“At a young age I was moved by the pain and discord around me and inside me. I sought to find a complete, final and universal answer to this pain. For 25 years I studied the world’s philosophies and religions. I sought out every mystic, seer and magician I could find throughout the world.
It was all useless.
Somewhere in all of this, the discovery occurred that pain and discord were not the problem, but the seeker was. The very grasping for an answer, for a response, for a solution that relieved me of the burden of feeling, was the problem. Without the grasping of the seeker; the nature of the problem fundamentally changes.” –from the book
$12.95
132 pages
softcover
ISBN 978-1-59181-068-1
Sentient Publications
What do you do after you’ve tried everything to find enlightenment or happiness? “Do nothing,” writes Steven Harrison. “As it turns out, nothing is a surprisingly active place, but it is here that we discover who and what we are.”
DOING NOTHING is for those who have found themselves religiously following practices which have not fundamentally changed their lives: new therapies, ancient meditations, exotic religions, or old-time religion. It encourages them to find the truths of life through the simple act of stopping the search.
What others have to say about Doing Nothing:
“Written in disarmingly unpretentious style, this book is a profound inquiry into the nature of our humanity.” —DR.THOMAS SZASZ, author of The Myth of Mental Illness
“Go beyond therapists, gurus, gods, and techniques, he tells us, to investigate our true nature in silence. Harrison’s uncompromising voice is a welcome companion on our journey toward being fully human.” –YOGA JOURNAL
“Discard your ideologies and dogmas, your gurus and ritual, argues Harrison in this caustic exploration of our psycho spiritual obsessions. The solution lies in not seeking a solution.” — UTNE READER
“A serious philosophical treatise, the book examines the meaning of life…forget meditation, forget psychiatry, forget spiritual gurus and all the processes that have been billed as paths to inner peace.” –ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
“A persuasive argument for stopping the perenial search for enlightenment.” –NEW AGE JOURNAL
Excerpt from Doing Nothing
Love, Emptiness and Energy
We often feel that we are not loved enough. This is a reflection of the fact that we do not love, that we cannot find our capacity to love.
Love is not something that we do to one another. There is no object in love and no subject.
Love is what is present when there is no object-subject, when there are not two.
This feeling of not being loved is in fact the need for love, the need for a cessation of the divided world in which our egos exist.
This cessation does not come about through someone loving us.
It does not come about by us loving another.
Love is not causal. It cannot be created, it cannot be practiced, it cannot be taught.
We can deeply inspect what we are, and in that we can see the structure of division which is inherent to thought, memory and ego. We can cease. We can be still.
Love, which is the very energy and expression of life, is whole. Thought cannot approach this energy. Words cannot capture it.
This energy of wholeness cannot be used, or divided, or squandered.
It is us all, and all of us.
This is not the answer to our question, it is the question fallen silent.
Having seen the nature of our thought and ego, we may pass through this gateway into silence.
We have left a world of fragments, and entered into something which is whole, but is empty. If there is no namer, then there are no names. If there is no subject, there is no object. This is emptiness.
There is tremendous energy here because there is nothing to dissipate it. There is great creativity, because there is nothing to restrict it.
Though the psychological self, the ego-center has gone silent, there is nothing lost. Out of this vast expansion of quiet, the energy of life expresses.
The nature of this energy, because it is beyond cause and effect, is unknown. It cannot be contained by concept, or manipulated by thought or used in any way.
We are not the experiencers or explorers of this energy. We are this energy: expressing, exploring, manifesting and disintegrating.
International Editions
- Chinese (simplified) – Beijing Lipin (coming soon)
- Chinese (traditional) – Life Potential Publications, 12-F 1, No.1, Kwang Fu S. Rd, Taipei, Taiwan, www.tgblife.com.tw
- Danish (At gore ingenting) – Borgens Forlag, Valbygardsvej 33, 2500 Valby, Denmark
- Dutch (Doe niets) – Servire. To order click here.
- French (Rien faire) – Editions Accarias-L’Originel. To order from Amazon.fr click here.
- German (Nichts tun) – Editions Spuren. To order from Amazon.de click here.
- Greek – Editions Alkyon, 44 Mavromichali St, Athens, Greece
- India – To order the English edition published in India, visit Wisdom Tree.
- Slovak and Czech – CAD Press
- Swedish – Svenska Forlaget, Box 3313, 103 66, Stockholm, Sweden
- Tamil, Telugu
- Turkish – Dharma Books
