From Steven Harrison

[Guest guest]

taken from the book of dialogues, The Question to Life's Answers; Spirituality Beyond Belief):--"The nature of the question is the recognition that we do not know. This most basic of understandings is also most powerful. The knowledge that trumps all other knowledge is the understanding that we have no certainty. Not knowing allows an investigation into life that is unobstructed by our conditioning, uncluttered by our information. It is the absence of knowing that allows the discovery of the new."--"As long as we believe that we will find something to fill our emptiness and quench our pain, explain the paradox of life and assuage its vagaries, give us substance and meaning, we will fill our days with the quixotic spiritual search. This relationship to life may have the trappings of the spiritual, but it is essentially self-centered. It is not a search for the dissolution of self or even the integration of self, but the expression of narcissism in its most duplicitious form."--"The attempt to be free and the measurement of how well we are succeeding is itself the conflict."--"I have no interest in being a teacher, so I can't be of help to you there. I am very interested in exploring the actuality of life as the ideas of spirituality fall away and nothing replaces them. This expresses itself out of great intensity, humility, and honesty, which either you have or you don't. Deconstruct all the assumptions you are making about enlightenment. Who gets enlightened, anyway?"--"We're already awake. We don't have to become awake. . . .You don't need another person to wake you up. Our relationship to each other can happen only when I don't want anything from you and you don't want anything from me, including enlightenment. It's an autonomous, adult, responsible relationship. That is worth exploring."--"The problem with seeking bliss is that you have to live in non-bliss in order to seek bliss. When you find bliss, it is ruined by the fear of losing it, and eventually the fact of losing it. But, is bliss the point? Another relationship to experience occurs when we are, for whatever reason, no longer interested in altering the experience but simply interested in its actuality."

Happy Days,Judi

 

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