Confucianism/RuismJoin integral pioneer Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Ph.D. for a 10-week philosophical and experiential course in exploring 10 distinct traditions of nonduality – East & West, ancient and contemporary.

The course will cover 4 traditions associated with the East and 4 traditions associated with the West, plus two contemporary nondual traditions that have emerged in the early 20th century.. The 10 traditions are listed below in the order we will cover them. We will start with major nondual traditions found in the East then we will explore Integral Yoga, the evolutionary nondual path established by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother in the early 1900s.

Eastern Traditions of Nonduality

1. Confucianism/Ruism
2. Chan & Zen Buddhism
3. Tenai & Shingon Buddhism
4. Bauls of Bengal
5. Sri Aurobindo: Integral Yoga

The next five weeks covers the nondual traditions most prominent in the West and ends with the Fourth Way school founded by G. Gurdjieff also in the early 1900s. Both Aurobindo and Gurdjieff were integral pioneers in that the spiritual paths they developed were syncretic drawing on many other traditions and creating a higher order synthesis. As a result both have had an immense influence on contemporary spirituality and represent some of the newest traditions of nondual realization on the planet.

Western Traditions of Nonduality

6. Hermeticism
7. Ibn ‘Arabi’s Unity of Being
8. Russian Orthodoxy
9. Chabad Hasidism
10. G. Gurdjieff: The Fourth Way

Each week I will post a 30+ min lecture on the nondual tradition being explored that week along with some study materials (handouts, articles, etc) about its unique practices and history. We will use the weekly live zoom call to discuss and engage the topic. These will be recorded and posted the next day. We will use Slack for weekly threaded discussions.

This course is going to be an amazing integral exploration of the history, practices, and traditions of nondual realization. Inspired by David Loy’s classic 1997 text Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy – I wanted to take the analysis further. I wanted to go meta (identifying new insights about nonduality via a big-picture trans-tradition comparative analysis) and go integral (including many more traditions than the three he focuses on). I’ve spent over a year engaged in this metaintegral analysis and feel ready to share what I’ve found with you and to discover new insights together.

Some of the cool insights I’ll be sharing and we will explore together include:

• The 3 major types of nonduality and how most traditions eventually include all three but not always in the same order.
• The history of how the nondual realization evolves through distinct stages/phases
  of deeper differentiation/integration.
• How “nondual seeds” planted withing various traditions often take 1000s of years
  to fully blossom.
• The ways different traditions of nonduality have influenced each other.
• The robust forms of nonduality in the West (who knew?!)
• The future of nondual realization – how many more stages/levels of realization are possible and/or are already emerging?
• The key texts and individuals associated with each nondual tradition.
• What role do institutions (e.g., monasteries) play in the development and dissemination of nondual texts and practice.
• What has allowed some traditions to develop nondual streams of practice before or more robustly than other traditions?
• The global status of nondual realization across traditions – we have more nondual choices of tradition than ever before.
• Interesting differences between solo realizers and those who awaken within a tradition.

Cost: $495 USD.