Don't fret not knowing the answer

Someone asks a question and nobody knows the answer.

That moment of uncertainty before someone makes something up can be excruciating.

Steven Harrison, author of "The Question to Life's Answers," says this moment of not knowing is where true humanity is found.

"Not knowing allots an investigation into life that is unobstructed by our conditioning, uncluttered by our information," Harrison wrote. "It is the absence of knowing that allows the discovery of the of the new."

Harrison discusses his book and ideas Thursday night at Gateways Books downtown.

Spending years looking for answers from politics, psychology and spirituality, Harrison followed teachers from East to West and discovered that what he was searching for was right in front of him in his day-to-day life.

Harrison is the founder of All Together Now International, which aids homeless children and the destitute in Nepal, Tibet and India. He talked to us from his hometown of Boulder, where he is helping to create a democratic learning community called the Living School.

You advocate for a spirituality beyond our ideas of what's spiritual, beyond teachers, beyond prescribed practices—yet you've written a book that will most likely be bought by people searching for answers. Why did you write this book?

Steven Harrison: I wrote the book as a question to short-circuit the celebrity expert viewpoint we've taken on. We all have access to life if we choose.

It's important that we find the qualities we've been searching for outside of our lives locally, in communities, in family, in our relationships. Spirituality has taken a wrong turn in disconnecting us from our lives. There's a lot to do right where we are.

The whole book is a dialogue. Who is the dialogue between?

Harrison: These two voices reside in us looking for security and creativity. Sometimes when those voices see each other, something new comes about.

You're saying there's a way to touch the experience beneath thought without any kind of spiritual practice. But don't you think your years of engaging in various spiritual practices helped you get where you are?

Harrison: I'm not instructing anyone to not do something. I think if you're drawn to a spiritual practice, then investigate it fully.

I'm just trying to describe what I see in what we're doing. There's a limitation to spiritual practices.

We become involved in the form, the process, the symbology, and then we forget what the whole point is. Spirituality becomes pressure, stress and neurosis.

We don't need to do anything. In the realm of opening the heart, we need to know less, not more. Really we need to come to it knowing nothing.

If you're on your own, how do you know you're not just deluding yourself further?

Harrison: You will always be in relationship and that will bring in information. If you're living in conflict, you'll feel it. If you're living in complexity, you'll feel the weight of it.

Life keeps feeding back to us the intelligence we need if we are attentive to it.

We have the ability to move consciously now. Not a hundred lifetimes later. This is where it's the rubber meets the road. Do we want this, or do we want our idea of it?

—Nancy Redwine, Santa Cruz Sentinel
April 16, 2002

Following in the same vein as his previous book, Doing Nothing: Coming to the End of the Spiritual Search, Harrison shows how to leave behind the frustrations of the spiritual path. He suggests that the first necessary step towards the full realization of our human potential depends on the simple discovery that the world we live in is made up of our thoughts, concepts, and conditioning. Thought, expressed in language, inherently divides what is whole into subject and object thinking thus becomes a dominating and ultimately divisive force. He suggests that this divided viewpoint is destroying the world we inhabit because we are prevented from seeing the whole. Harrison particularly explores the paradigm of not-knowing and not-doing in the context of relationship, children, and community. His essential message is that the most powerfully transformative thing we can know lies hidden in the recognition of all that we cannot know.

—NAPRA ReView
March/April 2002

Is it necessary to engage in a great number of spiritual and therapeutic activities when getting to know one's inner life? Steven Harrison doesn't think so. Rather this unorthodox "teacher" believes that stepping away from the conventional grasping, conceptualizing, and desiring for success in the spiritual search might be more beneficial than simply falling into our usual patterns of suffering. The author of the popular book Doing Nothing presents his viewpoints (or "nonviewpoints," as the case may be) in an accessible and enjoyable dialogue format. Beware, this may be the last book you ever buy!

—IONS Noetic Sciences Review
June-August 2002

I read The Question to Life’s Answers with one of my favourite B2 pencils in hand. I customarily annotate my books (to make them personal to me) and, even if the book has an index (this one hasn’t), I make my own index at the back to facilitate looking up specific aspects of subject areas that particularly interest me. Despite having several B2s always at the ready, I found myself frequently getting up to sharpen my supply, because this is a book that invites communication, participation… and lots of annotations.

It is deeply serious, deeply probing, but free from polemic. Steven Harrison makes it clear that he has no desire whatsoever to be a guru, or even a teacher or adviser. He gives new meaning to the art of deconstruction. Part of his purpose is to cut through the illusions and the comfortable concepts that prevent our asking the questions that would bring us nearer to “what is”.

The Question to Life’s Answers is both hard-hitting and gentle. If that sounds paradoxical, it’s in tune with this searching, honest book that sweeps away inauthentic spirituality practices and focuses instead on discovering a world free from divisions.

In a book that teems with questions, deconstructed so as to make us see how we prevaricate when we attempt to seek answers to our own questions, and how we delude ourselves as to the workings of our own minds, it does Harrison scant justice to provide excerpts as illustrations of his comments about the journey of exploration, because one is unable to give an adequate context in so brief a survey. There is therefore the inherent danger that readers will provide this for themselves and fall into suppositions that are far from Harrison’s intention.

Nonetheless, although aware of the pitfalls of this modus operandi and of the fact that I might be doing this gifted author less than justice, I give here a brief sampling of some of my favourite excerpts:

· The nature of a question is the recognition that we do not know. This most basic of understandings is also the 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.

What we know – the neural pathways we have assigned to a particular circumstance – patterns the experience. We fit what is new into what is old. This sorting and categorizing is a kind of intelligence and certainly not a capacity we could discard. However, as we fit what we find in life into what we remember, perhaps we can remember something else, as well – that to learn we must abandon the perspective of the past and expose ourselves to the uncertainty of what is new. This is the nature of the question.

The question is not suspicion or doubt; it is inquiry, curiosity, and openness. The past is our history, and like all history, it is distorted by the historian, which is the self that we have constructed. This self, carefully selecting from the totality of our experience in typical revisionist style, tells the fiction of our life and seeks to extend that story into each moment. This is the nature of our information and the limitation it imposes on our contact with the actuality of life. The past is illusion if it is held as an accurate map for the future. (pages 3-4)

• The sense of seeking often has the quality of something missing and with that, a projection of what completion would look or feel like. Carrying this template with us as we seek, we look for the parts or states that we imagine we need.
• The sense of exploration is not really about acquisition at all. It is naturally interested regardless of what it discovers or doesn’t discover. This is possible only when the exploration comes from a perspective of wholeness, as the fragmented perspective will generally turn the whole thing into seeking. (page 16)
• …the exploration of life is possible only when the limitations of the conceptual world are obvious. (page 19)
• The quality of awareness is not the assurance of bliss; rather, it is the contact with “as-is-ness”. Sometimes terror is what it is. (page 23)
• Question by the second person in the dialogue that is the mode of the book: “I looked up belief in the dictionary. The definition was ‘mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something’. What, then, would a life beyond belief be?”
  There has to be some kind of deconstruction of the educated or conditioned viewpoint, which believes substantially in its information. Part of this is coming to grips with the notion of self. Is it there, is it not, is it actual or imagined? The deconstruction has to take place without replacing the old ideas with a new set of ideas (non-dualism, Buddhism, fill-in-the-blankism). The challenge might be that such an exploration, being fundamentally unstable, requires a deep stability in the individuals engaged in it, Ideologies don’t require stability in the adherents since the ideology, being fixed, provides that. (page 25)
• Belief is rooted in the discomfort with not knowing. Explore that state of “I don’t know” and see what that is, rather than short-circuit that by overlaying an idea of any sort. (page 31)
• Belief systems require our blindness, and we have become aware of that, so we can no longer believe. Thought is symbolic; it is not the thing it represents. Teachers offer us the security of surety for the small price of our integrity. All we are left with is to explore. This is not an exploration of doing, but of being. (page 33)
• We must deconstruct our belief systems in order to return again to that primal awareness of life or feeling of God’s spirit flowing through us. (page 41)
• The radical abandonment of spirituality in its entirety is the first step of a life of enquiry freed from the demands of attainment, an exploration not restricted to the archaic notion of enlightenment. The end of spirituality is the recognition of an integral perspective as the fact in which we are all at play. (page 52)
• Certainly, meditation has technological uses. It appears to relax one, lower the blood pressure, increase concentration, and perhaps bring about changes in brain chemistry and functioning. I would suggest that meditation has no use, however, when it comes to fundamental transformation. (page 64)
• What the seeker seeks for becomes the expression of the projection. (page 70)
• My concerns with psychology have to do with the tendency to pathologize existential challenges and at the same time, perhaps, to psychologize physiological imbalance. I would like to see the field of psychology take on questions like: What is consciousness? If there is a mental illness, outside of brain abnormalities, where does it reside? Are psychological problems individual issues or societal/collective definitions? If behaviour is undesirable, why not make it illegal rather than an “illness”? Does change take place through process or is it acausal? Is it grace? The field of psychology is undergoing great changes, as it must. Within that change are some brilliant individuals who are getting at the heart of the matter. (page 83)
• We each must make a discovery in our lives if we are to live in the totality of our human potential. This discovery is very simple and available to each of us, all the time. This realization is that we live in a world that is made up of our concepts, our thoughts, our conditioning.
  That is it.
• The question to life’s answers is the explosion of the heart. It is the demand that we create our lives from an integral perspective, from a query responding to each answer, from the wholeness of silence, answering the limitation of thought. (page 102)

—Shirley Bell for Nuomeon