[MD] The End of Faith - Spirituality

[Steve Peterson]

Hi All,

One reason that I have had negative associations with atheism is  
because I see atheists as rejecting spirituality in favor of  
scientism. This is a stereotype of course, and it doesn't apply to  
all atheists, nor does it apply to Sam Harris.

I found this speech where Sam Harris explains religious experience to  
a bunch of atheists at an atheist convention interesting. He explains  
mysticism in a very rational way. I'd be interested in your thoughts  
on this excerpt from his speech "The Problem With Atheism":

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sam_harris/2007/10/ 
the_problem_with_atheism.html

"...Here’s what happens, in the generic case: a person, in whatever  
culture he finds himself, begins to notice that life is difficult. He  
observes that even in the best of times—no one close to him has died,  
he’s healthy, there are no hostile armies massing in the distance,  
the fridge is stocked with beer, the weather is just so—even when  
things are as good as they can be, he notices that at the level of  
his moment to moment experience, at the level of his attention, he is  
perpetually on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary  
relief from his search.

We’ve all noticed this. We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and  
tastes, and sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual  
curiosities, and our desire for friendship and romance. We become  
connoisseurs of art and music and film—but our pleasures are, by  
their very nature, fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely  
reiterate them as often as we are able.

If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of  
accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for about an hour, or  
maybe a day, but then people will begin to ask us “So, what are you  
going to do next? Don’t you have anything else in the pipeline?”  
Steve Jobs releases the IPhone, and I’m sure it wasn’t twenty minutes  
before someone asked, “when are you going to make this thing  
smaller?” Notice that very few people at this juncture, no matter  
what they’ve accomplished, say, “I’m done. I’ve met all my goals. Now  
I’m just going to stay here eat ice cream until I die in front of you.”

Even when everything has gone as well as it can go, the search for  
happiness continues, the effort required to keep doubt and  
dissatisfaction and boredom at bay continues, moment to moment. If  
nothing else, the reality of death and the experience of losing loved  
ones punctures even the most gratifying and well-ordered life.

In this context, certain people have traditionally wondered whether a  
deeper form of well-being exists. Is there, in other words, a form of  
happiness that is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our  
pleasures and successes and avoiding our pains. Is there a form of  
happiness that is not dependent upon having one’s favorite food  
always available to be placed on one’s tongue or having all one’s  
friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or having good books to  
read, or having something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it  
possible to be utterly happy before anything happens, before one’s  
desires get gratified, in spite of life’s inevitable difficulties, in  
the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

This question, I think, lies at the periphery of everyone’s  
consciousness. We are all, in some sense, living our answer to it—and  
many of us are living as though the answer is “no.” No, there is  
nothing more profound that repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding  
one’s pains; there is nothing more profound that seeking  
satisfaction, both sensory and intellectual. Many of us seem think  
that all we can do is just keep our foot on the gas until we run out  
of road.

But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that  
there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them  
are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of people like the  
Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And such  
a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often  
called “meditation” or “contemplation”—as a means of examining his  
moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis  
of well-being is there to be found.

Such a person might even hole himself up in a cave, or in a  
monastery, for months or years at a time to facilitate this process.  
Why would somebody do this? Well, it amounts to a very simple  
experiment. Here’s the logic of it: if there is a form of  
psychological well-being that isn’t contingent upon merely repeating  
one’s pleasures, then this happiness should be available even when  
all the obvious sources of pleasure and satisfaction have been  
removed. If it exists at all, this happiness should be available to a  
person who has renounced all her material possessions, and declined  
to marry her high school sweetheart, and gone off to a cave or to  
some other spot that would seem profoundly uncongenial to the  
satisfaction of ordinary desires and aspirations.

One clue as to how daunting most people would find such a project is  
the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are  
talking about—is considered a punishment even inside a prison. Even  
when cooped up with homicidal maniacs and rapists, most people still  
prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of  
time alone in a box.

And yet, for thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find  
extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast  
stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as  
rational people, whether we call ourselves “atheists” or not, we have  
a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the  
contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion,  
deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having  
interesting and even normative experiences under the name of  
“spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia.

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience,  
that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their  
emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical  
intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of  
subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like  
meditation.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what  
contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have  
discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the  
mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into  
consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously  
spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.

Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to  
himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other people— 
he’s probably mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day long  
silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior  
conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what  
we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is  
going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what  
should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to  
just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This  
is perfectly compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the  
experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.

Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. There  
is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It  
is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost  
all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the  
basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much  
rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit  
learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even  
talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.

 From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to  
boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather  
esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with  
discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize  
thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And  
when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is  
available.

But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you  
can’t borrow someone else’s contemplative tools to test it. The  
problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how  
distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own  
contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had  
to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if  
astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn’t make the sky any  
less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more  
difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build  
your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another  
matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad  
philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether  
certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have  
to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be  
able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for  
a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is  
not work that our culture knows much about.

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems  
more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone  
like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many  
atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible,  
or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to  
imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of  
mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of  
scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation,  
artistic inspiration, etc.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me  
assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself  
in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a  
time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not  
writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely  
observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought,  
he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely  
to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts  
at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the  
plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human  
happiness..."