Sam Harris, "Waking Up", Book Review.

want to start this video by saying that
I am making it with complete sincerity this is not a catty dismissive contemptuous video I am NOT having fun insulting the famous name of Sam Harris in this video it's really with kind of sadness and shock that I discovered what complete garbage this book is and it's with no joy in my heart that I'm sitting here reporting to the Internet what complete garbage this book is my expectations coming to this book apart from the fact that I spent more than 10 years of my life as a scholar of Buddhism and especially of tera vaada Buddhism the form of Buddhism that sam harris is invoking I saw Sam Harris's work on the internet I saw short articles he had written most of them directly or indirectly promoting this book but articles he wrote expressing his views about meditation Buddhism about the possible role of spirituality under this heading within a Atheist worldview those short articles are better than this book having read those articles and having heard his views I think in his own his own monologues and his own interviews this kind of thing I wasn't expecting this book to be good but I was expecting it to be better than what I had already seen on the internet and it's not this book is terrible from cover to cover it's complete garbage and if you don't know anything about Buddhism if you're completely ignorant ISM I'm very sorry that it's gonna fundamentally mislead you if you do have a prior background in Buddhism I think you would just find it impossible to read I mean when I first heard about this book I was expecting a certain kind of academic respond positive negative evaluative or otherwise so I actually looked it up in the academic the library database here looking for articles responding to it I would have expected some scholar of Buddhist philosophy or what-have-you to have engaged with this book all kinds of pop psychology books dealing with Buddhism all kinds of scientistic books popularizing Buddhism do get some kind of treatment in that sense even if it's just a book review now while this book is famous enough because the author is a famous guy that it had reviews in the New York Times and mainstream newspapers I was stunned by the complete silence in that sort of academic press now when this book arrived on my desk because I had to order it from another library only when I picked it up and looked at the text to understand why it had been ignored and just looking at it just flipping through it in the first couple of seconds of holding the book you can see this is a book that he's impossible to take seriously now that does not come as a surprise because his articles on the internet were good or wonderful they're not they're terrible in the wrong way maybe I'll say a little bit more about that but if if you want to engage in a critique of Sam hearses view on Buddhism meditation etc use the articles the short articles that post in the Internet this book is amazingly adapted from a PhD thesis if you know anything about academic publishing a certain level of respect is accorded to almost any book that is taken from a PhD thesis in this case a PhD thesis at a major Western University by a major or famous author by default it'll be taken pretty seriously but everything about this book is impossible to take seriously it's incredibly poorly written incredibly poorly sourced it demonstrates just an embarrassing level of ignorance of Buddhism and you know like many true believers he's self-righteous in his ignorance he just cites the expertise of his favorite white guru from California completely uncritically at one point here he makes what to me is an embarrassing contrast between what he values in the terawatt of Buddhist religion and written canon she was dismissive and contemptuous attitude towards Christianity Judaism and Islam he says here of a particular Souta so citta is a short text within the the Pali Canon this citta is not a collection of ancient myths superstitions and taboos it is a rigorously empirical guide to freeing the mind from suffering the stuff he chooses to address within Buddhism there's a huge literature in English on sort of every word every key term every every stage every twist in the road he chooses to go down and he ignores it beginning to end he learns nothing from the work of other scholars from the last 150 years we want to say and again this is in English Sam Harris can read English if it was written by someone whose only language were Lithuanian I would sympathize and believe me in a small country like Lao so if you talk about people whose only language is lotion you have to sympathize to some extent their ability to know anything about Buddhism may be really crippled because they have so much trouble accessing modern scholarship and so on even Chinese I mean it's a few if your first language is Chinese and you want to be a scholar of Buddhism now you have to learn in a European language like English she's very sad I actually have written articles about that I've made other YouTube videos I'm with that but it reflects how much progress was made in the last hundred and fifty years in the study of Buddhism in Europe and during that same period of hundred and fifty years basically civil war revolution and other factors destroyed what could have been a much more productive period of scholarship in China and in other countries in Asia Sam Harris demonstrates total incompetence in his use of sources and that includes purely scientific sources about the supposed mental effects of meditation over to religious canonical sources using the religious literature of Buddhism to make his point and to some extent I can only explain that in terms of stupidity when sam harris is sitting down and having interview with joe rogan he may seem intelligent he may seem exponentially more intelligent than joe rogan than the person who's interviewing him but both in the articles and in the book dealing with buddhism there's a great deal wrong with it