Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

How could someone’s happiness increase when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed?

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.

How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.

The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.”

Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.

Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences.

Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available.

Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having one’s favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend?

Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

Here is its logic: If there exists a source of psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying one’s desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed.

Any athlete knows that certain kinds of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable.

Whatever the context, our minds are perpetually moving—generally toward pleasure (or its imagined source) and away from pain.

Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting.

It is impossible for any faith, no matter how elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another.

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).

One can speak about Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. The same cannot be said of Christianity or Islam.

Despite the superstitions that many Buddhists cherish, the doctrine has a practical and logical core that does not require any unwarranted assumptions.

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y.

The fact that your mind is all you have and that it is possible to be at peace even in difficult circumstances can become an argument for ignoring obvious societal problems.

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.

My purpose in writing this book is to encourage you to investigate certain contemplative insights for yourself, without accepting the metaphysical ideas that they inspired in ignorant and isolated peoples of the past.

The reality of your life is always now.

We often fail to appreciate what we have until we have lost it.

For beginners, I usually recommend a technique called vipassana (Pali for “insight”), which comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism, the Theravada.

The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as “mindfulness,” and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial.

Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.

When one compares Buddhist texts with the Bible or the Koran, the difference is unmistakable: The Satipatthana Sutta is not a collection of ancient myths, superstitions, and taboos; it is a rigorously empirical guide to freeing the mind from suffering.

The four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and neutrality), the mind (its moods and attitudes), and the objects of mind (which include the five senses but also other mental states and even mindfulness itself.

Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.

The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts.

The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.

Mindfulness meditation is extraordinarily simple to describe, but it isn’t easy to perform.

Even for extraordinarily lucky people, life is difficult. And when we look at what makes it so, we see that we are all prisoners of our thoughts.

The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of well-being that is imperturbable—or if perturbed, easily regained.

It seems to me that a healthy spiritual life can begin only once our physical, mental, social, and ethical lives have sufficiently matured.

Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others.

Given our social requirements, we know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being must be compatible with an ethical concern for other people—even for complete strangers—otherwise, violent conflict becomes inevitable.

In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening.

The birth of consciousness must be the result of organization: Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate

Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.

But we can now say that any conception of our place in the universe that denies we evolved from more primitive life forms is pure delusion.

In humans, the left hemisphere generally makes a unique contribution to language and to the performance of complex movements.

The question of whether the right hemisphere is conscious is really a pseudo-mystery used to bar the door to a great one: the uncanny fact that the human mind can be divided with a knife.

The right hemisphere is dominant for many higher cognitive abilities, both in normal brains and in those that have been surgically divided.

Much of what makes us human is generally accomplished by the right side of the brain.

Consciousness—whatever its relation to neural events—is divisible.The evidence is overwhelming, however, that such unity, if it ever exists in a human being, depends upon some humble tracts of white matter crossing the midline of the brain.

The point of view from which you are consciously reading these words may not be the only conscious point of view to be found in your brain.

A person’s experience of the world, while apparently unified in a normal brain, can be physically divided.

We now know that at least two systems in the brain—often referred to as “dual processes”—govern human cognition, emotion, and behavior. One is evolutionarily older, unconscious, and automatic; the other evolved more recently and is both conscious and deliberative.

Despite the obvious importance of the unconscious mind, consciousness is what matters to us—not just for the purpose of spiritual practice but in every aspect of our lives.

We have ethical responsibilities toward other creatures precisely to the degree that our actions can affect their conscious experience for better or worse.

I have never come across a coherent notion of bad or good, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable that did not depend upon some change in the experience of conscious creatures.

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion—and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.

The feeling that we call “I” seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will.

Whatever its relation to the physical world, consciousness is the context in which the objects of experience appear—the sight of this book, the sound of traffic, the sensation of your back against a chair.

Duplicate your brain, and you will duplicate “your” contents in another field of consciousness. Divide your brain, and you will segregate those contents in bizarre ways.

Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. And the only thing relevant to the question of personal identity is psychological continuity from one moment to the next.

The effects of consciously practicing gratitude have been studied: When compared to merely thinking about significant life events, or comparing oneself favorably to others, thinking about what one is grateful for increases one’s feelings of well-being, motivation, and positive outlook toward the future.

Most of us let our negative emotions persist longer than is necessary. Becoming suddenly angry, we tend to stay angry—and this requires that we actively produce the feeling of anger.

The truth, however, is that you need not wait for some pleasant distraction to shift your mood. You can simply pay close attention to negative feelings themselves, without judgment or resistance.

