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Review of Sam Harris’s “Waking Up,” Chapter 1

August 25, 2014 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

To put Sam’s intentions in my terms, he wants people to learn to access experiences most people’s brains are capable of, but that aren’t widely promoted in western culture. He thinks this will be good for them, and for anyone … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2014 Tagged With: consciousness, Dogen, Lao Tsu, LSD, MDMA, meditation, mystical, religion, Sam Harris, spiritual, Zen

What This Site Is About

When I realized that the idea of god was a joke, I thought that was the end of the story. Later I found that Christianity had shaped my values, and while some were worth keeping, many had lost their foundation—the meaning of life, for example. Something similar happened when I realized that the idea of free will was a joke, and I’ve spent the decades since both those realizations discovering and editing what Julia Galef calls the “orphan beliefs” they left behind. It’s a tricky business, and this blog has been a chronicle of my efforts to puzzle it all out, including reviews of related books. I hope you find it helpful.

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