Sunyata: Rare-Born Mystic
by Ed Dougal
250 pp.
With just the right voice and page after page of hand-drawn images matched with his own handwriting, the author traces the unusual life of Alfred Julius Emmanuel Sorensen who, though born into ego-consciousness in 1890 in Denmark, never lost the non-dual mystic consciousness of what he called "the Invisible Real." Invited to India "to teach Silence" by the poet Tagore, Brother Alfred, as he was known then, felt a kindred consciousness in India. After much travel, he arrived in the hill town of Almora, where on a high ridge he built a stone hut. It had no running water, no electricity, no heat. What he did have was solitude, pure air and a 23-mile vista of Himalayan mountain peaks. He lived on five rupees a month given to him by a devotee. In researching his book Search in Secret India, Paul Brunton met Brother Alfred and introduced him to the great Indian Advaita sage Ramana Maharshi who gave him the name "Sunyata," meaning full solid emptiness. Sunyata lived in Almora until 1979, when friends of Alan Watts brought him to Sausalito. There, aboard Alan Watts' houseboat, he gave a weekly darshan, always insisting he had "Nothing to teach, nothing to sell." In 1984 at the age of 94, "Mr. Nobody," as his American devotees affectionately referred to him, passed into the Invisible Real.
Price: $30.00