for which there is no explanation aside from stupidity but the second major factor here is ego is the ego trip this guy is on my friend Joseph Goldstein one of the finest to be passing the teachers I know likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you were sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light upon the wall sam harris really exhibits some of the ego trip of the true believer in feeling that he has discovered something wonderful that's only accessible to a special few and that he is sharing this with you and in a sense his appeal to authority is his own mystical really supernatural experience now the funny hashtags are the the funny caveat to to add there is just that he insists that this is not supernatural and that for example what he's attained through meditation or most of what he's attained one of the one of the crucial experiences is actually identical to certain types of drug he talks a lot about MDMA about these mind-altering drugs and how he alleges the real impact or benefit of tera vaada buddhist meditation and he smears together what should be separate categories of Nibbana and met above and ah and about sixty I mean his treatment of the source text in Buddhism is a hundred percent incompetent and a hundred percent self-important he seems to have no concern there but then claiming that the the desiderata m-- the objective of this meditation and Buddhism is the same as what you experience through the use of certain mind altering drugs party drugs like MDMA that cause brain damage incidentally um anyone sincerely interested in Buddhism as a religion should find that deeply disturbing it's also false and should be refuted as false I'm not a Buddhist I'm not a member of the Buddhist religion but yeah in a sense this is both offensive and dangerous the other people who I think should step up the offend it would be anyone really interested in the situation for Neuroscience as a legitimate academic discipline because what this book contains and shockingly is adapted from a PhD thesis this shows neuroscience in modern Western academia to be no better than a sort of category of pop psychology with isolated anecdotes drawn from scientific experiments and I won't get into detail about it here but in terms of his incompetence with sources Sam Harris does misrepresent scientific studies that he cites it's much easier to follow up on that if using his articles in the Internet where he gives you a link or a citation and you can then go to the library and get that source one way or another and whether it's unintentional or a product of his own intentional bias he lies to you about really serious flaws in the sources he's citing my earlier video addressed a completely hilarious study that sam harris treats as proof positive as definitive proof that meditation has these effects on the mind and again he's not even really saying the same effect he's he's neither saying the same effects that the study showed nor is he relating these to the effects that actual canonical tera vaada Buddhism would be interested in and then you look at the study and it's this it's this fishing expedition that engages in moving the goalposts these are two idioms that we use in English and talking about these problems that have research but we have no other way to express it moving the goal posts meaning you don't really define what it was you were testing for and then any variation discovered in the test is treated as a significant finding because you're you're moving the goalposts you're changing the definition of what would be a significant finding as you go you know that study he treated as proof positive it uses these very dubious metrics like measuring how angry somebody is through some kind of standardized interview and then even then this meditation practice that's allegedly going to make you less angry which by the way is not the point of medicine this is not the point of meditation in tera vaada Buddhism I managed it I managed to condense that down to one word there medicine the useful term meditation ISM that ISM my not um hashtag medicine and the actual study what it shows is their control group sat and listened to the Lord of the Rings as a book on tape and the Lord of the Rings was more effective in reducing anger and achieving these other desert errata then the Buddhist meditation now so many problematic things in that study but it measured yet it had more than twenty four measurements so you know you're allegedly measuring how angry these people are how stressed out they are how much of this that the other psychological character they have before versus after this meditation training and for the control group before versus after listen or the Rings so they basically got one measurement that seemed to show a significant difference in the meditation group that was not there in the Lord of the Rings group but just reading the study as a whole just looking at the list of the quantitative measurements and then the conclusions and the assumptions and just thinking about what these metrics are what's being measured and having any basis in Buddhism it cannot be taken seriously when I was discussing this with somebody in the internet they called it a cargo cult science and I said look I can't get behind that term because cargo cults get results cargo cults compared to this they aren't that bad a cargo cult is a pretty rational logical religion it's based on real world experience it gets results it works its social you know everyone gets to come out and sing and dance my expectations were amazingly low before actually laying hands on this book but I was assuming that sam harris was gonna make some kind of significant contribution from an atheist perspective from a skeptical perspective to either the Western understanding of Buddhism or to a Buddhist reappraisal of neurology or something and it's not this book is complete garbage and this book is proof positive of absolutely nothing aside from the fact that sam harris is an idiot