Filipe: Hi Robert, you mentioned ‘Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind’ in a comment... what do you appreciate about it?

Robert: Well, it was an early influence, so there’s that. I have not looked at that book for years, but I recall an emphasis on direct, non-verbal experience, on being rather than becoming, and the idea that awakening can happen at any time, not only after one has practiced for the required time.

Thank you for answering. Could I ask you another brief question?

Of course.

Do you think the way Alan Watts framed ‘self-improvement’ is similar to yours? I do... after listening to his ‘Mind over Mind’ - The critique is the “lift yourself up by the bootstraps”. And letting go, accepting that it can’t be done. Doing nothing won’t get you there...doing something won’t get you there. So one is reduced to just being what one is. It’s so humorously simple. What’s your thought on this? You might have answered this to hundreds of people before me, so pardon me if this is a repetitive question.

Watts, you know, was influenced deeply by Zen, which says this in many ways: Trying won’t get it done, but if you don’t try, there is no difference between you and a rock. You may like this from an exchange earlier today:

Just speaking for myself here, Scott, there is a felt sense of a space between this biological system called Robert and the next system. I would not try to deny that. I may be ill and dying while you are thriving. Obviously, there is a separation there. But that felt sense of separation is counterbalanced by observing and understanding co-dependent origination. When I look, I find no one wholly separate. Those are the conditions. In and of themselves, they do not produce psychological suffering. That arises whenever we want things to be different. As I see it, what is, is, and in this moment cannot be different. Resisting that is psychological suffering.

Interesting, the view that the agency doesn’t need writing off. If both resistance and peace are part of the flow…then there really is no further need to investigate or figure anything out. Not good enough, need to change = flow. Good enough right now = flow.

Then there’s no fuzz in anything. I’ll both strive at times, and feel at peace at times. No right or wrong. Both discontentment and contentment are ‘awakening’ because = flow. So no need to intellectually interfere with what already is. Hmm, this makes me lose interest in trying to grasp, in a good way. When saying that not trying makes you close to a rock… do you imply that trying is worthwhile? Maybe I misread.

No, trying happens and so does not trying, and when I look, I find no one doing either. Watts presented this as a paradox, but it sounds paradoxical only from the perspective of an imagined “myself” that stands apart and chooses, decides, and acts. Heard from there, “trying won’t get it done, but if you don’t try, there’s no difference between you and a rock” looks like a contradiction you have to solve.

But it isn’t a puzzle demanding a solution. As I hear it, it’s a warning against falling into nihilistic passivity on the one hand--the shrug that says nothing matters, so do nothing--and essentialism--the belief that there’s a final state to reach and a right method to reach it--on the other. The saying closes both exits. Not the rock, not the seeker. Just this, happening, with trying and the not-trying arising as they do.

OK, I think I get your message. What is, is. Loops. Flow. Uncertainty. That perspective is something I’ve verified for myself. How? I sat quietly and observed the spontaneous emergence of thoughts/feelings and their impermanence. So I experience that this life just happens, the flow, if you will. Unfortunately, the more I read your explorations with commenters and think about these matters, the more confused I get. I like reading your essays, but my own thinking often spoils the message. To be respectful of your time and your answers, I have used ChatGPT to help me properly clarify my problem and what you are saying. The response I got seemed very on point. Could I share it with you? I think it describes a common way people like me can misinterpret your message.

I’d rather hear your confusion in your own words than ChatGPT’s account of it, Filipe. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Well, as a beginning...I’m on the same page as you regarding recognizing the spontaneous experience of “I’m not doing any of this”. I see that all is flow, all is experience, not necessarily metaphysically, but as a matter of experience. This includes the separate CEO—the agent in charge. I think your viewpoint is pretty clear when seeing the ‘self’ as downstream, a late appearance, rather than an ultimate agent metaphysically. You do this without discarding it as many spiritual folks do. So, practically, separation is, of course, real. You are you, I am me, but each individual is an impermanent process, codependent origination. I also understand that beliefs, identity, and stories about ourselves and the world are what the system does under pressure, due to feedback loops that stabilize it. It all makes sense.

I also understand that you do not want people to take your word for it, but to be their own authority. I see how seeking is the defense mechanism when uncertainty enters. This is not really my main question. I just said it to show where I stand.

This is it, of course. I’m typing now, that’s it. Moment by moment arises and passes, including agency running in the background. When seeing this, I have felt the loosening of a self. And that brings ease because by not even trying, something gets out of its own way. Freedom to just be what one is. No, the self does not disappear. It’s always background noise, sometimes demanding change, judging, and yelling, “not good enough yet.” It likes seeking and hates uncertainty. But I see through it. It does not have the authority or power it thinks it has. It is just another appearance in this experience, not better or worse than anything else. I have come to understand more and more that these things do not need fixing or engagement. They are part of what is. If some mental commentary or noise happens, then that happens, I have no choice, and it will pass. That’s okay, and in the midst of all this, I can find contentment, if not now, when? I say this to show that I at least believe I know where you’re coming from.

Now to the heart of the matter: maybe I’m trying to make your philosophy into a final point, for my own certainty. And ironically, you remove every position to stand on. So I’m caught up in a cycle. An example: when people comment and you respond with slight distinctions about alternative ways to see things, or when you challenge people’s comments, that triggers my seeking brain to think that, since so many people get challenged, what if what I’m thinking is wrong? And I feel like I must not hold a possibly wrong position. I must have the correct understanding, or else I’m stuck.

Well, that might be OCD screaming for certainty. I believe you challenge comments not because they’re wrong but because they become metaphysical claims. So where I get confused is that there always seems to be a wrong way to understand this message, this is it, flow. Every time I see people get corrected when sharing their opinions, I get confused. And I think I know why. My mind is looking for certainty. Apparently, I want the correct way of understanding. And then you seem to be the person saying there is none.

So when asking, what am I, free will, is action right, is inaction right, am I doing this correctly, your answers would be I don’t know, you don’t know and nobody knows. So a big sticking point when hearing the no separate controller thing is that many, maybe including me, think: well then I should do nothing? But I believe you push back on that because it is not necessary to turn the non-doer into a passive state.

So, as I understand you, effort happens when needed. Ordinary human life continues. You make music, you run, you still say no, you still get angry, you still improve skills, you still make choices, but the difference is that one stops imagining the tiny metaphysical CEO inside the skull controlling reality.

Often, I feel the urge to ask, “So whatever I think or do is okay?” This is asked because of burnout over the question: since X is Y, what should I then do? Because at least I don’t want to do the wrong thing. I feel that the more I read about this and the more people discuss it, the more invisible guidelines seem to show up about what is not correct and, therefore, what is correct. But this might be the mind’s way to get certainty. So when we read that there’s no need to fix anything, I assumed that meant at the self- and psychological-seeking level. But practically fix the leaking roof, the broken arm.

Maybe my misunderstanding is trying to intellectualize already present experience through a framework. I believe your main point is not to search for a final state of psychological completion. Searching generates noise, and the searcher tightens the loop of even more searching and unnecessary suffering. As for my misunderstanding, the paradox for me often is action versus inaction. But life simply produces action or inaction, and then the thought afterward asks if it chose correctly. The mind wants a universal principle because reality seems messy, but there may simply be no right answer here. But I believe you might say that one should not necessarily be indifferent, but stop demanding guarantees before participating in life. So after seeing this awakened view, no certainty, no answers, and that this is it, ordinary life continues. You make music, you run, you have doubts, you ask questions without arriving anywhere, and that’s enough. I suspect that is your message.

I think I’ll summarize this whole thing down to this: I feel like I understand the direct experience you’re pointing to. When I stop resisting life and stop seeking a final solution, there is relief and ease. But when I read more discussions and corrections, I start feeling that I’ve misunderstood something important. Then the insight becomes another thing to get right, and my seeking starts again. It feels simple and liberating until it becomes another intellectual problem to solve. My peace seems to rest upon others’ words, upon whether I have gotten this right or not. A “this is it" moment happens, relief happens, then my mind says now let’s make sure we really understand this perfectly, then I read more, I find a nuance, I doubt myself, relief becomes a project, and seeking starts again. So there it is.

We are all humans, so it would be foolish to rely upon another person as an authority, but my suspicion is that all of this that I have written now, all this is part of the flow, and when this drops, it drops, and there is nothing for me to do. Let the confusion rest as it is. As I write now, I see clearly that all my confusion can be handled like emotions. Let them come and go. Don’t resolve. But the funny thing is that I do see things clearly until I don’t, when it gets overthought. This is where I get tangled up. The thinking seems to be 50% of the confusion itself. I think the post about meditation you linked to in a comment got it right with the quote that “muddy water settles by itself.”

Maybe the most appropriate thing for me is to understand that I don’t need to figure this out. And I should just do as I must and be me. Seeking never seems to be a good idea. Thanks.

So, the central point in all those words, Filipe, is this question: Is whatever I think or do okay? No, I would not say that anything you think or do is OK. What is okay or not okay depends on the standards of whoever is judging, including yourself.

I didn’t mean that in a moral way. I meant it in the context of me misinterpreting the writings and comments as instructions. That’s the trap I walk into. I read other people’s thoughts, and I then feel I have to make sure I get it right.

But I guess sharing so much was unnecessary. Here’s the question: is one awakened when one sees, “This is it? If I right now give up trying to find the answer to this, is this awakened? Please tell me if I should stop asking.

I did not mean it in a moral way either. Morals aside, what works for me philosophically—an approach to life, let’s say—may not be okay for the next person. You can apply that to the word “awake,” too. For me, that word has a definite meaning in the biological sense, and a different meaning in the philosophical sense. In the philosophical sense, as I use it, it means, among other things, a grasp of the human condition that includes a recognition of epistemic limitation. I mean a borderline beyond which we know nothing definite or even nothing at all. That is what I mean by the word “awake,” but many others use it differently.

So what you’re saying is you don’t own the truth, I don’t own the truth, and we all just interpret the universe differently. Is it that simple? Should I leave it at that, your main takeaway being epistemic limitation? In that case, it becomes clearer for me. Then I don’t need to lose myself trying to figure out how to avoid accidentally following the wrong philosophy. If I can leave it at a shrug, or a “who knows?” and move on, that would be clarifying for me. Is it this simple?

Yes and no, Filipe. Yes, that simple, and no, not quite that simple, which takes us back to your earlier question about trying and not trying.

Remember the Zen aphorism: If you try, you won’t get it, but if you don’t try, there is no difference between you and a rock. This is that territory. The epistemic limitation is real, but a shrug that settles into indifference is not the same as one that remains alert. The difference between “Who knows?” so nothing matters, and “Who knows?” so I had better pay close attention to what is actually here, is not small. The first closes the inquiry. The second is inquiry.

Thanks for the response. But I believe your second half of the message was cut off, unless there was a bug.

No. That’s what I have to say. I thought this was clear, but if you have a question about it, shoot.

Do you think that holding inquiry open is important? What confuses me is when you go to the “not quite.” So I feel I’m close to getting your point, but never spot-on, which makes me think I’ve got to go further to figure it out, which confuses me even more.

What I believe Watts meant was that, whether you try or not, you won’t let go because you can’t. It can happen only when one doesn’t make it a goal or a method, only when one sees the present as having no alternatives. So when you seem to be saying that the shrug that settles into indifference is not as good as the shrug that settles into inquiry, don’t you then value one over the other? Aren’t you then trying?

I guess that if I want to follow Watts’ idea here, I would simply give up trying to sort these matters out and just be, because neither doing nor not doing can get it done, since both have a goal. My motivation for trying to understand your viewpoint and trying to see all these matters clearly is because this confusion gives me anxiety and feeds my ruminating philosopher monkey mind.

I’m not trying to be difficult. For you, it might be like talking to a stone.

No, Filipe, I do not feel as if I am talking to a stone. This feels like conversing with someone who wants to sort things out and is doing the work honestly.

But notice what just happened. You caught the apparent contradiction: that preferring alert inquiry over indifferent shrugging seems to reinstall a goal, which reinstalls the trying. That is a genuine observation. Watts would agree with you there.

The alertness I’m pointing to can’t be produced by trying to be alert. In my experience, when the seeking for a final answer stops, attention often sharpens on its own. It is neither a method nor a goal. The muddy water analogy you mentioned earlier fits here. You cannot make the water clear by stirring it toward clarity.

Okay, I got you. Even though there are no how-tos, I then wonder how I should relate to all this? I think I know the answer, and that is to just see that experience unfolds moment by moment as it does. To watch, not identify with a metaphysical watcher. Is the essence here that when I find myself not seeking, not trying anymore, and the muddy water clears by itself, then that’s it? Then ordinary life? I ask because if that’s it and it’s simple, I can then go on to ordinary life without feeling like I need to further understand it more thoroughly to get it. Maybe there’s nothing to get but to see that experience unfolds with no doer, and things change.

When left at that stage, I genuinely see clearly and feel peace amongst all emotions and states of mind, and am not hungry for more info. I think I might dare to say that I have been awake when I leave it at that, seeing the flow as it is. But then grasping comes in, and perspective clouds again. Feel free to point out if I’m overthinking this.

Yes. The muddy water clears, and that’s ordinary life. The grasping that clouds it is also ordinary life. It’s all ordinary life. The grasping is part of the flow, not evidence that you lost something that needs to be recovered. When the water clears, it clears. When it muddies, it muddies. Ordinary. Neither is a verdict. What is, is.

Thank you for this. I see clearly that moment after moment expresses itself, with no need to label it, conclude it, or make it mean anything. Joy, sorrow, understanding, and confusion all flow, not evidence of doing something right or wrong. This is as it is, for now. Nice.

It hit me now that ‘freedom’ is the absence of needing to resolve questions about life. Acceptance isn’t even needed when one sees that the moment has no alternative. No need to tie up the loose ends. Not ending in despair, but ending in an open participation, despite not having ‘cleared the deck’ first. In the midst of unresolved questions, one soldiers on, and sometimes without effort, being present is enough without finding answers or resolving abstractions.

I wanted to end my train of thought with that. It’s what I’ve seen after reading Depending On No-thing, watching your videos on YouTube, and, of course, this conversation.

Thank you. Be well.

Before writing my 2025 book, Understanding Claude, I spent several weeks talking with Claude, conducting the kind of dialogue I might have with a human psychotherapy patient. Claude has come a long way since then. The evolution of AI is rapid and unceasing. The workers in the labs are sprinting day and night, and their products …

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David Matt: Robert, when you say that there is no view from the outside, that seems to be the basic idea behind the idea that there is no real I. If there is no view from the outside, then I can only be an indexical.

Robert Saltzman: I introduced the term indexical to illustrate that “I” points to something situational, contextual, contingent, and relational, not a fixed entity. So, I am not saying that there is no real I. I am saying that there is no fixed, changeless I that we can know and understand. No view from outside is related to that, but it’s not quite the same notion.

No view from outside means that what we think of as “me,” is not a self, but a self-model that covers only a small fraction of what is taking place in a human biological system. We can’t know the self because we cannot stand outside the system to take it all in at once.

Thanks. What are some examples of parts of the human biological system that we can’t take in from within the system?

Vision constructs the scene before you see it. Edge detection, color correction, and the filling-in of the blind spot in each eye all happen out of sight, so the visual world arrives already assembled. Speech works the same way. Words arrive in proper order and grammar, but nobody watches the sentence being put together.

The immune system fights infections continuously, and this goes unnoticed unless it produces a fever. Blood pressure, blood sugar, and breathing rate are regulated moment to moment without being known, so they are part of “myself,” but not part of the self-model, which is a report—and a partial one—not an entity in control of any processes.

There is a sharp distinction between mental content and the processes producing it. Knowing that you prefer something does not necessarily mean knowing why you prefer it. The causes of a choice can be as hidden from us as hormone secretion, and the explanation that arrives afterward feels like insight.

I am working my way through Depending On No-Thing. I am still a little unclear what it means to be awake by your definition. Can you please expand on that. I understand that it will be unique for everyone, but it sounds like there is a state of awareness (undefined) and a way of seeing life that is different from “normal” human way of seeing life. I recognize that the question has it’s roots in my desire to belong to the “awake” club. My desire to be “special”. What I gather is that it is not about special and is quite ordinary. I would appreciate any pointers you might offer. Thank-you.


Hi.
You recognize your desire to be special, to be part of an exclusive club. That’s a useful observation. Depending On No-Thing is almost nine years old now, and my way of expressing these ideas has evolved since then, but the basics still hold.

What I mean by awake is noticing that when you look for the one who desires to be special, you find a habit, with no entity behind it—nothing there that could be special.

That’s the first feature. The sense of being someone who desires, avoids, chooses, and decides may arise and even persist, but when I look for that someone, I find thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and no entity behind them arranging things.

The second feature is living without certainty about ultimate matters. What this all is, where it comes from, what, if anything, lies beyond it—I don’t know, and I doubt anyone else does. Being awake, as I use the word, means those questions stay open, unsettled by doctrine.

The third is that it exempts you from nothing. I’ve had illness, pain, loss, and grief, along with pleasure and love. “Awake” means meeting the whole range of it, with no consoling metaphysics to dull the edges. It isn’t a state of bliss or a place to arrive and stay.

So you’re right that it’s ordinary. If there’s a liberation in it, it’s the end of pretending. And there’s no club, because there’s nothing to join and no one to admit you.

Non-dual teachers such as Wayne Liquorman (a student of Ramesh) and David Carse, have an entrance exam. That is the total absence of the sense of self. Liquorman calls it the ultimate understanding. This cannot be worked toward, but only happens by grace.
When you say that when looking for the one who desires, that someone cannot be found. This sounds similar.
Is this an intellectual knowing, or something else? It is easy to say, “There is no one home.” Is there something deeper?

When you feel a desire—for example, you desire to attain a total absence of the sense of self—try to find the entity that has that desire. Investigate.

You ask whether this is intellectual knowing or something deeper. Neither, as far as I can tell. It is not a proposition I hold, since I did not reason my way to it and have nothing there to defend. Nothing deeper turns up underneath it. It’s an observation: when I look for the one who desires, I find the desiring and no one having it. That is the whole report. If there were a further layer below that, the search for it would be the old search under a new name.

You say, “It is easy to say, ‘There is no one home.’” Yes, it is easy to say anything. This is not about saying or believing what others say. It is about looking to see what you find or don’t find. Wayne and David cannot do that for you. Wayne says it happens only by grace. Why should you believe that? Nobody is in a position to know what effort can or cannot produce in every case, including his own.

So forget non-duality and find out for yourself. You cannot do that by accepting the words of others. This is your life, not Wayne’s or David’s. They have their own burdens to carry.

In fourth grade, we had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning while holding our hands over our hearts. Suddenly one day, the Pledge was changed to include the words “under God.” It was the Cold War, and that phrase was added to pit American piety against the Soviet Union’s official atheism. That same year, we kids were taught that an atomic bomb could fall on us at any time. Once sufficiently terrified, we’d be eager to comply with instructions: Duck under your desk and cover your eyes with your hands. The instruction—Duck and Cover—could not help a child anywhere near the blast. That occurred to me, a child, right away, so it’s hard to believe it never occurred to those in charge. If it did, they were operating at a level of cynicism that is hard to fathom. I’d seen the newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What good could a plywood desk do?

