Exploring the direct perception of non-dual, "non-ordinary" reality, Paul Weiss shares guidance for navigating ordinary reality in an open, compassionate, and ever-maturing way. He affirms our shared human potential for the "direct experience" of reality--unmediated by our more relativistic mental faculties--and reveals this experience as an essential dimension of our conscious capacity for growth. He shares his most significant awakening experiences and the circumstances leading up to them, exploring the personal and transpersonal dimensions of the experiences and their psycho-emotional and psycho-spiritual foundations. He points to such experiences as part of our ongoing integration as human beings and the essential path of practice that supports our availability to them. Interweaving perspectives from psychology and neuroscience with important lessons from spiritual traditions around the world, Weiss explores how to live a life of integrity, reciprocity, and openness to reality, offering practical teachings for spiritual understanding, emotional development, and the cultivation of compassion, viewed by ancient Buddhist sages as the true meaning of existence. He addresses such human qualities as vulnerability, empathy, reciprocity, openness, and intimacy and shows how they express and participate in deeper conscious truths. The author also examines practical wisdom teachings within both Buddhist and Christian paths to realization.

Combining engaged mysticism with transcendent humanism, along with thought- provoking poetry, Weiss offers a living vision of a non-dual way of experiencing the world, a path that supports our functional, emotional, and spiritual maturity.

Dharma of Direct Experience : Non-Dual Principles of Living, Paul Weiss, Inner Traditions, Paperback, 288 pages, $22.99

Paul Weiss, an indefatigable philosopher who kept teaching despite the efforts of some of the best American universities to stop him because of his advancing age, died on July 5 at his home in Washington. He was 101. Dr. Weiss published more than 30 books. His most recent, ''Emphatics,'' about the use of language, was published in 2000 by Vanderbilt University Press. A new book, ''Surrogates,'' is to be published next year by Indiana University Press. ''The Philosophy of Paul Weiss,'' edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, was published in 1995 as part of the Library of Living Philosophers. It is unusual in the series because it includes examples of Dr. Weiss's drawings, which he did when he was developing a philosophy of art. The living philosophy series, established in 1938, has published critical analyses of philosophers like John Dewey, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, who was one of Dr. Weiss's teachers at Harvard.