NEEV Community for Self Inquiry & Sustainability

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NEEV Community for Self Inquiry & Sustainability We have devoted ourselves to philo-sophia – the love of wisdom. However, at NEEV Community, we have been developing such a life amid the world as householders.

NEEV Community for Self-Inquiry is a non-profit community devoted to teaching, sharing, and living a sustainable life based on Advaita Vedanta, an ancient school of non-dual self inquiry. In the Indian philosophical tradition, wisdom is developed using the faculty of intellect/buddhi through a radical self-inquiry or knowledge yoga/jnana yoga involving reading, reflection, and contemplation which finally transcends the intellect. Traditionally, jnana yoga has been practised mainly by monks who have retired from a worldly life to realize the non-dual nature of the world leading to liberation from all suffering/moksha - thereby culminating in a life of truth, freedom, and love. Therefore, the jnana yoga we practice is more inclusive and expansive than traditional jnana yoga, incorporating all fields of life. Where traditional jnana yoga focuses only on the summit of non-dual realization, the integral jnana yoga we practice focuses on the whole mountain of life. Therefore, it combines Advaita Vedanta – an ancient Indian school of non-duality – the teachings of J Krishnamurti, with the conceptual framework of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory.

THE FEAR BENEATH THE FEARImagine a whirlpool discovering that it is water.Nothing happens to the water.But everything ch...
10/09/2026

THE FEAR BENEATH THE FEAR

Imagine a whirlpool discovering that it is water.

Nothing happens to the water.

But everything changes for the whirlpool.

It can no longer maintain the fantasy that it exists independently of the river.

Perhaps this is what makes self-inquiry so frightening.

The question Who am I? sounds harmless until it is taken seriously.

Because the answer does not threaten Consciousness.

It threatens the imagined entity that has been claiming to be separate from it.

The ego may therefore resist awakening for the same reason a whirlpool might resist discovering what it actually is:

the truth is not going to destroy reality. It is going to destroy the mistake about reality.

Why do sincere seekers abandon self-inquiry just when it begins to deepen? Perhaps the obstacle isn’t lack of conviction, but fear. Beneath the fear of awakening lies an architecture of fears…

A caravan crosses the Sahara. The wind moves through them "as if there were no one on the dunes." What if that's not a p...
15/08/2026

A caravan crosses the Sahara. The wind moves through them "as if there were no one on the dunes." What if that's not a poetic exaggeration, but the truest thing in the passage?

A reading of Nobel Prize-winning author J.M.G. Le Clézio's Desert through the lens of Advaita Vedanta — where the line between the one who walks and the sand walked upon quietly stops holding.

A caravan crosses the Sahara. The wind moves through them “as if there were no one on the dunes.” What if that’s not a poetic exaggeration, but the truest thing in the passage? A …

There is a paragraph in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about the ordinary act of waking — a final wave heaving ...
24/07/2026

There is a paragraph in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about the ordinary act of waking — a final wave heaving you onto the sand, a scallop's shell you dreamed against, a forest you get lost in until you remember nothing of the sea. It reads, at first, like fine nature writing. Read again, and something else appears: the exact architecture of a doctrine composed on the other side of the world some two and a half thousand years ago — the Advaitic teaching of the three states of consciousness, waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep, and the silent witness said to remain unmoved through all three. Neither Dillard nor Vedānta was borrowing from the other. This essay sits inside that coincidence rather than explaining it away — tracing, phrase by phrase, how a devout Christian writer's private phenomenology of a single morning ends up mapping, with almost unsettling precision, onto a metaphysics she likely never read. It is an essay about what waking actually feels like, about how much a sentence can hold without announcing it, and about the strange places where two very different accounts of the self, looking closely enough, arrive at the same threshold.

There is a paragraph in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about the ordinary act of waking — a final wave heaving you onto the sand, a scallop’s shell you dreamed against, a fores…

Please Join Me on SubstackDear Friend, Thank you for being part of the NEEV community. Whether you subscribed recently o...
11/07/2026

Please Join Me on Substack

Dear Friend, Thank you for being part of the NEEV community. Whether you subscribed recently or have been reading my work for years, I deeply appreciate your companionship on this journey of self-inquiry. Over the past few months, my writing has taken on a richer and more varied rhythm. While the heart of my work remains rooted in Advaita, self-inquiry, and sustainability, I have also found myself drawn to another way of expressing the same insights—through literary essays, memoir, and reflections on fatherhood, nature, books, childhood, and the quiet mystery that pervades ordinary life....

Dear Friend, Thank you for being part of the NEEV community. Whether you subscribed recently or have been reading my work for years, I deeply appreciate your companionship on this journey of self-i…

𝗔𝗻 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻’𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝘁𝘇𝗺𝗮𝗻This essay begins with a provocative challenge. A respected critic of contempor...
10/06/2026

𝗔𝗻 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻’𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝘁𝘇𝗺𝗮𝗻

This essay begins with a provocative challenge. A respected critic of contemporary nonduality, Robert Saltzman, accuses Advaita of smuggling metaphysical certainty into what should remain an honest acknowledgment of mystery. He charges nonduality with anthropocentrism, tautology, spiritual elitism, and the construction of self-sealing belief systems. At first glance, the critique appears devastating. Yet as the essay unfolds, a deeper story emerges. Drawing on Śaṅkara, Gauḍapāda, Buddhist philosophy, phenomenology, and epistemology, it reveals that Saltzman's objections often target popular caricatures rather than classical Advaita itself. The article carefully separates the genuine pathologies of modern spiritual culture from the philosophical foundations of nonduality, showing where Saltzman is right, where he misunderstands, and where his own position rests on unexamined assumptions. Ultimately, it becomes an exploration of one of humanity's oldest questions: not merely what reality is, but what makes any knowing of reality possible in the first place.

Introduction I recently came across this Facebook post by someone— a lengthy statement by Robert Saltzman on the subject of nonduality. A Great Analysis of Non-Duality by Robert Saltzman: The initi…

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