Lessons In Coming And Going Or Neti-Neti (Not This, Not That) Paperback – October 22, 2025

From the ragged roads of Afghanistan to “forbidden” Lhasa - reached at a time when entry into Tibet was prohibited - and to the sacred waters of the Ganges at dawn, Lessons in Coming and Going follows Rusty Glicksman across three decades of travel 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 inseparable.Threaded through these travels is an ongoing reckoning with Jewish identity, family expectations, love and loss, and the desire to live ethically in an uncertain world. The chapters are anchored in specific places and moments - Tabriz, Bamiyan, Varanasi, Manali, Lhasa, Jaipur - so that each stop becomes both a point 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 principle: a search for meaning through negation, by shedding ideas, identities, and assumptions that prove false when tested against lived experience. Rather than offering answers, the memoir traces 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. Read more