Philip Kapleau (August 12, 1912 – May 6, 2004) was a teacher of Zen Buddhism in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition, a blending of Japanese Sōtō and Rinzai schools.

Kapleau was born in New Haven, Connecticut. As a teenager he worked as a bookkeeper. He briefly studied law and later became an accomplished court reporter. In 1945 he served as chief Allied court reporter for the "Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal", which judged the leaders of Nazi Germany. This was the first of the series commonly known as the Nuremberg Trials.

Kapleau later covered the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, commonly known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. While in Japan he became intrigued by and drawn to Zen Buddhism. Specifically, he attended a number of informal lectures given by D.T. Suzuki in Kita Kamakura. After returning to America, he renewed his acquaintance with D.T. Suzuki who had left Kita Kamakura to lecture on Zen at Columbia University. But disaffected with a primarily intellectual treatment of Zen, he moved to Japan in 1953 to seek Zen's deeper truth.

Ayn Rand ( /ˈaɪn ˈrænd/; born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.

Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two initially unsuccessful early novels, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward she turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected all forms of faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected ethical altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed all forms of collectivism and statism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she believed was the only social system that protected individual rights. She promoted romantic realism in art. She was sharply critical of the philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her besides Aristotle.

Paul Reps (1895–1990) was an American artist, poet, and author. He is best known for his unorthodox haiku-inspired poetry that was published from 1939 onwards. He is considered one of America's first haiku poets.

In association with his writing, Reps was also a well-received artist. Many of his books have artwork influenced by Zen Buddhism displayed in association with his writings.

Reps was widely travelled and spent a large amount of his time in Asia. In Japan, his art was widely accepted and he often went there in association with the displays of his artwork in galleries and to reaffirm his Buddhist understanding.

In the later years of his life, Reps made his home on the island of Maui in Hawaii. In the two years before his death, he lived at the Haven Institute with his friends Jock McKeen and Bennet Wong (McKeen & Wong 1991).

INCREDIBLE -- Incredible as it may seem ... it may seem!.

— Reps ((Wong & McKeen 1995))

Maurice Nicoll (19 July 1884–30 August 1953) was a British psychiatrist, author and noted Fourth Way teacher. He is best known for his Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, a multi-volume collection of talks he gave to his study groups.

Nicoll was born at the Manse in Kelso, Scotland, the son of William Robertson Nicoll, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He studied science at Cambridge before going on to St. Bartholomew's Hospital and then to Vienna, Berlin and Zurich where he became a colleague of Carl Gustav Jung. Jung's psychological revelations and his own work with Jung during this period left a lasting influence on Nicoll as a young man.

After his Army Medical Service in the 1914 War, in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, he returned to England to become a psychiatrist. In 1921 he met Petr Demianovich Ouspensky, a student of G. I. Gurdjieff and he also became a pupil of Gurdjieff in the following year. In 1923 when Gurdjieff closed down his institute, Nicoll joined P.D. Ouspensky's group. In 1931 he followed Ouspensky's advice and started his own study groups in England. This was done through a program of work devoted to passing on the ideas that Nicoll had gathered and passing them on through his talks given weekly to his own study groups.

Sri Anandamayi Ma (Bengali: শ্রী আনন্দময়ী মা Sri Anondomoyi Ma; 30 April 1896 - 27 August 1982) was a spiritual personality from East Bengal. Swami Sivananda (Divine Life Society) described her as "the most perfect flower the Indian soil has produced."Precognition, healing and other miracles were attributed to her by her followers.Paramhansa Yogananda translates Anandamayi as "joy-permeated". This name was given to her by her devotees in the 1920s to describe what they saw as her habitual state of divine joy and bliss.

Anandamayi Ma was born Nirmala Sundari (নির্মলা সুন্দরী; Nirmôla Shundori, English: "Immaculate, Beautiful") on 30 April 1896 to Bipinbihari Bhattacharya and Mokshada Sundari Devi in Kheora, Brahmanbaria District, British India, in what is now Bangladesh. Her father, originally from Vidyakut in Tripura, was a Vaishnavite singer known for his devotion. He had a detached persona. They lived in poverty, and lost many children in their infancy. Nirmala attended the village school for approximately two years. Although her teachers were pleased with her ability, her family thought she was dullminded because of her indifference and constantly happy demeanor. When her mother once fell seriously ill, relatives remarked with puzzlement about the child remaining apparently unaffected.