Freethinkers of the World, Meditate

Your buddy Sam Harris can help you access authentic spirituality

The Sage

‘It’s Ramana Maharshi,’ said the friend. He placed before the picture a wilted rose, white and yet a little soiled.

I looked again. The man in the picture cut a frail figure, too old ever to have been young. The bare shoulders were so scrawny, the lone spiritual sense they evoked was of the frailty of life, the sobering deterioration that vitiates longevity. A puff of beard haloed an all-knowing smile and had a certain shaving-lather quality to it. Unlike the Hindu ascetic of lore, he had kept his neck innocent of garlands. No saffron robe, vermilion, ash.

Those eyes, though. Even from that faded old photo, he seemed to stare not at you but into your depths and beyond. The self-assurance was apt to unsettle a soul, any soul, even the soul of an avowedly soulless atheist.

We shared a reluctant node, the friend and I.

‘Let’s not talk about him.’

Better not. I would have said, ‘Not again!’ Not one more of those neo-archaic global godmen hailing from this part of the world. Their kind had never made sense to me, the occultists and mystic grandees, crowd stirrers and Rolce Royce riders, plain charlatans and stand-up comedians. Not that I hadn’t had my share of dabbling with a respectable few. Jiddu Krishnamurti I was ready to get a touch fascinated with. Aurobindo no doubt possessed a remarkable mind. But on the flyblown end of the spectrum you wouldn’t miss, even if wished, the ones whose spiritual competency lies in some farcical variety of magic — ashes from air or the wrong place, et cetera.

To me, they must all belong to either of the two broad camps: the deluded or the deceptive.

Sam

In memory as in the picture, Ramana stood fading. A decade later I chanced my way back to him, link by link, via the unlikeliest of channels — Sam Harris, the American neuroscientist and public intellectual, one of the world’s most famous atheists.

Speaking of channels, the one to Sam Harris in my case was Richard Dawkins. Not so spiritual a channel, of course. Dawkins at the time had published his super-polemic work, The God Delusion, which would go on to be an atheist bible of sorts. We rationalists adore Dawkins. He speaks the language of crystals, such is the precision. The commitment to accuracy shows as he talks, the whole mental sifting and sorting, mending and fusing, slicking and rounding. But this in no way guarantees his opponents getting away unscathed if what’s at stake is evolution and a word has been uttered in praise of creationism.

While Dawkins counters decibels with reason and aggression with pure logic, his perennial ally the late Christopher Hitchens had no such restraint. He force-fed his opponents their own medicine, mostly in choking gallons. He could remain as elegant-eloquent-eclectic as he was but knew as well to give one the finger if the need arose. For atheists worldwide he was fun embodied, our clan’s pride and Presley.

Often they teamed up, Dawkins and Hitchers. Of their myriad videos available online, one stands out. ‘The Four Horsemen (2007)’, the title says. ‘Full 2 hour discussion, porn for the mind,’ reads the description. I hadn’t yet heard of the other two horsemen: Daniel Dennett the cognitive scientist and then the youngest of the four, Sam Harris. You couldn’t help but notice this chap Sam, svelte and polished, calmer and slower than the rest but sounding the most sure of himself.

That marked the beginning of an intellectual obsession. I found myself devouring Harris indiscriminately — debates, interviews, speeches. The quirky YouTube algorithm ensured almost all of them featured Harris the atheist, focusing on just this specific facet of his. But then as one would with the intellectuals of one’s liking, I explored his books. The most popular back then was Waking Up.

Its theme? Spirituality.

Awakening

Waking up proved an impressive read. Presenting a secular, structured, well-argued case for meditation, it is also the story of the author’s own metaphysical quest commenced at the absurdly young age of seventeen or so. There sure are the sort of Matthiessenisque accounts of exotic backdrops and mystic experiences, mind spreading out like magic carpet in presence of snowy peaks and starry nights, clever gurus who with their crisp retorts bursting about bubbles of illusory enlightenment, lazy talkers and crazy crooks crowding out the space meant for true seekers of deepest truths.

But what struck me most was a mention in there of Sri Ramana Maharshi, who Harris thinks was “the most widely revered Indian sage of the 20th century.”

Well. It was unthinkable to expect Ramana to be more acclaimed in the West than those other men of hype-fueled renown: Osho, Jiddu, Mahesh Yogi. But with whatever exposure I had with Sam’s benchmark for thinkers, I couldn’t much doubt the claim. Ramana was also the master of Sam’s own Indian guru, H W L Poonja.