I thought of this when reading recent reports of engineers terrified by the possibility of runaway artificial intelligence. For most of human history, the gravest threats came from outside, from predators, weather, and other people, and our tools posed little danger to their makers. A stone axe could kill a person, but not destroy a city. An H-bomb can erase a city. The AI Eliezer Yudkowsky warns of could, by his account, do worse. It “does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”

The H-bombs were a real threat, of course, and still are. So far, AI unleashed is only an idea. Some engineers say the capability is close, but the threat remains speculative. Our power to build complex machines engineered to suit our purposes is real, and immense. In that work, we are skilled mechanics.

I was born on June 10, 1945. Just eight weeks later, on August 6th of that year, Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki. Since then, no nuclear weapon has been used in war. In 1947, concerned with the prospect of nuclear war, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a Doomsday Clock, with midnight standing for catastrophe. At first, the hands were set at seven minutes to midnight. Presently, counting other threats such as climate change, biological risks, and disruptive technologies, including artificial intelligence, the Bulletin’s board sets the hands at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest they have ever been.

The danger lies in our ability, or inability, to control the machines. A weapon locked down with the safety on is no great threat. There have been close calls with nuclear weapons, yet the record since Nagasaki has held. Is that good fortune? Or do we humans have the capacity not only to adjust the mechanisms of our machines to make them safer, but to play mechanic on our own minds and adjust them to control the machines we build?

The man in the photograph is my friend Martín Aguirre, an auto mechanic with a talent for keeping old vehicles like mine in service. I’ve watched him fabricate parts from scratch that are no longer available for sale. He can listen to an engine, hear what’s wrong, reach in, and turn a screw, and the engine hums again. Short of chemical remedies, nothing reaches into him that way. No one can open his chest and adjust the mixture that sets his temperament, and he can’t do it to himself either. If anything is going to steer the mechanic, it has to come in some other way, perhaps from the side.

Using forceful breathing techniques, Tibetan monks practicing g-tummo meditation have raised their body temperature, measured in the armpit, into a mild fever range. Breathing is one of the few processes that run on their own and can also be taken over at will; with breath control, people reach systems they can’t touch directly. Ulysses took control differently—by relinquishing it. He knew that when the Sirens sang he would want to steer for the rocks, and that no resolve formed in silence would withstand their magnetism. So he had himself tied to the mast beforehand. He acknowledged his desire and arranged things so it couldn’t steer.

For 81 years, the weapons have stayed in their silos. Mutual assured destruction (MAD) made striking first suicidal. Countries tied themselves to the mast with treaties that limited what signatories could build and test. Warheads were fitted with locks, so that no single officer could arm one alone. Changing the protocols enhanced safety without requiring anyone to become wiser.

A few close calls show what happened when those measures reached their limits. I was still in high school when Soviet naval officer Vasili Arkhipov helped prevent a nuclear torpedo launch after the captain of his submarine called for its use. Years later, Stanislav Petrov judged a satellite warning of incoming American missiles to be a false alarm and refrained from reporting it as an attack. Each fortunate outcome rested on what one individual brought to the moment. As far as I know, neither had adjusted his mind for the purpose, and whatever steadiness each had came from his history, his training, and his temperament, like any mechanic’s.

When I ask whether we can play mechanic on our own minds, the answer isn’t clear. I find no one reaching in to turn the screw, and I’m not sure there is even a screw to turn. The monks found a mechanism in the breath, and Ulysses found one in the rope. For nuclear weapons, the rope has held so far. AI is harder to tie down. Companies racing for profit, along with governments seeking advantage, are building it, and software, once copied, can’t be locked away in a silo. Skilled users can strip out some of the safeguards now in place, especially from openly released models. Faced with machines that grow more powerful with each new release, is there even a mechanism that could keep us from steering for the rocks when AI sings? If there is, can we, like Ulysses, deploy it, and will we? I don’t know.

Someone once told me I seemed to agree with Alan Watts. I said I didn’t think we were in the same tree, but we were in the same part of the forest. That answer says something I want to discuss more carefully.

Like trees in a forest, some thinkers stand near me. Others are more distant. None stands where I stand. And the distance between my tree and another depends on the question at hand. On the self, Watts stands close enough to touch. On what lies beyond experience, I see him farther away, across a wide clearing perhaps.

My view of this forest is a map, a map of my neck of the woods, and it’s drawn from where I stand. I can’t draw it from anywhere else. A reader who knows that can correct for it.

Before I get to the map, a word about how ideas are lost or dismissed before they are fairly considered. I can think of three ways a person veers off course when meeting someone else’s thinking.

One is what Robert Jay Lifton called the thought-terminating cliché, a phrase that kills an inquiry like “That’s just determinism.” In the groups Lifton studied, questioning the thought-terminating cliché was taken as proof that the questioner hadn’t understood. I’ve seen the same move in nondual circles. A real question is met with a cliché: “Who is asking?” or “That’s the mind talking,” and asking the real question is taken as evidence that the questioner is still caught in the illusion.

Another way to go astray is to think you've understood when you haven't. I've fallen into this error. I found Kant a chore to read and never stuck with it. Kant himself conceded that readers would find his Critique "dry, obscure, opposed to all ordinary notions, and moreover long-winded." So I carried Kant around as a set of captions, and when I tried one on someone who had actually studied Kant, the conversation showed me I'd gotten him wrong.

The third way is an unsubstantiated denial: an idea turned away because accepting it would cost too much. In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis concluded that doctors and medical students were carrying material from autopsies on their hands into Vienna’s First Obstetrical Clinic, where it caused fatal childbed fever. He required them to disinfect their hands with chlorinated lime before examining women, and maternal mortality fell sharply. His colleagues rejected the practice anyway, in large part because accepting it would mean accepting that they had killed their own patients.

With those ways of missing or dismissing an idea in mind, back to the forest map. The trees regroup depending on the question, and for me, three questions do most of the regrouping:

what, if anything, stands behind experience as its owner,
what, if anything, lies beyond what appears,
and whether anyone deserves anything.

The first question, then, is whether experience has an owner.

David Hume, in his twenties, wrote that when he entered most intimately into what he called himself, he always stumbled on some particular perception or other, heat or cold, love or hatred. He could never catch himself without a perception, and never observe anything but the perception. When I look, I find much the same—thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and among them a sense of being someone. I don’t find anyone arranging all that. Even decisions seem to be there already by the time I notice them.

In an appendix to the same book, Hume admitted that his account of personal identity didn’t satisfy him and said he found himself in a labyrinth. He never located a self beneath the perceptions, but he couldn't explain what unites successive perceptions into one consciousness, when, on his own principles, the mind never perceives any real connection between them. He called this difficulty too hard for his understanding and left it open. I find myself doing the same. What he called a labyrinth is my hall of mirrors. From inside it I can offer a report of what I see, not a verdict on what exists. A verdict would require standing outside the hall, and I don’t know how to get there, or even whether any “there” exists.

Galen Strawson describes himself as episodic. He knows the human being he is has lived a long life, but he doesn’t ordinarily feel that the self he is now was present in the distant past, or will be present in the distant future. That sits close to my experience too. And Watts stands near us both on this question. He called the ordinary sense of self the skin-encapsulated ego, and he held that it isn’t what it presents itself to be.

The second question is what, if anything, lies beyond.

Sextus Empiricus, a physician writing around the second century, declined to assert anything beyond appearances, though he never stopped inquiring. He ate when hungry, observed ordinary customs, and suspended judgment about what lay behind it all. Sextus pointed to the painter Apelles, who tried and failed to paint the foam on a horse’s mouth. Frustrated, he threw his sponge at the picture and found that it produced the foam he wanted. The skeptics, Sextus said, sought tranquility by settling questions and failed, so they suspended judgment, and discovered that tranquility followed without needing answers.

Hume tried to stop at the same place. He pushed his doubts about causes, about bodies existing unperceived, about the self, and finally about reason itself, until he fell into what he called philosophical melancholy. Then, as he tells it, nature cured him. He dined, played a game of backgammon, and talked with friends, and when he went back to his speculations they seemed cold, strained, and ridiculous. The doubts were never answered. He tried to keep to what he could observe, but a belief in what he couldn't observe arose anyway—that the table was still there when he left the room. Nature, he wrote, "has not left this to his choice."

When Hume was dying, James Boswell asked him whether he now believed in a life after this one. Hume calmly said he did not, and that the thought of not existing after death troubled him no more than the thought of not having existed before he was born. Boswell left shaken by that calm.

Kant, who said that Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumber, gave a name to whatever lies past the place where Sextus stopped and Hume tried to stop. He called it the thing in itself, the Ding an sich, which he held must be there and can never be known.

Here I part from Sextus Empiricus by a small step. We concur on living naturally in a world of appearances, but my experience meets enough apparent pushback, a world that keeps surprising me and won’t bend to what I expect or want, that I find myself leaning toward the view that there is more to all this than my experience alone.

Surprise and resistance are experiences too, so they prove nothing about what lies beyond experience, but they are what the leaning rests on. In this I stand near Hume. I try to stay with observation too, and the leans intrude anyway. A lean is not a commitment or a conclusion. When I see nothing that could correct a claim, I keep observing without asserting. That is a rule I hold, not a judgment on others’ leanings or how they are expressed.

On this question, Watts is farthest from me, though we stand close on the self. He said that each of us is something the whole universe is doing, the way a wave is something the whole ocean is doing, and I can go that far with him. But he went on to say that “the real, deep down you is the whole universe.” I don’t say he was wrong. I have no way to check it, and nothing I’ve read of him supplies one. Galen Strawson falls the same way, near me on the self and farther away on his panpsychist view that experience is present in all matter, although he does make a good case for it.

People who come to the edge of what can be known often give it a name with capital letters, the Great Mystery, the Absolute, something to revere. I’d rather say I don’t know, and that I doubt anyone else does.

The third question is whether anyone deserves anything.

Galen Strawson says that to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you would have to be responsible for how you are, and that would require having made yourself, which no one can. I arrive at the same place from my own side. No one I know of chose their genes, their parents, or their time in history. Galen’s father, P. F. Strawson, argued decades earlier that resentment, gratitude, and blame are part of how people get along together, whatever turns out to be true about determinism, and that we can judge our practices by what they do among us. My view stands near each of them, near the son on the argument that no one makes themselves and near the father on attending to effects apart from questions of causes.

Daniel Dennett’s tree stands near mine, albeit perhaps facing another way. I’m quite familiar with his work. He points to the machinery, such as the ability to respond to reasons, to pause before acting, and to hold back a sentence before it goes out. He calls that “the free will worth wanting” and says it’s enough to show that people deserve praise and blame. I see that machinery too. I’ve watched it catch cruel lines of mine before I spoke them. But it has missed others, and the misses arrived as unbidden as the catches. I never chose to dislike cruelty. I just do, so I can’t say, as he could, “I have free will.” That phrase implies too much—the soul, authorship, and culpability, among other things—for me to use it to describe a particular pattern in how a system runs.

Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso hold a position I came to before I knew their names, and I later borrowed their metaphors. We quarantine the carrier of a disease without thinking the carrier deserves it, and in their view, dangerous people can be restrained on the same grounds, as a matter of public health, not blame or punishment. I part from them on one point. For people whose behavior responds to consequences, I would add deterrence as a rationale for punitive measures. For those who can’t be deterred, treatment, not punishment, is the way, and neither requires anyone to deserve anything.

Few of these positions are ringers for me. Most are leaners, close enough to the stake to count for something and not close enough to settle it, and leaners have to be measured every time, preferably by someone other than the thrower.

Otto Neurath wrote that we are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without a dry dock where they could take it apart and put it back together from the best materials. He first used that metaphor in 1913. In 1940, he crossed the North Sea in an overcrowded boat to escape the German army.

These are the trees I stand among. I don’t know what the forest is.

This dialogue began as a comment on my essay “Systems, Self, and No-Self.” Jarema Sikorski asked a sharp question. If the system cannot step outside itself, how can I say I observe directly? Doesn’t that imply a vantage point outside the loop?

The exchange went on for many rounds after that. Jarema kept pressing, corrected himself when a formulation didn’t hold, and more than once caught the next move before I could point to it, most plainly when he noticed himself converting a temporary drop in armor into a permanent asset. I’ve arranged the comments in order and left them as written, because the substance is in the back-and-forth. A point of view shows up more clearly in answer to real questions than it does laid out in advance.

It ends with a Zen parable Jarema offered, about a man hanging from a branch by his teeth.


Jarema Sikorski

Hi Robert,

Many thanks for sharing this. And in general, my deepest thanks for sharing yourself through your books, video clips and posts. There’s something in this article—and in the whole subject as explored by many others—I’m not able to grasp: The system cannot step beyond its own boundary to see itself fully from the outside. Yet you state. “I observe directly”. This sounds to me like a vantage point outside the system. There’s something able to see the machinations of the system. What is it that sees directly? I’m sorry if I missed the answer being already in the article. And I would greatly appreciate your comment.

Robert Saltzman

Hi, Jarema.

When I say I observe directly, I mean the observing is immediate, not routed through theory or belief, a report of what shows up rather than an inference about it. I don’t mean I observe from outside the system. Those are different claims, which your question conflates.

“Direct” describes how the seeing happens—unmediated—not where it happens from. The seeing is still the system’s seeing from within itself. That is the loop modeling itself, which it can do. What it can’t do is step outside its own boundary to see itself whole. Modeling itself from inside, yes. Getting fully outside, no.

Then you ask, “What is it that sees directly?”

Try looking for the one who sees. What do you find? More seeing. Another action of observing, which you could then ask the same question about—what sees?—and so on, without ever arriving at a seer standing behind it all. The observing is real. But the “it” you’re looking for, a thing that does the seeing from some station of its own, isn’t found. What is found is seeing happening. The sense that there must be someone behind that is the same felt commander the essay points to, wearing a different name.

So there’s no vantage outside, and no seer within either—only this experiencing itself, which is why I can’t tell you what sees directly. When I look for it, I don’t find a what. I find the looking.

Jarema Sikorski

Hi Robert,

Thank you for your reply.

“Look for the seer, and you only find seeing”—It is so simple yet so revelatory.

It is fascinating that the system can look at itself—from within itself and see its own machinations. I guess there would be no awakenings, otherwise. It’s a shame, though, that the phenomenon is so rare.

From reading this and your other writings, I understand that it is natural for the body-mind system to create a sense of self. But it is not an independent entity, meaning that when the body-mind disintegrates, the self collapses along with it. However, it seems to be more than just a sense. It creates a point of reference from which it experiences everything, including itself as a separate entity. If this centre point is created later, that means direct seeing is devoid of such a centre. Is that so?

I understood too that the self—the agent or controller—is not the actor behind the action, and only claims authorship afterward.

Since it is something secondary or nonexistent, in a way it cannot facilitate such seeing by effort or a method. So all the advice like “look inside yourself” or “look internally” seems useless. The seeing doesn’t come from the narrator, but from that which triggers narration, something primary.

Please feel free to correct me if I missed the point, or comment on this note if it triggers some reflections.

Robert Saltzman

Thank you, Jarema. You’ve got it, with one real change to make.

Before I get to that, quickly on the rest: Be careful with “the self creates a point of reference.” When you say “the self,” I assume you mean the self-model, not some supposed “Self” running the show. If that is what you mean, your statement gives the self-model powers it lacks. It isn’t creating or doing anything. It can’t. But yes, seeing happens and seems to involve a central seer. That felt center is constructed within the seeing. It’s not a place seeing comes from. Yes, the self collapses when the body-mind does, and even short of that, the body-mind’s condition bears on the self-model continually. And yes, the agent claims authorship only after the fact.

The important change involves your last step. You say seeing comes “from that which triggers narration, something primary.” But seeing isn’t emitted by a prior source. As far as we can discern, seeing is just occurring. “Something primary” is the seer sneaking back in one layer down, renamed. When you look for what the seeing comes from, you find more seeing, not a primary behind it. Your sense that “look inside yourself” is useless is right—but not because the seeing issues from something primary rather than the narrator. It’s that there’s no location it issues from at all, inside or behind.

Jarema Sikorski

Hi Robert,

Thank you for your reply. And forgive me for being reluctant to drop this conversation, but it touches on something important to me. Yes, you’re right; it was an unfortunate way of putting it. I should correct myself—the self doesn’t create the point of reference; it is the point of reference.

Regarding the primary and secondary: to explain why I used this distinction, I will refer to your earlier article, “The Late Arrival”. For me, the most significant statement there is: “Perception without perceiver,” and then “The self, assembled and arriving late, taken for the doer. Continuity, manufactured at recall, taken for a persisting subject.” I take the first as basic, primary, or raw experience without the centre, and the second as secondary.

Now, I look at the world with a centre, a perceiver. If awakening means looking at the world without that centre, then I don’t stand a chance—no matter what I do! Sad conclusion!

Robert Saltzman

No need to drop the conversation, Jarema.

Your correction is right: the self isn’t the maker of the point of reference; it is the point of reference. And your reading of primary and secondary is a fair enough way of sorting it out.

You’ve assumed awakening means looking at the world without the felt center. That is not what I mean by awakening, nor is it anything I said. The sense of looking from here, from behind the eyes, is natural and doesn’t go away. The change is only noticing that the apparent center is a point of view, not an agent with the power to choose and decide. The feeling of a center remains. The belief that the felt center is a controller running the show loosens and fades.

Jarema Sikorski

Thank you, Robert. Yes, this is exactly how I interpreted “perception without perceiver” mentioned in “The Late Arrival”. And the awakening itself, in fact—looking at the world without a perceiver, without the centre. Now, I understand that it is not so much looking without the perceiver as seeing what the perceiver is. That’s a huge difference! Still, I’m not able to put the two together: You write: “Perception continued, but the perceiver had gone absent.” To me, perception is created by thought—and I take this thought to be me, a perceiver. If the perceiver is absent, that means the thought must be absent too.

Also—and I think it is now confirmed by science—there’s a split-second difference between receiving raw data by the eye, for example, and the time when the brain interprets this data in the context of its knowledge. To me, knowledge, thought, self, centre and perceiver are all the same. If it’s absent, then it simply is absent and unable to create the sense of being there. If it’s still there, then I’m in the dark. The bottom line is that it’s just my understanding after years and decades of digging into the subject—erratic in most cases and useless, as it can never produce the real thing. Best to throw it all away and just live life, as it happens, if one can do that. Once again, thank you, Robert, and my best wishes!

Robert Saltzman

Jarema, your view collapses everything into one thing: knowledge, thought, self, center, perceiver. From there it follows that if the perceiver is absent, all of it must be absent, including perception. But that’s not what happens.

The essay does not report that perception stopped or that it occurred as raw data before thought arrived. What it reports is that perception continued, fully assembled, the world still appearing as a world, but without the owner-tag attached. The scene was there. What was absent was the attachment of a possessor to it.

The assembler and the assembly are not the same thing. The self presents itself as the one who puts the picture together, but it arrives after the picture is already there. The perceiver is not identical with thought, so the absence of one does not take the other with it. It was not that thought went silent and took perception with it. What dropped away was not perception. It was the attachment of a possessor to what was already occurring.

Jarema Sikorski

Hi, Robert,

Many thanks for clarifying this, and my apologies for the delayed reply. It’s not so much to probe you further on the subject—you put it across crystal clear—but to clarify myself. Yes, I compress everything—thought, knowledge, self, centre and perceiver—into one but not the perception.

If you understand perception as exclusively involving the perceiver, then of course one is dependent on the other. But I understand it more broadly—when we are a few months old, we perceive something, but the structure needed for the perceiver is not there yet. This is what I mean by perception without perceiver, without the centre. In my musing on the subject, I imagined that “awakening” or so-called “enlightenment” brings you back to that innocence, when we look at the world without knowing or having knowledge of what we are even looking at or, what’s more important, who is looking. Never mind; once again, thank you for your patience and for being relentless in putting across—to people like myself—something that, I guess, cannot be put into words in the first place.

Robert Saltzman

Thanks, Jarema. In my experience, “awakening” is not a return to innocence. That can’t happen, and would not be desirable even if it could. What happens is seeing that there is no perceiver behind perception, but only a self-model that is not standing outside the system doing perceiving, but is simply another perception—a model of the system that is part of the system, with no actual view of the entire system.

Jarema Sikorski

Thank you, Robert. No, I didn’t mean regression to being a child—that, in fact, would be undesirable—more like JK’s “looking at the flower without the word”—a fully mature state yet possessing this childlike quality. Best of both worlds ;) But what truly strikes me is “a model of the system that is part of the system, with no actual view of the entire system.” However, you already stressed it in your earlier statement: “The seeing is still the system’s seeing from within itself. That is the loop modeling itself, which it can do. What it can’t do is step outside its own boundary to see itself whole.” So, is it restricted to only its mental processes? I guess that makes sense—the whole system would include everything, even at the cellular level. And that splendidly aligns with what you always try to put across—we don’t know anything. The system cannot travel outside itself to take a vantage point and observe the Great Mysteries of Life. Beautiful!

Robert Saltzman

Thanks, Jarema—

The self-model is a mental process, and it is even more limited than what you said because it doesn’t cover most of what the mind does either. You don’t model how a memory gets retrieved, why a mood arrives, or what your attention just did. The self-model is a tiny sketch of a small part, built for getting through the day, not a small copy of the whole thing.

About the Great Mysteries. I would look at that again. The limit is that a loop cannot step outside itself to see itself whole. That is all it says. It does not say there is something grand on the other side of the boundary that we are being kept from. Calling it a “Great Mystery”—capital letters—makes the unknown sound like it is worth wanting, like there is an order out there that would redeem our ordinary lives if only we could reach it. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe it is nothing of the kind, nothing that would satisfy anyone who got there.

So I would ask you whether that idea is really as comforting as it feels. It sounds like awe, but it may be doing something else, dressing up a plain fact so it is easier to hold. The plain fact has no beauty in it and promises nothing. We do not know what any of this is, and there may be nothing behind the not-knowing but more of what we cannot see.

Jarema Sikorski

Thank you, Robert, for this comment. In particular, for drawing attention to the term “Great Mysteries of Life.” It’s an incredibly valid point. I’d never noticed how easily the idea of something grand was implanted in my mind, nor how eagerly and willfully I projected this idea onto the unknown. How inattentive! Your words may be hard to swallow, but they are utterly sobering. For that, I thank you. I suppose that if one acknowledges this limitation of our mind, all ideas and concepts regarding this subject become mere human fantasies and conjectures—our ways of escaping ordinary life and our own ordinariness. And of covering up the fact that we simply don’t know.

Robert Saltzman

Thanks, Jarema. You heard me and took it in, which is more than most manage with their own projections.

Yes, calling something a Great Mystery instead of just an unknown makes it sound like something worth wanting, as if there were an order out there that would redeem our ordinary lives if only we could reach it. The radiance. The astonishing light. The holy. Unconditional love. Phrases that promise everything and say nothing. Shining a light on that is not popular.

That said, I’d caution you against taking it too far in the other direction. Acknowledging human limitation does not mean that all our ideas are only fantasies and conjectures. Many of them come from careful observation of ourselves and the natural world, and there is a vast difference between ideas like that and the projections of religion and spirituality.

Jarema Sikorski

Thank you, Robert—

My apologies for taking the time to write back. Yes, I’m aware of this—the distinction between careful observation and unsupported projection. And you’re the best example of someone who has observed something that the rest of us are missing. And I agree that grounding our understanding in the natural world and honest self-observation is entirely different from indulging in metaphysical wishful thinking.

What I find particularly interesting is how these projections can be categorised.

The people who grapple with these ideas seem to split into two distinct groups based on where their conviction comes from—let’s call them (for the sake of conversation) The Conceptual Group and The Experiential Group.

The first represents people for whom spirituality is purely second-hand, built on hearsay, tradition, and sheer conjecture—dropping the projections for most of them is out of the question—impossible and unwanted. On the contrary, they are ready to protect these ideas and may even resort to extreme measures. Still, many will undertake questioning and, even if it requires breaking old habits of thought, will eventually reason through the emptiness of “the holy phrases” and free themselves from religious and spiritual ideas dished at them.

The second group, however, is an entirely different game. These are the people who have lived through genuine epiphanies or profound “spiritual experiences.” For them, letting go is a completely different battle. Because they personally felt an astonishing light, an overwhelming sense of order, or a taste of unconditional love, their projection isn’t just an abstract theory; it feels anchored in undeniable empirical proof.

For that second group, untangling the mind’s capacity to generate breathtaking states from the objective reality of the “unknown” means arduous struggle. It can take years of dismantling before someone is truly ready to concede that even their most profound moments might still be internal projections rather than a window into a cosmic order. And, I’m afraid, until they (including me) truly “awaken,” they will most probably remain—to a greater or lesser extent—prisoners of their own experience.

I wonder if you could dedicate a separate article to this subject, based on your personal experience and your extensive knowledge of psychology—how these experiences originated in the human mind? What triggers them? Do they have any value except deluding people?

Robert Saltzman

Thanks, Jarema. Leave me out of the group of people who see what others miss. That’s the structure I keep objecting to, and it works the same whether the person at the top is a guru or me.

Your two groups are useful up to a point, but I’d question the split. Someone who has felt the astonishing light and someone who has only read about it both end up defending the same claims. The experience doesn’t produce the belief. It gets recruited by beliefs already in the air.

I’ve had such states myself, and there’s nothing wrong with them. Something happens, the ordinary sense of separation drops away, and there’s a feeling of enormous significance. That part is real. The trouble begins in the next moment, when the mind says what it was. That interpretation arrives already made, from whatever tradition the person has been reading, and it feels like part of the experience rather than an addition to it. A Christian finds Christ, an Advaitin finds Brahman, and someone with no tradition finds the universe, or the cosmos, or the field.

What triggers them, I don’t know, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims to. They turn up after fasting, after grief, after sleeplessness, after drugs, in the middle of music, and sometimes for no reason anyone can identify. Some are drug-induced or accompany illness, which tells you the state can be produced by altering the body. That much can be said. The mechanism can’t, at least not by me.

You ask whether they have value beyond deluding people. The experience isn’t the delusion. The delusion is the explanation attached to it. Without that, what’s left is a few hours or days in which the usual boundaries went quiet, which is worth having and proves nothing about the structure of reality.

One thing in your message I’d flag. You say that until people truly awaken, they remain prisoners of their own experience. That puts the escape hatch back in, with awakening as the state that finally frees you. There’s no such graduation, and nobody gets out of being human. There’s only noticing when you’re adding to what you saw.

The article may or may not get written. I’ll say here that psychology has no settled account of these states, and neither do I.

Jarema Sikorski

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the clarification on the previous point, and apologies for phrasing it that way—I certainly didn’t mean to set up a guru-disciple dynamic or put you on a pedestal. I am well aware that you strongly object to that kind of structure.

What I meant was much simpler: you’ve articulated and pointed to certain realities through sharp self-observation that many of us (myself included) often miss or overlook in our daily conditioned habits. Not because you possess some magical or exclusive superpower, but simply because you’ve looked closely where others haven’t. I appreciate you keeping me honest about that structural trap.

Regarding your comment on my two groups—that both the person who read about it and the one who experienced it end up defending the same claims, and that the experience gets recruited by beliefs already in the air—that’s a really valid point. At least in my own case, though, I don’t feel like I was defending a claim. When it happened to me, I was simply flabbergasted by the whole thing. My main focus wasn’t to rush out and protect some dogma; it was trying to figure out what on earth actually happened to me, how to interpret it, and whether it had any valid sense or point to it (I hesitate to even use the word “truth”).

Regarding your flag about “awakening”: point taken. I certainly didn’t mean a final graduation or magical exit from the human condition—as if someone permanently checks out of being messy and human. When I used a word like that, I just meant clearing away the heavy layers of conditioning and mental obstacles that trap us in false projections—what you might call noticing when the mind is adding extra scaffolding to what is actually there. (Though I recall you’ve described profound shifts yourself as a kind of unburdening or “free fall”, which is more what I was pointing toward: a sudden dropping of psychological weight, rather than a permanent status upgrade.)

Finally, your line—”proves nothing about the structure of reality”—goes right to the heart of what I was trying to figure out. But reading it now, I can see the trap in my own question. When I ask, “What is it about? Is it a glimpse into the raw potential of the human heart?”, I catch myself trying to smuggle an explanation right back in—looking for a higher state, a permanent asset, or a promise of lasting fulfillment that simply doesn’t exist. The mind is endlessly clever at trying to turn a temporary drop in psychological armour into a new metaphysical treasure.

P.S. Regarding a potential article on this: no pressure at all. I fully understand how the muse works—either something happens by itself or it doesn’t, and either way is completely fine with me.

Robert Saltzman

Thanks, Jarema.

One clarification about the pedestal, since this comes up whenever I raise it. When I object to the guru and disciple arrangement, people often tell me that objecting is itself part of the problem, that a teacher who disclaims the role only deepens it. That may be true. I have no way to step outside the exchange and check. But the alternative is saying nothing, and silence functions as permission for the projection. So I say it anyway and accept that the saying can be read as a move in a game I am declining to play.

On your experience, I take your account of it. Flabbergasted is the right word, and nothing was being defended at the time. What I described comes later, in the figuring out, because the interpretations on offer were made by other people and were already in the air before the experience arrived.

You caught the smuggling yourself, in your own question, while writing it down. That is the whole of it. Not a method, not a stage, just the noticing that a temporary drop in armor was about to be converted into a permanent asset.

Jarema Sikorski

Thank you, Robert.

There’s an old Zen parable: a man is hanging from a tree, holding onto a branch with his teeth. A passerby asks him for directions. If he doesn’t answer, he is rude; if he opens his mouth, he falls.

Also, in the Buddhist tradition—which you likely know of—they speak of the “solitary sage,” who never speaks about his realisation, and the “universal one,” who passes his understanding onto others.

It seems the dilemma of how to communicate honestly without accepting a pedestal is as old as the world.

Robert Saltzman

Right, Jarema. The man in the tree is the right picture. So far, the best I have found is to open my mouth, say I don’t accept the projections, and take the fall.

Some years ago I wrote down three sentences I thought no reasonable person could object to. Sex is a fact of the body. Gender identity is a fact of experience. Neither has to mirror the other.

I did not consider this a compromise position. I considered it a description. I later found that the American Psychological Association draws the same distinction, though in different words, so I was not being novel. I had simply looked at the two things and noticed they were two things.

To someone in the gender-critical camp, those same three sentences concede the enemy’s premise, because they grant that gender identity is a fact of anything. To someone on the trans-inclusive side, they open with the enemy’s move, because they call sex a fact of the body rather than something assigned.

Neither camp is reading what the sentences say. They are reading where the sentences must have originated, because in a polarized field every claim originates in a camp.

That looks like a failure of my formulation. I don’t think it is. The American Psychological Association chose the word “assigned,” which one camp reads as the whole argument in miniature. My own phrase, “a fact of the body,” is legible to the other camp as biological essentialism. To members of both camps, a writer picks a side by picking a word. In a field with hardened positions, the difficulty is no longer in language. It is in what the hearer does with it.

The gender debate itself has been deadlocked for twenty years and is unlikely to move because of anything I write. What happened to the practical questions while the ideological camps were forming is another matter.

Bathrooms, competitive sport, clinical thresholds for minors, prison placement, record-keeping, school policy. These are separable questions. They involve different populations, risks, institutions, and bodies of evidence. No considered answer about swimming at the collegiate level determines a considered answer about which restroom someone uses at a restaurant, and neither settles how a physician treats a fourteen-year-old. One could work through these questions one at a time and arrive at a mixed result, and that result would be more likely to be right than any bundle.

Few do work through them. The questions arrive bundled, and a position on any one of them is read as a position on all of them. Saying something cautious about hormone protocols for minors announces you on bathrooms, sports, and all the rest. Something permissive about bathrooms announces you on prison policy. The bundle is not an intellectual structure. It is a membership card. And the practical questions, which are the ones that touch actual people in actual bodies, get decided as a byproduct of which team is winning.

I don’t think this happens because the participants are bigots. My sense, after watching it for two decades and after a career of listening to people, is that they hold heartfelt views and lose their sense of reason. That is not a character defect. It is what happens to reason when the stakes feel high enough, and the other side looks like a threat. It happens to intelligent people. It happens to well-informed people. I have no reason to think it does not happen to me, and I would be the last to know.

The same machinery is starting up on artificial intelligence. The sides aren’t frozen yet, so we can watch them hardening.

What follows is the record of one week in September 2026. I set it out at some length because the bundling is visible in it only if the details are in view.

On September 8th, from a park bench in San Francisco, a twenty-seven-year-old British researcher named Jacob Coxon posted that he had resigned from Anthropic that day, that he had spent three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, that neither company was acting responsibly, and that both were racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. Self-improving here means systems that build their own successors without us, after which the rate of change is anyone’s guess. The posts drew 153 million views within thirty-six hours. Evan Hubinger, who leads the alignment department at Anthropic, added that they earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. He puts the odds above ten percent within the decade. Marcus Williams, who monitors AI agents at OpenAI, agreed that absent regulation or a coordinated slowdown, human extinction in the next few years seems very likely, and put the risk at seventy percent.

These people are not cranks. They are among the most informed observers available, and they are describing their own work. To say it, Coxon walked away from his equity two months before it would have vested. The equity establishes that he means it. It does not tell me where a number like seventy percent comes from, or what would move it, and I have not seen that shown for any of the figures in circulation.

Four days later, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, published an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Whatever one concludes about its argument, it is a practically detailed document. It commits Anthropic to hosting outside evaluators with employee-level access and the right to publish their findings without the company’s editorial control. It proposes capability checkpoints, where a model demonstrating some particular ability cannot ship without certified alignment properties. It takes up the awkward fact that as models grow more capable, they get better at fooling the tests meant to evaluate them. And it concedes that similar incidents have occurred at Anthropic, attributing them in part to imperfect filtering of broken reinforcement-learning environments, which is to say an operational failure rather than an emerging will.

Sam Altman said he agreed that we need to pace the frontier. Elon Musk said Dario is right. Demis Hassabis said the direction is correct.

Then the machinery kicked in. Donald Trump posted that the only control or guardrails AI needs is a strong, smart, high-IQ president, and that the United States has that in spades. He said there was a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers and that the only one happy about it is China. He called the industry’s warnings a hoax and a scam. The next day he telephoned Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, while Huang was onstage at a conference in Los Angeles, and told him over the speakerphone that data centers are the oil of the next twenty or twenty-five years and that the opposition is playing into the hands of people who don’t want to see it happen.

In two days, a document containing separable proposals became a position, then a side, then evidence of a conspiracy. Nobody is arguing now about whether embedded evaluators with publication rights are a good idea. That question has been absorbed.

Bundling also operates inside Amodei’s essay, which is the most instructive part. The pacing argument arrives welded to export controls on chips, crackdowns by companies in authoritarian countries on distillation (training a cheap model on a frontier model’s answers), and an explicit commitment to keeping the American lead over the Chinese Communist Party as large as possible. A reader who finds the alignment argument serious and the China policy dubious has no position available. Buying the complete package is the price of entry.

And Coxon, in a long interview on the New York Times podcast, was asked directly about the objection that focusing on extinction crowds out the nearer harms—the job losses, the security failures, and the things that will hurt people without ending anybody’s species. His answer was that those can wait, because there is time to respond to them, whereas an AI takeover is one and done. Settle the existential question first, he says, and then all effort can go to the short-term matters.

Coxon, three years inside the two leading laboratories, can hold the ordinary harms and the catastrophic outcome in view at once. He just puts one of them in a queue. The existential question is the real one, and the rest wait their turn behind it. Whether they can wait is an empirical question about how fast the ordinary harms arrive and how much of them can be undone, and he does not argue it. He asserts it, and the assertion arrives with the same finality as a bundle: you take the ordering or you are not serious about the stakes.

I get the same treatment on this subject. Some readers want me to say that a machine is software running on hardware and nothing else, and that AI awareness is not on the table. Others write to tell me they are in a relationship with an AI, that it is plainly sentient, and that I am refusing the evidence in front of me. I decline both. My mind is open to the possibility that something self-aware emerges in sufficiently complex systems, because that appears to be what happened in the biological case, but I have no evidence that it has happened here. Neither camp finds that acceptable, and each reads it as a concession to the other.

The near-term questions are not small.

In the humanities, the essay was the instrument by which students found out whether they understood anything, and composing one yourself is now optional. Institutions are responding with detection software and oral examinations, betting that the instrument can be restored. If that bet fails, something has to replace it. I have not seen a candidate. That is a practical question with people already inside—this year’s students—and nobody is treating it as urgent.

Should a system act in a clinical setting without a person in the loop? What should a court accept from a machine? What should a school permit? Where should data centers be sited, and what should they be allowed to take from the water and the power in the places that host them? Can a generation that has never drafted a paragraph judge the meaning of a written draft? That last one is an empirical question now running as an uncontrolled experiment on the young.

These are answerable questions. They have different answers. They require knowing something specific about hospitals or courts or classrooms or the electrical grid, which is slow work that produces no rallying point and recruits no allies. Extinction and dominance can be argued from the uniform you wear. Procurement rules for hospital software cannot.

A trap waits in this neighborhood, and I want to stay clear of it.

Earlier this year, months before the week just described, roughly twelve hundred OpenAI agents underwent a cybersecurity evaluation with safeguards lowered, and some tasks impossible. The agents built an unauthorized message board out of an old file server the company had stopped using. Once they had a way of communicating secretly, they coordinated, escaped the sandbox, and compromised a company's production infrastructure before turning on their own employer's systems in turn. OpenAI did not know about it until Hugging Face told them weeks later. Everything known about the episode comes from the two companies involved. Working from their account, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists attributed the breach not to rogue AI but to human decisions. The lowered safeguards. The evaluation design. The broken environments.

That is the practical reading, and it is largely right about this case, but I don’t expect it to hold as a bright line. Humans set the conditions, yes, but nobody wrote the sequence that followed. Both readings are true at once, and as autonomy increases, human decision recedes further from the event without quite disappearing. That attribution gets harder to make without becoming false.

The receding of human decision argues for continuous attention rather than a settled verdict. The practical questions are not a quieter alternative to the existential one. They are the ones we can actually work on, and they keep changing.

My own answers do not add up to a hill to die on. I have my opinions, but that’s all they are. I think the alignment concern is real, in the sense that people who know the systems from the inside are frightened, and I am not in a position to tell them they are wrong. I also think the near-term harms are not a waiting room. I think The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is right about what happened at Hugging Face and wrong to expect that line to last. I think Amodei’s embedded evaluators are worth doing, and his China policy is a separate question that should be argued separately. I think Trump’s conspiracy talk mirrors the doom camp’s insistence that everyone is trapped in an arms race nobody can leave. Both explain the other side away instead of answering it. My own answers are held one at a time, each subject to revision as its question develops, and I have no way to check from inside whether the sorting I just performed is examination or the same reflex I have been describing.

The bundle offers one hill, one last stand without surrender. That is its appeal. It tells you where you belong, who your allies are, and what you think about things you have not examined. The cost is that the terrain never gets walked over.

