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Sam Harris vs. Deepak Chopra

Gambit

Well-Known Member
The following is a (short) "YouTube" video containing a snippet of the "Future of God" debate that appeared on ABC News "Nightline." Apparently, Sam Harris sided with the atheistic camp while Deepak Chopra sided with the theistic camp.


Question:

What exactly is the difference between Harris' worldview and Chopra's? As far as I can tell, both subscribe to a worldview that is basically in line with Buddhism and/or Advaita Vedanta. And both are promoting essentially the same brand of spirituality.
 
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Debater Slayer

Vipassana
Staff member
Premium Member
One major difference is that Harris doesn't baselessly claim to know the source of consciousness or the explanation thereof. He doesn't make unwarranted assumptions about it like Chopra does. Another difference, obviously, is that Harris believes in no gods, while Chopra is a believer. Chopra also advocates unscientific "medical" practices.

Those are the main major differences I can think of offhand. Personally, I agree with Sam Harris 95% of the time, but I find most of what Chopra says to be little more than hogwash and garnished jargon.
 

Gambit

Well-Known Member
One major difference is that Harris doesn't baselessly claim to know the source of consciousness or the explanation thereof. He doesn't make unwarranted assumptions about it like Chopra does. Another difference, obviously, is that Harris believes in no gods, while Chopra is a believer. Chopra also advocates unscientific "medical" practices.

Both individuals are promoting a spirituality and or a form of mysticism based primarily on Buddhism and/or Advaita Vedanta.
 

Debater Slayer

Vipassana
Staff member
Premium Member
Both individuals are promoting a spirituality and or a form of mysticism based primarily on Buddhism and/or Advaita Vedanta.

Harris seems to have a soft spot for meditation, but his worldview makes far less unwarranted assumptions than Chopra's. From what I have seen, Harris doesn't claim to know what he doesn't about spiritual matters, unlike Chopra.
 
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LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
Both individuals are promoting a spirituality and or a form of mysticism based primarily on Buddhism and/or Advaita Vedanta.

Excuse me, but I think those two Dharmas deserve more respect than that. Deepak Chopra does not have enough of a grasp of either to promote any spirituality worth of that name... or of much attention, either.
 

dgirl1986

Big Queer Chesticles!
One major difference is that Harris doesn't baselessly claim to know the source of consciousness or the explanation thereof. He doesn't make unwarranted assumptions about it like Chopra does. Another difference, obviously, is that Harris believes in no gods, while Chopra is a believer. Chopra also advocates unscientific "medical" practices.

Those are the main major differences I can think of offhand. Personally, I agree with Sam Harris 95% of the time, but I find most of what Chopra says to be little more than hogwash and garnished jargon.

Pretty much this.

If you listen closely to Deepak and what he says, most of the words do not actually mean what he wants them to mean.
 

gsa

Well-Known Member
Both individuals are promoting a spirituality and or a form of mysticism based primarily on Buddhism and/or Advaita Vedanta.

Not really. While Harris identifies certain dharmic traditions as having picked up insight as a result of their contemplative traditions of yoga/mediation, he rejects the leap from the experience of these altered states of consciousness that are made by some New Age advocates, including Deepak Chopra. You can just read this from the man himself:

Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes: Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind—parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky. In this vein, one finds Einstein’s amazement at the intelligibility of Nature’s laws described as though it were a kind of mystical insight.

New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and other contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum mechanics and that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his identity with the One Mind that gave birth to the cosmos.

Chopra certainly falls in the latter category. He promotes Ayurvedic medicine, and wisely perceives skeptics as his natural enemy, writing in 2010 that "No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others." He also wrote this:

So whenever I find myself labeled the emperor of woo-woo, I pull out the poison dart and offer thanks that wrong thinking has gotten us so far. Thirty years ago no right-thinking physician accepted the mind-body connection as a valid, powerful mode of treatment. Today, no right-thinking physician (or very few) would trace physical illness to sickness of the soul, or accept that the body is a creation of consciousness, or tell a patient to change the expression of his genes. But soon these forms of wrong thinking will lose their stigma, despite the best efforts of those professional stigmatizers, the skeptics.

I can guarantee you that Harris, while open to empirical research into certain claims (including, for example, the survival of consciousness after death), is not claiming that physical illness represents soul sickness, or that patients can change the expressions of their genes. This endorsement of "self-help epigenetics" is astonishing since it finds such wide reception, and is sadly co-signed by the equally dubious Rudy Tanzi, a Harvard PhD with the same habit of making bold, ungrounded claims about "spiritual" applications of science, or alternatively scientific endorsements of spiritual beliefs. Jerry Coyne demolishes their nonsense pretty quickly and clearly.

The two men are light years apart.
 

Gambit

Well-Known Member
Not really.

Yes, really. Sam Harris has much more in common with Deepak Chopra than he does with Michael Shermer or Richard Dawkins.

American philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris published Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014. In this book, Harris promotes a syntheistic, post-atheist spirituality beyond traditional religion, especially beyond the Abrahamic faiths, inspired by Buddhism and the Indian philosophical school of Advaita Vedanta.

(source: Wikipedia: Syntheism)
 

Gambit

Well-Known Member
Harris seems to have a soft spot for meditation, but his worldview makes far less unwarranted assumptions than Chopra's. From what I have seen, Harris doesn't claim to know what he doesn't about spiritual matters, unlike Chopra.

Harris embraces mysticism in no uncertain terms. I'm fairly confident that Chopra would say "Amen" to the following (because it's textbook Buddhism/Advaita).

The claims of mystics are neurologically quite astute. No human being has experienced an objective world, or even a world at all. You are at this moment having a visionary experience. The world you see and hear is nothing more than a modification of your consciousness, the physical status of which remains a mystery...We really are such stuff as dreams are made of. (source: pg. 41, "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris)
 

Gambit

Well-Known Member
Excuse me, but I think those two Dharmas deserve more respect than that. Deepak Chopra does not have enough of a grasp of either to promote any spirituality worth of that name... or of much attention, either.

Puhlease! We have already established that you are grossly misinformed concerning Buddhism.
 

Gambit

Well-Known Member
Pretty much this.

If you listen closely to Deepak and what he says, most of the words do not actually mean what he wants them to mean.

The problem I have encountered is that most of the atheistic fans of Harris have not listened very closely to what he has actually written.
 

Gambit

Well-Known Member
Uh, how do you figure? The fact that they both meditate?

I just cited a source that clearly states that Harris' spirituality is inspired by Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. I'm afraid you don't have the luxury of ignoring that fact.
 

George-ananda

Advaita Vedanta, Theosophy, Spiritualism
Premium Member
I think Deepak made the best point of all in his very last words of that clip: metaphysical statements come from subjective experience. I think this position is the source of the main difference between the these two guys. Metaphysical insights can not come from rational objective thought. Advaita Vedanta comes from the seers and sages of the Vedantic tradition through subjective experience of the nature of reality. As very few of us can reach that type of experience for ourselves we must choose to accept or not accept what these seers/sages/mystics have experienced and formulated into Vedic science. I personally accept Vedanta as the highest form of philosophy mankind has formulated as I find it the most consistent with the full body of human experiences and from the vast respect I have from studying the full lives of some of these spiritual masters.
 

Bunyip

pro scapegoat
I just cited a source that clearly states that Harris' spirituality is inspired by Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. I'm afraid you don't have the luxury of ignoring that fact.
Fairs fair Gambit, you can not claim the exclusive right to ignore facts.
 
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