Kashmir Shaivism
Swami Lakshmanjoo
Lakshman Raina was born in Srinagar and studied from boyhood under Swami Ram and Swami Mehtabkak, the last teachers in an unbroken Kashmiri Trika line. He lived nearly all his life at his ashram at Ishber on the shore of Nishat, teaching the Shaiva texts in Kashmiri and Sanskrit to a small number of students. His expositions of the Shiva Sutras, the Vijnana Bhairava and Abhinavagupta's Tantraloka were recorded from the 1960s onward and later transcribed and published. He is widely regarded as the last living master of the Kashmir Shaivite tradition.
Core teaching
Consciousness is not something you attain; it is what is already recognising.
Advaita Vedanta
Ramana Maharshi
Venkataraman Iyer was born in Tiruchuzhi, Tamil Nadu. At sixteen, a sudden and spontaneous confrontation with the fear of death led him to inquire directly into who or what was dying — an inquiry that resolved into an abiding recognition of the deathless Self. He soon left home for the hill of Arunachala in Tiruvannamalai, where he remained for the rest of his life, first in prolonged silence and later answering the questions of the visitors who gathered around him. He taught chiefly through self-enquiry, holding the question "Who am I?" until the sense of a separate "I" dissolves at its source, and rarely wrote or spoke at length, letting his presence do most of the teaching. The talks recorded by his devotees, along with his own short written works, made him one of the most influential voices in modern non-dual thought.
Core teaching
The mind that turns inward in search of itself finds only the Self it never really left.