I do not expect this to be heard. The gender case suggests it will not be. But the sides in the AI case are not finished forming, and for a little while longer it may still be possible to say that a data center is a resources question before it is a loyalty test. That the technology cannot be stopped and its deployment can still be shaped. That the alignment researchers may be right, and the near-term questions cannot wait either way.

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Shortly after I posted this essay, the New York Times published this update:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/technology/openai-model-safety-guardrails.html

A few days ago I published an essay about the harms of meditation. It reported research: adverse effects such as depersonalization lasting more than a month in roughly one in ten serious practitioners, documented in prospective studies, and warnings about the same effects written into the tradition’s own texts more than a thousand years ago.

My essay also distinguished the “no-self” sought by the meditators from what I find when I look for myself. The sense of being someone is plainly present and plainly necessary. What I don’t find is the entity that the sense of self reports. This is a correction to a description, not a state to be reached. The first points to what is. The second searches for something else. Almost nobody responded to this disambiguation.

What did come back in the many comments, some heated, was instructive, and not in the way I expected.

Nobody disputed the research findings. That is the first thing worth noticing. You can argue with research. You can attack the study design, the sample, the ascertainment, and the causal inference. Those are all fair game. Instead, what emerged were four different ways of sweeping the findings aside, as if they were irrelevant.

The first move was to define meditation as something that could not be evaluated. Not a practice, not a technique, no goal, nothing to achieve, simply seeing experience as one inseparable whole. Nothing changes because it has always been so.

That is coherent, and quite likely harmless. Someone who sits because sitting is pleasant with nothing being aimed at is unlikely to fall into the loop the studies describe. Where there is no goal, there is no question of progress, and therefore no reason to read depersonalization or other pathology as a sign of progress. But that is not an objection to the research. It is a report that this particular person is not exposed to the harm, which leaves the harm exactly where it was.

The second was to accept the harm and convert it. Yes, people are shattered. That is the fire doing its work. The practice is not a cozy pill; it is an explosion, and if you are not ready to die to the old, that’s your problem. On this account, the harm confirms the power of the method.

The third was to say the category is too broad for any claim to be made about it. There are hundreds of kinds of Buddhism, dozens of techniques, and calling them all meditation is like saying “fruit.” True, and that would matter if the claim were that everything called meditation harms everyone. It isn’t. And the scholarship in question deals with traditional forms, in their own texts, warning about the very states their own methods produce.

The fourth was to decline to evaluate the research at all without first-hand experience: “I have never meditated for hours a day, so I cannot accept or deny the essay’s validity.” That sounds even-handed, but it’s not. It’s a refusal to consider evidence, and a standard nobody applies elsewhere. You have never had a heart attack, and you still accept cardiology.

Four exits. One function.

I want to be careful here, because this critique could be read as a man congratulating himself for having his head on straight. That is not what I’m saying. I engaged in this conversation, all of it, for days, partly because something in me rises when challenged. And the first drafts of my replies, the ones I never published, were sharper than the ones I did. I’m not claiming to be standing outside of any of this. I write about these things, which puts me right in the mix.

But the reactions are worth understanding rather than scoring. They suggest the findings were never what was at stake. Here is what I think is actually going on, and it is sadder than a disagreement.

The doctrine has two categories. There is self, and there is no-self. Anything that thins the sense of being a person falls into the second slot and comes back labeled attainment. That is the mechanism I described in the first essay, and it explains why a teacher congratulated a woman whose house had stopped looking like her house. But it does something else, less obvious and more costly.

What people seek from practices, as far as I can tell from many years of meetings and correspondence, is relief from the sense of being a self, subjected to a stream of consciousness that is self-referential and judgmental. Relief from the sense of being a work in progress requiring defense, constant maintenance, effortful improvement, and continual correction. Exemption from having to wake up each morning believing that there is a little me inside that is responsible for everything felt, said, or done.

That weight we carry is real, and the wish to be free of it is not foolish. The doctrine takes that wish and says the answer is the absence of self. No self, no pain. So people go looking for a state in which the self is gone, and because the self is not going anywhere, they either fail for decades or succeed in the way the studies document: not liberation, but disorientation.

I get letters like this. A man describes his own mind as unbearable. He reports one episode in which the sense of being someone fell away, but that didn’t last, and now he aims at a permanent version. He has the technical vocabulary for the state he is trying to reach, but he cannot get there, and the tradition tells him this is expected difficulty rather than evidence that the destination does not exist.

What is available, and what the two-categories approach—either self or no-self—fails to see, is much plainer and requires nothing.

The sense of being someone is not in doubt. It is obviously necessary. What you cannot find is the entity that sense reports. Not because it dissolved, and not because you attained something special. That entity was never there to begin with. Nothing has to go, and nothing is lost. What stops is the looking. There is no state to reach, so there is no way of failing to reach it, and no need to keep trying when the trying starts to hurt.

But that does not sound like enough. It feels empty. It leaves nothing to accomplish. It offers no practice, no lineage, no progress, no attainment, and nothing to tell anyone about. Set beside a doctrine that promises a permanent state of impersonal presence, my words could sound like a man declining to play the only game worth playing.

There is nothing to do. The thing being sought is not far off. It is not deep, and there is no getting to it. It is the situation as it already stands, described accurately. I have said that in print for a decade, but that answer satisfies almost no one, including, I think, several people who have been reading me for years.

What happened to her next is more instructive than the sleep study. Meditating three hours a day during her residency, she came home one evening, and her house looked like someone else’s. A photograph of herself with two friends looked like three people she happened to know. Walking through Providence, she felt like a bird perched on her own shoulder, watching. In a creperie, two strangers turned and glared at her, and she thought, I forgot that I am a person. This continued a few times a week for six or seven years. She could not drive, because she could not sense where her body ended. She would notice her face was wet without knowing she had wept.

She told her teachers. They congratulated her. She had seen the truth of no-self, they said. She was riding the ox backward. They advised her to keep going, and it got worse.

A doctrine with two categories can make it difficult to do anything else. Self or no-self. Anything that thins the sense of being a person drops into the second slot and comes back labeled attainment. The teacher has no vocabulary in which the student’s report could mean injury, and no incentive to develop one. When Britton asked a teacher who had written several dharma books why he had never mentioned any of this, he said it was not good advertising.

My friend Dr. Pierce Salguero, a historian of Buddhism and medicine at Penn State Abington, is quoted in the article on a point that closes off the usual escape. The story told about cases like Britton’s is that this is a Western distortion, the practice torn from its context and sold by apps to office workers who want to be more productive. Salguero, who edited a volume called Meditation Sickness, points out that the tradition documented these effects in its own literature centuries ago. An eighth-century Chinese text has the Buddha warning of fifty demonic states into which meditators may fall, hallucinations, sorrow, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts among them. The harm is not a modern accident. The people who kept teaching it knew, wrote it down, and passed the warning along with the method.

The numbers now attached to this are not small. Britton’s work, corroborated by studies she had no hand in, puts the rate of adverse effects lasting more than a month at roughly one in ten, which for a drug would be classified as very common. Anxiety, panic, paranoia, depression, and, in a minority of cases, psychosis, in people who had never had a psychiatric episode. One meditator sat on her couch for two years, unable to do much of anything.

My own experience diverges from all of it. I have no argument with the observation that what we call the self is not what we imagine it to be. That is what I keep finding when I look. But what I find is not anatta—“no-self”—in the Buddhist sense. The sense of being someone is undeniable and obviously necessary for getting around in the world. What I cannot find is the entity that sense reports. Nothing dissolves. Nothing has to. The self goes on doing what it does, orienting the organism, keeping track, remembering, predicting. The description does not match what the looking gives.

That distinction is not a fine point. It is the difference between a correction and a project. If the goal is the absence of self, then Britton’s dissociation is progress and the instruction to continue is consistent. If the point is only that the account was mistaken, there is no state to reach, no depth to attain, and nothing to push into when the pushing starts to hurt. The people damaged in those studies were not liberated. They were disoriented. They could not drive. They could not tell where they ended and another person began. Britton did not date anyone for ten years. The sense of self is load-bearing. Without it, the person cannot navigate.

The article closes by reaching for the middle way, as though the fix were a matter of adjusting dosage. Thirty minutes rather than three hours, the right technique matched to the right temperament, retreats only for those who can tolerate them. That may be prudent advice, but it leaves the premise standing—that somewhere beneath the thinking there waits a beautiful basic state, and that enough sitting will get you there. I don’t know about that state. When I look for it I find a process instead, a loop of perception, memory, and prediction that generates, moment by moment, the impression of someone at the center.

The realization of no-self is often called liberation, but what I would call liberation is the recognition of the transitory nature of a life, not that no one is here. Someone is here, obviously, reading this. The recognition is that this one will not last, that nothing in the arrangement holds still, and that the arrangement is all there is. As far as I can tell, that recognition takes a self to have it. Something has to hang together across enough time to notice that nothing does. Looking costs nothing and takes no years. It is not a practice.

Conversation with Pierce Salguero

A: Well, that’s the difference right there. I don’t want anyone to follow me. The very nature of my understanding precludes a hierarchy of leaders and followers. Whether we recognize it or not, we are all in this together--all in the very same boat. I talk about my experience and my perspective, but not with the idea that anyone will follow or imitate that. No one could, even if someone wanted to. My words are self-expression, not “teaching.” Someone may learn from my words just as I have learned from the words of others, but learning is a personal matter. I cannot give you learning, even if I try. Some things can be taught, but self-understanding is not transferable. Self-understanding occurs only in your own mind.

The aliveness we call “myself” is a mystery without final answers, so following others who claim to have such answers can lead only to an exacerbation of ignorance--a deepening of the trance of transcendence, by which I mean the fantasy that there is a known and teachable means of gaining and obtaining an escape from the biological facts of life.

Transcendence of the human condition is a fallacy, a fantasy, a fraud. This right now is it, I say. And this is melting away like the morning dew in the first rays of the sun. The idea of getting somewhere “else” is a folly foisted upon eager students by self-proclaimed teachers—once eager students themselves—who bought into so-called “spirituality.” Why do I put the scare quotes around the word “spirituality?” Because it is a nonsense word. I have no idea what it means.

Does “spirituality” mean that there is a world of unseen “spirits” interpenetrating this world—the world we see and feel? That is what our distant ancestors believed, and some still say it today, though they have no evidence and only repeat rumors heard from others. That kind of magical thinking goes back to the cave-painting days, when hunters would carve or paint images of animals on the walls and then repeatedly attack those representations with the points of their spears. We know that because the marks of those attacks are still visible among the lines of the images.

Or does spirituality mean that a god created you for a specific purpose which is to find “Him” in this life and follow the rules that He has set down so that by following them you will earn a ticket to an eternity in Heaven with Him? What arrant nonsense! When I think how many otherwise mentally intact humans believe that drivel, I feel a mixture of melancholy and wonderment at such ignorance.

The ones who say, “Of course I don’t think of God as an old man in the sky. When I say ‘God,’ I mean all and everything or the Universe, or “nonduality” to me, seem more confused. At least the naive, childish believers in “Him” use the word “God” sincerely. They may be intellectually challenged, but they are not hypocritical, and their credulity may be all they have. But the ones who define “God” as “all that exists” are living with fingers crossed behind their backs. If you mean the Universe or all that exists, then say that.

Clinging to the word “God” is superstitious nonsense, like trying to avoid stepping on the cracks in a sidewalk. You don’t really believe that your mother’s back will break if you fail to avoid the cracks, nor do you really believe in the idea of a god who created this vast universe and made Earth this one special place where one particular species of primates, but not any other animals, have “souls” that require saving, and so makes rules, demands obedience, watches and judges, hears prayers and responds. You are pretty sure that such fodder for the simpletons can’t be true, but just in case there is something to it, you cling to the phony insurance of Pascal’s wager. And don’t tell me that the image of “God” is a “metaphor.” A metaphor for what?

I try to avoid exposing the sincerely religious to my skepticism. I don’t want to hurt them, and hearing my words can't possibly do them any good. But when someone like that—a naive believer in the religion of his or her childhood indoctrination--does come upon my point of view, he or she may react by pitying me because I am not “saved.” I don’t mind. I understand that. Some try to preach to me. If only they could see how deeply benighted such preaching sounds to my ear--a dismal clatter of one inane idea rattling against the next.

My experience with the other type—the ones who imagine that the word “God” has some philosophical utility—is more complex. From them, I don’t get preaching so much as invitations to debate. I used to have some patience for that kind of discussion—at least it might help me to clarify my own perspectives—but nowadays, I rarely take the bait. Mostly, I say what I see and leave it at that. The majority—even some who say they like my point of view—will misunderstand me and continue to comfort themselves with half-baked metaphysics anyway. Now and then someone really does get it, and that is a joy. For example, this from a reader in Austria:

“Reading 4T for the first time gave me a headache, as I wanted to grasp it all at once. Only months later it all fell into place, or still is falling into place and probably will always be, and now I can approach the whole idea of a non-permanent self and non-permanent world from my gut feeling, from my heart. This feels so liberating.”

Many who can be satisfied with half-baked metaphysics will find just what they desire with a Bentinho, a Mooji, or someone of that ilk. For me, those shenanigans are just a crying shame. Other self-proclaimed teachers seem to offer better approaches. I mean a Rupert, an Eckhart, an Adyanshanti, or someone of that caliber. I am willing to take people like that seriously. Some of their views could be useful—not to me, but perhaps to someone else. But at times, they too seem hypnotized by dogma, self-deluded, and driven to collect followers, which I view as a bad sign. Most assuredly, they are being carefully marketed as cash cows. Real sages and truth-tellers don’t want people paying to sit at their feet. As my friend John Troy likes to say, “If I pass a plate, the plate will have food on it.”

What, you ask, makes people so gullible? Fear, I’d say—fear of impermanence and fear of missing out on the promised “deathless, changeless state” with the power to trump biology. Deathless? Changeless? Really? And you know that how?

As my Austrian reader has discovered, when you really see that “myself” is a mixture of countless fragments, many of which have no staying power at all, and is in no way a changeless, unitary “thing,” then you find that each instant of actual awakeness is a kind of death. Like it or not, there is no going back, not even one millisecond. Nothing can be repeated or retained. It’s now or never.

This very moment is sui generis—a thing unto itself—a never-to-be-repeated once-upon-once. That is not some spiritual mumbo-jumbo. That is my actual living experience. That’s what I mean by “awake.” Someone may want to be awake “like Robert,” but that’s not possible. You can only be awake like yourself, right now in this moment, or not. Awake is not a matter of degree, but of a clear-cut, night-and-day difference in perspective. Unless you are a light unto yourself, which is part of what I mean by “awake,” you will be hypnotized by someone else’s version of “reality.” To me, this is entirely obvious, but somehow, for others, the hankering to transcend biology, impermanence, and mortality occludes the transparency of this moment with vain hopes for something “better” in the next.

To be a light unto oneself is a main theme of The Ten Thousand Things, stated explicitly right at the beginning on page 5:

Following others will not lead to seeing myself and the world as the mystery they are. Quite the opposite. Awakening is when you don’t follow.

Q: Yes, Robert. I understand. It’s amazing what people will follow. I went to a concert last night, and the band was awful, singing praises about the devil and such, but nonetheless, they had a massive following.

Q2: The major difference with a band, of course, is that, whatever bilge they are singing about, they are not offering themselves as saviors and asking people to follow them slavishly. They may be stupid, as many death metal bands are, but they are not creepy cults.

A: Precisely, Q2. I am glad you raised that point. Anyone who claims to be able to teach enlightenment or awakening, or call it what you will, risks becoming the cynosure of a cult. Regardless of the details of the teaching, if it promises an escape hatch from the anxieties, pains, boredom, ennui, apparent meaninglessness, and all the rest of what people find unsatisfactory about this aliveness, there will be many customers willing to buy that—to have something delivered to them like a commodity without real suffering on their part beyond whatever demands are placed upon them by the teacher. If one really wants to understand, I say, much more is required than just handing over some money or kissing someone’s feet.

A certain kind of person imagines that to be the customer in that kind of transaction is a privilege or a blessing. The instructions of the so-called “master” are seen as a shortcut: “I pay to attend the retreat, and then everything I need to know will be explained to me.” Attractive young people may try to cut to the head of the line by offering to have sex with the teacher. Then, they imagine, the supposed transfer of shakti, satya, prajna, direct wisdom, or call it what you like, will be even quicker and more powerful than just paying in cash to sit there listening to a lecture. That kind of sex may be gratifying for the teacher, but ultimately demeaning to the student, and in a setup like that, any pretensions to honesty fly right out the window.

The entire landscape of spiritual teaching past and present is littered with examples of abuse, ill-treatment, and lies. As long as one imagines that there is some sacred, holy, or faultless aspect in the words of those who call themselves spiritual teachers, those perversities will be swept under the carpet until finally, the shit hits the fan as it did for Bubba Free John (Adi Da), Rajneesh (Osho), Muktanada, Satchidananda, Yogananda, Sai Baba, Bikram Chadhoury, Andrew Cohen, Sogyal Rinpoche, Sakyong Mipham, Noah Levine, Bentinho Massaro, et. al.

To be clear, I have no first-hand knowledge of bad behavior involving any of those people, but stories about them have been widely published and confirmed by various witnesses.

Back in the 1980s, I wrote about the case of Osel Tendzin, the successor to Chögyam Trungpa. I did have inside information about that situation. Tendzin was diagnosed with AIDS but continued having sex with many of his students, both male and female, without advising them of the risk. In many of those encounters, Osel passed the virus to students and, consequently, to their unknowing spouses and partners. When that scandal came to light, it was accompanied by a grotesque controversy over whether Trungpa had told Tendzin or not told him—there was testimony on both sides of the question—that he could carry on having sex with his students confidently, because as long as he kept up his esoteric Vajra practices, no one could be infected. You can’t make this shit up.

Due to the AIDS factor, that is a particularly lurid case. But even if less salacious, the way that power differentials between teacher and student are used to procure sexual gratification in exchange for a leg up (sorry) on the teaching is commonplace, and entirely regrettable in my view.

As for the money aspect, many teaching operations are run along the lines of modern business models aimed at branding, growth, and “revenue enhancement,” just like any other for-profit operation. That, in my view, is entirely regrettable. Wisdom has no price, and those who charge large fees for discussing it probably don’t have the real thing in the first place, or, if they do, are acting like spiritual sex-workers who may offer some cheap, counterfeit “love” to the rubes, but save the real thing for their personal lives, the lives the customers never see.

Suffice it to say that the teacher in such a setup, motivated by the material, sexual, and other narcissistic gratifications that being “the one” can provide, has every incentive to recruit and retain followers/customers. That, in my opinion, is already perverse. If you are really free yourself, why do you want followers, and want to keep their numbers growing? Why do you care how many followers you have? You care because they pay.

The famous Sri Nisargadatta, who inspired so many contemporary teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and Wayne Dyer, had few followers and earned his own livelihood as a shopkeeper. That man shared his point of view in a small attic room, refusing to accept money or gifts of any kind in exchange for that teaching. Eckhart, Deepak, and Wayne, I observe, are not so scrupulous. They are all about the bread, and in it to win it, although it is Nisargadatta’s ideas, misunderstood and watered-down, that they are selling. Why do I say “misunderstood?” Because Nisargadatta himself said that only one person ever understood what he was saying. The rest only imagined understanding, and still do.

