' Waking Up '...

Sam Harris: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion


What are we conscious of? We are conscious of the world; we are conscious of our bodies in the world; and we also imagine that we are conscious of our selves within our bodies. After all, most of us don’t feel merely identical to our bodies. We seem to be riding around inside our bodies. We feel like inner subjects that can use the body as a kind of object. This last impression is an illusion that can be dispelled.

The selflessness of consciousness is in plain view in every present moment—and yet, it remains difficult to see. This is not a paradox. Many things in our experience are right on the surface, but they require some training or technique to observe. Consider the optic blind spot: The optic nerve passes through the retina of each eye, creating a small region in each visual field where we are effectively blind. Many of us learned as children to perceive the subjective consequences of this less-than-ideal anatomy by drawing a small circle on a piece of paper, closing one eye, and then moving the paper into a position where the circle became invisible. No doubt most people in human history have been totally unaware of the optic blind spot. Even those of us who know about it go for decades without noticing it. And yet, it is always there, right on the surface of experience.

The absence of the self is also there to be noticed. As with the optic blind spot, the evidence is not far away or deep within; rather, it is almost too close to be observed. For most people, experiencing the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness requires considerable training. It is, however, possible to notice that consciousness—that in you which is aware of your experience in this moment—does not feel like a self. It does not feel like “I.” What you are calling “I” is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.