Certainly and shamefully, it was my problem, not Ramana’s, that it took me so long to discover him.

I should have known him better also because I lived a 4-hour drive from Ramana’s former ashram.

And I had visited it just months before reading Harris’s book.

The Whitest Spot

Ramana’s ashram hadn’t struck me particularly impressive. It had its austere charms, sure, vivified by the fact that it stood a mile or so off the temple of Thiruannamalai, one of the most majestic of southern Indian temples. But hereabouts if you’ve done your bit of travel you may have coursed through quite a few ashrams and, unless you’re diligent with your homework, would fail to see much of a point.

Mine was a family trip. I remember feeling abnormally hungry as I moved about, hungry and bored, clicking fingers to startle the strutting peacocks and taking pity on Europeans in lotus postures. Right now, with all that’s been learned of Ramana, perhaps I can retrospectively romanticize the experience, the Om-pattern formed on the ground by secretly soft-conscious leaves, that wise one-eyed robin flitting up the ashram’s roof and how even the forenoon breeze was leaving in its wake the scent of Advaita Vedanta. After all, lies and truth are part of the same cosmic unity.

But Ramana Maharshi deserves, if nothing else, your basic honesty and intellectual integrity. Carl Jung called him ‘the whitest spot in a white space’, noting that In his teachings we find ‘the purest of India, with its breath of world-liberating humanity.’ And this is just one such myriad reliable testimonies. In his lifetime Ramana said and wrote way less than what has been said and wrote on him. Whoever met him in person went around spreading the word, keeping on about the transmissive quality of his grace and wisdom. What else should one expect of a sage who believed true silence is an endless speech?

Most disciples, former skeptics included, recall themselves seated at his feet, that soul-mining glance meeting and merging with theirs and rendering them instant converts. He spoke scanty yet measuredly, with life-warping impetus.

But then there are these other fables, the ones of miracles. Here’s where the likes of Harris and their intellectual standing come up against the legacy of Ramana the sanyasi.

Ramana’s disciples claim to have had experiences explicable solely by way of telepathy, teleportation, even transfiguration. For instance, many months before Mr Poonja was to meet Ramana in his ashram, the sage in the guise of a mendicant had paid him a visit which, of course, was impossible since Ramana never went out of the ashram, let alone traveled all the way to northern India to motivate a prospective student to pitch to him the virtues of enlightenment.

The question is: How would these stories reconcile with reason? Is it stooping a bit too low to meet our innate need for feeding the soul?

No, I’d imagine. Ramana occupies a space of his own. Without much exotic appeal and sartorial feats, his poised simplicity ratifies the essential genuineness expected of an exponent of cosmic unity, of infinite grace. It takes a good deal of gullibility on one’s part to take seriously these other soi-disant ascetics sheltered under their massive headgear, cloaking their cerebral shortcomings in silk and designer linen. At best, their attire warns you overtly where not to look for wisdom.

Still, sadly, in these traditions there is no dearth of possibilities and no check on impossibilities. As the collective intellectual culture of humanity tends to value an idea for its scientific veracity and logical soundness, too much reliance on fantasy wouldn’t thrive.

Half-dozen Einsteins

As Harris warns, thanks to the fault of a fraudulent few the baby perennially gets thrown out with the bathwater, the baby here being spiritual wisdom. However significant may an idea be, its proponents need to be watchful of whatever hocus-pocus that live off its cognitive essence, leaving behind in time just a brittle husk set to turn to dust at the gentlest touch of science and sense.

But there also exists this camp of the real “bathwater throwers”, the blind, bland believers in absolute materialism.

Up until the mid of the gone century, all one needed was plain empirical proofs concurring with common sense. Then quantum laws gatecrashed the party. Now the quests of all sorts, scientific as well as metaphysical, fall well beyond the direct reach of the senses, at times even of deductive, axiomatic logic. If there’s a single qualifier that goes with miracles and quantum physics alike, it’s ‘counter-intuitive’. To respect it, to learn to live with it, is a great therapy for myopia. Demystifying quantum entanglement may not be as spectacular as debunking Gellar’s bending spoons, but also not as simple. Science had grown not just grander but trickier; now way too crazier also to disallow so many absurd- or near-absurd-sounding narratives. As novelist Martin Amis remarked,

“Looks like we are at least six Einsteins away from even the elementary understanding of reality.”

