Lessons in Coming and Going or Neti-neti (Not this not that) - Paperback

by Rusty Glicksman (Author)

From the ragged roads of Afghanistan to "forbidden" Lhasa - reached when entry into Tibet was prohibited - and to the Ganges at dawn, Lessons in Coming and Going follows Rusty Glicksman across three decades of adventure and spiritual seeking.

Beginning in the American suburbs of the 1950s and shaped by the moral pressure of the Vietnam era, the author leaves home and keeps moving - through Europe and the Middle East, then deeper into India, Nepal, and Tibet. Ashrams, monasteries, teachers, fellow travelers, and long stretches of solitude become part of a life in which the outer journey and the inner one are difficult to separate.

Threaded through the travels is an ongoing reckoning with Jewish identity, family expectations, love and loss, and the desire to live ethically in a complicated time. The chapters are anchored in specific places and moments -Tabriz, Varanasi, Manali, McCleod Gang, Lhasa, Jaipur - so each stop becomes both a scene on the map and a turning point in the narrator's understanding of himself.

The subtitle, Neti-Neti ("Not This, Not That"), names the book's guiding concept: a search for meaning by stripping away what proves false: ideas, identities, and versions of the self that prove insufficient when tested against lived experience. Lessons in Coming and Going is a memoir of movement, questioning, and the slow, repeated work of learning what the search is not, and what remains.

Written in a meditative, candid voice, Lessons in Coming and Going may appeal to readers of Pico Iyer and Peter Matthiessen. It explores faith, rebellion, love, and loss, and returns to the idea that the most consequential journey is toward self-knowledge - a lesson in both coming and going.