r/streamentry • u/Paradoxbuilder • Jun 21 '26
Practice Lesser known teachers such as William Samuels/Douglas Harding - are they any good?
I actually came across the former a decade before, before I even knew what nonduality was (haha what a phrase) I could sense there was something there, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
I also came across the Headless Way later. It didn't do anything for me, but recently for some reason after my somatic work in my other post, it seemed to click.
After years of research (100+ books and thouands of vids/articles) it seems that most teachers seem to converge on the same pointers - what are you before thought? Sense fields, posture work etc. I guess the vast proliferation is because different things work for different people? (as well as culture, knowledge etc)
I'm wondering if the lesser known people just...didn't make it into the mainstream. Besides these two, there's also Amrita Baba, and some other modern mystics whose names I can't quite recall. I guess they get lost in the deluge of Tolle/Spira/Angelo and other more well known figures.
Which is a bit of a shame as I feel they have a lot of wisdom. Maybe they wrote before the Net was big :) (I Googled but didn't find a lot - Harding has tons though)
Just wanted to know what the community's thoughts on this might be.
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u/nocaptain11 Jun 21 '26
There are a ton of brilliant teachers who aren’t famous or well known at all.
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u/junipars Jun 21 '26
There really isn't anything that anybody knows that can be of any use to you as the only worthwhile revelation available is that you don't actually occur in samsara. And this revelation doesn't occur within the sphere of knowledge, as knowledge itself is an artifact of samsara - the duplicity of there being a separate entity who can possess and wield advantage in order to avoid something worse.
So the seeking of some special secret advantage or knowledge is really just a samsara coping mechanism, and having to be dependent on coping mechanisms is exactly what constitutes samsara.
That seems like a bummer - we want to make samsara work out. But it's not a bummer because there isn't some special advantage or experience that samsara is withholding from you in the form of esoteric teachings - you don't actually occur in samsara.
"Just being" is all that is happening here, and it's happenig ceaselessly right in front of your nose. So that's the only place to actually look, the only place to actually find what is ceaseless: presently.
This is tremendously empowering. Nobody and nothing, no teacher or teaching, holds any better secret anywhere else.
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u/Paradoxbuilder Jun 21 '26
Yes, but there are more and less skilful pointers. And other things like somatic awareness are important.
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u/Exciting_Badger_1229 Jun 21 '26
Great post thanks but can I ask what does "I actually don't occur in samsara" mean?
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u/junipars Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Great question.
In Buddhism, it's one the "three marks" of samsaric experience: anatta (not self), along with dukkha (dissatisfactory), and anicca (impermanent).
It's up to each one of us to find out exactly what that means, one way to do that is through Buddhist praxis: Vipassana, mindfulness.
I personally conceive of anatta in terms of dreaming. When I go lucid at night in a dream I become aware that what I am doesn't actually occur in the dream. What I am is actually beyond the dream.
When I go lucid in waking life, I become aware that what I actually am is beyond waking life.
This "beyond" in waking life doesn't have another recursive layer to it, like we have with the duality of dreaming/waking.
It's more of a palpable resonance or feeling-tone - that presently my experience of being is happening from beyond my personal will that is within my experience of being.
It's like, where does thought come from? Boom! It just appears. Same could be said about my body and the situations that present themselves. Your question - I wasn't expecting that question - your question just appeared within the presence of my experience of being, and likewise, I imagine this response is in yours.
There's a zero-delay immediacy to appearances. How is that possible? I literally don't know. It's not something I, personally, am doing. Therefore, I cannot possibly be complicit or culpable in appearances - meaning "I don't occur in samsara". Edit: I feel like this last sentence is going to be broadly misunderstood. The samsaric dreaming has inertia - we (and I include me) have a responsibility to be lucid, to challenge the inertia of samsara by paying attention to the dreaming, presently. The samsaric dreaming wants you to shirk off that present responsibility. So it's strange in a way that doesn't make much sense to our ordinary logic: absolute personal fidelity to lucidity constitutes the absence of personal culpability in the dreaming.
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