Some quotes from Steven Harrison

[Guest guest]

--"The nature of the question is the recogntion that we do not know. Thismost basic of understandings is also most powerful. The knowledge thattrumps all other knowledge is the understanding that we have no certainty.Not knowing allows an investigation into life that is unobstructed by ourconditioning, uncluttered by our information. It is the absence of knowingthat allows the discovery of the new."--"As long as we believe that we will find something to fill our emptinessand quench our pain, explain the paradox of life and suage its vagaries,give us substance and meaning, we will fill our days with the quixoticspiritual search. This relationship to life may have the trappings of thespiritual, but it is essentially self-centered. It is not a search for thedissolution of self or even the integration of self, but the expression ofnarcissism in its most duplicitious form.Religious, philosophical, and spiriutal systems suggest that we must gothrough some process, some systematic search, some basic preparation. Butthey are all built upon a false permise: that we must do something todiscover the timeless now. There is no lack of access to the immediatemoment. No preparation is needed to be where we are--in that present. In theimmediate there is no "me" to be found. . . .This search is in vain. Thesearcher, which is the core sense of self, is both the problem we seek tosolve and the problem that searches for the solution. This fundamentalrealization brings the spiritual life as we know it to a screeching halt. Itis over. There is nothing to do because there is no doer. There is nothingto resolve, nothing to fill, nothing to fix. But this is not the end; it isthe beginning. . . .The radical abandonment of spirituality in its entirety is the first step ofa life of inquiry freed from the demands of attainment, an exploration notrestricted to the archaic notion of enlightenment. The end of spirtuality isthe recogntion of an integral perspective as the fact in which we are all atplay.The expression of our life then becomes not the search for this awareness,the self looking for its cessation, the "me" looking for something more orbetter. Rather, the expression of our life becomes that of consciousnessitself, which is, by its nature, inclusive and connected."