11/20/14
This Week in Great Subliminal Phalluses from History

We just finished Sam Harris’s Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion for our book club last night. It was a spirited debate, which went a little something like this:

– Harris is self-centered, arrogant and off-putting.
– But you just don’t know him like we do.
– He condones drug use.
– And that’s wrong why?
– Religion does good.
– Religion does bad.

Wine was drunk, feelings were hurt, and someone misplaced their Diva Cup (for real). But we all went home agreeing on two points:

  1. We would all try to meditate more (at least more deliberately than zoning out for 20 seconds on the toilet).
  2. There was definitely a hidden penis in one of the illustrations in the book.

In the fourth chapter on meditation, Harris talks about how one British contemplative was inspired to describe “what it’s like to glimpse the nonduality of consciousness” (duh) after seeing a self-portrait by the 19th century Austrian physicist/philosopher, Ernst Mach, “who had the clever idea of drawing himself as he appeared from a first-person point of view.” And here Harris includes the drawing:

Now, maybe it’s a symptom of writing a sex blog for a living. Maybe our subconscious was at work in mysterious ways. Maybe, like the optic blind spot, there’s a phallic symbol blind spot that most people aren’t aware of, but sexually enlightened folks like us can see through. Or maybe we’re just seeing what we want to see. As Harris attests, the brain works in incredible, complicated ways. (We’ve juvenilely highlighted the dick in question with color below.)

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris is available on Amazon.com