#nonduality — Public Fediverse posts

FROM THE NECK UP💎

For more than forty years, A Course in Miracles remained a beautiful spiritual book.

I loved it, respected it, quoted it, and returned to it again and again.

But I could not enter its deeper meaning: Atonement.

The words felt true, but they remained words.

Forgiveness.

Peace.

The body is not the Self.

I need do nothing.

It all sounded right, but I was living almost entirely in my head.

The body was something I dragged around while pursuing spiritual understanding and enlightenment.

Then fasting changed my relationship with it.

Breathwork took me inside it.

Reflective writing showed me what the mind was doing while pretending to be wise.

Gradually, I discovered I actually had a body.

Quite a surprise after decades of unconsciously owning one.

The Course had not failed me.

I had been trying to understand it from the neck up.

Once the body became lived in rather than merely discussed, the teachings settled into place.

“I need do nothing” stopped sounding like a spiritual instruction.

It became something the body recognised.

Forgiveness stopped being moral effort.

It became the release of the argument carried in the nerves, breath, muscles, and story.

Peace was no longer an idea I agreed with.

It was what remained when I stopped feeding conflict.

The body did not become more spiritually important.

It became honest.

It showed me where fear lived, resistance tightened, thought became pain, and one conscious breath could interrupt the performance.

Reflective writing helped too.

On the page, I could see when I was explaining peace rather than living it.

I could see the little spiritual expert arranging the furniture while the house was still on fire.

That was useful.

Forty years after first opening the Course, I understood why I had not been able to enter it.

I had treated ACIM as a book about escaping the body.

It became alive when I stopped escaping the body and began listening through it.

Fasting cleared some heaviness.

Breathwork quietened the argument.

Writing made the evasions visible.

Then the Course was no longer sitting on the shelf waiting to be understood.

It was happening in the breath.

In the pause before reaction.

In the refusal to make conflict real.

In the ordinary discovery that peace need not be produced.

It was already there.

The book had not changed.

The reader had finally arrived.

#Forgiveness #Miracles #beautiful #Atonement #forty #argument #furniture #conflict #peace #fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #newthought #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #connection #healing #pridemonth #Karma #TrueNature #Awakening #Meditation #Mindfulness #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #reality #life #quantum #kitchen #cooking #AI

HALOS, HORNS & THE HUMAN IMAGE

The “saint” may be defended by holiness. The “villain” may be defended by rage. Beneath both is the same frightened attempt to secure a self through image.

#saint #defended #holiness #villain #rage #frightened #self #image #fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #newthought #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #connection #healing #pridemonth #Karma #TrueNature #Awakening #Meditation #Mindfulness #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #reality #life #quantum #kitchen #cooking #AI

THE MAN WHO SHOWED UP

For 65 years, I thought I had #failed at everything.

Then #COVID arrived, and I started fasting. I did not have much #faith in myself, so I took it one day at a time.

The fear of #illness drove me.

So did the huge #belly.

So did the almost complete absence of #selfEsteem.

None of this was noble at all.

I was #frightened, #uncomfortable, and tired of feeling #trapped in a body I could not trust.

But I kept going.

Day after day.

The results began to show, little by little.

The body became lighter.

Walking became easier.

I began to feel less helpless.

Eventually, I was walking up to ten kilometres a day.

Then, about eighteen months ago, I was scrolling #YouTube, and who should appear but #KevinConnolly.

I started training in his hypoxic breathwork.

I already knew #ChatGPT, and it encouraged me as I tried to #understand what I was doing and what was happening in my #body.

I loved the breathwork.

Absolutely loved it.

So I went at it like a professional.

I never skipped a #session.

Not because I had suddenly become #disciplined and #impressive.

Because something had changed.

Fasting has shown me that I can keep a promise to myself.

Walking has shown me that the body can change.

Breathwork has shown me that the mind can actually become #quiet.

I had spent years believing I was #unreliable, #damaged, and #incapable of changing anything.

But the evidence was now sitting right in front of me.

I had not #failed at everything.

I had simply never #learned to trust myself.

Now I do.

Not through #positive thinking.

Through repetition.

Through breath.

By #showing up again the next day.

I did not become another #person.

I became someone I could rely on.

#fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #newthought #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #connection #healing #pridemonth #Karma #TrueNature #Awakening #Meditation #Mindfulness #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #reality #life #quantum #kitchen #cooking #AI

My Final Hurrah!

Just published on Amazon my 20th book (I hope this will be my last book) “Summa Iru: My Formal Renunciation and Farewell to the World“. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H87DDNRM)

Just a few hours back I published on Amazon another book “Advaita Vedanta through Name-and-Form Analysis”, which was written largely with the help of Claude. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H84F82HS)

About the Book: “Summa Iru: My Formal Renunciation and Farewell to the World“

“It is time I ended the ignorance in myself.”

