Brilliant. Funny, engaging, quick read. Harris relates his reluctant journey into meditation. It starts with his on-air panic attack as a news anchor at ABC, moves through his war reporting, a long-term adjunct assignment reporting on world religions (as an agnostic), and his initially very skeptical attempts at meditating.
The first paragraph of the preface had me hooked. Read it on Amazon.
From his religion reporting and interesting piece on Eckhart Tolle, whom he largely dismisses as too eccentric, but with a few frustratingly insightful gems (from the interview for ABC):
" ... Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress." (p.67)After his first attempt at mindfulness meditation, approached with a skeptic's cynicism Harris writes:
"When I opened my eyes, I had an entirely different attitude about meditation. I didn't like it, per se, but I now respected it. This was not just some hippie time-passing technique, like Ultimate Frisbee or making God's Eyes. It was a rigorous brain exercise: rep after rep of trying to tame the runaway train of the mind. The repeated attempt to bring the compulsive thought machine to heel was like holding a live fish in your hands. Wrestling your mind to the ground, repeatedly hauling your attention back to the breath in the face of the inner onslaught required genuine grit. This was a badass endeavor." (. p.101)From his early guided meditation attempts:
"On the cushion, the best opportunities to learn mindfulness are when you experience itches or pain. Instead of scratching or shifting position, you're supposed to just sit there and impartially witness the discomfort. The instruction is simply to employ what the teachers call "noting," applying a soft mental label: itching, throbbing. For me this was infernally difficult. A daggerlike tingle would appear under my thigh, a little pinprick portal to Hades, and I would grit my teeth and question the choices I was making in life. I couldn't suspend judgment: I hated it.
The idea is that, once you've mastered things like itches, eventually you'll be able to apply mindfulness to thoughts and emotions. This nonjudgmental noting -- Oh, that's a blast of self-pity. . . Oh, that's me ruminating about work -- is supposed to sap much of the power, the emotional charge, out of the contents of consciousness." (p.104)
On awareness vs. thinking:
"By way of example: you can be mindful of hunger pangs, but you think about where to get your next meal and whether it will involve pork products. You can be mindful of the pressure in your bladder telling you it's time to pee, but you think about whether the frequency of your urination means you're getting old and need a prostate exam. There's a difference between the raw sensations we experience and the mental spinning we do in reaction to said stimuli.On the criticism that Buddhist acceptance is too passive - a passage that applies to free will per Viktor Frankel:
The Buddhists had a helpful analogy here. Picture the mind like a waterfall , they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions: mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory--but, easier said than done." (p.105)
"... Acceptance is not passivity. Sometimes we are justifiably displeased. What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, "respond" rather than simply "react." In the Buddhist view, you can't control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feelings that we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.This relates directly to the Viktor Frankel thesis that our humanness gives us the opportunity to choose how we respond to most stimuli. Animals don't have a choice - they simply react. We abdicate our humanness when we simply react without being aware of our emotions and thinking, then choosing how we will respond.
Bingo: respond not react. ..." (p. 115)
Also... love the title of chapter 10. "The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick."
