The Modern Teachers

Watts's one idea: you are not a separate little self, sealed inside a bag of skin, looking out at a universe that is not you. You are the universe, doing the temporary thing it is doing right here as you, the way the ocean does a wave. The feeling of being a lonely ego walled off from everything else is a kind of optical illusion, and seeing through it is the whole game.

He was the great translator of the bunch. An Englishman who had read his way deep into Zen and Taoism and could explain them in a warm, funny voice that made you feel the point instead of just filing it. His book The Way of Zen and a shelf of recorded talks put Zen into more American heads than any monastery did.

Ram Dass's one idea fits on a bumper sticker, which is the point: be here now. Not in the past, which is memory. Not in the future, which is worry. The present moment is the only place anything is actually happening, and almost none of us spend any time there. He learned it in India and spent the rest of his life pointing at it.

He got there by the strangest road of the five. He was Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist running the early experiments that fed people psilocybin and LSD, until Harvard fired him in 1963. He went to India chasing something the drugs kept showing him but could not make stick, found a guru in the Himalayan foothills, and came home as Ram Dass, "servant of God." His 1971 book Be Here Now became the handbook for a generation's turn from getting high to waking up.

Tolle's one idea: the nonstop voice in your head, the one narrating and rating and worrying, is not you. You are the awareness underneath it, the thing that can notice the voice running. Most suffering is just getting fused with that voice and dragged around by it. Step back into the awareness, which only ever exists right now, and the grip loosens.

His origin story is the teaching. At 29, deep in depression, he was lying awake thinking "I cannot live with myself," when the sentence turned on him. If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me, the "I" and the "self" it cannot stand, and maybe only one is real. Something let go. He spent about two years more or less blissed out on park benches, then wrote The Power of Now, which sold slowly until Oprah put her weight behind it, and then sold by the millions.

Krishnamurti's one idea is the most radical, because it eats the others: there is no path to truth. No method, no system, no teacher who can take you there. The moment you start following someone, you have stopped looking for yourself and started copying them. So he refused to be followed. No technique to sell, no steps, no authority, including his own.

He had more reason than anyone to distrust the role, because he had been handed it. The Theosophists raised him from boyhood to be the messiah, and at 34 he gave the whole thing back (the story at the top of this page) and told them truth was not something he or anyone could pass to them. For the next half-century he just talked, all over the world, circling one instruction: look at your own mind directly, without a system and without the "you" that wants a comfortable answer.

The oldest and strangest of the five, and the root a lot of the others quietly tap. Gurdjieff's claim: you are not awake. You think you are conscious and choosing and doing, but you are mostly a machine on autopilot, reacting to whatever lands on you, asleep with your eyes open. There is no single "you" in there running the show, just a crowd of reflexes taking turns and calling itself a person. Real life only starts when you wake up, and waking up is work that almost nobody does.

The work he taught was "self-remembering," the hard trick of staying aware of yourself and the world at the same time instead of vanishing into whatever you are doing. Gurdjieff was a magnetic, slippery Greek-Armenian who said he had pieced the system together from years among Sufi orders and remote monasteries. We have it in plain, teachable form mostly because his student P.D. Ouspensky wrote it all down.