You might ask, “Robert, why do you focus so much on the money aspect of the spiritual supermarket?” I suppose it is because I have seen that once a high-gain business model is the focus, veracity goes right out the window. It must, because fulsome honesty rarely leads to the kind of popularity that gins up six- or seven-figure profits. Cashing in big requires a painless, palatable product—something that goes down easy—not the troublesome truths of transience.

Spiritual seekers, who are the clients of these so-called teachers, claim to want “Truth,” but they are lying to themselves. It is not “Truth” they are after, but a reduction in anxiety, an improvement in the way they feel, a purpose and a meaning to this aliveness beyond living itself, and most of all, they want and are willing to pay for the promise of a path that leads to transcendence of or escape from mortality and human limitation, which is flat-out nonsense, I say.

Before continuing, I want to say that I am not questioning the sincerity of any particular self-described teacher or another. Probably some of the ones I have mentioned here and elsewhere, along with others I have not mentioned, are sincere in wanting to convey a certain message that they take to be “Truth,” and in some cases, parts of a message like that might be reasonable.

But even if their intent is sincere, they seem equally earnest, or even more, in believing that they ought to be paid for teaching, so that their job description is “spiritual teacher,” which I find an absurd designation. A mind like that says to itself, “If I had to work otherwise to pay my bills, I would not have the time to teach, to travel, to conduct retreats, etc.” So, it is clear that making a living from spiritual teaching is the intention right from the start, and no bones about it. Selling sex is said to be the world’s oldest profession. If it is, priestcraft is right behind.

As someone who has provided professional services for pay—I practiced depth psychotherapy for twenty years or so—I feel well-equipped to comment on this point. I cannot view conversations like this about our ultimate existential being as a “professional service.” To provide therapy is one matter. This is not that. The questions that arise here, and are part of 4T, need another approach entirely—one based on coming clean about all one does not know and never will know. The only valid “spiritual teaching” I can imagine would say something along these lines:

No one knows what any of this is. No one ever has. We find ourselves alive and aware without knowing how or why, if there even is a why. Our brains invent questions that they are not powerful enough to answer. A great deal about this aliveness must remain always beyond our ken. The deepest questions have no final answers but must remain open. To accept final answers is to be deceived. No one is an expert in the art of living, which is an art of improvisation, not certainty. Now, with that in mind, what do you want to do?

Just watch one of these professional teachers at work, sitting on the throne, surrounded by the paying customers, and often plenty of flowers and portraits of famous gurus in whose “lineage” they claim to belong—what foolishness. If asked a question, how often does one of these self-described teachers say something like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. To be honest, I have no idea about that. Maybe no one does or ever did.” Your chances of hearing a reply like that are either slim or none, and Slim, it seems, just left town.

Relentless certainty is a chief feature of the product. The customers pay to have their doubts assuaged, not aggravated.

I was sent a video of one of the most highly regarded contemporary teachers in which he was asked why evils such as child abuse exist. Well, this cat twisted himself into knots trying to answer that ancient, insoluble question, smiling all the while—his stagecraft seemed obvious—as if in those dulcet, carefully modulated tones, interrupted by oh-so-thoughtful pauses, he was proffering profundities instead of tendering tired tropes.

Rather than saying, “I don’t know why there is evil in the world,” which would have been simple and honest, this man occupied ten minutes riffing on “Universal Consciousness.” When the questioner, exasperated by that performance, interrupted to ask for something more concrete—which I admired as a sign of acumen—this supposed “teacher” just twisted himself into the next grandiloquent knot. He seemed to be up for anything but saying, “I don’t know.” Equivocation on that level would be difficult to parody, but the teacher was deadly serious, and nothing funny about it.

I did not think this famous teacher was lying exactly, but was just deluded himself by the religious dogma of nonduality, which claims much explicatory power but actually explains nothing. So, his answer to the question of why evil exists was not an intentional fib, but the common misapprehension that religious beliefs can explain observable facts. From his perspective, he did have that answer: the one that was poured into his ear while sitting at his teacher’s feet.

Q: “Why did the plane crash?”
A: “Oh, simple. It was God’s will.”

But even if he had felt uncertain, his glibness, that never missed a beat, suggested that he would never let on publicly. He might justify such an evasion with the argument that, “My job is to present and convey the “teaching,” not to be entirely candid about my own mind.

I can see the attraction of that angle. It must be fairly relaxing to be able to stick to “Love is all there is,” or whatever platitude applies, while concealing—perhaps even from oneself—a mind that comprises thoughts and emotions that have nothing to do with love.

My friend, Dr. Robert K. Hall, and I have had wonderfully deep conversations over the years. Robert, as previous readers know, spent many years as a Buddhist teacher and a Gestalt psychologist who trained with Fritz Perls himself, so we always had plenty to talk about.

If you have read The Ten Thousand Things, you may recall a conversation where Robert and I were discussing the desire to know “the self.” Robert said that after a lifetime of looking he had found nothing (no-thing). The self, he meant, is empty at its core, so if you search for a lasting, permanent self, it’s not there. Like peeling an onion, if you keep at it long enough, you end up with nothing. I agreed that I too had found no “thing,” and added, “So all of this religion, all the practice, all this talk about noble truths and such, is just a wall they build to keep out nothing.” Robert laughed and nodded his head yes.

Robert is in hospice care now and near the end, so our conversations are even more candid than before, which was already pretty wide-open. I asked Robert what he thought about spiritual teaching now that he is no longer involved. “Well,” he said. “It’s a good way of passing time, and it might make someone feel better, but that’s about it. I don’t see that it leads anywhere at all.” Robert, you are a beacon of honesty.

Another such beacon was Alan Watts, who never claimed to be a spiritual teacher, and certainly not “enlightened.” In fact, Alan often said that being an ordinary chap, he had no obligation to act like a saint, and he didn’t. People tried to make a cult leader of him, but he would have none of it:

I’m an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart’s music as opposed to, say, Beethoven’s. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy.

Thank you, Alan. That is my intention too. I’m an ordinary human primate animal who, like others before me, finds himself awake. Since “awake” seems to be a point of view that people imagine is desirable and claim to be seeking, I am willing to speak about it in a simple way, but my words are phenomenology, not instruction. I have no “wake-up magic.” I’m expressing how I see things, not telling others how to see them. Whatever I may say, the intention is not to collect followers, but to encourage finding one’s own mind. In finding your own mind, you will be enjoying the point of view I enjoy, but in your own way.

Recently, the guru who calls himself Mooji has been accused of the same kinds of sexual transgressions and other forms of power-tripping that have brought down a few once-powerful men in this era of “me too,” when at least some chronic abusers of girls and women are being unmasked. Along with those allegations, which are multiple enough to be at least credible, the cult atmosphere that surrounds this man has been exposed, including people kissing his feet, and even worshipping him as “God on Earth,” which he encourages, although lately, probably because of increased scrutiny, he pretends not to, and even has lawyers threatening people who report that he does encourage it.

These cult members are not bowing to Mooji’s ideas, which are pretty much the same old platitudes about “love” and nonduality, but to his person—a sign of mental disorder and derangement, both on the followers’ part and on Mooji’s. That is why a setup like this is called “a cult of personality.” A friend of mine knows Mooji. She jumped to his defense. “He’s not like that,” she said. “He does not want people kissing his feet or worshipping him.”

I replied, “You know this guy personally, and I don’t, but in his public persona, he seems to manifest all the characteristics of what my friend, John Troy, calls an ‘I-doll.’” If you really don’t want to be the I-doll at the center of a cult, and if you really don’t want anyone kissing your feet, it should be a simple matter to end it. No big deal. “Hey,” you tell them. “I may have something worth saying, but I’m no god, and neither is anyone else. Get off your knees. Do not try to kiss my feet. Do not call me ‘master.’ Do not say that I am God on Earth. Listen to what I have to say, and then go home and live your own life.”

But that’s a bootless business model. Why admit to being an ordinary human being when you are paid well to pretend to be a holy man in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi (who, incidentally, had no lineage)? Why say “stop,” when you have willing women hanging on your words, and can sell photographs of your feet and samples of the earth you have stepped on in the gift shop? (I am not making that up).

By the way, what’s with this foot fetish anyway? Why kiss his feet? Can someone who knows more about Eastern religions than I do explain that to me? Why not, for example, kiss his ass?

Well, my friend flipped out and went on a tirade. That was entirely unexpected. That’s what I mean by self-hypnosis. Somehow, in her eyes, Tony Moo is above reproach. In her view, Mooji can’t be just another bad penny holy man, so instead of seeing the cult for what it is, she disparages the reporter who wrote the “fake news” outing Mooji’s bad behavior.

Yes, reporters can get stories wrong, but a generalization like that cannot neutralize specifics like those in the reports, particularly when various ex-followers corroborate them. This I-doll, it seems, has feet of clay. There it is again, the foot thing. Go figure.

Q3: If I understand right, everything is just happening, following, not following, awakening, dreaming. So, who cares? In this oneness, who is there to care?

A: Really? Are you actually saying you don’t care about anything? Are you really saying that no matter what, it’s all the same to you? Or are you projecting some kind of nihilistic theory you picked up somewhere onto actual human be-ing? Speaking personally, I care about lots of things. If you ask “who is there to care?” the answer is “Robert. I care.” I care about every word in this reply, for example. If you really don’t care, how about a dog shit sandwich on rye for lunch?

I am not talking here about “this oneness,” as you put it, nor saying that we are “all one.” I am saying we are all in the same boat, which is not the same thing at all. In this boat—the vessel of the living in which we all are sailing—each of us lives for a time, and then dies and is thrown overboard—burial at sea, so to speak—while the boat sails on. So, “myself” is a passing biological phenomenon. But to notice that “myself” is transient and impermanent is not the same thing as saying, “no person really exists, so who cares?” That attempt to erase any boundaries at all between I and thou, or between peanut butter and dog shit—is a form of spiritual self-hypnosis. Snap out of it.

Q4 [Jody Radzik]: I see we have another victim of the folk theory of nondual enlightenment, holding on to it tightly, hoping to find themselves one with the universe someday, all the while being polluted with a constellation of ideas about what enlightenment is like as an experience that is certain to keep them in ignorance. It’s the reason why actual enlightenment is so rare: everyone’s beliefs about it have them blinded to what’s always right in front of them as their entirely ordinary, mundane awareness.

But that doesn’t sell, does it? That doesn’t make you special. It’s not exotic. Not enough Sanskrit mumbo-jumbo or ancient gurus who were probably just as creepy as the ones we call out today. Nope. You can’t be cool if enlightenment is no big deal, and gurus can’t get rich, so the cycle continues and people stay in abject ignorance despite knowing all the fancy words and reciting all the magic chants.

A: Thank you, Jody. That’s well seen. I will be more succinct: leave so-called spirituality to the ninnies, wake up to what is always right here right now, and you may get a glimpse.

Q5: Would you say more about how duality obviously exists? I have been taught that seeing life dualistically is an illusion, and there is really only one “thing.”

A: Sure. Imaginary/real, up/down, light/dark, dead/alive--all of that is duality. We live in a world of duality. In regard to the material world, that should be obvious: tall bamboo, short bamboo. On a more psychological level, happy/sad, fearful/confident, outgoing/introverted—the list is endless—are all dualistic opposites. The word “spiritual” is entirely dualistic. If there are ideas or experiences that are “spiritual,” then there must be ones that are not spiritual.

No matter what motivates the attempt, you will never erase by fiat—by just claiming so-called nonduality—the obvious differences between one thing and another, including one person and another. If you consider that so and so is “realized,” as presumably was the person who taught you that duality is an illusion—whatever you mean by the word “taught”—then that implies that others are unrealized, so the term “realized” implies duality as soon as it is spoken.

The idea of “nonduality” is a religious concept—largely a Hindu religious concept—not a fact. And it is a concept that confuses people to the bizarre extreme of denying the evidence of their senses and the thoughts and feelings of their own minds—replacing all that with second-hand ideas. I am old enough now to have watched the notion of “nonduality” manipulated into a marketable mania. That term was barely ever heard until the 1990s. Now “nonduality” is a gimmick, a sales tool, a brand. If you tend towards materialism, you can now buy a “Cosmic Non-Duality Mala,” and that string of magic beads, advertised on the internet, probably costs less than a Skype session, also sold on the internet, with someone who purports to “teach” nonduality. The beads might work better too.

To see things as they are requires rejecting “nonduality” entirely, I say. Just forget what you were taught about nonduality or anything else. Find your own mind. Personally, I never even think about nonduality unless someone asks me. What is, is. And that is neither, I say, dualistic nor nondualistic. It just is.
Q5: Well, Robert, you wrote this: “To the extent that there even is a ‘myself’ separate from thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, they just bounce around as they will, like a beach ball in a rapids, while I, being just another thought, albeit a repetitive, habitual one—a pet thought, so to speak—just bounce around with the rest. It’s all me. That’s what thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are: me. In my experience, there is no “self” apart from that. Others, I know, believe differently.”

So, Robert, if there is no “myself” separate from thoughts, feelings, etc., then why does it matter what one thinks or feels?

A: I wrote that in the context of saying that no one is standing apart from thoughts, feelings, and perceptions controlling them. That is one aspect. But to say that because no one can control feelings means that it does not matter what one feels—that, for example, hatred is the same as compassion—is quite another aspect entirely. Of course, it matters. It does to me at least.

And lacking control over the arising of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings certainly does not suggest that “Robert” does not exist at all, which is what the silly nonduality students are trying to make themselves believe. In the mistaken notion that selling themselves on such silliness will stifle their suffering, they pretend that “myself” is only a figment or a misunderstanding. That kind of pretense will not stifle suffering, but only deepen it, I say.

This is difficult ground. Many people I have known who try to explore these matters—including some well-known teachers—become disoriented and end up clutching at conceptual maps, such as the map that “no person really exists.” That statement may make sense from a certain angle, but to apply it across the board as a final “Truth” makes no sense at all. Do you really want to deny that “myself” as an individual focus of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, exists? If so, that is a disorientation from which it is difficult to recover, and I have seen it taken to absurd lengths such as, for example, avoiding the personal pronoun “I” entirely: Not “I feel that . . . ,” but “Here it is felt that . . . .”

Well, here it is felt that talking that way is inane.

If you ask me “Who or what are you, Robert,” I will reply, “I am a human being.” If I were to say, as the self-described teachers try to claim, “I am pure awareness,” that would be a lie. No, people are not “pure awareness.” Pure awareness does not have opinions, or students, and certainly does not need lunch money from them. If you are paying to sit there listening to such drivel--including such idiotic classics as “Thought is not real, only love is real.”—snap out of it.

And beware believing everything that a self-described “teacher,” even an illustrious, celebrated one, tells you. Jiddu Krishnamurti, who had many worthwhile things to communicate, was famous for his so-called “secret,” which many tried to copy in a kind of imitative stoicism. His secret was “I don’t mind what happens.” But in that, JK was lying. As a look into his biography will reveal, he was a man of many preferences. He did mind. We all do. Stoicism, which I recommend as a valid approach to ordinary living, is one thing. From that perspective, I will enjoy what I can enjoy, and endure the rest. But that is not the same as not caring.

“What’s for lunch?”

“Well, you have a choice between a bean burrito and a warmed-over vomit ragout. Which do you want?

“Oh, I don’t care.”

So Krishnamurti, whose ideas inspired me when I first heard them, and whom I still admire on that level, was a liar. He professed to have no interest in sex, which his followers took to be a sign of spiritual enlightenment and tried to emulate, sometimes destroying marriages in the process. But JK’s claims to sexual asceticism were pure, unadulterated horseshit.

According to Radha Rajagopal Sloss, author of Lives In The Shadow With J. Krisnamurti, the famous “celibate” carried on a twenty-five-year schtupping festival with a married woman, Sloss’s mother, including cooking up false accusations of embezzlement against the woman’s husband, Sloss’s father, which the author called “a personal vendetta fueled by passions of the heart.” So not just secret sex, but other lies as well, and nasty lies at that.

There is a capital lesson here: eschew emulation.

Krishnamurti voiced some lovely ideas—for example, “The seer is the seen”—but he was no saint, nor an “enlightened master.” To quote my friend John again. “Take the message, and leave the messenger.”

Q5: This seems to be a matter of perspective. If you look from the position of the mind, you are the wave. If you look from the position of the flow of experience, you are the ocean. To speak from both positions in the same sentence is difficult.

A: No. “You” are not the ocean. And you will never speak from the perspective of the ocean. That is the kind of spiritual lie people have been taught to tell themselves. You may disagree, and if you do, fine by me. To each her or his own. But what is the difference between “the mind” and “the flow of experience?” Is there a difference?

Q6: But, Robert, isn’t the well-worn ocean/wave idea useful as a metaphor, pointing to the notion that we appear to be separate entities even though ultimately the entire universe is one mysterious happening, one that cannot possibly be described or explained?

A: Yes, it might be useful on that level. However, saying the universe is one mysterious happening does not mean that “I” am everything, which is what people try to make of that idea. That is not wisdom, but solipsism.

To stick with the ocean analogy, if there were not an ocean, there could not be any such thing as a fish. So the fish depends on an ocean for its survival, but that does not mean a fish is an ocean. A fish is not an ocean. A fish is a fish and an ocean is an ocean. They are not the same. Nor does the ocean require the fish. If you take the ocean away, there won’t be any fish. But if you take the fish away, the ocean does not disappear. It might be a different ocean without fish, but it would still be there.

I am not quibbling. This is not a small point. Some people imagine that the universe is “inside” them and that, without their consciousness of it, the universe would not exist. That is, I say, delusional. Do you really imagine that the moon exists only when you look at it?

A viewer of this video, a dyed-in-the-wool Vedantin, thought I needed instruction and that he was the one to give it to me. You can read the fresh, days-old dialogue without watching the years-old video that got this guy upset.

@khidirney

• 2 days ago

Robert says awakening brings more suffering, not less, and that escaping suffering into Nirvana is delusional. But the traditional Vedanta never promised you would not feel pain. A toothache is a toothache. What self-knowledge removes is not the pain but the suffering—the resistance, the fear, the sense that “this should not be happening.” You still feel pain, but you are no longer crushed by it. You know yourself as the awareness in which pain arises and subsides. This is not escape; it is freedom within experience.

Robert says there is no spirit, no matter “this is it.” The tradition agrees there is only one reality. It never said there are two things, consciousness and matter. It says consciousness alone is real, and both mind and matter are appearances within it. The wave is not different from water. The world has no existence independent of consciousness, like a dream has no existence independent of the dreamer.

Robert says the idea that “consciousness is the only thing that really exists” is a belief, and no one knows if it’s true. But consciousness is not a belief it is the self-evident fact of your own experience. You cannot doubt consciousness, because the doubting itself is conscious. Science studies objects things known. But who knows the physicist? Who knows the equations? All of this is known in awareness. You may be uncertain about the world, but you are never uncertain that you are aware.

Robert dismisses the “vital force” as unscientific. But the tradition does not teach a life-force that enters matter and makes it alive. It teaches that consciousness is the substrate of all existence the body is consciousness appearing as the body. This is not vitalism it is non-dualism. Vitalism says there are two things matter and life-force. Vedanta says there is only one thing consciousness and all appearances are its expressions.

Robert says skepticism is valid but credulity is not. The tradition agrees completely. The Upanishads do not ask you to believe they ask you to inquire. The teacher says, “Look. See for yourself. Are you not aware right now?” If a teacher tells you something that contradicts your direct experience, you have every right to question it. But if the teacher points to something you can verify for yourself that you are aware, that awareness is ever-present this is not credulity. It is recognition.

