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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion QUOTES

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion QUOTES

121 " The mind is a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts arise because there is the thinker. The thinker is the ego. The ego, if sought, will automatically vanish. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

122 " looking for a path back to the present: "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

123 " There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn’t the same as investigating the nature of one’s mind absent any doctrinal assumptions. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

124 " In the broadest sense, however, meditation is simply the ability to stop suffering in many of the usual ways, if only for a few moments at a time. How could that not be a skill worth cultivating? "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

125 " Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

126 " During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

127 " to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

128 " Is true freedom even possible? It certainly is in a momentary sense, as any mature practitioner of meditation knows, and those moments can increase in both number and duration with practice. Therefore, I see no reason why a person couldn’t perfectly banish the illusion of the self. However, just the ability to meditate—to rest as consciousness for a few moments prior to the arising of the next thought—can offer a profound relief from mental suffering. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

129 " Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

130 " It should also trouble NDE enthusiasts that only 10 to 20 percent of people who approach clinical death recall having any experience at all.13 "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

131 " Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

132 " The gurus I have met personally, as well as those whose careers and teachings I have studied at a distance, range from crooks who could be quickly dismissed to teachers who were brilliant but flawed, to those who, while still human, seemed to possess so much compassion and clarity of mind that they were nearly flawless examples of the benefits of spiritual practice. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

133 " Interestingly, when one functions in this mode, one quickly recognizes all the other people who are playing the same game. I had many encounters wherein I would meet the eyes of a person across the room, and suddenly we were playing War of the Warlocks: two strangers holding each other’s gaze well past the point that our primate genes or cultural conditioning would ordinarily countenance. Play this game long enough and you begin to have some very strange encounters. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

134 " religious. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

135 " But one need not believe in psychic powers to cut through the illusion of the self. Accomplishing this can be elusive enough. If I’ve met a person who has done so perfectly, I am unaware of it. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

136 " is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain. It is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every move. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

137 " most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

138 " We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

139 " Nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence for it in the universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The only proof that it is like something to be you at this moment is the fact (obvious only to you) that it is like something to be you.10 "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

140 " Being wisely selfish and being selfless can amount to very much the same thing. There are centuries of anecdotal testimony on this point—and, as we will see, the scientific study of the mind has begun to bear it out. There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them. "

― Sam Harris , Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion