Pompous Pontifications of a Misanthropic Mystic (A Review of Sam Harris’s Uber-Popular, But Grossly Overrated, Text “Waking Up”)

If you’re an off-the-assembly-line, Matrix-bound moron, “programmed” by Church (mainstream religious institutions) and/or State (public schools and progressivist government propaganda) and/or Mainstream Media (including clueless pseudo-profound talking heads such as Bill Maher and John Stewart) and/or “Higher” Education” (meaning the Ivory Tower idiots hiding behind fancy sheepskins), and/or pop/superficial Buddhism/neo-Advaita Vedanta teachings (check out my 237 Amazon reviews, in which I deconstruct many of these teachers and teachings), then you might find Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” an enlightening read.

But for someone like me, who has “cracked the cosmic code,” waved the zeitgeist goodbye, and become, arguably (I challenge anyone to argue otherwise), the foremost expert in the world on mysticism and esoteric spirituality, it is a pathetic joke by a pompous pontificator who doesn’t have a clue what “waking up,” or spiritual Enlightenment, is really about, but yet pretends to be able to educate us on the subject. The guy no doubt knows brain science (which doesn’t include understanding consciousness), but he is out of his league when he ventures into the subject of Enlightenment – and he does real spirituality a real disservice by reducing it to his circumscribed level of understanding. As Ken Wilber rightly asserts (though, unfortunately, it is one of the very few things he rightly asserts), every man is a philosopher of his own level of evolutionary adaptation – and Harris’s level is not very high when it comes to “cracking the cosmic code.”

My guess is that Sam Harris saw how successful “Buddha’s Brain” (see my one-star review), by Rick Hansen, another deluded neuroscientist, was, and he decided to pen his own text on “waking up” within an essentially Buddhist context. Money talks, and even though Buddhist baloney walks, it brings in mucho moolah to mainstream-popular pseudo-pundits such as Harris.

I could write a book deconstructing Harris’s book (just as I have written one deconstructing Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”), but because this is just a book review, I will limit my criticisms to a few of the arguments or statements by Harris that particularly get my gander.

First off, Harris criticizes Aldous Huxley’s and others’ vision of a Perennial Philosophy, arguing that it is essentially chimera, because the Abrahamic religions are “incorrigibly dualistic,” and thus cannot be equated with nondualistic Buddhism and Hindu Advaita Vedanta. I not only say that Harris is wrong, but in my writings I present an esoteric Trinitarian version of the Perennial Philosophy that exceeds Aldous Huxley’s (see my four-star review of “The Perennial Philosophy”), Frithjof Schuon’s (see my two-star review of “The Essential Frithjof Schuon”) and Rudolf Otto’s (see my two-star review of “The Idea of the Holy”). If Harris could look a little deeper, he’d realize that the putatively nondual Eastern traditions are only nominally nondual. In fact, unbeknownst to Harris, who is a clueless, remedial student of Tibetan Dzogchen (a tradition that I’m an expert in), the Buddhist Trikaya (Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya) perfectly mirrors the Christian Trinity. Moreover, the practice of Dzogchen (which I teach, among others) perfectly mirrors the mystical, or esoteric, Eucharist.

Harris clearly uses just one side of his brain. If he had an iota of feeling- intuition, he wouldn’t mock astrology as he does (by putting down the Dalai Lama for consulting an astrologer); rather he would quickly realize that people, in general fit their Sun signs. I’m a former professional astrologer, and I laugh at clueless clowns like Harris who put down astrology without having studied it. The great Issac Newton was once asked how he could believe in astrology. His response, which Harris should take to heart, was, “I have studied it, you haven’t.”

Because Harris is an “unitiated,” or “unbaptized,” spiritual practitioner, he has no experience or understanding of consciousness as Spirit, or Shakti—meaning a dynamic Force (which is termed Kundalini, relative to its movement through the “coils,” or “nadis” of one’s etheric body). Moreover, he has no comprehension of how this Shakti, or Light-Energy, divinizes, or en-Light-ens a yogi, enabling him to Awaken. If Harris had an esoteric bone in his body and had been “initiated,” (what The Buddha termed being a “Stream-winner”) he’d realize the Buddha was called “the Blessed One” because he was Blessed/Blissed by Light-Energy (the Stream, or Sambhogakaya or Dharmamegha), the Supernal Inflow that precipitates the Nirvanic “drying up of the outflows,” and what he called the “Heart [or Consciousness] Release” (which I’ll further elaborate on when I discuss Ramana Maharshi, and Harris’s failure to grok him).

