18

Harris makes a case that not all religions are the same or essentially aimed at the same experience or goal - that actually their ‘truth claims about reality are mutually incompatible’.

21

He discredits Huxley’s Leibnizian perennial philosophy on the grounds that Abrahamic religion is dualistic while Eastern traditions transcend duality, which is not enough to convince me that there isn’t common ground in some form of universal experience - what Huxley called the ‘highest common factor’. I am hopeful that such shared experiences could be the grounds for something like a transpersonal and experiential psychology that will help us transcend the differences of interpretation that result from divergent metaphysical worldviews.

Any individual can have these experiences with appropriate training and guidance.

It may be that not all humans are even interested in such an experience, but maybe developing my mind/heart to the highest potential of Buddhist teachings, I contribute to the collective consciousness and the rising tide lifts all boats - leaning into something like Pascal’s Wager, I figure that if I don’t make it to enlightenment in this lifetime, I might at least find myself reborn among the next stage of an ever-awakening humanity - or some other class of more-evolved beings.

Of course this is highly speculative, and I am becoming aware that such a consoling fantasy might be an outgrowth of my conditioned belief in history as linear progress. Buddhist cosmology is not linear but cyclical, and may not accommodate my wish to believe that we are evolving over lifetimes, alongside the endless nature of samsara.

It is a speculative fantasy, but isn’t all cosmology? If it doesn’t contradict right view, then no harm, no foul.

21 - 22, primacy of consciousness

He says that in various Eastern traditions, ‘consciousness itself is identical to the very reality that one might otherwise mistake for God’, which also sounds speculative or just misinformed. I don’t think Buddha ever equated/conflated ‘consciousness’ with ‘reality’, let alone God, and may not have even said anything about the nature of reality itself but instead focused on how our misperceptions of reality cause suffering and how to correct these misperceptions.

Next, Harris says ‘these teachings make metaphysical claims that any serious student of science should find incredible’ and I wonder about what those claims are, why they are incompatible with ‘serious’ science (meaning, what are the metaphysical claims of this esteemed science?) and why credulity about modern Western science is preferable to credulity about about Eastern metaphysics. It is not necessarily the case that the current conclusions of the mainstream-science orthodoxy are making truth claims more credible than other worldviews.

22 -23

He is quite damning of organised religions like the Abrahamic faiths, but mentions Meister Eckhart (Christian mystic) and Al-Hallaj (Sufi, Muslim mystic) as examples of individuals who transcended the ‘doctrinal assumptions’ of their religions and realised they were ‘one with God’. Alas, then they were excommunicated as heretics and/or murdered for challenging the orthodoxy. Nonetheless, their experiences inspire faith in me, and I would like to

• read more about each of these people, as well as Rumi

It inspires faith for me to read about such case histories in an account of spiritual realisation by a modern Western neuroscience.