In his new book, Waking Up, Sam Harris describes how spirituality emerges from the morass of thought and perception that constitutes consciousness. The spiritual sense results when the self comes apart, when it finds itself in a new atmosphere into which it might empty.

The self has to come apart in order for the human entity to come into meaningful contact with the world. It’s the self that stands in the way, the self that both precludes and enables meaningful contact with the world. So the spiritual path will be a methodology that breaks the self down into pieces that might be sloughed off. The assumption here is that something exists for us to come into contact with worthy of our efforts at coming apart, be it God, Dasein, or the constituents of the Periodic Table.

Harris says that when the Christian or Jew draws sustenance from the world, it is the breaking down of the self that is at the root of the experience— respective religions being a reference point only. The experience is always and forever that of a specimen of homo sapiens coming apart. The rub is that though nothing of spiritual import can be experienced by the self (its being caught up in the coils of thought), it is only the self that is capable of recording and codifying spiritual experience. Only the self can enter into a spiritual path, can long for something beyond itself. Thomas Ligotti in The Conspiracy against the Human Race sees consciousness as a vicious cycle and nothing more. Ligotti says that natural selection has trapped us in a relentless loop. Our genes think they’ll live forever, even if they’re trapped in a bag of bones. They make us believe all kinds of silly things.