Scott Kiloby

Scott Kiloby is a contemporary American nondual teacher, author, and speaker who developed a structured family of self-inquiry practices known as The Living Inquiries (later, The Kiloby Inquiries).

A licensed Indiana attorney and California Certified Addiction Treatment Counselor, he came to nondual teaching out of his own recovery from addiction, and he is distinctive for translating abstract nondual insight into a precise, repeatable procedure aimed squarely at psychological suffering—the deep belief of being deficient (“not good enough,” “unlovable,” “unwanted”), and the cravings and compulsions that grow from it.

He founded a worldwide community of Living Inquiries facilitators working in over a dozen countries and co-founded the Kiloby Center for Recovery in Rancho Mirage, California—described as the first addiction, anxiety, and depression treatment center to focus primarily on mindfulness and inquiry.

His books include Natural Rest for Addiction (2014), Living Realization, and The Unfindable Inquiry (2018). Kiloby’s place in the Atlas is as the figure who most rigorously operationalized the nondual claim that the separate, deficient self cannot actually be found.

Drawing the “unfindability” move from a rarely-translated school of Buddhism (Madhyamaka) and pairing it with a Gendlin-style attention to the felt sense in the body, he built a looking-practice in three components—words, mental pictures, and body sensations—and the recognition that suffering is these elements “Velcroed” together.

Where Byron Katie questions the truth of a belief and Ramana asks “Who am I?”, Kiloby asks you to look directly for the deficient one among its actual constituents and discover it cannot be located.

He represents the recovery-and-trauma–facing pole of contemporary nonduality: present-moment resting (“natural rest”) as ground, inquiry as the working tool, applied to addiction, anxiety, and the felt sense of lack.