Sam Harris Black Swan, 2015, PB, 256pp, £9.99, 978-1784160029
Sam Harris captures a popular call for spirituality that is good for mental health and not tainted by religion. He expands the secular concept of spirituality fruitfully, but his insights are limited by a lack of academic rigour or practitioner experience.
Harris argues that spirituality is not only ‘an indispensable part of understanding the nature of the mind’ but also requires a broader focus than the individual. Spirituality has ethical and relational aspects distinguishing it from concepts of individual mental wellness or peace. This is an important insight: the need to think about spirituality in a more communal way.
Harris’s propositions are informed by neuroscience, Buddhist teachings, and personal experiences of psychotropic drugs. He dismisses religious traditions, including contemplative traditions, even though they may have much in common with what he regards as spiritual. Harris is upfront about this, but this suggests an ideological position rather than a genuine enquiry. Harris creates an account of spirituality later in the book that is primarily neurological, calling on functional MRI and other evidence. Extensive notes and references are provided but these omit mainstream academic work on spirituality and health/mental health, for example, that of Chris Cook, John Swinton, or Harold Koenig, which would provide balance to Harris’s arguments, or in some cases challenge them.
Those looking for help with spiritual practices will find brief advice on dealing with negative emotions, but Harris strays readily into bizarre-sounding meditations, including imagining one has no head! Harris not only references mindfulness-informed techniques that have empirical support but also recommends using recreational drugs to create spiritual awareness, despite evidence that this can lead to poor psychological outcomes.
It is informative that Harris, a committed atheist, joins this debate and comes down on the side of spirituality as a crucial concept that relates to mental health, with implications for medical practice. He usefully expands this concept beyond the individual. He captures the zeitgeist of ‘religion-free spirituality’ but at a cost: academically robust accounts of spirituality and mental wellness deserve to be empirically and philosophically constructed without first ring-fencing the enquiry in this way.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2020
