Sam Harris isn't quite the atheist provocateur that Christopher Hitchens was nor the militant that Richard Dawkins is. But he is building his place in the pantheon of god-free thinkers book by book. His latest is "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion." As a California native, he grew up with the Golden State's alternative ideas. His own ideas among them, that morality and spirituality can have a secular, scientific foundation rather than a religious one are rooted in his UCLA neuroscience degree and his years'-long studies of meditation in places such as Tibet and India, including a brief gig on the security team for the Dalai Lama.

You write that you want this book to "pluck the diamond from the esoteric dunghill of religion." What is the diamond of spirituality?

It's the phenomenon of self-transcendence. Introspection is a domain of real discovery and consequential changes in your conscious life. Many people are uncomfortable with the term "spirituality," and frankly I'm uncomfortable with it. I'm not the first atheist to use it somewhat defiantly. Christopher Hitchens and Carl Sagan didn't use it quite the way I do, but they felt it was a word we had to reclaim and strip of its spooky associations.

What do people mean when they say, "I'm spiritual but not religious"?

Many things people mean by "spiritual" are every bit as incredible as religion. I divorce myself from the crazy claims about crystals and Atlantis and the things you find in the spiritual section of a bookstore.

The line between spirituality and religion for me really comes down to the former making claims about the nature of human consciousness and its possibilities, and the latter making claims about the nature of reality the divine origin of certain books or the virgin birth or the way the world is going to end.

If you have an experience of unconditional love, that's a spiritual experience; it tells you about the nature of human experience, about the potential of the human mind and human relationships, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cosmos. You can value it and seek it out, but if you start making claims like "love pervades the universe," then you're just making spooky claims that by their very nature trespass upon the territory of physics and the rest of science.

Many people naturally conflate spiritual and religious feelings.

The problem is, everyone is living in the context of some religious indoctrination, so when they have these experiences, they count them as data in favor of religion. If you're a Christian praying in church and you feel bliss, you're going to start talking about the grace of God. If you're a Hindu praying to Shiva, you're going to have a very different interpretation for the same experience.

There are mental states that people from athletes to writers call "the zone" or "alpha state" that pass for spiritual experiences.

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No God? No problem, says god-free thinker Sam Harris