Waking Up by Sam Harris
“The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.”
Waking Up explores and explains the answers to most common questions about religion, consciousness, free will, mindfulness, ego, and self, and helps people from all walks of life understand the nature of the mind. It shows us how to cherish and be grateful for the present moment without an illusion of the self following us like a shadow. Waking up acts as a bridge between atheism and theism, and it does it so masterfully.
You should by all means read this book for yourself. Below, I have written out my book notes, but I couldn’t cover hundreds of pages in just a couple of bullet points. That is why I highly encourage you to create your notes whilst going through the book, and for the time being use mine as a guide on what this book is about.
For more books check out Best Self-Improvement Books or Best Classic Books, and for a full self-improvement guide, you can also take a look at my Roadmap to Overman.
Book Notes
- At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me – only my life did. And I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to change.
- Our minds are all we have. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life – you won’t enjoy any of it.
- Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: we are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
- How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.
- Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.
- It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extend without limit. The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.
- Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available.
- The reality of your life is always now.
- Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.
- The change comes when we experience the present moment prior to the arising of thought.
- Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.
- Consciousness is the feeling of being you. The feeling of being like you are. Is a bat conscious? It depends on what it would feel like to be a bat. If it would feel like anything, then it would be conscious. If it wouldn’t feel like anything or in other words be the same as not existing, then it wouldn’t be conscious.
- Life is defined according to external criteria. Consciousness is not.
- Split brain experiment. Consciousness – whatever its relation to neural events – is divisible. And just as it isn’t shared between the brains of separate individuals, it need not be shared between the hemispheres of a single brain once the structures that facilitate such sharing have been cut.
- The feeling that we call “I” seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished.
- The split-brain phenomenon puts pressure on the very idea of personal identity.
- It seems clear that the maintenance of psychological continuity is what we care about, and it is generally what we mean by a person’s “survival” from one moment to the next.
- There is no “I” who is aware of the pain. The pain is simply arising in consciousness in the only place it can arise.
- Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. And the only thing relevant to the question of personal identity is psychological continuity from one moment to the next.
- One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it.
- “I” is the sense of possessing, rather than merely being, a continuum of experience.
- It can be liberating to see how thoughts pull the levers of emotion – and how negative emotions in turn set the stage for patterns of thinking that keep them active and coloring one’s mind.
- Without continually resurrecting the feeling of anger, it is impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments.
- Our habitual identification with thought – that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearance in consciousness – is a primary source of human suffering.
- Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I”, and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness – free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.
- In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself – you are not the next evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.
- Nothing is intrinsically boring – indeed, boredom is simply a lack of attention.
- When one overcomes the resistance to staring into another person’s eyes, the absence of self-consciousness can be especially vivid.
- We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.
- Most people still believe that religion provides something essential that cannot be had any other way.
- Consciousness is simply the light by which the contours of mind and body are known.