Zen Shit

[Mr. Blonde]

"A monk asked Ummon, "What is Buddha?"

Ummon replied: "Dried shit stick."

Sam Harris is up to some very interesting things. I have suspected it for a while (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), but now he seems to be "out of the closet", so to speak. This Fall, he is releasing a book about meditation, consciousness, and humanity's relationship to reality, called Waking Up:



At the height of my militant anti-religious bloodlust, I became cognizant of the fact that the likely billions spiritual experiences still deserve an explanation, and this is Sam Harris's attempt at pointing humanity in the right direction. I believe it was while reading Ray Kurzweil speculate that we will create intelligent machines that will eventually claim to have spiritual experiences, and that we will believe them. Imagine a robot telling the entire world on national hypertelevision that he regularly speaks with God. Creepy.

Point is, consciousness is very strange, and exploration of the vast inner realm of one's own mind is probably going to be a large part of humanity's future. Meditation is one of the safest (and most helpful IMO) ways to do just that. I'm looking forward to reading it.