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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Spirituality

• how we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives
• there’s more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit
• Spirituality - clearer understanding of the way things are and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of self
• wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice
• Buddhism isn’t primarily a faith-based religion and its central teaching are entirely empirical
• asserts that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment
• we manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy
• Mindfulness - a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness
  • a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body - thoughts, sensations, moods - without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant
  • a technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of experience in each moment
• principal enemy of mindfulness is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts
• the problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without being fully aware that we’re thinking
• when we look at what makes life difficult, we see that we are all prisoners of our thoughts
• the goal of meditation is to have an increasingly healthy mind
• conventional sources of happiness are unreliable, our feelings of fulfillment do not last, and the stress of life continues
• you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present
• goal of Spiritual Practice is the capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening

The Mystery of Consciousness

• Spiritual Life - investigating the nature of consciousness and transforming its contents through deliberate training
• an organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism
• the question of how consciousness relates to the physical world remains famously unresolved
• human minds are the product of human brains
• every chain of explanation must end somewhere - generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself
• rigorous introspection - spirituality - is an indispensable part of understanding the nature of the mind
• in split-brain phenomenon, the isolated right hemisphere is independently conscious and the divided brain harbors two distinct points of view
• consciousness is divisible, and, therefore more fundamental than any apparent self
• consciousness is the substance of any experience we can have or hope for, now or in the future
• every notion of bad or good, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, depends upon some change in the experience of conscious creatures

The Riddle of the Self

• conventional sense of self is an illusion and spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment
• Psychological Continuity - maintenance of one’s memories, beliefs, habits, and other mental traits
• Buddhism teaches that there is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next
• Consciousness - the context in which the objects of experience appear
• we think of I as the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience
• the self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment
• learn to recognize thoughts as thoughts - as transient appearances in consciousness - and to no longer be distracted by them
• it can be helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you
• thoughts pull the levers of emotion and negative emotions in turn set the stage for patterns of thinking that keep them active and coloring one’s mind
• without continually resurrecting the feeling of anger, it is impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments
• our habitual identification with thought is a primary source of human suffering
• the self is the feeling that there’s an inner subject, thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experiences
• Theory of Mind - capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them; serves as one of the foundational elements for social interaction
• there is no rider on the horse - we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self

Meditation

• a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind
• enormous difference between being hostage to one’s thoughts and being freely and nonjudgmentally aware of life in the present
• Meditation - the ability to stop suffering in many of the usual ways, if only for a few moments at a time
  • goal is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds
• the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self
• being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one’s spiritual journey, not its end
• meditation doesn’t entail the suppression of thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them
• break one’s identification with thought and allow the continuum of experience, pleasant and unpleasant, to simply be as it is
• train yourself to repond differently to adversity by truly accepting unpleasant sensations and emotions as transitory appearances in consciousness

Gurus, Death, Drugs, and Other Puzzles

• a student’s moral intuitions and instincts for self-preservation can always be recast as symptoms of fear and attachment
• nothing is intrinsically boring - boredom is simply a lack of attention
• a contemplative expert is someone who can help you realize certain truths about the nature of your own mind
• the ability to meditate - to rest consciousness for a few moments prior to the arising of the next thought - can offer a profound relief from mental suffering
• what is needed to establish the mind’s independence from the brain is a case in which a person has an experience without associated brain activity
• subjectively speaking, there is only consciousness and its contents; there is no inner self who is conscious
• psilocybin and LSD pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well tolerated
• MDMA has remarkable therapeutic potential but is also susceptible to abuse
• no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness
• meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states as psychedelics, but far less haphazardly
• the power of psychedelics is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime
• there are no real boundaries between science and any other discipline that attempts to make valid claims about the world on the basis of evidence
• we should care about demanding good reasons for what one believes and being dissatisfied with bad ones
• spirituality requires the same commitment to intellectual honesty

Conclusion

• most people still believe that religion provides something essential that cannot be had any other way
• spirituality remains the great hole in secularism that reasonable people strike in the presence of unreasonable faith
• altered states of consciousness are empirical facts
• to seek to live a spiritual life without deluding ourselves, we must view these experiences in universal and secular terms
• consciousness is the light by which the contours of mind and body are known and it is never improved or harmed by what it knows
• making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life