Waking Up -- Sam Harris

Waking Up, by Sam Harris

I encourage people to buy this book. I think it is an important piece and am uploading it because I think the people who can't afford it may be the people that need it the most.


Here are the reviews:

[A]n extraordinary and ambitious masterwork… altogether spectacular… a superb read in its entirety, quite possibly the best thing written on this ecosystem of spiritual subjects since Alan Watts’s The Book of Taboo.
Maria Popova, Brainpickings

Harris’s book . . . caught my eye because it’s so entirely of this moment, so keenly in touch with the growing number of Americans who are willing to say that they do not find the succor they crave, or a truth that makes sense to them, in organized religion.
Frank Bruni, the New York Times

I used to roll my eyes when people described themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Not anymore. With his usual sharp and elegant prose, Sam Harris—one of the great skeptics of our time—shows how spiritual traditions provide important truths that have largely been missed by the scientific and secular communities. Waking Up is an extraordinary book: It is a seeker’s memoir, a scientific and philosophical exploration of the self, and a how-to guide for transcendence. It explores the nature of consciousness, explains how to meditate, tells you the best drugs to take, and warns you about lecherous gurus. It will shake up your most fundamental beliefs about everyday experience, and it just might change your life.
Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University and author of Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

In this important and wide-ranging book, Sam Harris demonstrates that the practice of “rational spirituality” is not an oxymoron. As a neuroscientist, Harris shows how our egos are illusions, diffuse products of brain activity, and as a long-term practitioner of meditation, he shows how abandoning this illusion can wake us up to a richer life, more connected to everything around us.

Jerry Coyne, Professor of Biology at the University of Chicago and author of Why Evolution is True