The masters, checked against their own words.

1. Rumi1207 to 1273 · KonyaPersian poet and Sufi teacher. Much of the English Rumi on our feeds was written in the last fifty years.Famous lines, checked
2. Lao TzuTradition says 6th century BCE · ChinaThe Tao Te Ching, eighty-one short chapters, and the lines that were added to it in English.Famous lines, checked
3. J. Krishnamurti1895 to 1986 · India and the worldRaised to be a world teacher, he dissolved the order built for him and spent more than fifty years asking people not to follow anyone, him included.In his own words
4. Osho1931 to 1990 · India and OregonThousands of recorded talks on meditation and watching the mind, and a commune whose leaders were convicted of serious crimes.In his own words
5. Gurdjieffc. 1866 to 1949 · Armenia, Russia, FranceTaught that we go through life asleep. The enneagram symbol came through him. The nine personality types came later, from others.In his own words
6. Ramana Maharshi1879 to 1950 · TiruvannamalaiLeft home at sixteen for the hill of Arunachala and gave one question for a lifetime: Who am I?In his own words

Most of this site is research: the Psychology Library and the field guides, each study read for what it shows and what it doesn’t. Psychology measures what it can across many people. The masters each looked at one mind, their own, for a lifetime, and some of what they reported is now being studied.

We don’t treat either side as the last word. Where the two meet, the page says so, and says how strong the research is, including when it is thin.

A line goes on a page only when we have read it in the source: a scholar’s translation for the poets, the transcript or the book for the teachers who were recorded. We quote whole sentences, never a piece cut out of one, and we name the translator or the talk.

Where a teacher reaches us through a pupil’s notes, as much of Gurdjieff does, we name the pupil. Where we couldn’t open a source ourselves, we say that too.