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REVIEWS
WHAT'S NEXT AFTER NOW?
Steven Harrison
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What's Next After Now? Post-Spirituality and the Creative Life addresses the question of what is 'next after the now' when spirituality is set aside and you drop into the present. Spiritual seekers have consulted gurus and religions and discovered the power of the present within the spiritual circle What's Next After Now? Addresses what comes after, and is a wonderful survey recommended for any spirituality or new age library.
—Midwest Book Review
October, 2007 |
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What is next ... after spirituality?
Steven Harrison has written six distinct books in a little over eight years, each one unfolding, within a specific exploration of issues such as meditation, relationships, education. The connecting thread through these investigations has been a perspective of living an authentic, transformative life, one that is about spirituality beyond any belief. In his latest work, What’s Next After Now: Post-Spirituality and the Creative Life, Harrison terms it ‘post-spirituality’, Kriben Pillay reports.
In many ways, readers familiar with Harrison’s writings will see this as his most challenging work, and certainly it is conceptually challenging when we see that he is exploring notions such as acausality, amorality and transactual reality. But unlike other deconstructive explorations, in Harrison’s writings these challenging concepts are not for our intellectual entertainment, but rather they appear as experiments in energetic movements using words to allow us to touch what is beyond concept. It is inevitable that each reader will be challenged differently by this book, but if we approach it as a dialogue, that is, suspending our mental noise as we read and listen with quiet attention, then the possibility of communion beyond communication with Harrison may be possible. In fact, this is no different to the way Harrison engages participants in a retreat.
In his reply to why he wrote What’s Next, Harrison states clearly the nature of the exploration:
‘Spirituality is often framed in either a mechanistic “practice makes perfect” ideal, or a magical thinking “create your own reality” denial. There is a breakthrough of sorts when we notice that there is a tremendous power in the present that breaks through this kind of dualism and synthesizes a new possibility. In What's Next After Now?, I wanted to begin to explore the dynamic _expression, the actual manifestation of possibility we can discover in leaving behind our ideas of spirituality and taking the risk of creativity. The present moment has been captured by our notions of spirituality, made into a dead space, a place to distance from the energetic qualities of life. In actuality, presence doesn't exist in the way we have come to think of it. It occurs as the becoming, the creative movement of what is next, and this is the nature of the human potential that has all possibility – quantum possibility and the creative, post-spiritual life. Writing this book is a contribution to this exploration.’
—Odyssey Magazine
August-September 2005 |
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