Anant Jog.
A school prize in the eighth grade — a small collection of a young yogi’s lectures — was the unlikely beginning of Anant Jog’s lifelong inquiry. The words in it were simple, but what they talked about appeared to arrive from another world whose language he had no name for. The book closed; the feeling it left did not. An inner emptiness — inexplicable but persistent — became, from that point, the driving force of every direction his life would take.
Through adolescence and into adulthood, that force drove him into one all-consuming immersion after another. Arts. Literature. History. Civilisations. Philosophy. The persistent inquiry into each domain resulted in distilled knowledge of it but would also put to birth the motivating question for the next one.
A serious study of the works of Rishis, Yogis, Mystics and Saints followed. Slowly, the precise difference and confluence of philosophy and spirituality began to emerge.
A point eventually arrived at which his mind and intellect, working alone, could not progress any further. It became evident to him that the next stretch of understanding was only available through the direct instruction of a Guru. The search intensified through further study.
While working in a corporate firm in the United States, Anant chose to answer that inner call. He returned to India where he met his Guru, who introduced him to the disciplines required to discover non-duality in every manifestation.
For twelve long and arduous years, Anant remained under his master’s tutelage, undergoing the practices in their full rigour. They helped strengthen the seeking.
What emerged on the other side of those twelve years was not a new philosophy. Anant has a decent coverage of philosophical and spiritual literature — from the classical texts through to modern teachers — but the reader will find no direct quotations of any of them in this book. What has come through is a single, integrated, rational framework: the PVM-Structure as the unit of existence; the Fictitious I as the central misidentification; the distinction between Life and Lifestyle; the Human plane of PVM existence; the Cosmic Will and Intellect that pervade the PVM; and Pain Navigation as the practical method.
The Fictitious I is the distillation of that work. It is the fruit of purely rational analysis, observation and practice, set down in day-to-day language free of spiritual jargon — a completely self-reliant method by which anyone can question their own fictitiousness and step onto the path of progress.