Sam Harris appreciates this, at least tacitly. He finds himself among those who consider consciousness to be the sole real possession of an individual, as a matter of felt-experience, and the ways of the mind and universe are trickier than we think, for our thoughts themselves are often guileful. Also, both as a philosopher and neuroscientist, he argues free-will is an illusion.

Sam Meets the Sage

Here Harris’s ideas converge intimately with Ramanas’. The absence of freewill lies at the very heart of Raman’s conception of advaita vedanta. To him, every event, from the faintest underwater pulse to the blooming supernova, is predetermined. Over his lifetime a person does what he’s destined to, nothing more, nothing less, and the question of an autonomous will doesn’t thus arise. One is free at best not to identify oneself with his body — thoughts, feelings, pain and pleasure.

On the topics of freewill and consciousness, Harris finds himself at loggerheads with fellow atheists, mostly his friends. One of the “four horsemen” Dan Dennett, for instance, insists on freewill being real and consciousness an illusion, a view diametrically opposed to Harris’s. The criticisms could take hostile turns, at least lexically. Dennett calls himself a deflator of consciousness, which according to him is just a product of the anthropocentric hubris of meat machines ( read humans).

But the vehemence and uncharitability of the debates have failed to shake up Harris’s belief in the primacy of subjective experience in matters of being and reality. If there’s one thing he can never stress enough, it’s this tendency to mistake us as the authors of our thoughts, hearers of noises, seers of sights — all those devious tricks of mind to contrive a sense of ‘self’ out of a sensory soup. His meditative advice, as offered through a mobile app identically titled with his book — Waking Up — aims at dispelling this illusion.

The benefit is evident — if you can stay detached from what the mind tosses at you like a smirking butcher, you would never be at its mercy. Harris sees this as a superpower to deal with pain and fear, to circumvent most episodes of needless suffering. It’d be interesting to look at the see how identical his advices are with Ramana’s:

Ramana: Seek the seeker

Harris: Look for the looker

Ramana: Just as the pictures appear on the screen as long as the film throws the shadows through the lens, so the phenomenal world will continue to appear to the individual in the waking and dream states as long as there are latent mental impressions.

Harris: Everything appears on its own, like random images in a mirror.

Ramana: When other thoughts arise, one should not pursue them, but should inquire: ‘To whom do they arise?’ It does not matter how many thoughts arise. As each thought arises, one should inquire with diligence, “To whom has this thought arisen?”. The answer that would emerge would be “To me”. Thereupon if one inquires “Who am I?”, the mind will go back to its source; and the thought that arose will become quiescent.

Harris: Watch the thought itself. Where did it come from? Where did it go? Watch it unravel and disappear.

The Grandest ‘Why’

That is not to say Sri Ramana’s and Sam Harris’s philosophies match in all aspects. Harris doesn’t even see the need for an overarching metaphysical framework to reap the benefits of an examined mind. Of course he wouldn’t subscribe to the extreme predestiny that Ramana proposes. Nor would he fall in with Ramana’s call to surrender entirely and throw all responsibilities on God.

In Harris’s approach, there’s nothing at all that necessitates a God. His stand is staunchly rationalistic. He is disposed to attribute every cognitive phenomenon, even consciousness, to the brain. There needn’t be a soul riding the body, and at death no ectoplasmic phantom should whoosh out through its choicest orifice, only to wait for its turn to spiral its way down again into the next ordained womb and get on with the eternal journey.

And so it fits to call Harris the ideal intellectual of the times. He’s a scientific spiritualist, rigorous yet balanced. He’s appreciative not just of modern science but also of other sensible intellectual traditions, the global ones. There are attempts to bracket him with the Far Right and the so-called “intellectual dark web”, but no fair-minded human would find him a closet racist or white supramcist. He’s even less polemic and vitriolic than Hitchens, thankfully so, since the priority isn’t so much to win an argument as to get across in earnest the truth as one conceives it.

Atheist hardliners don’t take kindly to his spiritual inclination, but here they must ask themselves: Why am I an atheist in the first place?

