The Modern Teachers

Watts starts with the feeling that you are a little person inside your body, confronting everything outside it. In The Book, he calls that sense of isolation a mistake. Your breathing, food, and existence depend on processes beyond your skin. He wants that dependence to become part of how being alive feels.

His further claim is that your deepest identity is the reality expressing itself as everything. The book adapts Vedanta, a Hindu philosophical tradition, into Watts's own English. He tells a story in which God plays hide-and-seek by becoming each of us and forgetting who he is. He presents this as a myth that illustrates his account of the self.

Watts taught through books, radio, and recorded talks. His official biography describes his role as a philosophical entertainer and his preference for comparing worldviews over prescribing a single method.

Ram Dass was Richard Alpert, a psychologist who encountered Neem Karoli Baba in India. His Be Here Now helped carry meditation and yoga into the American counterculture. The title catches one part of the teaching. His devotion to his guru and his commitment to serving people are just as necessary to understanding it.

He tells a story about trying to read a holy book on a Greyhound bus while resenting the man who sits beside him. He recalls his guru's instruction, puts his attention on the passenger, and talks with him for the trip. The opportunity to practice was the conversation he had been trying to avoid.

He describes serving people as a way of recognizing God in them, beyond the body and personality that attract or annoy you. This is bhakti, devotion expressed through love and service. You can admire the ordinary kindness in the bus story without sharing the belief about God that makes it spiritual practice for Ram Dass.

Tolle asks you to listen to the running commentary in your head without adding another judgment about it. You can notice a thought about an old argument, then return attention to something happening now. His examples include feeling the water while washing your hands and attending to your breath after getting into a car.

The book identifies this observing presence with your deeper self. It also describes an eternal reality, which Tolle calls Being, accessible when thought becomes quiet. He keeps that spiritual claim even when the instructions sound like a simple attention exercise.

In the introduction, Tolle says that after years of anxiety and suicidal depression, a thought changed his life: “I cannot live with myself any longer.” He wondered which of those selves was real and describes a sudden end to his anguish. That is his account of a private experience.

Krishnamurti rejects a prescribed path to spiritual freedom. Adopting a teacher's account gives you another set of ideas to repeat. He asks whether you can observe your reactions without explaining them through what you have already been taught.

His example is anger. First there is anger; then a voice says it was justified or should be suppressed. That judge feels like a separate person managing the emotion. Krishnamurti says the judge is made from accumulated experience, the same past that shapes the reaction. His inquiry includes this apparent observer.

Your own judgments may be borrowed too. He asks for observation without naming or condemning what appears. Can you do that without turning his instruction into another rule you enforce against yourself?

Gurdjieff's example is the person who decides at night to rise early, then refuses in the morning. P.D. Ouspensky records his explanation: different desires take turns saying “I.” We mistake these changing reactions for a person with a stable will.

One exercise is self-remembering: keeping attention on yourself and on what you observe at the same time. Ouspensky describes trying it while walking through St. Petersburg. He repeatedly forgets the exercise. That failure lets him see a limit in attention that he had previously taken for granted.

The wider method is the Fourth Way: working on body, feelings, and thought together while living an ordinary life. It involves sustained work with other people. Hugh Ripman, a pupil of Ouspensky, explains this as developing consciousness and psychological integration. The book also claims that the Moon feeds on organic life on Earth. “Wake up” comes with a cosmology.