Jac O'Keeffe

Jac O'Keeffe's teaching begins where a lot of others stop. Some years after her own awakening, she noticed that a new identity had quietly taken the place of the old one: she had come to identify with what gets called nondual awareness. In time she saw that this identity had to dissolve too. What lies past the sense of spaciousness, past being at home in pure consciousness, past the concept of existence itself — that is the question she works with, and she is candid that language runs thin there.

Her stated aim is not to add concepts but to make people independent of her. She talks about spiritual maturity as the point at which you are your own guru, and about retaining your autonomy at every stage of awakening. Her work is explicitly for people who are done outsourcing their awakening to gurus.

That concern runs beyond the teaching. She is a founding member of the Association for Spiritual Integrity, which exists to hold spiritual teachers to account and to encourage continual self-reflection among them, and in 2024 she spoke at a Harvard Divinity School conference on the influence of colonialism on ethics and accountability in alternative spiritual teaching, proposing a system of accountability for the field.

She is the author of Born to Be Free and How to Be a Spiritual Rebel.