The conventional sense of self is an illusion—and [] spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scienti… - Sam Harris
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The conventional sense of self is an illusion—and [] spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation.
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About
Sam Harris
Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, public intellectual, and neuroscientist, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason. He is the author of The End of Faith (2004), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005 and appeared on The New York Times best seller list for 33 weeks, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), The Moral Landscape (2010), Lying (2011), Free Will (2012), and most recently Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014).
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Wikimedia Commons, Cmichel67 (Christopher Michel) (CC BY-SA)
You believe that your religious concerns about sex, in all their tiresome immensity, have something to do with morality. And yet, your efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults — and even to discourage your own sons and daughters from having premarital sex — are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering.
Why should we live in relationship to ourselves rather than merely as ourselves?
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development.