• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Mysticism Without Metaphysics

Sam Harris on Waking Up

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Sam Harris� Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion advances a thesis that is both philosophically provocative and culturally strategic: the core insights traditionally associated with spirituality—self-transcendence, non-dual awareness, ethical concern grounded in experiential clarity—are real, empirically accessible features of human consciousness, and they do not depend on metaphysical doctrines, supernatural beliefs, or religious authority. Spirituality, properly understood, is not about believing extraordinary propositions about the cosmos; it is about investigating the structure of experience. And that investigation can proceed within a naturalistic worldview.

1. Redefining “Spiritual”

Harris begins by disentangling spirituality from religion. In contemporary discourse, “spiritual” often functions as a placeholder for the supernatural—souls, divine plans, karmic justice, transcendent realms. Harris rejects these ontological commitments. His project is not to smuggle metaphysics back into secularism under a softer label. Rather, he argues that certain modes of experience—especially those accessed through contemplative practice—are transformative, epistemically significant, and ethically consequential, yet fully compatible with a scientific understanding of the world.

The crucial move is definitional. Spirituality, for Harris, concerns the investigation of consciousness itself. It is an empirical inquiry into the nature of the self, the illusion of agency, the structure of attention, and the possibility of non-dual awareness. One need not posit anything beyond the physical universe to explore these dimensions. The laboratory is first-person experience; the method is disciplined introspection (e.g., mindfulness meditation); the framework is cognitive science rather than theology.

2. The Illusion of the Self

The conceptual center of Waking Up is the claim that the self, as ordinarily conceived, is an illusion. By “self,” Harris does not mean the organism or the narrative identity constructed over time. He means the felt sense of a thinker behind thoughts, a witness behind perception, an enduring subject at the center of experience.

Drawing on neuroscience, Buddhist psychology, and his own contemplative training (particularly in Dzogchen), Harris argues that this sense of self does not withstand careful inspection. When attention is directed toward the apparent subject of experience, what one finds are only sensations, thoughts, and perceptions arising in consciousness—none of which constitute a stable, central entity. The “self” dissolves under scrutiny.

This insight is not a metaphysical assertion but a phenomenological claim. It is verifiable—or falsifiable—through direct experience. One can test it. The rationality of secular spirituality, on Harris�s account, rests on this methodological openness: claims about consciousness should be grounded in experience and coherent with science.

3. Experience Without Dogma

Here Harris�s position resonates with the work of the Dutch Indologist Frits Staal. In Exploring Mysticism (1975), Staal argued that mystical experience does not logically entail mystical doctrine. Religious traditions frequently surround contemplative practices with elaborate metaphysical narratives, but the experiences themselves—states of absorption, ego-dissolution, non-duality—can occur independently of those doctrinal frameworks.

Staal�s comparative work suggested that ritual and contemplative structures often precede theology historically and psychologically. In some cases, doctrine is a retrospective rationalization of experiential phenomena. If this is correct, then it is entirely coherent to preserve the practices and phenomenological insights while discarding the metaphysical superstructure.

Harris effectively operationalizes Staal�s insight for a contemporary audience. Meditation is not validated by Buddhist cosmology any more than surgery is validated by medieval humoral theory. One can extract techniques for attentional training and insight into consciousness without endorsing rebirth, karma as cosmic justice, or supernatural cosmologies.

This decoupling is central to the possibility of secular spirituality: experiential claims are separable from metaphysical commitments.

4. Rationality and First-Person Methods

Critics sometimes argue that spirituality is inherently irrational because it privileges subjective experience. Harris counters that all empirical inquiry begins with experience. Science itself rests on observation, which is structured and interpreted through consciousness. The difference is methodological rigor.

Meditative practice, in Harris�s view, is a disciplined refinement of introspective attention. It is not a free-for-all of private revelation. Just as the telescope extends visual perception, contemplative training extends the resolution of introspective awareness. Reports of ego-dissolution or non-duality are not exempt from critical scrutiny; they are hypotheses about the structure of consciousness, open to intersubjective comparison and neuroscientific investigation.

Indeed, contemporary neuroscience increasingly investigates the neural correlates of self-representation, default mode network activity, and altered states of consciousness. The convergence of first-person reports and third-person data strengthens, rather than weakens, the rational standing of contemplative insights.

Secular spirituality, then, is not anti-scientific. It is an attempt to integrate first-person phenomenology with third-person neuroscience within a single naturalistic ontology.

5. Ethics Without Transcendence

Harris also links spirituality to ethics. If the self is not what it seems—if the boundary between “self” and “other” is psychologically constructed and experientially permeable—then compassion is not merely a moral rule but an intelligible response to the structure of experience.

This does not require belief in divine commandments or cosmic teleology. It requires clarity about the nature of suffering and the conditions under which it arises. Harris�s broader moral philosophy (articulated in The Moral Landscape) argues that well-being is a natural phenomenon, and that questions about human flourishing admit of better and worse answers. Spiritual insight, by reducing self-centered reactivity, contributes directly to well-being.

Thus, secular spirituality becomes rational in two senses:

• It is epistemically grounded in experience and compatible with science.

• It yields practical consequences for reducing suffering and increasing well-being.

6. Demystifying the Mystical

Perhaps the most subversive aspect of Harris�s thesis is his insistence that so-called “mystical” experiences are not evidence of the supernatural. They are natural events in human consciousness. The sense of boundlessness, unity, or timelessness can arise from identifiable alterations in attention and neural processing.

To call these states “spiritual” is not to re-enchant the cosmos but to acknowledge their transformative psychological impact. One can experience profound awe, ego-dissolution, and radical present-centeredness in a universe devoid of divine intention.

Here again Staal�s work is instructive. Mystical states, stripped of theological interpretation, are part of the repertoire of human cognitive possibility. They do not imply metaphysical idealism or cosmic consciousness. They imply that consciousness has more depth and plasticity than ordinary waking cognition reveals.

7. A Middle Path

Waking Up occupies a distinctive position in contemporary discourse. It rejects religious literalism and supernaturalism, but it also rejects the reductionist dismissal of contemplative experience as mere illusion or pathology. Harris charts a middle path: fully naturalistic, scientifically literate, yet open to the transformative potential of introspective practice.

In doing so, he reframes spirituality as an extension of rational inquiry into the domain of subjectivity. The goal is not belief but insight; not dogma but clarity.

If spirituality means the disciplined exploration of consciousness and the experiential dismantling of the egoic illusion—without appeal to supernatural metaphysics—then secular spirituality is not only possible. It is a coherent and arguably necessary complement to a scientific worldview that takes consciousness seriously.

The wager of Waking Up is that we can retain the depth of contemplative traditions while relinquishing their cosmological baggage. Frits Staal showed that mysticism need not entail mystification. Harris pushes that insight into the public square: the deepest insights of spiritual practice are compatible with intellectual honesty.

Spirituality, in this sense, is not a retreat from reason but its inward extension.