Non-dualism is the position that the separation we perceive between things is not fundamental. Self and world, observer and observed, subject and object, all of it is one process appearing as many, and the division is something the mind produces rather than something it finds. (Excerpt from Volume I Meditation & The Work of Living)
Alan Watts: Alan Watts was a British writer and speaker, 1915 to 1973, who spent his life translating Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. He argued that the sense of being a separate self standing apart from the world is a useful illusion rather than a fact, and that most human suffering comes from defending a boundary that was never really there. He was a popularizer rather than a practitioner, and he said so himself, which is part of why I trust him. I love his British accent. Anandamayi Ma: Anandamayi Ma was an Indian spiritual teacher, 1896 to 1982, born Nirmala Sundari in a small village in Bengal. She had almost no formal schooling and never took a guru, yet she became one of the most revered saints of twentieth century India, sought out by everyone from villagers to prime ministers. Her name means the Joy-Permeated Mother, the title Paramahansa Yogananda gave her in Autobiography of a Yogi. She taught that there is only one Self appearing as everyone and everything, and that the search for God and the search for who we really are is the same search. She left no organization she wanted worshiped and wrote no books herself, and what survives is the record of people who sat with her and came away changed. Ram Dass: Ram Dass was an American teacher, 1931 to 2019, born Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist who lost his academic career over psychedelic research and then went to India and came back with a different name and a different project. Be Here Now made present-moment awareness accessible to a generation that would never have opened a Buddhist text. After a stroke left him partly paralyzed in 1997, he kept teaching, and what he had to say about suffering afterward was worth more than anything he said before it. He was a great storyteller. Jiddu Krishnamurti: Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian speaker and writer, 1895 to 1986, raised by the Theosophical Society to be the next World Teacher and given an international organization built around him. In 1929 he dissolved it, returned the money and the property, and said that truth is a pathless land that cannot be approached through any organization, creed, or teacher. He spent the next fifty-six years talking to people without ever accepting the role of guru, insisting that the observer and the observed are not separate and that real change comes from seeing what is actually happening rather than from any method or practice. He is the strongest argument against my own approach, and I take him up directly in chapter nine of Volume III. A man who dismantled his own following at thirty-four has earned the right to be heard. Fred Bisci: Living-foods pioneer and clinical nutritionist who has eaten raw for over half a century, arguing in Your Healthy Journey that most disease traces back to what we put in the body, and that the transition out of it has to be gradual, honest, and permanent rather than another diet. Richard Moss: Physician turned teacher whose The Mandala of Being maps the four ways we leave the present moment, into past, future, self, and other, and shows that every form of suffering begins the instant we step off the center of Now.