I applaud Harris for at least being a serious spiritual seeker – but unfortunately he is not a finder. He describes his journey to the East and his encounters with his two “gurus” after he attempted to move beyond Burmese “master” U Pandita Sayadaw’s Vipassana meditation instructions.

His first guru was H.W.L Poonja (1910-1997), commonly known as Papaji (see my two-star review of his book “Truth Is”). Because Harris has no real spiritual discrimination, he mistakenly considered Papaji to have been as Enlightened as his guru, Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950). This is complete nonsense. Unlike Papaji, Ramana Maharshi truly “cracked the cosmic code” (see my five star reviews of “Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi,” “Sri Ramana Gita,” and “Sat Darshana Bhashya”).

The truth is, I should probably have become the neuroscientist, and not Harris, because if he had read and grokked Ramana Maharshi, he’d have realized that the root locus of consciousness (where it intersects a human being) before it “crystalizes” as thought-forms (or mind) in the brain is the spiritual Heart-center (Hridayam in Hinduism, Tathagatagarbha in Buddhism), located two digits to the right of the center of one’s chest. The human soul-matrix, one’s “storehouse consciousness” (alaya-vijnana in Yogacara Buddhism) or “samskaras,” or complex of psychical seed tendencies, is located here relative to an incarnated human vehicle.

Harris would also know that only by the descent of the Shakti, or Sambhogakaya (which is literally sucked into the Hridayam, along with the mind, the “crystallized” outflow of psychical seed tendencies) that what the Buddha termed the “Heart-release,” or Nirvana, is achieved when the Heart-knot is cut (which Ramana describes in his esoteric teachings, which are over Harris’s head). When the Heart-knot is cut, universal (timeless, spaceless) Consciousness radiates ceaselessly through the “Heart-hole” to Infinity. This Consciousness, or Awareness, is the One Mind, described by the great Zen master Huang Po (see my five-star review of the “The Zen Teaching of Huang Po”); but Harris, a pompous, deluded pontificator, assures us there is no such thing as the “One Mind.”

Most egregiously, Harris talks about realizing that the self/individual “I” is an illusion, but never mentions that when this “illusion” is transcended that one awakens to the true, or transcendental, “I,” the true Self, or Buddha-nature. Harris is in line with most contemporary Buddhist teachers/writers in his failure to talk about Self (or Buddha)-realization, and in my fifty-plus reviews of Buddhist books, I “chop off the heads” of these teachers/writers with my “Dharma Sword,” just as I have done with Harris in this review.

And speaking of “chopping off one’s head,” Harris in this book praises (and provides an excerpt from) Douglas Harding’s so-called “classic” Zen book “On Having No Head.” In no way do I hold this book in the high regard that Harris does (see my two-star review of it).

After Papaji failed to Enlighten Harris, he moved on from Advaita Vedanta to Dzogchen. Unfortunately, his choice of gurus was no better in Dzogchen. He became a student of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (1920-1996), an overrated Dzogchen “master,” in my estimation (see my two-star review of “Rainbow Painting”).

Harris attempts to describes Dzogchen meditation (which consists of the two complementary practices of treckho and togal), but he does a poor job explaining Treckho and doesn’t even mention Togal, which he could have no real understanding of since he is just an uninitiated talking head when it comes to real Buddhism.

I could go on and on deconstructing Harris, but since this review is already way too long, I’ll bring it to a close by summarizing my take on this book. If you already have an inkling of what Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and spiritual Enlightenment are about, you will find this book good for nothing more than fuel for your fireplace. But as I stated at the outset of my review, if you are a clueless, off-the-assembly-line, Matrix-bound moron, then this book could perhaps precipitate an awakening for you.