Sam Harris’ Waking Up App, Reviewed
New online meditation course blows every other meditation app out of the water.
Neuroscientist, philosopher, and author Sam Harris has never been one to make excuses for himself. His long-awaited meditation course app Waking Up was in the pipeline for roughly four years, starting with the release of his 2014 book on meditation by the same name. On his podcast, which also formerly bore the name Waking Up (since rechristened Making Sense), he continually chastized himself for the app’s still uncompleted state until the thing finally saw the light of day in the fall of 2018.
It was well worth the wait. Not only is Waking Up a far superior meditation app to anything else out there, but it is without doubt the single most useful digital tool I have added to my life in recent times — and a much-needed antidote to so much of the anxiety-inducing digital brain poison out there.
Take a bow, Sam!
2018 was the year we reached Peak Mindfulness. The last couple of years have seen an absolute glut of books on mindfulness and the benefits of meditation, and throughout the year every other magazine seemed to feature stories on the health and productivity benefits of meditation as though it were a fad diet (as opposed to an ancient practice that has been around for at least 2,500 years).
It also saw the emergence of a whole parade of meditation apps, such as Calm, Mindspace, the hideously titled Buddhify (seriously?), and of course journalist-turned-meditation cheerleader Dan Harris (no relation)’s 10% Happier app.
It is perhaps ironic that Sam Harris, a man who prior to his emergence as a bestselling author spent well over a decade in itinerant hippie acolyte mode soaking up wisdom from Buddhist and Hindu teachers in India, Nepal, and elsewhere was relatively late to the game in developing a meditation app. But we can all be thankful he took is time, as the Waking Up app combines everything that is good about the other meditation apps on the market while taking it to a whole new plateau of wisdom and edification — in a way that should give it considerably more shelf life than its competitors.
The App
The app itself is straightforward, uncluttered, attractive to look at, and remarkably intuitive. As somebody who tends to meditate either first thing in the morning or last thing at night, my main criteria for a meditation app is ease of use, and on that front Sam scores a ten out of ten.
The app’s design is refreshingly simple, providing a “daily meditation” (generally no longer than 10 minutes) and a continually expanding collection of “lessons” on topics related to meditation, such as “Working with Pain,” “What is Real?”, and “Drugs and the Meaning of Life.” It also provides longer guided meditations (up to an hour) for those days where you really need it and have the time.
One of my complaints about many meditation apps (particularly the 10% Happier app) is that they give you too much choice — too many options for what to focus on when you just want to cross your legs, close your eyes, and meditate. Do you want to focus on “loving kindness” practice tonight or deal with your sleep issues? Do you want greater productivity? Seeing as so much of our present-day anxiety stems from an excess of choice (especially in the online sphere), do we really need all that in our meditation apps?
Waking Up solves this problem by distilling it down to a constantly unfurling series of daily meditations that take you through all the different types of practices: basic mindfulness, focusing on the breath vipassana style, loving kindness practice, both open-eyed and closed-eyed meditation, and so on. You never know quite what you’re going to get on any given day, but at least you don’t have to spend five minutes or more fussing with app options.
It’s also a format that really incentivizes daily practice, something that Sam himself repeatedly espouses. The more regular you are with it, the more of a wide range of exercises and practice you get, and the better the results.
“Don’t Meditate Because It’s Good For You”
If the Waking Up app is truly a different creature from its competitors (which it is), this is because the man behind the app is the product of a very different world than most app developers. There are very few people out there who can claim a solid grounding in philosophy, neuroscience, AND Buddhist meditation, and fewer still who have all this plus as impressive a grasp on technology-related issues as Harris does.
It therefore figures that Waking Up would be a very different sort of tool than the Calms and Mindspaces of this world.
Initially I found Harris’ guided meditations to be too “talky” for my liking. Compared to the very sparse guided meditations narrated by Dan Harris partner-in-crime Joseph Goldstein, Sam’s guided meditations are more talkative — that is to say more directly instructive. However, I found myself coming to appreciate this approach more and more the further I got into the app. With the precision of a surgeon, Harris explains the brain processes the go on while one is trying to meditate, and demystify many of the concepts that mindfulness experts routinely employ. Admittedly, much of what he talks about strikes one as very esoteric at first, but with daily practice they become much easier to grasp.
But the most fundamental difference between Waking Up and the other meditation apps on the market lies in its basic fundamental raison d’être. Where as most meditation apps (and modern mindfulness champions in the west generally) espouse meditation for its purported health and wellness benefits, Sam openly eschews such reasons, even stating matter-of-factly in one of his on-app lectures that you “shouldn’t practice meditation because it’s ‘good for you’.”
For Sam, who as a young man spent countless years in the company of Indian yogis, Tibetan lamas, and other spiritual teachers, the purpose of meditation is to “cut through the illusion of the self.” This is a fundamentally back-to-basics view of meditation that hearkens back to the historical Buddha himself, who identified attachment to an egocentric “self” to be the root of all human suffering (dukkha). While a good number of Harris’ guided meditations focus on more specific practices, such as loving kindness, most go straight to the heart of the matter — the illusory nature of the self, the fact that there is no wraithlike “I” sitting behind your eyes, pulling levers like a bulldozer driver.
The results of such practice, ideally at least, do include a greater sense of personal well-being, which in turn (presumably) leads to all the good this-worldly stuff that other meditation apps and teachers espouse, such as getting better sleep, being more productive at work, having better relationships with your friends and loved ones. The Waking Up app nevertheless pulls back the curtain to reveal a much bigger picture, a landscape that is far more “spiritually” edifying than anything conjured up by the other apps on the market. I have a feeling Siddhartha Gautama himself would approve of it, were he around today to see it.
At once refreshingly simple and deeply challenging, Sam Harris’ Waking Up app has with a stroke obviated the need for any other meditation app, and created something that I truly believe will stand the test of time. The current mindfulness craze will subside as surely as any other “trend” does, to be replaced by some other popular obsession, but the self that Harris refers to will continue to be an anxiety and dissatisfaction-inducing illusion that only bona-fide spiritual practice can counteract.
Short of attending an extended silent retreat in Boulder or Bhutan, the Waking Up app is probably the best option out there — and will no doubt continue to be for some time to come.
