Getting to Where You Are: The Life of Meditation

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. Harrison’s book, Doing Nothing, which Utne Reader called a caustic exploration of our psychospiritual obsessions established him as one of the most insightful and provocative authors in the arena of spiritual inquiry. Yoga Journal characterised Harrison’s voice as uncompromising honesty and New Age Journal calls his writing persuasive. Getting to Where You Are is a far-reaching investigation of our ideas about life and our spirituality, in which 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 active exploration of life – as it is – free from the restraints of doctrine, religious belief, and 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 humour and insight, Harrison investigates the fabric of life as the very expression of our spirituality.