Book Discussion: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

March's book will be Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris. Like John Horgan's Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment, Harris seeks to trace and understand the neuroscience behind what we traditionally refer to as 'mysticism.' As Harris notes in his earlier book, The End of Faith, "Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Faith is not."

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From the jacket flap: "From Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of numerous New York Times bestselling books, Waking Up is for the twenty percent of Americans who follow no religion but who suspect that important truths can be found in the experiences of such figures as Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and the other saints and sages of history. Throughout this book, Harris argues that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow, and that how we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the quality of our lives.

Waking Up is part memoir and part exploration of the scientific underpinnings of spirituality. No other book marries contemplative wisdom and modern science in this way, and no author other than Sam Harris—a scientist, philosopher, and famous skeptic—could write it."

“The fact is that Waking Up lends a different picture of Harris (at least to me): an intelligent and sensitive person who is willing to undergo the discomfort involved in proposing alternatives to the religions he’s spent years degrading. His new book, whether discussing the poverty of spiritual language, the neurophysiology of consciousness, psychedelic experience, or the quandaries of the self, at the very least acknowledges the potency and importance of the religious impulse—though Harris might name it differently—that fundamental and common instinct to seek not just an answer to life, but a way to live that answer.” (Trevor Quirk, The New Republic - http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119397/sam-harriss-waking-review )

Copies of the book are readily available in area libraries.

Refreshments will be served.