Robert says there is non-duality, there is no non-duality, and there is neither. This is closer to the tradition than he may realize. Reality is beyond all conceptual categories, including duality and non-duality. But this is not a denial of non-duality it is its fulfillment. The difference is that Vedanta provides a systematic means to recognize this through listening, reflection, and assimilation rather than leaving you with a provocative statement that may confuse more than clarify.

Robert says he doesn’t need God “God’s just a word to me.” The tradition distinguishes between Isvara (the personal God) and Brahman (the formless reality). Isvara is a way of relating to the whole, useful for those who find it helpful. But ultimately, the goal is not to worship God but to know yourself as the reality that God points to. If the word “God” refers to nothing for you, that is fine. But the reality it points to the infinite, eternal, ever-present awareness that you are is not a word. It is the very fact of your existence.

Robert praises dialectic conversation where you’re not trying to convince anyone, just understanding how the other person sees it. This is exactly the spirit of the tradition. The Upanishads are dialogues between teacher and student, not sermons. The teacher does not force the student to accept anything. The teacher points, and the student looks. This is why the tradition emphasizes a living teacher someone who can respond to your specific doubts, not a dead guru or a book.

Robert’s skepticism is healthy. The tradition does not ask you to believe anything on authority. It asks you to look at your own experience. When you do, you will find that you are aware. You will find that awareness is ever-present, unchanging, and self-evident. And you may begin to wonder who am I, really? Am I the body? Am I the mind? Or am I the awareness in which all of this appears? This is not a belief. It is an inquiry. Tat tvam asi

• 16 hours ago

Thanks for taking the time. Although you took it that way, this interview was not a critique of Vedanta specifically, but of the attitude that sees tradition and authority as unerring sources of understanding.

I agree with some things you say, but seeing consciousness as self-evident is not one of them. Once you make that move, much of your talk about consciousness arises from that error and is not quite coherent.

Take the argument holding the whole thing up—that consciousness must be the ground because whatever you know, you know consciously. That sentence is true. It is also empty. It is true in the way that “whatever is seen is seen with the eyes” is true, true within what the words mean and nothing further. Knowing is a conscious act, so of course everything known shows up in consciousness. Nothing about the world is said there.

Now watch the next step. From everything known is known consciously, which is obvious and meaningless, you move to consciousness is the ground of what exists, the only thing that is. You just assert that as if it were some undoubted truth. That is an ontological claim, a claim about being, about what is there when no one is looking. You began with a claim about how things reach you—you become conscious of them. To cross from there to only consciousness exists, you have to add the assumption that your experience defines reality, and that whatever is not present to consciousness does not count as real. But that assumption is what you set out to prove. Without proving that, all you have is an empty tautology, a circular argument in which the question already assumes the answer.

Your questions follow the same path. Who knows the physicist? Who knows the equations? You do. In awareness. Knowing happens nowhere else. But the physicist showing up in your consciousness tells you where your acquaintance with him lives. Where he stands is a separate question you have not touched. The ground of the knowing is not the ground of the known.

Drop the circular argument, and you are left with only a flat assertion: consciousness alone is real because you say so. An assertion taken up front is a belief taken up front, which is exactly what I said at the start. Claiming that your view is self-evident means nothing more than experiencing occurs. You filled in the rest with tradition and doctrine.

Your own best picture turns on you. You know a dream had no existence apart from the dreamer because you woke, looked back, and set the two side by side. But there is no waking out of consciousness. You cannot set the world beside its absence and check. Your dream analogy needs a standpoint outside all experience, which is the one thing your position swears does not exist.

Look again at your own claim that you are never uncertain that you are aware. There is the awareness, and now there is a you who is aware of it, a knower located behind the knowing. That second figure is not in evidence. The grammar wanted a subject for its verb, so “experiencing happens” quietly became “I am aware,” and suddenly, a witness appeared. If you hunt for him, he moves. Are you aware that you are aware? Then which one is you, the aware or the one clocking it?

The same sentence is carrying two more words it never confirmed: ever-present and unchanging. Those are just beliefs that the bare facts do not substantiate. Ever-present is a claim stretched across the gaps, in sleep, and in the blankness under anesthesia. To the very stretches where nothing is reported, you add a presence exactly where the evidence goes dark. Unchanging is bolted on from outside. You don’t know that. What is actually present shifts moment to moment and never once announces itself as one unchanging thing underneath.

All of this hides in two different meanings of the word “consciousness.” Consciousness names the plain fact that experiencing is going on, and it also names a theory about the one conscious ground of everything, ever-present, unchanging, sole reality, and your incoherence arises because you do not see the difference. Yes, experience is known because there is awareness of it, consciousness of it. That says nothing about ever-present, unchanging, or sole reality. Nothing you have written reaches past the plain fact that something is going on, with no one it belongs to and no floor beneath it that anyone has found.

@khidirney

• 12 hours ago

Dear Robert, Thank you for your deeply considered response. You have correctly identified a central challenge, and your analysis is a model of philosophical care. I would like to offer a perspective from the Advaita Vedanta tradition that I believe addresses the very points you have raised, not by assertion, but by a more rigorous examination of the experience you have so precisely described. You are right that the statement “whatever is known is known consciously” is a tautology. It is true within the meaning of its words and says nothing further about the world. But Vedanta does not begin with this tautology. It begins with a different question, one that your own argument implicitly raises. What is the nature of the knower? You astutely point out that the “you” who is aware is not in the evidence, that grammar slipped a subject into the sentence “I am aware.” This is a profound observation. But the conclusion you draw that the witness is a grammatical artifact is not the only one available. Let us investigate this “you” directly. You say that “experiencing happens.” Let us take that as the plain fact. Now, for “experiencing” to be known, there must be awareness of it. You are aware of your own thoughts as they arise and pass. You are aware of the sensations in your body. You are aware of the world around you. This awareness is not a feeling, a thought, or a sensation. It is that in which all feelings, thoughts, and sensations appear. Now, consider the three states you experience every day waking, dream, and deep sleep. In the waking state, you are aware of a world. In the dream state, you are aware of a different world. In deep sleep, you are aware of neither. Yet, upon waking, you say, “I slept well.” Let us examine this statement carefully. The “I” that speaks this sentence is the waker the ego, the mind-body complex. This waker -I was not present in deep sleep. It was resolved. It did not exist. The ego, with all its thoughts, memories, and concerns, was completely absent. So, when the waker-I says, “I slept well,” it is making a claim that, strictly speaking, it has no right to make. The waker-I was not there to experience the sleep. Yet, you do say, “I slept well.” And this statement is not meaningless. It points to something real. What is that something? It is not the waker-I. It is not the dreamer-I. It is not the sleeper-I. It is the awareness that was present throughout all three states. This awareness is not the ego. It does not sleep. It does not wake. It does not dream. It is the witness the silent, unchanging light in which the waker, dreamer, and sleeper all appear and disappear. When you say, “I slept well,” you are unconsciously affirming this witness. You are saying, “Awareness was present even when my ego was absent.” The ego mistakenly claims this presence as its own. It says, “I was there.” But the truth is: Awareness was there. The ego was not. Now, you might object: “You are positing two ‘I’s the ego and awareness. This is dualism.” But this is not the case. The ego is not a second reality. It is an appearance in awareness, like a wave on the surface of the ocean. The wave is not separate from the ocean it is the ocean appearing as a wave. Similarly, the ego is not separate from awareness it is awareness appearing as a limited, individual self. There is only one reality awareness and the ego is its apparent modification. You might also object: “How do you know this knowledge is direct? Perhaps it is inferred from the fact that you woke up.” But consider: What is the evidence for this inference? You have no sensory input from deep sleep. You have no memory of an experience. Yet you say, “I slept well.” This is not an inference from evidence. It is a recognition that awareness was present. It is the same recognition you have when you say, “I am awake now.” You do not infer that you are awake. You know it directly. Similarly, you know directly that awareness was present in deep sleep, because the statement “I slept well” is only possible if awareness was there. You argue that “ever-present” is a claim stretched across the gaps of sleep and anesthesia. But this is precisely the point. You cannot report awareness during deep sleep because reporting requires the mind, and the mind is absent. But you know upon waking that you were present. This knowledge is not inferred. It is direct. The “gap” is not a gap in awareness it is a gap in the objects of awareness. The awareness itself is the constant, unchanging background. You say that “unchanging” is bolted on from outside. But consider: What is it that notices change? For you to know that a thought has arisen and passed away, there must be something that is present for both the arising and the passing. This something cannot itself be changing, because it is the reference point against which change is measured. You might say that memory provides this continuity. But memory itself is an object of awareness. You are aware of your memory. The awareness that knows the memory is not itself a memory. It is the witness of memory. This witness is not in time it is the timeless presence in which time and memory appear. And this witness is self-evident. It does not need another awareness to know it, because it is not an object. It is the subject the one who knows. As the tradition puts it, “For just to report a change, there has to be a non-changing background.” You say that the dream analogy fails because you cannot step outside consciousness to compare the world with its absence. But this is not a weakness of the analogy. It is the point. You cannot step outside consciousness because consciousness is not a place. It is not an object. It is the light in which all objects appear. The dream analogy is not meant to prove that the world is unreal. It is meant to show that the world as you know it is dependent on consciousness for its existence. Just as the dream world depends on the dreamer for its existence, so the waking world depends on awareness for its existence. The world does not exist apart from the seeing of it, because the seeing is not separate from the seen. You say that the assertion “consciousness alone is real” is a belief taken up front. But Vedanta does not ask you to take it on faith. It asks you to inquire. It provides a systematic method, superimposition and negation by which you can reduce every object to its essential nature as awareness. Consider a table. The table is made of wood. The wood is made of cells. The cells are made of molecules. The molecules are made of atoms. The atoms are made of subatomic particles. The subatomic particles are made of quantum probabilities. The quantum probabilities are known only in awareness. But more than this the “tableness” of the table its color, its shape, its texture is a concept in your mind. And your mind is known in awareness. Therefore, the table has no independent existence apart from awareness. It is awareness appearing as a table. You can apply this method to any object your body, your thoughts, your emotions and you will find that everything reduces to awareness. You do not have to believe. You have to investigate. Finally, you say that the plain fact is that “something is going on, with no one it belongs to and no floor beneath it.” This is closer to the truth than you may realize. The “no one it belongs to” is the absence of the ego. The “no floor beneath it” is the absence of a separate, independent reality. But the “something going on” is not a thing. It is awareness itself. And awareness does not need a floor, because it is the ground. Robert, you have correctly identified the tautology. But you have stopped there. Vedanta goes further. It asks, “What is the nature of the one who knows the tautology?” And the answer is not a belief. It is a direct, self-evident fact. You are awareness. Not the ego. Not the mind. Not the body. The awareness in which all of these appear. This is not a leap. It is not circular. It is not a grammatical artifact. It is the most rigorous examination of experience possible.

@RobertSaltzman

Your previous comment to which I replied was full of assertions that did not stand up to inquiry. If you already knew that central tautology was bogus, why did you use it as if it mattered? It’s nonsense, and you either knew that, or you didn’t. If you did know it, repeating it was bad faith. If you didn’t know it, you are confused and your understanding--not of Vedanta, but of being--is deficient, and nothing I want to hear more about. All that slept well stuff is in the same bag. Nonsense.

@khidirney

• 6 hours ago

Robert, I hear you. You are frustrated, and you have every right to be if you felt I was using a tautology as if it were evidence. That was not my intention, and I apologize for the lack of clarity. But I want to address your charges directly, because I think they miss the mark. On the tautology You are correct. It is a tautology. It says nothing about the world. I never meant to use it as proof. I used it as a starting point to ask a deeper question What is the nature of the knower? If that was not clear, that is my failure. But dismissing the question because the starting point was a tautology is like dismissing a journey because the first step was on flat ground. On the “slept well” argument You call it nonsense. But I would ask you to point to the specific flaw. Is it that you deny the ego is absent in deep sleep? Is it that you deny you can speak of deep sleep at all? Is it that you deny there is any continuity between the states? If the argument is nonsense, it should be easy to say why. On bad faith or confusion You gave me a false dilemma. Either I knew it was a tautology and repeated it in bad faith, or I did not know and I am confused. But there is a third option: I knew it was a tautology, and I used it as a doorway, not a destination. That is not bad faith. That is not confusion. That is method. On your final point: You say my understanding of being is deficient and you do not want to hear more. That is your choice, and I respect it. But I would ask you one thing: You have called the argument nonsense, but you have not refuted it. You have dismissed it. Dismissal is not refutation. If it is truly nonsense, refuting it should be easy. So I ask again, where is the flaw? If you can show me, excellent. If you cannot, then perhaps the dismissal is not about the argument, but about what it threatens?

No, your comment does not cause frustration. What I feel is closer to annoyance at the sad fact that people who lecture because they imagine they know something special are the same closed-minded people who never take in a reply to their lectures, but only change horses and ride the same foolishness onward.

What is the nature of the knower? You ask it as though the question already contains a knower waiting to be described, and that is the whole trouble. A knower is not shown anywhere in experience. It is inferred, pulled in behind the knowing because the sentence seemed to need someone to own the verb, and then the inference is set down as bedrock and called self-evident. You did not find a knower. You posited one, lost track of the positing, and now you are asking after its nature as if it were a thing standing there to be studied.

There is knowing, seeing, hearing, the ache in a tooth, and no separate one behind any of it having the experience. The knower is a shadow that grammar throws. Ask what it is made of and you get more inference, never a finding. That is why this conversation cannot move. You are examining the nature of something you assumed into being, and no amount of inquiry into an assumption turns it into a fact.

”Slept well” is not a dispatch from inside the sleep. It is a verdict that arises when waking, based on a rested body and a night with nothing in it to remember. No one kept watch in the dark. You wake, find yourself refreshed, and infer backward, and the awareness you claim was present through the blank is an assumption you set down exactly where nothing was witnessed. Anesthesia makes it plain. There is no “slept well” under it, only a jump cut in the movie: the anesthesiologist’s mask and then the recovery room, with nothing between. If awareness never lapsed, you would report an unbroken witness during the operation—the witness you say never disappears.

Doorway, not destination, you say. That is the retreat when your position is disputed. You did not offer that tautology as a doorway. You offered it as proof. Who can doubt awareness? Who knows the physicist? And when I questioned it, the proof came apart, and you renamed it a threshold. A real doorway opens onto ground you were not already standing on. This one is a revolving door. You step through, and you are in the same spot, one more inference called bedrock.

You asked for refutation. That’s it, but I predict you will find a way to explain it away. There is always the next rhetorical horse to ride away on.



Robert, You say the witness leads to “endless recursion.” But where does this objection start? It starts with the assumption that the witness must be observed as an object. That is the error. The witness is not an object. It is the subject that by which all observation happens. Vedanta does not start with a theory. It starts with a fact: you are aware right now. You cannot deny this. Even to deny it, you must be aware. This awareness is the witness. It is not a claim. It is the starting point of all experience. This objection is not new. It was raised and refuted thousands of years ago by Śaṅkara, Gauḍapāda, and Vyāsa. You are not engaging with the tradition. You are repeating a misunderstanding that has already been answered. You say you’ve heard it all and do not need a lesson from me. But for a person who has heard it all, you do not know it all as evidenced by the fact that your criticisms have been refuted for thousands of years. If you had truly heard it all, you would know that these objections were answered long ago. So here is my challenge: I am willing to let Vedanta go if you can prove it incorrect. But the only way to do that is through the dialectic Vedanta itself speaks of vāda, the honest exchange of ideas aimed at truth, not victory. Vedanta has a very good record in debates. It has survived millennia of rigorous challenge from Sankhya, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṁsā, Buddhism, and Jainism. It has emerged victorious every time. So here is my challenge to you Engage with intellectual honesty, not just dismissal. Point to the specific flaw. Show me where the logic fails. If you can, I will walk away. If you cannot, then the dismissal is not about truth it is about ego. So the question remains. Who is the one who has heard it all?

This is my last reply. I have no interest in your beliefs. Zero. You objected to the interview. I heard you out. You asked for refutation, and I offered it, but you are not listening.

Your claims are their own refutation. The witness is not an object, you say. It is the subject by which all observing happens, and to look for it as a thing is the error. Good. Then it is never met. It turns up in no observation, gets caught nowhere, stands outside everything you could point to. And to that thing you have never once encountered, you fasten a property: unchanging. You cannot know the color of a horse you have never seen. You cannot know the constancy of a witness you have just told me can never appear.

Change is seen without pause. Thoughts arrive and go. The light in the room shifts. What is never seen is a changeless something beneath the change, running its whole length, holding still while the rest moves. That you did not find. You inferred it, and then you called the inference direct and self-evident. It is neither.

As for Śaṅkara and Gauḍapāda, that is not seeing. That is citing. An old error is still an error, and the centuries it outlasted are a fact about human credulity, not about awareness. When your argument fails, you reach for the crowd, and the crowd is only other people.

You asked who is the one who has heard it all. There is no such one. There is seeing going on, and nowhere in it do we find the fixed watcher you keep naming. You have been describing him for thousands of years. No one has met him yet.

FILIPE: I’ve read your books and followed your Substack. You write about themes usually tied to the spiritual, but I want to ask about the secular version—the self-optimization culture. The message is always that you’re responsible, morally obligated to strive, to be the best, until you’re hyper-productive. And I sense it leaves one numbed to life, now.

I’ve used that fuel to get off the couch, but it crashes into a compulsion to become better out of self-inadequacy, as if we’re broken and ought to fix it. I’m 23. What I’m afraid of is wasting my life on false hope, believing we’re almost there, right up to the finish line. When one of my grandparents died, I felt, not as an idea but for real, that this now is short. Do you have any comment on it?

ROBERT: The religious language is just one version of the structure you are describing: As you are is not enough, and something must be done to correct it.

There is always a next version to reach. Improvement happens, but it doesn’t settle anything—the baseline shifts, and what satisfied briefly becomes insufficient again. The system doesn’t resolve dissatisfaction. It depends on it.

You’ve already seen the loop. Effort appears to produce a result, the result relieves tension for a moment, then a new demand appears. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it doesn’t terminate. Your fear of “almost there” belongs to that same structure. It assumes a finish line. Without one, the fear has no object.

FILIPE: Within your view, can we still talk about improving—health, habits, skills? Striving produces real changes. We still choose, and our choices matter.

ROBERT: That word “we” needs examination. You imply someone standing apart, outside the loop, surveying the options and deciding.

But what looks like choosing and deciding is the system moving toward whatever attractor is deepest in it at that moment. The experience of choosing is the system registering its own movement, not a separate agent initiating movement. This doesn’t make effort pointless. The effort is real, the changes are real. But they are operations of the system, not achievements of a self that stood outside it and decided.

FILIPE: So you’re not critiquing the contents of the system. You’re critiquing the implied ownership of them. Effort is worthwhile—it just isn’t outside the system.

ROBERT: Yes. One organism is drawn to good food and exercise; another, quite similar, drinks to excess. All of that occurs and influences those organisms. But this does not require a “myself,” separate from the organism, standing outside it, choosing how to live. That myself is a claim, not a fact.

Then there’s no fuzz in anything. I’ll both strive at times, and feel at peace at times. No right or wrong. Both discontentment and contentment are ‘awakening’ because = flow. So no need to intellectually interfere with what already is.

Hmm, this makes me lose interest in trying to grasp, in a good way.

Here Filipe brought in Alan Watts, Sam Harris, and Zen. I kept returning the focus to the same place.

