, visual and auditory hallucinations, dreams, and even pain are among the innumerable
"first-person" facts that can be finally verified only by self-report; (2) in those cases where independent measures of internal states do exist, they exist only by virtue of their reliable correlation with self-report. Even fear, which is now dependably linked to a variety of physiological and behavioral measures-increased startle response, rising cortisol, increased skin conductance, etc.-cannot be taken off the gold standard of self-report. Imagine what would happen if subjective ratings of fear ever broke free of such "independent" measures: if, say,50 percent of subjects claimed to feel no fear when their cortisol levels rose and to feel terror when they fell. These measures would cease to be of any use at all in the study of fear. It is important that we not lose sight of the cash value that physiological and behavioral variables have in the study of mental events: they are only as good as the subjects say they are. (I do not mean to suggest that people are subjectively incorrigible, or that every mental event is best studied by recourse to self-report. When the topic under consideration is how things seem to the subject, however, self-report will be our only compass.)
23 Indeed, the future looks rather like the past in this respect. We may live to see the technological perfection of all the visionary strands of traditional mysticism: shamanism (Siberian or South American), Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism), and all the other byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are born of a longing for esoteric knowledge and a desire to excavate the visionary strata of the mind-in dreams, or trance, or psychedelic swoon-in search of the sacred. While I have no doubt that remarkable experiences are lying in wait for the initiate down each of these byways, the fact that consciousness is always the prior context and condition of every visionary experience is a great clarifying truth-and one which brands all such excursions as fundamentally unnecessary. That consciousness is not improved-not made emptier of self, or more mysterious, transcendental, etc.-by the pyrotechnics of esotericism is a fact, which contemplatives of every persuasion could confirm in their own experience.
The modern version of the visionary impulse, perhaps best exemplified in the exquisite ravings of Terence McKenna, is the equation of spiritual transcendence with information of a transcendental kind. Thus, any experience (most effectively invoked with the aid of psychedelic drugs) in which the mind is flooded by paradoxical disclosures-visions of other realms, ethereal beings, the grammatology of alien intelligences, etc.-is considered to be an improvement upon ordinary consciousness. What such a romance of the subtle overlooks, however, is the sublimity of consciousness itself, prior to subject/object perception. That subtle disclosures are captivating to the intellect (whether or not they are "true"), there can be no doubt. But their impermanence-any vision, having arisen, is destined to pass away-proves that such phenomena are not the basis for permanent transformation.
I do not mean to suggest, however, that these "interior" landscapes should remain unexplored. Increasingly subtle appearances hold intrinsic interest for anyone who would acquire more knowledge about the body, the mind, or the universe at large. I am simply saying that to seek freedom amid any continuum of possible disclosures seems a mistake, one that only the non-dual schools of mysticism have adequately criticized. What is more, the fascination with such esoterica is largely responsible for the infantilism and mere credulity that attends most expressions of spirituality in the West. Either we find mere belief, wedded to the hideous presumption of its own sufficiency, or we are met by the frenzied search for novelty-psychic experience, prophecies of doom or splendor, and a thousand errant convictions about the personality of God. But the fact remains that whatever changes occur in the stream of our experience-whether a vision of Jesus appears to each of us, or the totality of human knowledge can one day be downloaded directly onto our synapses-in spiritual terms we will be consciousness first, and only, and already free of "I." It does not seem too soon for us to realize this.
24 Whether mysticism entails the transcendence of all concepts is surely an open question. The claim here is merely that the concepts that underwrite our dualistic perception of the world are left aside by mystics.
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