Sam Harris Interview, Part 3

Sam Harris wrote the best book I have read this year. I mention that because this week's installment of the Sam Harris interview includes my very skeptical questions about mysticism. But that's only because this interview was focused on the last chapter of The End of Faith, rather than on the rest of Harris's bold and potentially revolutionary book. Here is Part 3 of the Sam Harris interview...

Atheist bloggers Strange Doctrines and Brian Flemming continue the questioning of The End of Faith author Sam Harris on the merits of meditational mysticism. (See also Part 1 and Part 2.)

STRANGE DOCTRINES: You state, "[T]he feeling we call 'I' is one of the most pervasive and salient features of human life: and its effects upon the world, as six billion 'selves' pursue diverse and often incompatible ends, rival those that can be ascribed to almost any other phenomenon in nature. Clearly, there is nothing optimal--or even necessarily viable--about our present form of subjectivity." (214) This puts me in mind of W.H. Auden's remark: "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know." I read Auden's irony here as laying bare a central puzzle about the notion that the highest morality (or the most advanced state of being) consists in setting the self and its reflective interests aside: The meaning of my existence surely must include me, and so subjectivity (and whatever degree of egoism that entails) would seem necessary for any meaningful human life.

Is Auden (as I read him) wrong? If so, why? If not, what would the "optimal" form of subjectivity look like?

HARRIS: Leaving aside the issue of what Auden may or may not have meant, I think your question goes to the link between ethics and spiritual experience. I discuss this a little in my book. To my mind, the contradiction between true selfishness and true selflessness is only apparent. (I'm by no means the first person to make this observation.) From the perspective of most spiritual traditions (once again, I use the word "spiritual" squeamishly and in a restricted sense), to be truly selfish is to seek the happiness that only comes with the total abandonment of self, and the abandonment of self opens the door to those states of mind that have been traditionally associated with saint-like selflessness. There's a passage in my book (p. 186-187) that gets at this issue with respect to the emotion of love, ending with the following observation: "There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others. We discover that we can be selfish together."

The other point to make, perhaps, is that even on strict retreat, while attempting to meditate every waking moment, most of us will still spend much of our time lost in thought, feeling like separate selves, and motivated on the basis of this feeling. So the total loss of self is a very rare problem, if it is a problem at all.

Another thing to mention, perhaps, is that successful (selfless) meditation is by no means synonymous with the total suppression of thought. There are types of meditation that try to achieve this, of course. And in the beginning, discursive thinking really is an obstacle to concentration. But there comes a point of stability in meditation in which thoughts can arise and yet cease to be distracting, which is to say they cease to imply the existence of an inner thinker who is thinking them. There's a beautiful image that the Tibetan Buddhists use, describing thoughts at this stage as being like "thieves entering an empty house." So the "optimal" form of subjectivity is surely compatible with thinking.

BRIAN FLEMMING: Several years ago I edited an instructional video about zazen meditation for a California Zen center. It was my first exposure to that culture. While I found the focus on breathing to be similar to yoga or other forms of physical exercise, the trappings of a religion or cult designed to control people were clearly present: the students submitted to the authority of the guru, who would order them to think about confusing concepts, which would humble them and cause further submission; as a group they thought of themselves as different and better (more "enlightened"); and so they would proselytize (the purpose of the video, I discovered). Is it possible to explore consciousness under the instruction of an authority ("serious training is usually in order," you say above) and have the experience *not* turn into religion?

HARRIS: This question of how healthy it may or may not be to idealize a spiritual teacher is an interesting one. First, we should note that this issue visits us throughout our culture. Just look at how we treat great athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Such enchantment is not entirely misplaced, of course, because certain people really are the best in the world at what they do The same is true in science, where people like Richard Feynman inevitably become the objects of a kind of hero-worship. Other scientists even succumb to these devotions, if for no other reason than that they are in a better position to appreciate a virtuoso performance when they see it. So the first point to make is that idealization is not always a sign of infantile projection. As long as we value certain talents, we will have a special fascination for those who are most talented. That said, there are surely dysfunctional forms of guru-infatuation and group-think.

The bottom line, however, is that spiritual practice is a domain of genuine expertise (or its lack), and so there will be both experts worth listening to and charlatans worth avoiding. All of this is complicated by the fact that devotion to a guru -- that is, love and gratitude toward a spiritual mentor -- is a legitimate (and even
unavoidable) aspect of this line of inquiry. Of course, people often feel love and devotion toward teachers of all sorts, but in the area of spiritual practice, these emotional states are very closely related to the subject under study. So the answer to your question is a qualified "yes." Yes, I think it should be possible to do all this without falling into egregious cultishness and irrationality. But it should not surprise us too much when some of that happens. I would wager that some of the people hanging around Feynman when he was at his prime were as annoying as anyone you met at the Zen center.

BRIAN FLEMMING: But Tiger Woods can demonstrate his skill for me without my joining his cult. I can see what he's good at. No leap of faith is required before I become a fan. And I can understand and appreciate Feynman's work without making myself vulnerable to his cult in any way. Meditation seems unique to me in that in order to understand its benefits, one has to turn over one's mind to it, generally under the guidance of an authority. "What I have to sell you is wonderful, but you have to buy it to know why," is a very familiar pitch.