New Podcast: Here-Now-Being
plus information about my books
New Podcast
SAND (Science and Nonduality) has just released a new podcast with me, Here-Now-Being:
My Books
For those of you who don’t know, I have 5 published books. They are all in some way about seeing through (and waking up from) the imaginary problems created by conceptual thought, and discovering the aliveness, openness and immediacy here-now. My books always encourage the reader to investigate directly rather than holding onto beliefs or second-hand ideas.
Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life, published in 1996, is a spiritual memoir focusing largely on the years I spent working with Toni Packer while on staff at Springwater Center in rural northwestern New York. Toni was a former Zen teacher who resonated deeply with J. Krishnamurti, and she left traditional Zen behind to work in a more open way. The book also covers some of my early life, my sobering up from near fatal alcohol addiction with a remarkable therapist who had a unique approach, my time in the anti-imperialist left, and my experiences in Zen, practicing with Sojun Mel Weitsman, Charlotte Joko Beck and others.
Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is, first published in 2003, combines personal narrative with expository writing about nonduality and poetic prose. The personal story is about my life in middle age, partly in the California Bay Area and at Springwater, but mostly in Chicago, where I moved in 2000 to be with my mother in her final years. Like my first book, this one also has a lot of material about addiction. Unlike my first book, my perspective by this time includes not only Zen and the work of Toni Packer, but also what I’ve gleaned from my experiences spending time with several contemporary Advaita satsang teachers, along with the kind of radical nonduality that emphasizes no self, no choice, no practice, nothing to do or not do, and everything happening by itself.
Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Non-Duality, first published in 2010, is a collection of talks and dialogues transcribed from meetings held mostly in Chicago in the early 2000s. It gives a feeling for my meetings, and it provides a blend of the radical nondual perspective that all there is, is here-now-being, for which no practice is needed and from which no deviation is ever possible, and the meditative or contemplative approach of “being here now,” seeing through stories and beliefs and consciously shifting attention from thinking into present moment sensing and awaring.
Nothing to Grasp, written in Oregon and published in 2012, is a concise distillation of my essential message. It’s probably the best introduction to my work and my perspective, which by this time had settled into my own dynamic blend of Toni Packer’s work, Zen, Advaita, and radical nonduality.
Death: The End of Self-Improvement, published in 2019, again combines personal narrative with expository writing and poetic prose, and is an exploration of aging and dying, with an emphasis on being alive here and now. It shares the story of my mother’s final years and my journey with my own aging and a near fatal cancer.
These books all invite the discovery that the body-mind-world is an undivided, seamless, ever-changing, ungraspable, unresolvable happening with no inside or outside. All of them explore questions of identity, free will, suffering, transformation, nonduality, awareness and the nature of experience. All my books point to the simplicity and immediacy of right here, right now, just as it is, and they invite a kind of meditative exploration that is direct, non-methodical, awareness-based and not result-oriented. I write from my own direct experience and insight in what I hope is a very down-to-earth, honest, self-disclosing, and sometimes humorous way. My perspective has elements gleaned from radical nonduality, Advaita, Buddhism, Toni Packer’s nontraditional work, along with other things I have explored.
Find out more about the books, read endorsements and so on here:
You can find more podcasts, audio and video, many articles, some of my photography, information about individual meetings at joantollifson.com
Thank you all for being here.
I highly recommend Nothing To Grasp--a lovely deep dive.