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Sam Harris “The Happiness Experiment “
Shoshin
No one in particularNowhere Special Veteran
Just some food for thought for the thoughtless.....
”Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought is a primary source of human suffering”
What are your ‘thoughts on this ?
4
Comments
Very nice
It stimulates the thoughts, firing up the neurons "Neurons that fire together wire together!"
Oooh, I just listened to the . . . debate? Talk? Interview? that this excerpt is from, but couldn't tell you which one it was. He was speaking to the interface of science and faith, and begins with him apologizing for his use of the word 'spirituality'.
Sam Harris's opinions and ideas aside, he has a gift for articulating the subtle. And 89% of the time he is misunderstood (often deliberately so). The world is not quite ready for Sam Harris.
I think I linked to the wrong video. Didn't seem to be anything about science just about adults not finding total satisfaction in life.
The atheist world often hosts him, the scientific, psychological, Buddhist, contemplative worlds are ready for him.
I iz ready.
The world aka samsara is bu z z z y in SamSara mode rather than Sama Harris realm . . .
Always great to hear dharma explained simply.
Ok seen that. Whats next...
I listen to HHDL and other teachers for several hours throughout the day and receive lots of benefit to my well being from listening to their spiritual vibes. But 8 minutes of listening to his explanation of the reason to practice speaks to me and motivates me more than all those motivations foreign to my sensibility do.
Sam Harris' The End of Faith was the first book that got me seriously interested in Buddhism. I can thank him for changing my life, and yes, his thinking is brilliant and clear. However, he also has expressed some opinions about torture that I find to be lacking in compassion. Here's the controversy in his own words:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/why-id-rather-not-speak-about-torture1/
Yes, there are plenty of people 'ready' for Sam Harris. Thank goodness for that. But the people NOT ready for him are the ones he's most wanting to have a discussion with.
He works very hard to front load his audiences by saying "I am not here to offend anyone. I am going to question ideologies, but I'm never going to put down any PERSONS who might have those ideologies. Ideologies are the problem as I see it."
And that won't work because the ideology as much as IS the person, if you ask them. He's criticizing THEM personally.
And the lefties who are now calling him a racist and a bigot (even though they know better) are unwilling to consider a religious ideology as something TO criticize. They are worried his criticism will incite hate crimes or more violent disturbances.
I don't get the impression Harris knows how to 'set the stage' so people feel safe enough politically to grant him his logic. Instead the lefties are looking as dogmatic and dense as the religious zealots.
And THEN Harris writes a book about 'spirituality' and horrifies other nonbelievers
Yes indeed. There is a strategy in Buddhism it is part of the strategy of Buddhist 'crazy wisdom Arahats' that bypasses this problem . . .
In Sufism it is a high station (spiritual state)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malamatiyya
http://www.chishti.ru/path-of-blame.htm
I will start another thread on 'the Black Heart' that relates to this . . .
sounds like my kinda man...
I have yet to listen/watch the vid.
. . . more Sam Harris . . .
Sam amazes me how he can 'do' spirituality talk in the exact same voice as he talks politics or psychology or social ills. Whatever his faults, he has amazing personal integrity, and I think that takes a ton of personal 'work' and humility and all that. I just wish he could debate like Christopher Hitchens
or channel him somehow. He's not a bad debater at all. Hitch had a special gift, whatever his innumerable faults 
The West has no well established contemplative science or culture when compared with, even today, Chinese culture. Most Westerners still can't accept the possibility that the very substance or essence of their thoughts transcends all of human mentation; it is even the very 'stuff' of the universe. When Zen master Hui-neng said the following this is exactly what he had in mind:
If we accept on faith that Master Hui-neng attained direct gnosis of this reality, why aren't we moderns inspired to venture out on our own and seek such wisdom? I think we are still skeptical. We doubt that a contemplative science is possible. We have placed our bets on fMRI machines and people with degrees who tell us we are just brains. When they crap out—that's it. There is no more.