Unless driven by the compulsions of some dogmatic ideology, one chooses atheism on rational grounds. One embraces it organically, as it is the de facto stand for the scientific-minded, for science in essence is reason manifested, a pragmatic extension of logic. But even more important is its pliability, an openness to accommodate conflicting thoughts until all but one are winnowed out by dint of objective evaluation. Being an offshoot of science as it is, atheism must not mistake itself for an ideology. it needs to remain as an exploratory framework or else one fails to see its right role and nature.

Such a framework brings with it hope and excitement and endless potential. Such possibilities, however odd-seeming or at odds with prevalent patterns and approach, might have in them the seeds of tomorrow.

The Brushstroke of Reality

Think of all the revolution that quantum mechanics touched off. Its perpetual smirking at common sense didn’t keep it getting into a soul-talk with human comprehension. The theory is now regarded as the apex of our collective cognitive achievement.

But quantum theory didn’t have an ideological shadow to grapple with. Here is where the question of the subjective experience wades into a rationally hostile territory. Most thinkers, scientists included, concur on the mysterious nature of consciousness but no consensus exists as to what that mystery should be. If one imagines consciousness to have an existence that transcends the body and brain, in the next stop down this road of thought you’d meet soul, spirit and other apparitions, and you lose the game. As we are inherent suckers for the enticing, delicious possibilities rather than pure reason, the search would veer toward all sorts of delusory tomfoolery. The next thing you know, you find yourself trucking an African hillock to surrender the rest of your life to a voodoo wizard.

Seriously — there are way too many ways for things to go wrong from the moment a hardened system of reason develops the faintest crack. So yes, when it comes to Consciousness, one must trudge with care, but trudge on nonetheless.

Even so, we don’t have another tool, another means. No amount of brain scans would do fat lot of good to understanding subjective experience. It’s a hard problem — and the Australian Philosopher David Chalmers really did call it out as “the hard problem of consciousness.”

There is a great revival of consciousness as an object of interest for a number of reasons. Its irreducible yet boundless nature has earned it a place of beyond the reach of the cold chalky hands of mathematics and the tendrils of classic biology.

Why, ask some, can’t conciousness be hypothesized as a fundamental building block of reality? Why to shackle your ideas to those tricky minuscule mots of subatomic world? Why go for dots when glorious whole brushstrokes are permitted?

These are fascinating times in science. Now more than ever, the scientific community has begun to explore such crazy-sounding ideas as panpsychism, which argues that every discrete entity in the universe, animate or inanimate, possesses some mental or experiential aspect. Think of meditating stars and brooding rocks cease being mere metaphors.

Meanwhile, down in the micro-world, quantum theorists or at least a sizable group of them are now ready to explore the possibility of the observers’ consciousness causing the collapse of the wave function. Curiously, taking this road really does seem more “reason-able” than all other possibilities.

After all, if the state of a quantum object depends on the very act of observing it, what else should be in play here but the observer itself?

It may remain hard to prove any of it, sure. But it’s still better to stay agnostic in areas where nobody has much clue. As a curious human, who would want to miss out on these profound debates? That’s how it makes more sense to keep up with this intellectual dynamism than to stay put where you are just to retain the badge of an atheist. Involve gently, but do involve.

A hint of heat is enough to sense an active volcano — you needn’t step in and swim to confirm.

A Lab unto Oneself

It is impossible to be fully objective about consciousness. Sensorily isolated minds are the lone labs here, at least for direct experimentation. The separation of the subjective and the objective breaks down and the scientific enquiry spookily becomes both at the same time.

Meditation as a meta-cognitive tool has now been around for a while and with all that’s happening around, it’s perhaps the most essential skill an individual can possess. As mindfulness trainer Lock Kelly puts it,

It is often called the ultimate medicine.The discovery and uncovering of awareness immediately opens us to natural qualities of peace, joy, love, and courage.

But now it’s time for it to function as lab and see for ourselves. To say I Don’t Know is not intellectual debility — it’s scientific courage. One should be glad that science is so accommodating, so conducive to changes: even fundamental revamps.

And in the case of self-exploration, of exploration of awareness, the lab is the most ubiquitous and accessible of all . Not trying it out is nothing short of lassitude. If the collective effort would eventually lead to some sort of cosmic enlightenment, so be it. If one gets glimpses of a non-dualistic universe, so be it. If it begets a bit of beauty and peace as by-products, so be it, too.

Do meditate. Let mind labs flourish. And, with it, serious first-person contemplative inquiry.