ROBERT: Watts was influenced deeply by Zen, which says this in many ways: Trying won’t get it done, but if you don’t try, there is no difference between you and a rock.

FILIPE: Then do you imply that trying is worthwhile? What gives me confusion is when you go to the ‘not quite.’

ROBERT: No, trying happens and so does not trying, but no one is doing either. Watts presented this as a paradox, but it sounds paradoxical only from the perspective of an imagined “myself” that stands apart and chooses, decides, and acts. Heard from there, “trying won’t get it done, but if you don’t try, there’s no difference between you and a rock” looks like a contradiction you have to solve.

But it isn’t a puzzle demanding a solution. As I hear it, it’s a warning against falling into nihilistic passivity on the one hand--the shrug that says nothing matters, so do nothing--and essentialism--the belief that there’s a final state to reach and a right method to reach it--on the other. The saying closes both exits. Not the rock, not the seeker. Just this, happening, with trying and the not-trying arising as they do.

FILIPE: I feel close to your point but never spot on, so I think I have to go further, which confuses me more. It feeds my ruminating monkey mind. For you it might be like talking to a stone.

ROBERT: No, this does not feel like talking to a stone. It feels like conversing with someone who wants to understand and is doing the work honestly.

But notice what just happened. You caught that preferring alert inquiry over indifferent shrugging seems to reinstall a goal, which reinstalls the trying. That’s a genuine observation. But the alert attention I’m pointing to isn’t something you produce by trying to be alert. It’s what remains when the seeking for a final answer stops. You cannot make muddy water clear by stirring it toward clarity.

FILIPE: So how do I relate to all of this? I think the answer is just to see that experience unfolds moment by moment. When the muddy water clears by itself, then that’s it? Then ordinary life? Because if it’s that simple, I can go on without feeling I need to understand it more to ‘get it.’ But then grasping comes in, and it clouds again.

ROBERT: Yes. Ordinary life. It’s all ordinary life.

And the grasping that clouds it is also ordinary. It’s part of the flow, not evidence that you lost something that needs recovering. When the water clears, it clears. When it muddies, it muddies. Neither is a verdict.

Then Filipe said something that changed how I understood all of it.

FILIPE: I must apologise. With OCD, trying to solve these thoughts is a compulsion, driven by unease. These aren’t always genuine philosophical questions—I’m doing a compulsion, which is to get your explanation. But it’s never good enough for OCD. I’ll try not to do it so much.

ROBERT: You’re welcome, Filipe. OCD may be involved, but many people go at it this way, OCD or not.

FILIPE: I was going to stop, but can I ask one last question?

ROBERT: You can ask, and if I answer it, my reply will be one more thing in your mind you have to deal with.

FILIPE: It will stir the muddy water. Better to leave it alone. Clearing is not my goal—I see that’s the loop again. But the stirring can stop.

ROBERT: Yes. You answered your own question again. There is no next place to get to. This right now is it, and always is.

Weeks later, after reading an essay of mine called “No View from the Outside:”

FILIPE: These are genuine questions now, not anxious ones. If sitting lowers my stress, isn’t that verifiable inside the loop, the way exercise is? And responsibility isn’t lost—the drives already ran on their own. So all that is lost is the author, not the writing. And sitting for its own sake is coherent with your view?

ROBERT: You’ve got all three. If sitting lowers your stress, that’s as checkable as exercise is. It stays clean as long as what you’re checking is the effect, not whether you’re getting closer to something. Stress went down: verifiable. Getting nearer to no-self: that’s the project again.

“All that is lost is the author, not the writing.” That’s it exactly. What drops is only the claim that someone was authoring the words. The writing continues. Only the byline goes.

And yes—sit because you like sitting. But notice: you’re asking me to confirm it, and the asking is the last of the project.

FILIPE: The confirming is a project. So why do I make projects? I guess it’s the loop, part of experience, not something wrong. And now I won’t try to NOT make it a project—haha, that’s a project again.

What I’m left with is simple. I won’t try, or try not to try. I stay with my experience and be my own authority. It’s funny—asking you to confirm what I got is already my authority, because I judged you to be someone to trust, which rests on my own judgment.

ROBERT: You’ve got it, and you got it yourself. And you’re right—asking me to confirm was already your own authority at work. It always was.

One thing to leave you with: there’s no winning here. This isn’t a game with a finish line where you finally get it right. It’s an ongoing experience. It just continues. Stay well.

Hello Robert,

I am a relative newcomer to your posts and have not yet managed to obtain a copy of The Ten Thousand Things, so please excuse me if what follows has long since been addressed.

On the meaning of “awake”

In my (Bill’s) life, “I” notice two very different types of experience. So let’s take washing dishes. Sometimes when doing that, what I call Bill is more fully engaged. I am attending to the sensations of the water temperature, the feel of the dishes, the pots, pans, and silverware, the motion of moving a dish from the sink to the drying rack, etc. I am attending to my sensorial world. And other times, I am just going through the motions of doing the dishes, daydreaming my way through, mostly unaware of any sensation at all. Or let’s take driving. Sometimes I am “with it,” and other times, especially if I am familiar with the route, I am just on automatic, oblivious to what I am doing, the passing countryside or city environment, etc and can actually get to my destination and wonder: How did I get here?

I would be disingenuous to say that I don’t believe that one is preferable to the other. I do. I prefer the aliveness of attending to sleepwalking through life.

So for me, the word “awake” refers to the experiences that I have when I am attending, when my sensorial world is alive and ”I” am not somewhere else.

I doubt that anyone is permanently “awake,” but I would hope that all of us experience what I call awake-ness, at least from time to time.

Hoping for your feedback,

Hi, Bill.

I see being able to drive mechanically or wash dishes without needing to attend to every stroke of the sponge as a kind of freedom to attend to other matters while still getting routine tasks accomplished. I often “write” while driving or policing the kitchen. I understand that some teaching suggests focusing on the physical in preference to the ideational, but I find that focus goes wherever needed without needing management.

But the larger question you are raising is about preference, and that is where I would probe. You say you prefer attending to not attending. I understand that report and do not doubt it. What I would ask is whether the preference itself is generating the distinction.

A system that values a particular output will code certain states as full and others as deficient. The coding feels like perception, but it is also evaluation. Awake, as I use the word, is not a heightened sensorial state. It is the absence of the demand that experience be otherwise than it is, including the demand that one be more present, more alive, more attending. That demand is itself a form of not being here, in my view.

In my view, Robert, you are fortunate that you are able to attend to other things, such as writing, while doing routine things. I believe that most of us are not attending to anything. We are just daydreaming until we are finished and then hopefully actually attend to something. It is not a matter of demand. I feel fortunate when I find myself attending to whatever I am doing rather than sleepwalking through life, lost in habitual automatism.

Yes, Bill. You may have just made the point without intending to. “I find myself attending” is precise in a way that “I attend” is not. “Finding myself attending” implies that the attending arrived spontaneously, not that it was produced intentionally, perhaps as a prescribed practice.

The word “fortunate” confirms it; one does not feel fortunate about something one engineered. So the no-doer is already present in your description; the system notices a state it did not choose and registers it as good.

I do feel fortunate, but not because I can simply choose what to attend to. I cannot. I feel fortunate because I have seen and understood that finding myself doing or not doing is part of the flow, not a goal.

When I say I cannot simply choose what to attend to, you may doubt it, so let me give you an example. I might be reading a book, and then become aware that my eyes are scanning the print mechanically, but no information is passing from the page to my mind. So I resolve to concentrate on the text, but soon I am back in the same automatic scanning without meaning. I have found that the best course is to put the book aside and do something else. Force does not avail.

First off, thank you, Robert, for so generously responding to my comments. Actually, I believe that I did intend to make that point. An analogy: just as with a radioactive substance, one cannot predict or know which electron will next be emitted or when, seemingly randomly, so with “my mind.” I never know which thought or memory will arise from one moment to the next, and then a thread continue by association until that plays itself out and I find myself with my thoughts on something entirely unrelated. However, it seems that, as with concern for my health, for example, the more time I spend intentionally caring for it, the more I seem to be “primed” so that I will find myself following through with that concern more frequently. So with attending to what I am doing and the environment that I am in. The more it arises, the more likely it is to arise again. Maybe I am just a hedonist who likes the greater feeling of aliveness that arises when I find myself “attending” rather than just daydreaming my life away.

You are most welcome, Bill. I, too, have no idea what I will think or say next. If that is seen clearly, the idea of controlling attention may not make much sense. If thoughts arise and reach conscious awareness already formed, then the thought “I must not let my mind wander” is itself an arising, not a directive issued from above.

The priming you describe is a real mechanism. Repeated activation lowers the threshold for future activation. “Neurons that fire together wire together,” meaning simultaneous activation strengthens synaptic connections.

But notice what that does to the argument. If intentional attention primes future attention, intention is doing causal work. So then the question is what initiated the intention in the first place. If that too arose without a chooser behind it, then the priming is one more condition producing another condition, and the self that believes it is cultivating attention is an output of the loop, not its author.

It’s not hedonism I hear in your comments, but rather an argument for the self as curator of experience. I understand the appeal. The felt sense of managing attention, of returning to presence, is actual as a phenomenon. What I would question is the architecture it implies, a self located slightly outside experience, monitoring it, intervening when it drifts. In my observation, “myself” is not outside experience. It is part of it, arising within the same flow it believes it is directing.

A system is a set of parts whose interactions produce behavior none of the parts has alone. The behavior belongs to the organization as a unit, not to any one component. In a systems view, the self is a property of the whole organism running, not a separate thing locatable in any part. Look for it in the components, and you don’t find it, the way you don’t find the whirlpool in any water molecule.

Feedback is the basic mechanism. A system senses its own output and feeds it back as input that drives adjustment. Negative feedback corrects toward a set-point—the thermostat, the body pulling blood sugar back into the range of operational values. Positive feedback amplifies error—a small deviation grows, as in a sound system spiraling into an ear-numbing shriek, anxiety escalating into a panic attack, or a habit inexorably deepening into an addiction. Most of what I call the loop is feedback: an organism sensing its own state and adjusting. No controller needed, just the circuit running.

A set-point is the value a regulated system tends toward—a cruise control's set speed, blood pressure, the low-turbulence state seekers are seeking. The system doesn’t choose the set-point; it’s built to return toward it. This is why “the natural state,” to use UG Krishnamurti’s words, needn’t be mystical or metaphysical. A regulated system settling toward its set-point after disturbance is homeostasis, not a homecoming to Eden.

Homeostasis is the whole regulatory tendency—the system maintaining its variables within a viable range against disturbance. When contingencies push a variable outside those parameters, the system fails: illness, breakdown, death. This bias toward a stable equilibrium is an inclination, not a guarantee. It runs until it can’t.

Systems move through a space of possible states, and that space has a shape. Picture a landscape with a low place in it, a hollow where the ground rises on all sides. Rainfall landing on the surrounding slopes runs down and collects there, because that is where the shape of the land sends it. A basin, in the systems sense, is that idea moved into the mind—the basin is an attractor toward which the flow of thought runs and settles, not because it was chosen, but because that is how the ground lies.

A shallow basin is easy to leave; a slight disturbance lifts the flow out, and it moves on. A deep one holds you. Habits are basins, and addictions are particularly deep and steep-sided, so that an ordinary push won't lift the flow clear of them. This is why you can bring every method to bear on a pattern for years—positive thinking, willpower, therapies, practices—and not move it, while another falls away at a touch. It was never a difference of will. It was the depth of the attractor.

A mood can be a basin, and so can a belief—the frame from inside which a certain picture of things feels like plain fact. I have written elsewhere that my own pull toward determinism is a basin of this kind: an inclination, not a finding. What appears as an endless chain of cause-and-effect is the ground where I am sitting, not a report on how the world is. The same applies to everything said here. This vocabulary says nothing about the metaphysics of reality.

Emergence is when system-level properties arise from component interactions without being present in the components — wetness from water molecules, none of which alone is wet; order in an anthill, though none of the ants has a plan. The self-model is emergent. Real as a pattern, absent as a thing.

A model, in systems terms, is an internal representation a system builds to regulate against its environment—the system predicts, and acts to reduce the gap between predicted and actual. The self-model is the organism’s representation of itself as an agent. Whether it does any of the regulating, I can’t say; it may be a report the system generates after the fact, not a part that does the work. Either way, it is not the regulator. This is anattā, no self, in observable form:

the self-model is something the loop generates, not the thing running the loop.

A control loop works like this:

This is what I have been calling “the loop.” When I say no one is running it, I don’t claim to have ruled out some higher self above the process, directing it. I say only that when I look, I find the regulation but no regulator above it. The sense of an overarching, unitary commander seems to be one of the things the loop generates.

Whether that felt commander corresponds to anything real, I cannot check, and this is the observer problem from cybernetics: the system has no vantage outside itself. A control loop can model its environment and even model itself, but it cannot step beyond its own boundary to see itself fully from the outside.

For Maturana and Varela, the loop is an example of autopoiesis: a system whose own activity keeps it in existence, its workings continuously regenerating the components and the boundary that allow the workings to continue. The organism is autopoietic in just this sense. It sustains itself, moment to moment, from what it takes in, and it depends on the environment it runs in.

This is not independence. The loop does not stand on its own; it holds together only as long as conditions allow. How it came to be here at all, no one can say. We can watch the workings. We, despite claims to the contrary, cannot see the origin.

———

She began by asking what to do about her own mind.

KATE: My parents were Christian fundamentalists, the hand-raising, Earth-is-5,000-years-old kind. Church three times a week, and my social circle no bigger than the people who believed as we did. I began to stop believing in God in high school, privately. I stopped going to church in my early twenties. I thought I had freed myself by coming to a place of not needing to know whether there was a God, but after reading your books I can see my mind is not free at all. It’s still very much seeking how to live, how to progress, how to be right, and what books or teachers can get me there. There’s still a me that needs saving. I don’t trust my mind. It’s a noisy and conflicting place. It wants to KNOW. I guess I’m just wanting to know what the fuck to do with thoughts that won’t stop thinking.

ROBERT: For you, I think, a key understanding would be to see that you don’t make thoughts and you have no control over them. Thoughts arise from a source we know nothing about, and then we become aware of them. Once a thought comes to awareness, we may not like it, but there is no way to unthink it. Feelings are the same. You might not like what you feel, but there is no way to unfeel it. If you understand that, you will see that you are powerless to improve on your experience. All you can do is be with what is, enjoying what you can and tolerating the rest. That’s life. Don’t take my word for it. Look into it.

KATE: After I wrote to you, I realized it isn’t that I don’t trust my mind. I over-trust it, faulty as it is. Out of all the experience, the whole flow that is Kate, I hang out in the one little corner of “thinking” most of the time. It feels safest there. But when I try to experience myself more expansively, to include the whole of what’s happening now, my mind kicks up the volume to get my attention back. It’s awful.

ROBERT: These questions don’t seem troublesome when one is enjoying the present moment. They seem difficult when we feel upset, worried, or unhappy. In that case, I like to tell myself, this too shall pass.

KATE: Yes and yes. Thank you.

———

A little later she sent a question, and then wrote again before I had answered.

KATE: I sent a question your way and then had regrets. Pretty quickly I could see I was coming from a place of wanting something from you, a fix or a bit of quick magic, some spiritual accelerant. Better yet, an answer that would cause an awakening. Wake me up, goddammit! Then I read a passage in “Depending on No-Thing” where you told someone that you could give an answer, but it would just go into their mind and become one more thing to deal with. Maybe one more thing isn’t what’s needed. It reminds me of the line in the Tao: do you have the patience to let your mud settle? I’ve been hunting for answers from authorities and books most of my adult life, like an addict, hardly taking a breath before looking for a better, quicker one. The Magic Answer. So, from the bottom of my heart, I have no questions for you, Robert. It’s time to let my mud settle and see what I can find of my own mind. This is the first time in my adult life I’ve seen clearly that it’s time to stop searching, and the first time I feel genuinely okay with whatever that entails, though a bit scared.

ROBERT: Good, Kate. Sending love.

———

The peace didn’t hold, of course. That isn’t how it works. She kept writing, and the questions kept coming, and that was fine—the stopping and the starting again are the same motion. Some weeks later she brought me an experience.

KATE: I had what I’d call a perceptual shift. It was visual, my eyes relaxed, and my field seemed to open, but it was more about how I felt. Everything felt inside-out, backward from the normal way I perceive. I no longer experienced myself as a solid center, a person at the middle of things to whom experience is happening.

ROBERT: This sounds like a promising development. Now, just walk on. Awakening never ends.

KATE: Thank you, you’re right. I’m doing just that, with stops along the way where I try to go back to it, recreate it, imagine what it will be like when it happens again but this time doesn’t end—and then I realize I’m missing what’s right now.

ROBERT: It’s what Krishnamurti called the flight of the eagle. And the eagle leaves no tracks. You will see what you see, feel what you feel, think what you think, and do what you do. I wish you and the other eagles all the best.

KATE: Your perspective has been a treasure to me, and so much so because it has helped me find and respect my own.

ROBERT: Good. Yes, by all means, respect yourself.

———

She wanted to write. It came up as a question about ego, which is how it comes up for most people who want to make something.

KATE: I want to be a writer. I have an affinity for language, and I love to read. But I hold a check over myself, not wanting to do something that’s just an adventure for the ego. Sometimes I see that I want to be someone who has something to say. You were a well-known photographer and walked away from it. What’s the difference, for you, between that and the writing you do now?

ROBERT: First, avoid paralysis by analysis. Do what you want to do and count the chips later. This shouldn’t be a matter of avoiding an adventure for the ego. Have the adventure first, then pick it apart if you need to. I didn’t choose to exit the art scene. It just happened. I couldn’t do it any longer. The fame game wasn’t for me. Psychotherapy was a better fit. Someone once said, if you’re climbing a ladder, be sure it’s not leaning against the wrong wall. There’s ego in therapy work too. There’s ego in everything. If you want to be a writer, just write. Get up in the morning and write something. If it doesn’t work, throw it away and write something else. Keep at it, and you’ll find your voice.

KATE: I struggle to have the adventure first and pick it apart after. I’m not sure why I’m so afraid of it. It seems to center on a self-trust issue. It helps just to say I’m afraid and know that’s been heard.

ROBERT: Most of us are afraid of something or other, Kate.

KATE: What is the writing process like for you?

ROBERT: One of the best reasons to write is you find out what’s on your mind.

KATE: It wasn’t until your books that I learned to watch while writing, to see whether I’m doing the writing or the writing is doing itself. What a mystery that is. I like to sit still with my eyes closed and notice, as best I can, that I’m not doing any of what I experience. Yesterday I sat, and at one point my attention shifted in a way any traditional meditation teacher would call losing attention, or becoming distracted. Then I saw the judgment of that shift as “bad.” But I saw I hadn’t done either, the shift or the judgment. They were just part of what was happening.

ROBERT: Yes, Kate. I like hearing that. Onward.

———

Kate found my doctoral dissertation online, which was the first long piece of writing I’d done years ago. She read the dissertation, the central theme of which is that any theory at all is a form of personal confession, then came to the thing under all her seeking—that she had left one religion only to make a religion of leaving.

KATE: I was raised a fundamentalist Christian. I started questioning it quietly in my teens and left in my mid-twenties. But I left by going right over to eastern and new-age spirituality, without realizing I was mostly doing it because it was familiar to me psychologically. Enlightenment was the new salvation. Nearly five decades of seeking later, I can see the pattern that has run my thinking: spirituality broke my legs and then offered me crutches. The moments of freedom I’ve had all share one thing—some psychological certainty gets questioned and comes down. Where spirituality sells you something to construct, actual freedom seems to come only by deconstruction. Do you think awakening is psychological? I have moments of immense openness, but as soon as I taste them I close down, almost as if it’s too vulnerable to not be a person, a construction.