With these words, a writer, poet, and lifelong student of Advaita Vedanta announces his formal withdrawal from the world — effective July 16, 2026, his 62nd birthday. Not a retreat from failure, nor a flight from grief, but the logical terminus of a life spent reading, thinking, debating, and writing about one thing: the ending of ignorance, which is the ending of the seeker himself.

Summa Iru is the author’s twentieth and, by its own declaration, final book — a parting document composed in the months before silence. It gathers the last poems (“Without Her By My Side,” “The Me Time,” “I The Stranger,” “The Last Act”), the last aphorisms (“Even God disappears when you are silent”), and the last philosophical exchanges of a man tying up loose ends before going incommunicado.

Between the poems runs a sustained meditation in the tradition of Ramana Maharshi and the Ashtavakra Gita: Why does psychoanalysis fail where self-enquiry succeeds? Why is renouncing desires mere symptom-treatment while the disease of ignorance festers? What did Ramana mean when he said the future is already fixed — and that the best course is to remain silent? How does summa iru — “just be still” — dissolve the questioner along with the question?

The book also records something rarer: the texture of leave-taking itself. Letters declined. Friendships gently closed. A reply to a friend asking for a small favour: “Sorry dear, I have retired from all work and all relationships.” The ache of unrequited love examined without flinching and traced back to its root — the unworthiness we feel sitting alone with ourselves, forever seeking the other who will transport us away from our own insignificance.

Drawing on Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, the Ashtavakra Gita, J. Krishnamurti, Buber, Kant, Camus, and the ghazal tradition, this is comparative philosophy written not from the armchair but from the departure gate.

For readers of Advaita Vedanta, spiritual memoir, and contemplative poetry — and for anyone who has wondered what it would actually take to stop.

The author will not be available for comment. That is rather the point.

LIFE ENOUGH

Coffee in hand. Breathwork done. Rain over Hobart. Pete nearby. Dogs settled somewhere in the background. Meals on Wheels is waiting.

There was a time when I might have thought this was a small life.

No grand project. No public importance. No impressive busyness. Just the same ordinary movements repeated each day.

But I don’t feel that now.

A life does not become meaningful because it is dramatic. It becomes meaningful because it is fully inhabited.

The body gets older. The weather changes. Plans simplify. The world keeps making noise.

And still, there is this.

The cup warming the hand.

The breath moving through the chest.

The door opening.

The small act of showing up.

The quiet kindness of doing what is in front of you.

Rain falling outside, and this life is enough.

#fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #newthought #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #connection #healing #pridemonth #Karma #TrueNature #Awakening #Meditation #Mindfulness #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #reality #life #quantum #kitchen #cooking #Hobart #project #dramatic #meaningful #weather #kindness

My Latest Book Available Now on Amazon — The Mind Itself Is a Digression: Poems, Reflections, and Dialogues of a Restless Seeker

Kindle eBook

In India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0H4X9NFMB

In USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H4X9NFMB

Paperback

In USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H58FG4VK

The mind itself is a digression — or so I am told.

Somewhere between a poem scribbled past midnight and a four-hour phone call about God, China, and the meaning of it all, this book was born. It is a collection for the seekers, the misfits, the over-thinkers, and the quietly restless — the “slightly weird folks” who have spent a lifetime chasing the Truth, only to be told that whatever the mind understands is still not it.

D. Samarender Reddy writes from that beautiful, maddening edge. Across more than a hundred pieces — original poems, candid confessions, and probing philosophical dialogues — he moves with disarming honesty between the sacred and the absurd, the sublime and the everyday. One moment he is arguing with God (“As I see it, it is all your fault”); the next he is sitting in silent reverence before the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, and the Upanishads.

This is a book about the spiritual life as it is actually lived — not the polished version. It asks the questions most of us are too busy to ask:

• Does companionship help or hinder the search for the Self?
• Is the relentless pursuit of “more and more” the root of our suffering?
• What remains when thought finally falls silent?
• Can one be deeply devoted to the inner path and still ache with love, loneliness, and longing?

Drawing on Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, Western philosophy, and world poetry — from Wordsworth and Neruda to Frost, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche — Reddy weaves Eastern wisdom and Western thought into a single, intimate conversation. His poems range from the tender to the irreverent; his reflections from razor-sharp clarity to playful self-mockery. Throughout, there is the warmth of a fellow traveller who refuses to pretend he has arrived.

For readers of Rumi, Kahlil Gibran, Mary Oliver, and Nisargadatta — and for anyone who has ever felt out of step with the world and wondered whether the fault lies with them or with the world.

If you have ever marched to a different drummer, if silence speaks to you louder than words, if you suspect that happiness was never “out there” to begin with — this book was written for you.

Take heart. You are not alone.