Waking Up

Whatever you think of Sam Harris, and most people seem to have strong opinions, “Waking Up” is not the book you’d expect from a New Atheist firebrand. Trevor Quirk, writing in The New Republic, noted that it reveals “a different picture of Harris: an intelligent and sensitive person,” and that shift in tone is real. This is Harris at his most personal and least combative, writing about consciousness, meditation, and the nature of the self with a sincerity that caught many of his critics off guard.

The book’s argument is straightforward: spiritual experience is real, important, and worth investigating, but it doesn’t require belief in God or adherence to any religion. Harris draws on his years of practice with teachers like Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, one of the great Dzogchen masters of the twentieth century, and his engagement with both Advaita Vedanta and Tibetan Buddhism is genuine, not superficial. Frank Bruni, reviewing in the New York Times, observed that Harris had shifted from criticizing religion to trying to understand what people actually seek in it. Stephen Cave in the Financial Times called it “a fine book” written with “great colour and clarity.”

What Harris does well is describe the phenomenology of meditation with unusual precision. His account of looking for the self and failing to find it, the core practice of Dzogchen, is vivid and compelling. He’s also good at dismantling the common objection that spirituality without religion is somehow thin or rootless. For readers coming from secular backgrounds who sense there’s something real in contemplative experience but can’t stomach the metaphysical baggage, this book opens a door.

But it’s a narrower door than Harris seems to realize. Jules Evans, writing in Philosophy for Life, praised the book but flagged Harris’s “harsh denigration of Western contemplative wisdom,” noting that his version of spirituality is “quite individualistic” with no mention of arts, poetry, or ritual. This is a significant blind spot. Contemplative traditions have always understood that awakening doesn’t happen in isolation; it unfolds in community, in liturgy, in the texture of daily life. Harris’s spirituality is essentially private, a matter of what happens on the cushion, and that thinness shows.

Holly Smith, reviewing in the Washington Independent Review, offered a useful corrective by noting the book is really “a memoir-cum-scientific-text-cum-hearty-endorsement-of-meditation” rather than an actual guide to spiritual practice. She’s right. Despite the subtitle, you won’t find much practical instruction here. It’s more of an argument for why meditation matters than a map of how to do it.

For all its limitations, “Waking Up” remains one of the better entry points for skeptics and rationalists who are curious about nondual awareness but wary of religious frameworks. Harris takes the investigation of consciousness seriously as a first-person endeavor, and that alone sets the book apart from most popular science treatments of the subject.