But our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering.

Without significant training in meditation, remaining aware—of anything—for a full minute is just not in the cards.

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming.

Meditation: The first sign of progress will be noticing how distracted you are.

The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought.

Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.

What you are calling “I” is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.

Why should we live in relationship to ourselves rather than merely as ourselves? Why should an “I” and a “me” be keeping each other company?

Whatever causes the brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it makes sense that it could stop doing this. And once it does, our inner lives become more faithful to the facts.

Psychologists and neuroscientists now acknowledge that the human mind tends to wander, engaging in what has been called “stimulus-independent thought.”

The authors concluded that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Anyone who has spent time on silent retreat will agree.

Activity in the default-mode network (DMN) decreases when subjects concentrate on tasks of the sort employed in most neuroimaging experiments.

Mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation (Pali: metta) also decrease activity in the DMN—and the effect is most pronounced among experienced meditators (both while meditating and at rest).

Meditators tend to have larger corpora collosa and hippocampi (in both hemispheres).

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?

Being mindful is a means of attaining an experience often described as “cessation,” which is thought to decisively uproot the illusion of the self (along with other mental afflictions, depending on one’s stage of practice).

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses—and that the idea of a “pure consciousness” apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, is a field of consciousness—free, undivided, and uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.

Being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one’s spiritual journey, not its end.

Thus, it is often said that, in Dzogchen, one “takes the goal as the path,” because the freedom from self that one might otherwise seek is the very thing that one practices.

There might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on the student, but once the truth of nonduality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was always available—and there was never any doubt about how to see it again.

Unfortunately, to begin the practice of Dzogchen, it is generally necessary to meet a qualified teacher.

Dzogchen is not vague or paradoxical.

Such wanderings of mind are the primary obstacle to meditation.

The deeper purpose of meditation is to recognize that which is common to all states of experience, both pleasant and unpleasant.

It really is possible to look for the feeling you are calling “I” and to fail to find it in a way that is conclusive.

Look for whatever it is you are calling “I” without being distracted by even the subtlest undercurrent of thought—and notice what happens the moment you turn consciousness upon itself.

We’ve all had the experience of looking through a window and suddenly noticing our own reflection in the glass. At that moment we have a choice: to use the window as a window and see the world beyond, or to use it as a mirror.

Most techniques of meditation are, in essence, elaborate ways for looking through the window in the hope that if one only sees the world in greater detail, an image of one’s true face will eventually appear.

To be a better spouse or parent, we often must make a deliberate effort to change ourselves. Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.

The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves.

The difference between an expert and a novice is no less stark when it comes to recognizing the illusion of the self. But the qualifications of a teacher and the progress of a student are more difficult to assess.

One can’t fake being an expert gymnast, a rocket scientist, or even a competent cook—at least not for long—but one can fake being an enlightened adept.

One of the first things one learns in practicing meditation is that nothing is intrinsically boring—indeed, boredom is simply a lack of attention. Pay sufficient attention, and the mere experience of breathing can reward months and years of steady vigilance.

Generally speaking, you should head for the door at any sign of deception on the part of a teacher. Admittedly, you might want to make certain allowances for cultural differences and for the harmlessness of the lie.

If one person on earth possessed psychic powers to any significant degree, this would be among the easiest facts to authenticate in a lab.

One need not believe in psychic powers to cut through the illusion of the self.

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.

But the deepest problem with drawing sweeping conclusions from the NDE is that those who have had one and subsequently talked about it did not die.

I know that we do not understand consciousness, and nothing that I think I know about the cosmos or about the patent falsity of most religious beliefs requires that I deny this.

The truth is that, whatever happens after death, it is possible to justify a life of spiritual practice and self-transcendence without pretending to know things we do not know.

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness.

The “war on drugs” has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness.

One thing is certain: The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them.

Everything that one can experience on a drug is, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has seen or felt after ingesting LSD is likely to have been seen or felt by someone, somewhere, without it.

If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail.

I believe that psychedelics may be indispensable for some people—especially those who, like me, initially need convincing that profound changes in consciousness are possible. After that, it seems wise to find ways of practicing that do not present the same risks. Happily, such methods are widely available.

Once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes just a means of getting more familiar with it. The goal, thereafter, is to cease to overlook what is already the case. 

The true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the whole of one’s life, to waking up from the dream of the self. We need not take anything on faith to do this. In fact, the only alternative is to remain confused about the nature of our minds.