John Tan, Thusness

I am John Tan, known also as Thusness, co-owner of the blog Awakening to Reality (www.awakeningtoreality.com).

I first posted the seven phases of enlightenment around twenty-five years ago; they later appeared on the Awakening to Reality blog. The contemplative journey behind that framework, and behind everything in these books, spans roughly forty years.

For most of that time, consolidating it into a book was something I wanted to do and never found the time for. What changed is the arrival of AI capable enough to work through this material with me directly: not writing it for me, but making it possible to think out loud, be pushed back on, corrected where I overreached, and helped to organize four decades of scattered insight into something coherent enough to put down.

Everything here is free to read and share. Four of the books, all but Nāgārjuna's Middle Way, are under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: you may copy and pass them on, as long as you name the author, do not sell them and do not change them. Quoted translations remain the work of their translators.