Publishers Weekly
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Expanding upon concepts posited in The End of Faith and Free Will, neuroscientist Harris draws from personal contemplative practice and a growing body of scientific research to argue that the self, the feeling that there is an I residing in ones head, is both an illusion and the primary cause of human suffering. Through meditation, this illusion can be extinguished, resulting in a deep sense of personal well-being regardless of circumstances, and also in compassionate and ethical behaviors toward others. The reality of such self-transcendence has been hitched to unwarranted claims about the nature of the universe by persons of faith and denied outright by most atheists and skeptics. The great value and novelty of this book is that Harris, in a simple but rigorous style, takes the middle way between these pseudoscientific and pseudo-spiritual assertions, cogently maintaining that while such contemplative insights provide no evidence for metaphysical claims, they are available, and seeing them for ourselves leads to a profoundly more salubrious life. Agent: Anne Edelstein, Anne Edelstein Literary Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

Harris (co-founder and CEO of Project Reason) is no ordinary God-bashing atheist. He is a thoughtful, scientific skeptic who views nonmaterialistic claims and near-death experience reports sympathetically and explores their validity with fairness and objectivity. Harris, who recognizes the uniqueness of consciousness, has studied mystical efforts to fathom its deepest recesses. He does not discard metaphysical theses on consciousness as nonsense and is not "reflexively hostile" to some of the claims of supernaturalists. To explore spiritual truths, he has listened with respect to a Hindu guru and traveled to Lucknow and Nepal. He knows the value of meditation and has experienced the truth behind the Advaita claim that the ego is an illusion. He believes it is possible to experience a spiritual dimension to life and acknowledges that the wisdom traditions have contributed to human welfare. With all that, he remains an agnostic on many fundamental questions. This book may not be a great revelation to enlightened thinkers on these matters; however, its sane perspectives, articulated here with autobiographical commentaries, could well wake up many readers. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students; general readers. --V. V. Raman, Rochester Institute of Technology

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Another challenging work from the founder of Project Reason, this time an attempt to separate spirituality from religion.Neuroscientist Harris (Lying, 2013, etc.) argues that the conventional sense of selfa feeling that there is an "I," a center of consciousness sitting somewhere behind the eyesis false and that spirituality consists largely of ridding oneself of this illusion. The author recognizes that the term "spirituality" comes with loaded meanings, but here he uses it to refer to the transcendence of self. Early on, Harris describes his book as "a seeker's memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives: the sense of self we call I'my goal is to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion." The author's many narrative strands intertwine throughout the book. The memoir portions tell of his explorations into Eastern meditation practices and of his experiences with psychedelic drugs. His how-to-meditate directions are simple and straightforward (for further guidance, readers are directed to his website), and his experiments with consciousness-altering drugs are both revealing and startling. Most challenging are the chapters on the brain and the nature of consciousness. Since the author is primarily a philosopher and a scientist, not a lifestyle counselor, readers expecting a user-friendly how-to manual on becoming more spiritual will no doubt be perplexed and disappointed, but they will come away having been warned about unethical gurus and bad drugs. Only the chapter on near-death experiences, which deftly slices and dices Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife (2012), is out of place, reading rather like a book review that Harris has been seeking to get published. A demanding, illusion-shattering book certain to receive criticism from both the scientific and the religious camps. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.