Indeed. I feel he represents the beginning of integral western dharma which is experiential, makes use of our critical capacities, our science and rationality whilst acknowledging the inestimable heritage of eastern contemplative traditions that are also independent of cultural delusions or ignorance.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris_(author)
Integrity is key. Dharma is not about becoming 'Buddhist', it is about becoming real. Thus have I heard.
. . . and here it is written down
What we need, in fact, is a contemplative science, a modern approach to exploring the furthest reaches of psychological well-being.
http://www.lionsroar.com/killing-the-buddha/
Contemplative science? Cool. I'll join . . . what no need for baldies in saris, Buddha statutes [sic] or Buddhas paragliding into Paranirvana? Tsk, tsk who would have thought it . . .
I think Hitchen's was a funny guy, very clever and articulate, but come on; all Hitch did was present straw men and knock them down. There wasn't much depth to his understanding.
He also classed Buddhism as being a religion which poisons everything.
@lobster said:
Yesssss (fist pump).
Yeah . . . well, but those were some seriously unspoken-but-often-thought strawmen
Taking out ALL the strawmen (and the straw women) is something Harris strives to do, which takes 'points' off the overall performance of his debates. And the 'performance' is the least of it, really.
I have thought for years that 'religion' is a kind of poison or cognitive disease, I'll be honest, and I'd include Buddhism in its ideological form. That's a very negative judgment, and I don't completely believe it nor wish it were so. I've only 'met' Hitch very recently, watched two or three short debates but haven't really gotten into him like I have with Dawkins and Harris.
I'm a big Hitch fan, though mostly because I find him funny. I've read a few of his books, including his last one that he wrote while dying of cancer; watched loads of his debates too.
Dawkins is in a similar league to Hitchens in that he also presents strawmen. For example, when it comes to discussions of God, there's lots of different levels of understandings, the deeper ones can be very similar to the deeper understandings of Emptiness; but he'll only rubbish the 'Magic Man in the Sky' concept of God.
But mystics - with a deeper understanding - from all religions seem to be able to have dialogues about their practise and experience. At this level of understanding there doesn't seem to be a lot between them. An example of this would be Thomas Merton's (a Trappist monk) dialogue with that Zen guy (Suzi Rosh___?); they apparently got on great together.
Sam Harris is a bit different from Hitchens and Dawkins in that he doesn't seem to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. But he still does the strawman thing.
Hitch IS very funny, if he has a biography, that would be a good read.
The 'religion' these guys rant on about is a bit of a caricature, but then again, so are many evangelicals and fundamentalists, and you can't miss it with radical Islam. And if you are an atheist without any experience of being a believer, ANY religion looks like a fairy tale full of magic. So comparing God to Santa Claus isn't really a straw man, it's a parallel. But for the mystics like Merton and our Buddhist arahants, Sufi, Jews devoting their life to studying the Kabbalah -- straw man is exactly what it looks like. Is that the kind of straw man you mean, @Tosh? I seriously doubt these are the kinds of religious people the atheists are talking about.
They may be using straw man, oh the irony, but religious lunacy is a reality. Who cares about climate change or human progress in medicine, art or science if Jesus is coming back to destroy it all? I looked this up: 41% of Americans believe Jesus will return in the next 40 years. Can't get the link fx to work, so google Pew Research Center, it has lots of interesting percentages. Anyway, that's a lot of people. To me, that is religious lunacy. If it didn't affect the way they vote or interfere with public education, who cares what people believe? So even if straw man is happening regarding a rather under-spoken subset of the Abrahamic folks, it's not with the rest. That's a God I wouldn't believe in even if He were real.
I don't worry much about labeling Buddhism as religion. For some it is, for some it isn't. It only becomes a problem if people create the problem and continue to see it in a dualistic way. it's hard to label it a religion because as soon as you attach that label, it's in competition with other religions, which doesn't work out so well. But personally, I don't have a problem. I think certain factors of religion in general can do a lot of harm depending how people adopt them. But I also think that anchovies on pizza do a lot of harm yet it doesn't affect my judgement of pizza as a whole