Wayne Liquorman came to nondual teaching in the late 1980s through Ramesh Balsekar, the retired Bombay banker who had been Nisargadatta Maharaj’s chief translator and one of his close students. He met Balsekar in September 1987, and he has spoken openly about the nineteen years of heavy drinking that ended a couple of years before that meeting, an ending he experienced as something that happened to him rather than something he achieved. After his own recognition in 1989, he was authorised by Balsekar to teach. He has held open weekly meetings in California ever since, travels for retreats, and runs Advaita Fellowship, the organisation that publishes the lineage’s books.
His teaching reproduces the central Nisargadatta-Balsekar pointing. There is no doer. The sense of being a separate self choosing among options is itself an arising, not the agent it appears to be. The apparent doership dissolves not by effort but by the recognition that nothing other than what is happening could possibly be happening. This recognition, when it lands, brings an extraordinary lightening, the sense of being lived rather than the strain of trying to live. He is also responsible for editing and bringing into print most of Balsekar’s later books.
His Ram Tzu poems, sharp little verse-dialogues with the seeking mind, circulate independently of his prose teaching.
An example of the teaching
The centrepiece of his presentation is what he calls the false sense of authorship. The phrase is precise. He does not deny that decisions happen, actions happen, consequences follow. What he questions is the claim, added after the fact, that a personal author produced them.
In meetings he works this through with whatever the questioner brings. Someone says they chose to come that evening. He asks them to trace the choice. A thought arose: I could go hear Wayne. Did you author that thought, or did it appear? Another thought weighed the traffic, another checked the calendar, and at some point the body was in the car. Examined closely, each link in the chain simply showed up. The feeling I did that arrives afterward and takes the credit, the way a commentator narrates a game already in motion. He invites people to test this on anything, including the next thought: sit and try to know what you will think ten seconds from now.
He spends a good deal of time heading off the fatalist reading of this. Life continues exactly as before, with planning, effort, and responsibility as part of the happening. What falls away, when the seeing deepens, is the load of pride and guilt that only an author can carry.
Where to start
- Acceptance of What Is: A Book About Nothing: his most direct presentation of the teaching, drawn from the Hermosa Beach meetings.
- Never Born: a longer collection of dialogues.
- No Way for the Spiritually Advanced: the Ram Tzu poems.
- The official site (Advaita Fellowship): meeting schedule, books, and a substantial archive of audio talks.
