Chapter
Eighteen
Waking up
The four noble, or ennobling, truths are 1) Suf-
fering. Life is inherently unsatisfactory because
everything is impermanent. 2) The origins of
suffering. We suffer because we cling to things
we like and reject those we don’t, becoming
trapped in a cycle of being and becoming called
samsara. 3) The cessation of suffering. Recognis-
ing impermanence, and letting go of desire and
the desiring self, ends suffering. Sorrow and grief,
joy and happiness can come and go without
attachment, leading to nirvana. 4) The way. The
Buddha recommended an eightfold path of right
understanding, thought, speech, action, liveli-
hood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.
Heart and mind, or wisdom and compassion, are
seen as inseparable.
This path has been described as
a way of life to be followed, practised and
developed by each individual. It is self-
discipline in body, word and mind, self-
development and self-purification. It has
nothing to do with belief, prayer, worship or
ceremony. In that sense, it has nothing which
may popularly be called ‘religious’.
(Rahula, 1959, pp. 49–50)Nevertheless, many of the Buddha’s discourses
were passed on by oral tradition and then writ-
ten down several hundred years later as the
sutras, and despite his warnings about relying on
hearsay and tradition, Buddhism became a great
religion, spreading to southern India, Ceylon,
and Burma as Theravada Buddhism, and elsewhere as Mahayana Buddhism. It
spread to Tibet, where it took a unique form built on existing folklore, including
reliance on the concept of reincarnation, which was already popular there. It
spread along the silk route from India to China, where it became Chan Buddhism,
to Japan where Chan became Zen, and eventually also to the West (Humphreys,
1951; Batchelor, 1994).
In this final chapter, we will explore some of the questions that remain after our
long journey through the wide and often baffling territories of research and
thought that relate to consciousness. This chapter is more personal than the other
seventeen, but we hope that some of your questions might be similar to ours, or
that ours will interest you nonetheless. The questions we will try to address are as
follows.
Are we stuck with the problems and illusions we have discovered, or can we learn
to see through them? If we can, this amounts to wondering: can consciousness
itself change?
PRoFILe 18.1
Sam Harris (b. 1967)
Trained as both philosopher and
neuroscientist, Sam Harris has a
PhD in cognitive neuroscience from
UCLA, has written books on faith,
religion, morality, and free will, and
runs the Waking Up podcast. He is
fiercely critical of organised religion
and along with Dennett and Dawkins is considered one
of the ‘Four Horsemen’ of the new atheism, although,
unlike them, he is a long-term meditator, believing
that some Buddhist and Hindu traditions offer valuable
empirical insights into consciousness. Experiences with
psychedelic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA,
led him to leave Stanford in his second year to seek spir-
itual insight without drugs. Travelling to India, he pur-
sued strenuous methods of meditation, including a year
on silent retreat, concluding that the key aim is to look
into the sense of being a separate self until it dissolves.
He thinks free will is an illusion, morality can be studied
scientifically, everything we do is for the purpose of alter-
ing consciousness, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (though having
little to do with consciousness) is surprisingly relevant to
the illusoriness of the ego.