Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Most people still believe that religion provides something essential that cannot be had any other way.

Buddha described four foundations of mindfulness,

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion—and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.

The claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self—that there is no rider on the horse—seems to be on firm ground neurologically. Whatever causes the brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it makes sense that it could stop doing this. And once it does, our inner l

The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.

To most readers, this thought experiment will suggest that psychological continuity—the mere maintenance of one’s memories, beliefs, habits, and other mental traits—is an insufficient basis for personal identity. It’s not enough for someone on Mars to be just like you; he must actually be you.

It is always now.

But the true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the whole of one’s life, to waking up from the dream of the self. We need not take anything on faith to do this. In fact, the only alternative is to remain confused about the nature of our minds.

The self, as the implied hub of cognition, perception, emotion, and behavior, can remain stable across even wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness