Position and purpose
Where I stand, so you can weigh what I say.
The wager, stated as a wager. The four questions this project keeps apart on purpose. Who this is for, and what it is asking for.
Position, not findings. The wager this project is made from is stated here as a wager, and kept apart from everything the atlas actually demonstrates.
↩ Back to the AtlasYou can close this page now and lose nothing essential. Sit down. Breathe.
Before it is a theory, nonduality is a human question: is the distance we feel between self and world, knower and known, lover and Beloved, as final as it appears?
The wagerwhere I stand, and why it is not a finding
Made from inside the lineage I practice in: what this page is testing for lies underneath the traditions, underneath the categories they argue in, and underneath what it is to be a human being at all — one awareness, already present, prior to whoever is looking for it.
That is a wager and not a finding. The evidence does not establish it, and a Madhyamaka scholar, an Indigenous philosopher and a Sikh theologian would each reject it for different and serious reasons. The atlas is built so that it could fail.
And a second wager, which this page is arranged to test: that the teaching and the practice are one loop — that the form keeps the shape of what happened, and that it can be picked up and made to happen again. Sometimes the form is a poem. Sometimes it is an argument, a shout, a posture, a sung line, or a question built so the mind cannot sit where it was sitting.
Which suggests what is actually being compared on this page. Not a shared metaphysics — these traditions disagree profoundly about what is real, and the atlas exists to keep those disagreements visible. Possibly a shared problem: how do you transmit something whose realization involves the collapse of the very subject-and-object structure that transmitting depends on? Their answers are different technologies, and technologies can be compared without being identical.
Also a wager. Much of this corpus is composed, metrically constrained and liturgically ordered: Gurbāṇī is arranged by rāga, by a compiler. A fossil is not the animal. And the pattern is not universal — the Indigenous relational philosophies in Layer 1 are the standing counter-case, and this page keeps them as one rather than pressing them into the shape. What the evidence can settle is narrower and more tractable — when a technique is first attested, when a form is first attested, which came first, and whether a form was built to be performed again. That last one is a question about how something is made, not about what anyone experienced, which is why it can be answered at all.
Four questionskept apart, on purpose
- The wager. There is an underlying unity. A position of practice, not a result of research.
- The historical question. What can be demonstrated — which contacts, which transmissions, which dates, on what evidence.
- The comparative question. What structural resemblances appear once identity is no longer assumed.
- The open philosophical question. Whether these traditions are meeting one reality, undergoing structurally similar transformations, reporting culturally mediated experiences, or doing genuinely different things. Nobody knows.
Holding all four at once is the whole discipline of this page. Collapsing them is how perennialism gets smuggled in as scholarship — and also how scholarship gets used to take a living tradition apart.
Why this existswho it is for, and what it is asking for
The scholarship on these traditions has never been better, and it is often used as a wedge — to show that one tradition borrowed from another and therefore owns nothing, that a practice was assembled recently and is therefore hollow, that someone has no right to the thing they love. Used that way, learning becomes one more instrument for separating people looking in the same direction.
This site stands in the Udāsī lineage, and the Udāsī instinct is to gather. So the map is built the other way round: to look for the underlying unity, honestly, which means letting each difference be exactly as real as it is.
It is built for four kinds of people who rarely read each other — practitioners, who deserve a history that neither flatters nor demolishes them; people who arrived through contemporary nonduality, who deserve to know the vocabulary has a manufacturing history; poets, because here the poem is the primary evidence; and scholars, because the gaps are enormous.
It exists so that all four have access — to the texts, the sources, the dating, and what is disputed — and so the work can actually be done. We are in need of real scholarship. The last section of this page is a list of dissertations waiting for someone.
Where I stand, so you can weigh what I say.
I am a poet and a scholar. My field is transmission and visionary poetry — how a vision passes into language, and how it travels from one generation to the next without dying on the way. That is the training I bring to yoga.
I am also a wild devotee of the lineage that has accepted me. I am a student of Yogi Amandeep Singh, and I am an Udāsīn. Those are not credentials I hold at arm's length. They are how I live. I am deeply trained in Kundalini Yoga, in Advaita, and in Himalayan Yoga as taught by Yogi Amandeep Singh — the practice side of this is not something I have read about.
I am ultimately a Yogi.
What follows from that should be said plainly. I am not a scholar of yoga in the academic sense. No doctorate in Indology, no Sanskrit or Punjabi philology, no training in fieldwork. What I have is what my own field gave me — a feel for how texts get attributed, how transmission gets narrated, how much weight a line of poetry can be asked to carry, and how often a tradition's memory of itself and its paper trail diverge. I am putting what little I have to work here.
Modern practitioners are often a-historical, and I understand why. The practice works. The history can feel beside the point, or worse, like an attack dressed up as an inquiry. But look at the nondual and kuṇḍalinī-oriented traditions that have actually lasted, and every one of them carries a long history of scholarship inside it. Advaita produced a thousand years of commentary. Madhyamaka was argued and re-argued for a millennium. The Kashmiri Śaivas wrote enormous technical works and expected their students to read them. The Nirmalās existed in order to study. In those traditions rigor was one of the ways realization got carried across time — a form of devotion, not a threat to it. This is an attempt to begin that work for the modern nondual and Kundalini tradition I belong to, which is young enough that most of it has never been done.
This is a preliminary study. I am doing it as much to learn as for anyone else's benefit. Some of it will turn out to be wrong, and I would rather hear that from someone who knows than spend my energy defending it.
If you are a scholar of yoga and you can correct, sharpen, or overturn something on this page, please do. Corrections are the point of publishing it.
If you are a deep practitioner in any of these traditions and you have something to add — a text, a transmission, a memory, an objection — please tell me. This map is built to be revised, and every entry on it carries its sources so that disagreement has something to grip.
I may also work in the future on the hagiographies of these traditions. They are their own form of visionary poetry, and they deserve to be read as that — which is a different task from the one this map is doing, and one I would not want to confuse with it.
To know beyond seeking, one must simply know.
To know through the mind, one must be rigorous.
To go beyond knowledge, one must live at the heart.
That is the shape of this whole page. The threshold above is the first line. The atlas below is the second. The third is not on any page, and it is the reason for the other two.
This map asks about the standpoint of the scholars it cites — where they were trained, what they were part of, what that gives them and what it costs. It would be poor form to leave my own unstated.
Please bear with my flaws in the relative sense. I am presenting this from the limited view of one human being, and those limits are real and they are mine. And I stand with you all from the heart, as the infinite.
The evidence behind this page
Every claim above opens into the atlas, and the atlas is loaded here — the same timeline, the same map, the same entries. Open it in place, or go to the Atlas itself.