Getting to Where You Are

A penetrating and wide-ranging journey through contemporary spirituality, meditation technology, and post-modern culture, Getting to Where You Are challenges the very basis of contemporary spirituality and the consumer society that created it.

This book is a far-reaching investigation into our ideas about life and spirituality. Harrison challenges the notions of enlightenment as a way to happiness, zero-coupon bonds as the way to security, and Stephen Hawking as the final arbiter of scientific reality.

What does all of this have to do with meditation? Everything. Because meditation is about everything. Harrison suggests that the only meditation that does not produce more mind clutter than it removes is the one which we are all doing already—the active exploration of life as it is, free from the restraints of doctrine, religious belief, technique-oriented practices, and free from the embedded conceptual framework of our culture.

Getting To Where You Are explores what meditation actually is, and more important, what it is not and how it got that way. In a series of interlinked essays, filled with humor and insight, Harrison investigates the fabric of life as the very expression of our spirituality.

This is not just another book on how to meditate. Instead, it dispels the notion that there is some technique of meditation that will solve our problems, relax our bodies, and bring us to the radiant light of truth in only twenty minutes a day. Harrison believes that we have it all wrong—that meditation is not about achieving some state of bliss—and his irreverent style and direct challenge to New Age consumerism make this book unique.

Praise for Getting to Where You Are

Harrison is a truth teller.

—Stephen Levine, author of Who Dies?

Harrison shows us a radical approach to wholeness, daring us to try authentic living as our natural spirituality.

—Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, professor, Naropa University

A bold and challenging examination of spiritual assumptions that leaves the reader appreciating life itself as the only spiritual journey worthy of its name.

—Catherine Ingram, author of Passionate Pressence

I love this book. It's simple, direct, clear, and refreshingly honest. It goes right to the root, challenging us to leave all props behind, and to be here now, where we actually are. Steven Harrison is one of the deepest and most interesting people around in the spiritual (or post-spiritual) world today.

—Joan Tollifson, author of Bare-Bones Meditation

With undeniable clarity, Steven Harrison demonstrates that to be intimate with our limitations is to actualize the limitless in our everyday lives.

—Paul Rezendes, author of The Wild Within

Getting to Where You Are takes us on a challenging ride through the pitfalls of contemporary spiritual life. But that's only half the tale. With humor, lively stories, and experiments we can all do, Steven Harrison leads us home. This is a book to be revisited frequently, and the last "meditation book" you'll ever need.

—David Kundtz, author of Stopping: How to Be Still When You Have to Keep Going

Has the flowering of the postmodern cultures of meditation unwittingly come to serve the very lifeways of consumerism? This is what Steven Harrison tells us in his own inimitable style. Practicing the actuality of the moment is so obvious that many of us would do anything to avoid it. But having called our bluff, he relents and opens the way to that practice. A very unusual book!

—Elise Boulding, author of Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History