Is there anything, anyone, more irritating than the self-styled “spiritual but not religious”? According to Sam Harris, bestselling anti-religion controversialist and neuroscientist, 20 per cent of Americans fall into this category, and he is one of them. Harris has made a career out of his distaste for organised religion but he has, unusually, combined this polemical mission with decades of practice in meditation, following various Buddhist schools. And what Waking Up is, is Mindfulness for Atheists, or the pleasures of spirituality without the humiliating necessity of submission to dogma that religion entails. There is something faintly humorous about a self-aggrandising controversialist – one might say egotist – passionately insisting on there being no such thin