The most valuable thing Harris talked about in that book, IMO, was psychedelics. That is the atheist's gateway to spirituality. The mind is a frontier more vast than space. If you haven't explored it, you're really lacking experience in one of life's greatest wonders. To have treated psychedelics (in particular) like we have would be equivalent to looking at the night sky once and banning telescopes. There is an entire realm we have declared off limits for investigation. It is, indeed, the spiritual realm. Spiritual in no supernatural sense, of course.
The way forward isn't for everyone to immediately start doing drugs, necessarily. I kinda think everyone should at least give them a try, to miss out would be kind of like to miss out on ever having sex, but whatever I guess. I am less concerned with actually taking them myself these days, but helping bring society to a place of understanding and intelligence about them, so finally they can be experienced like they should be. To do it now is to be alone, and in unfavorable conditions which could lead to bad experiences. We need a future where that isn't the case, where we can all explore the mind in safety and support. I see things being pretty different one day.
The way forward isn't for everyone to immediately start doing drugs, necessarily. I kinda think everyone should at least give them a try, to miss out would be kind of like to miss out on ever having sex, but whatever I guess. I am less concerned with actually taking them myself these days, but helping bring society to a place of understanding and intelligence about them, so finally they can be experienced like they should be. To do it now is to be alone, and in unfavorable conditions which could lead to bad experiences. We need a future where that isn't the case, where we can all explore the mind in safety and support. I see things being pretty different one day.
