Waking Up

Review of Sam Harris' 2014 book.

Mindfulness Meditation

I completed Sam Harris' Waking Up course about two years ago. Many of the lessons have stuck with me and meditation has become more an hour-to-hour skill than a daily habit. So I made to a point to get this full picture with his 2014 book.

I do not subscribe to all his political Ideas and I am am not intersected in his surgical deconstruction of religion, but he makes a point to exclude dogma from his guide to mediation.

Consciousness

This really blew my mind: Patients with cross hemispherical seizures would have the bridge between the halves of the brain severed so the tow brain halves are no longer in direct contact. The patients adapt to normal life but under conditions where the patient is questioned and their left and right sides are questioned separately, the patient will give different answers simultaneously as if there is two different personalities in the same body. Consciousness can literally be divied with a knife. This blows my mind.

• Does this explain our inner conflictions?
• What differences in the brain hemispheres make us who we are?
• Am I more left or right brained?

Self

We can talk about the Phycological and Physical continuity of the self, but the mystery remains. The thought experiment is to consider is the invention of teleportation. The process of teleportation was to create a detailed representation of every atom and it position in our body, then send the representation file to be precisely recreate our representation out of the destinations available materials elsewhere, but then in the process of scanning your atoms, destroying your body.

• Will your teleported self be YOU?
• How is this different from cloning?
• Will this clone have your consciousness and your experience connect?

The survival of your self seems to be a fragile thing that exists within us.

When we are looking something we know we miss places around the home. We may talk to ourselves turning over papers and things, but when found we may exclaim to ourselves "There it is!".

• Is there someone else in our search party?
• Isn't just the feeling of having found it enough to resolve the inner conflict?
• Why do I keep myself company in my head all the time?

We create a sense of self in our head and even switch out "selves" situationally. The idea that there is an inner real self that is experiencing rather than just a body receiving raw data presented in our conscious is an Illusion which may have different origins in evolution. Breaking down the Illusion allow me to experience the world fully and without "self consciousness."

I have many unanswered question but lots of leads to run.

4/5.