Waking Up

Sam Harris makes a genuine argument here — that meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative experience are too valuable to be left exclusively to religious frameworks — and he writes about it with unusual personal honesty, including his own decades of practice and his encounters with teachers and psychedelics. For secular readers already skeptical of religion, the book is thoughtful and accessible. Penny's audience, however, should know what they are picking up: Harris is explicitly and persistently dismissive of religious faith as false and harmful, and he advocates for psychedelic drug use as a legitimate spiritual tool. The New Republic noted logical inconsistencies in his framing of consciousness, a fair critique. This is a book for a narrow audience, and that audience is not a faith-affirming one. Score reflects its real merits within that lane.