The New Atheist who spent eleven years abroad studying meditation
Sam Harris made his name as a Four Horseman of the New Atheist movement, sharing that label with Dawkins, Hitchens and Dennett. Less well known is that he dropped out of Stanford after one mind-altering night, spent over a decade in India and Nepal learning meditation, and once briefly guarded the Dalai Lama.
Harris was born in Los Angeles in 1967. His father, Berkeley Harris, was an actor in Westerns from a Quaker family; his mother, Susan Harris, who is Jewish, created the sitcoms Soap and The Golden Girls. After his parents divorced when he was two, she raised him in a home he describes as entirely secular, though not deliberately atheist.
At Stanford he started as an English major, but an experience with MDMA made him wonder whether the same insight could be reached without drugs. A quarter later he left in his second year and travelled to India and Nepal to study with Buddhist and Hindu teachers, among them Dilgo Khyentse, and early in the 1990s he spent several weeks as an unpaid guard for the Dalai Lama. He returned to Stanford in 1997 and finished a philosophy degree in 2000.
He began his first book, The End of Faith, right after the September 11 attacks. That debut took a PEN/Martha Albrand prize and stayed 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2009 he earned a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience at UCLA, using brain scans to study belief, disbelief and uncertainty; the thesis became The Moral Landscape, arguing that science can inform human values. His sharp critiques of Islam in particular have drawn accusations of Islamophobia, which he rejects.
His other enduring project is secular contemplation. In Waking Up he argued that meditation can be separated from religious belief, and he has credited Buddhist thought with insights about the mind. Since September 2013 he has hosted a podcast now called Making Sense, whose episodes often run over two hours, and in 2018 he launched a meditation app. In 2020 the app company became the first to sign the Giving What We Can pledge for businesses, committing at least 10 percent of profits to effective charities.
Source: Sam Harris