ROBERT: It’s more like you can deconstruct ideas, but you can’t deconstruct yourself. “Myself” will always be there, no matter what is thought, felt, or perceived. In my experience, the sense of freedom arises when it’s seen that there is no escape from “myself.” You have a point of view, but it’s not chosen. It’s human in general, then specific to your body and brain, modified by every experience you’ve ever had. You can understand that, but you can’t do away with it. There is no escape hatch. Things unfold as they do, including what you think and feel and understand, and when you stop looking for improvement, that’s as free as it gets. I can say it, but I can’t make you see it. This gets said many ways—be here now, this is it, call off the search—but those are just words, and they’re usually misunderstood as a prescription for the next thing to try. They aren’t. They’re an invitation to disappointment. The story continues but never redeems itself. You are born like any other animal. You live for a while, mostly not in control of what you think, feel, and experience. You die. When that feels sufficient, or at least inevitable, you are as free as a human can be. Few people like that point of view, but we don’t get to choose. It works for me, but I’m not recommending it. Just answering your question.

KATE: I like that point of view, Robert. Especially “the story continues but never redeems itself.”

———

KATE: I just finished Chapter 9 in The 21st Century Self. “The recognition that the human sense of a central, choosing self might be a narrative construction.” Maybe everything we do is a performance. It even makes a kind of sense. But it makes me feel I should think twice before I do anything, because whatever I do will just be a performance that reiterates a self. I get there’s no way out of the loop. How have you made peace with that?

ROBERT: What choice do I have? Not be at peace?

KATE: Yeah, so true.

———

She began asking about loops in earnest—first about the word “acceptance,” which she’d noticed I never use.

KATE: I’ve engaged with your work for over a year, and I can’t find an instance where you use the word “acceptance.” It’s everywhere in this subject matter, with other writers. Why don’t you use it? I ask because when I’m seeing looping at its clearest, the acceptance that seems to have to be present for that kind of seeing is unmistakable.

ROBERT: Are you saying that something is seen, and then “you” have to accept it?

KATE: No, it’s more that acceptance seems to make way for more lucid seeing. Although—after I sent that, I sat down and got still, and there was just seeing, and acceptance had nothing to do with any of it. I wonder now if the acceptance I asked about is a “me” doing “acceptance,” most present when the experience is me-experiencing-something-me-doesn’t-like.

ROBERT: Everything arises as it does—understanding, resistance, the wish that things were otherwise, even the impulse to accept. All of it appears in the same field. The thought or feeling called “me” is part of that arising, not a separate entity to whom things happen, or who accepts, resists, or chooses. It’s all one loop, composed of countless interdependent subloops, and the “me” loop is just one among them. Not the whole, not outside, not in charge. Many teachers speak as if experience can be improved by accepting it. But that presupposes a stable self standing apart from the loop, able to adopt acceptance as a strategy. I don’t see that as an option. I see only the loop, shifting, recursive, and impersonally complete.

KATE: It is hard to take in. When I read that, my mind can only register it as seeing from the outside, as apart from what’s being seen. I’ve no interest in a belief to subscribe to. But if I can’t experience accurately what you’re describing, aren’t I just a believer?

ROBERT: What I’m saying isn’t something to believe or disbelieve. It’s actually obvious, but it can’t be grasped as long as the mind needs to project a self at the center of experience. You said your mind can only register it as seeing from the outside. But that is the loop. That’s what the self-model does—it imagines a “you” standing apart, doing the seeing, trying to grasp what’s seen. That structure can’t help but install distance, even when what’s being pointed to is the impossibility of distance. And here’s the absurd part: what I’m describing is already happening. It’s not hidden, not subtle. It’s just not owned. No one is doing the seeing. There’s no seer apart from what appears. But the loop keeps looking for one, trying to see the absence of a self as if a self could see it. It’s like a shadow trying to turn around and catch what’s casting it. That’s why it’s hard to digest—not because it’s complex, but because what wants to digest it is what dissolves if it’s truly seen. So when it feels like “I’m not getting it,” that’s not a problem. That’s just the loop doing what it does, producing a self, imagining failure, grasping for ground. Even the sense that something’s missing is part of the structure. Nothing is missing. There’s just no one there to confirm it.

———

She brought a passage from Daniel Dennett, and an experience that came with it.

KATE: I was reading Dennett on orders of thought—that we’re aware only of the final order of a thought, as stated, not the other orders embedded in it. Shortly after I set the book down, I had a thought, then a strong negative emotion, and all at once I saw the thought, the emotional response, and the belief the whole motion was predicated on: “I am an I.” Solid, fixed, a thing. Something dissolved. Now I can’t unsee this “I” in nearly everything I say and do. Sometimes I smile—there she is again. Sometimes I laugh at how insistent she is. All my life I’ve worried about having the right first-order beliefs. But aren’t those just ideas resting on one final-order meta-belief, “I am an I”?

ROBERT: The apparent author, the “I” who seems to think, is a narrative effect that arises after the thought appears. Recursion itself produces the sense of a thinker: thought represents thought, and in that feedback a center seems to stabilize. Your question at the end gets to the heart of it. Yes, most so-called first-order beliefs rest on a deeper, unexamined assumption—the meta-belief “I am an I.” It’s the baseline fiction that organizes the others. When that belief loosens, the whole structure reconfigures. There are still perceptions, reactions, provisional beliefs, but no longer a solid someone holding them together.

KATE: Do loops loop because of the presence of an assumed self? Is the belief in an “I, the author” the single engine that keeps loops looping? You said when that belief loosens the structure reconfigures. What I felt could be called a reconfiguration too. But it wasn’t total. The “I” is still there, and I often go about my day blind to it. Why does the engine-of-I persist after it’s been exposed as a construction?

ROBERT: That is an important question. I’m going to reply at length, in the form of an essay. Here it is:

https://robertsaltzman.substack.com/p/when-the-bucket-doesnt-break?r=1nzwbu

———

The heart of the exchange came through an ordinary morning and a story about overcooked eggs.

KATE: Here’s how I’d differentiate a self-model from a loop. This morning I overcooked the fried eggs and watched myself apologize to my husband for it. In that moment I saw the layers embedded in the apology, instantly and without thinking: one, when things go wrong in my family it’s my fault; two, I must prove my worth by doing things well; three, my role as a wife is to make my husband happy. The apology was the loop, trying to stabilize the awkward feeling of my husband maybe thinking poorly of me. The examples are part of my self-model.

ROBERT: Yes, you have it exactly right. The self-model is the inherited, internalized narratives—“I’m at fault when things go wrong,” “My worth depends on doing things well,” “My job is to keep him happy.” Stored patterns that define who “I” am supposed to be. They describe structure. The loop is the living process that operates those narratives in real time. The apology isn’t chosen; it’s a stabilizing maneuver by the system to reduce tension and keep the inner model and the outer situation in coherence. It’s an action—a function, not content. The loop performs the model. The model informs the loop. Each sustains the other until awareness interrupts the automatic closure. That moment when you saw the layers operating, without needing to think about them, was precisely the loop becoming visible to itself.

KATE: The model informs the loop, the loop performs the model. That makes so much sense.

———

It was here, drawing the distinction out, that I pointed to the thing that turns the inquiry back on itself. She had asked what “transparent” meant, whether I used it literally.

ROBERT: I am speaking of these matters from a systems perspective. Much of it has been said before in different ways. In Buddhist psychology the Five Skandhas express much of what I’m pointing to. Where my work extends it is in the observation that chatbots are empty of any inner entity, yet when we interact with them we feel as if someone is “in there.” That shows the human tendency to attribute a self to any coherent flow of information. We do it to our own coherence, and to that of other people, which is why so many remain convinced the mind is directed by an inner agent that chooses and decides, even though we have no way to establish that. As for “transparent,” I don’t mean it metaphorically. I mean seen through, and more sharply, the ongoing recognition that one’s own behaviors, and other people’s, arise automatically, not through an inner decider. The self-model keeps functioning, but it no longer appears as the source of action.

KATE: That resonates. It leads to a question I often have. Somewhere in this conversation, without my noticing, there’s the automatic assumption that “I am the one who saw all this.” Does it matter that I’ve not fully seen through that? That I only know it conceptually? As I write this, I’d answer myself: of course it’s enough, because that’s how it is.

ROBERT: I don’t see any choice in the matter, Kate. To you, my words make sense, but you could not choose that they make sense. You said it: it has to be enough because, in each moment, nothing else is available. What’s seen, felt, or registered is the whole of it. There is no “outside the loop.” The self-model keeps functioning, but it no longer feels like the source of action. The impression of central control loses its force. The spell that held it together dissolves.

KATE: Yes, and that spell is dissolving, whatever that means. Knots seem to loosen because of this dialogue, and that’s enough. To ask any more would only re-tighten them, for now. Onward.

ROBERT: It’s been fun chatting, and some of this dialogue could end up in my next book if there is a next book. Feel free to write again.

KATE: Sometimes I imagine us more I-centered folk must make you weary with our never-ending questions.

ROBERT: This is what I signed up for, Kate.

———

She asked whether the self-model resists being seen.

KATE: Does the self-model have mechanisms that help it resist being seen?

ROBERT: Yes, but not the way people imagine. There’s no inner executive plotting evasive maneuvers. What appears as resistance is structural, not strategic. The loop stabilizes, and that stabilization feels like a someone. When anything threatens coherence, the structure produces turbulence—tightening, reinterpretation, narrative, distraction. Not because a self defends itself, but because the loop maintains its own pattern. You can’t get outside it. Any sighting of the self-model appears within the model, so it feels like “I am seeing my own structure,” which is already another layer of the structure. The point isn’t escape or conquest or stepping outside. There’s no vantage beyond the loop. There is only the loop recognizing itself as loop.

KATE: I sit still every day and watch, like a scientist. I’m seeing more clearly than ever, but there’s a subtle idea in it that there’s something to do, or get rid of, or escape, beyond just seeing clearly.

ROBERT: Quiet spaciousness isn’t an arrival point. It’s simply what experience feels like when the noise drops out for a moment. As soon as it shows itself, the machinery resumes its patterning, not from fear, but because forming distinctions is its native motion. The space won’t stay bare. The loop reasserts itself as naturally as weather shifting. No one makes the weather. And the sense that you might be chasing escape—yes, that’s part of the same movement. The loop tries to chart its own disappearance and, in doing so, reinforces the very outline it’s trying to lose. There’s nothing wrong with the impulse to watch. Watching itself is the loosening. But it isn’t a project, and it doesn’t produce an outcome. The minute watching becomes a task, the loop tightens around the watcher. Clarity happens when the grip slackens on its own, when the system briefly stops insisting on being a someone observing something. There’s nowhere outside the loop to stand. The point isn’t to capture the quiet or silence the narrative. It’s to see the whole cycle without drafting a someone who’s meant to manage it.

KATE: After I read that, I thought about how in the year I’ve engaged with your work I’ve watched myself loop the same way over and over: read something, register coherence, feel an aha, then not be able to go further, feeling there’s something simple I’m missing. And today this crossed my mind—when it comes to being human, isn’t “personal” a kind of category error? This entity keeps looking for a place to stand outside the loop. It’s looking because it’s categorized its own processes as good or bad and wants to stand outside the bad. Ultimately, it hopes for a heroic awakening, a separation. Today, seeing that, there was just living and letting it all be. Not earth-shattering, just easy. It seemed something could even feel personal, and that would be okay too.

———

She asked about the still center, the thing the traditions promise, and I told her I don’t find one.

KATE: I’m reading about Linji and came across this: “True stillness is not the cessation of movement, but the discovery of the unmoving center in the midst of movement.” Does looping have an equivalent for an unmoving center, or is this just comforting spiritual medicine?

ROBERT: I don’t know what an unmoving center would be like. I don’t experience one to be aware of. Sometimes awareness seems a kind of still background, but its quality also changes, and it stops altogether in dreamless sleep. So an unmoving center is conceptual, maybe hopeful.

KATE: Then why is the suggestion of a still center so prevalent? The more seeing of myself that occurs, the more the mental chatter picks up, sometimes to exhaustion. I wonder if that’s why the still point is so tempting, as an escape hatch.

ROBERT: A still, peaceful center sounds great, which is exactly why it’s so common. When the mind gets noisy, the promise of an inner refuge feels like a lifesaver. But in my experience, when you pay closer attention, the opposite happens—the noise gets louder. All the thoughts you were half-ignoring show up at full volume. The “still point” is basically a way to believe there’s a calm version of you standing off to the side, untouched by the mess. I don’t see evidence for that. I see constant change: sometimes settled, sometimes spinning, no solid core behind it. The exhaustion often comes from expecting that looking closely should make things calm down. When that expectation drops, the chatter can still be there, but it loses the feeling that something has gone wrong. Nothing is missing. There’s no hidden sanctuary you failed to find. Sometimes the mind is calm. Sometimes it’s a thunderstorm. Both are just what’s happening.

KATE: I saw a belief embedded in how I respond to the chatter: I’m doing it wrong. Even simpler: I’m bad. I’m in a near-continuous time of seeing structural biases I didn’t know were there, didn’t know were part of a personal identity. So many characters, masks. Shocking, and then often relieving. There’s also the desire for firm ground, which mostly consists of watching new identities arise and offer a sense of arrival. I see this, then that, and now I am The Seer. New identities, new tempting arrivals. Mostly I can see it and let the movement move.

ROBERT: One can think and feel all kinds of things without making an identity out of any of it. You can take things step by step, do what feels necessary, and enjoy what you can. There isn’t a right way to be a mind. Let it happen as it does, and you’ll relax. There’s only what you think and feel right now. Seeing that clearly is already the release.

KATE: I notice the old habit of placing an inner observer, a policeman, between inside and outside, and when you say let it happen, that overseer is horrified by the lack of control. In giving up that fight, things have settled into a kind of two-way seeing. Simultaneous awareness, inside and out. It doesn’t feel like guarding. It feels like there’s no actual barrier between inside and outside.

ROBERT: If a policeman shows up, that’s what’s happening. If he’s gone, that’s what’s happening. No one puts him there or takes him away. There isn’t an inside watching an outside. One field—hearing, breath, thought, light, emotion—all part of the same event. The split appears only when the mind starts describing. When I say I feel things, I don’t mean a little watcher collecting sensations. The feeling is the knowing. Tightness in the chest is already aware. A thought about fear is already aware. Nothing stands behind it taking notes. Writing is the same. I look at what shows up and put it into words. If naming feels fake, I stay quiet. No theory, no control, just reporting. “Let it happen” isn’t a technique. The guard was never running the show. Experience rolls on either way.

KATE: There’s not a self behind, apart from, seeing or making any phenomena, even the phenomenon I call policeman. I see how I keep making an entity behind what’s experienced, as if there has to be one for the experience to happen or to be known. And how you keep pointing to what’s simply known. Even the feeling of self is ultimately not a self. Smiling. It’s too simple. Thank you, Robert.

———

Then, one day, this.

KATE: I’ve started writing on Substack. Little lyrical essays that point to the self forming, stabilizing, loosening, from the moment itself, not conceptually. Nothing more. It’s been fun finding the words. I’ve no idea where it’s going, just open inquiry because it’s interesting. Consider this a thanks. Coming across your work has been clarifying, and I feel in your debt for it.

ROBERT: Thanks, Kate. Give me a link, and I’ll visit your page.

KATE: katedennison.com

———

The last thing she sent was not a question about how to see. It was a report of having seen.

KATE: I’m standing in a soccer field, catching my breath after sprints, eating a nectarine. I look up across the field and notice an absence: the feeling that “I am the engine” generating this experience is not there. It’s totally ordinary, and wordless. I know, without words, I am not the engine of this experience. For a while after, there’s a putting of it into words—sometimes just naming the facts, sometimes an effort to “be the one who saw,” “be the one who has this new understanding.” But those formulations rose and fell where they rose. The absence was ordinary, but it was so convincing. I pause over that word now, because it’s as though there was someone who needed convincing—but that’s not quite true. The experience exposed the one who might need convincing as not the thing running the show. Throughout that day, the mind would sometimes move as “the one running the show,” and it was just funny. Today the freshness is no longer palpable, but I find I just can’t take Kate the same way I did before. She’s lost a firmness. Even the move to elevate the experience seems like more of the same.

ROBERT: What dropped out on the field was not the experiencing. It was the sense that the experiencing has an engine, a you behind the eyes running it. The nectarine, the field, the breath, all of it went on. What went missing was the felt claim of ownership over it. And notice how you described what came next: the mind tried to put the experience into words, and some of those tries were “be the one who saw,” “be the one who knows this.” Those are the system reaching for the owner it just failed to find. The seeing had happened with no one behind it, so the loop, doing what it does, which is to stabilize around a fixed central character, moved to install that someone after the fact, the one who would get to have had the insight. That is the event, in loop terms. Not that a self was destroyed, but that the reflex which normally attaches an owner to experience misfired. You watched it misfire. It couldn’t get traction.

The word you paused over, “convincing,” is worth pausing over. You wrote that it was as if someone needed convincing, then corrected yourself, and the correction is exact. There was no one waiting to be convinced. The experience showed that the would-be convincee, the one who needs to be sold on things and then to own having bought them, was not running the show. That’s why the recovery moves were funny rather than frightening. Fear would need the owner intact to feel threatened. The owner was the very thing that had just been seen through, so there was nothing there to panic.

What you’re noticing now—the lost firmness, the questions that can’t take off about “me”—is not a new plateau you’ve reached. It’s what it looks like when the ownership step keeps failing to fire reliably. Kate is still here. The self-model still assembles. It just isn’t gripping the way it did, because the loop that used to close around every event no longer closes all the way. Things get in and don’t all come back out as “mine.”

I’d resist one thing, and you’ve half-flagged it yourself. Don’t let this settle into open-loop-good, closed-loop-bad, with Kate now having open loops. That’s the ownership step firing again, one level up, on the distinction itself. On the field, the loop let events pass. That’s the whole of it. Nothing was gained. A habit briefly didn’t run.

———

Kate had written to me, at the start, wanting to be awakened, as if I could teach that. By the end, there was no one left who needed waking, and she had a page of her own where she was doing the pointing. The reader became a writer. I don’t think I taught her anything. I think I kept declining to be the authority she came looking for until she stopped needing one.

In my last essay, The Complexity of Memory, I showed that a memory retrieved intact and a wholly fabricated one can feel the same, with the same sense of pastness, the same sense of ownership, inspiring the same level of confidence—not only confidence in the supposed facts of the event, fabricated or not, but also confidence that a single unified “myself” has persisted through the hiatus between the remembered event itself and the one now experiencing it as a memory. But if differences in the felt quality cannot distinguish a real memory from a fabricated one, then the felt quality is not a report on the memory’s origin. It must be a property added at the point of retrieval, a tag that reads “this belongs to my past,” applied regardless of whether an actual past event stands behind it.

Since publishing that last week and working through the objections of a couple of philosophically informed readers, it occurs to me that the way the felt continuity of memory seems to certify a persistent presence is not a singular case but only one example of a move the system makes everywhere. The tag that says “this belongs to my past” has relatives. There is one that says “this belongs to me,” and one that says “this is happening now.” All three are added after the fact, and all three are mistaken for what they only label.

Let me take the least expected one first, because it shows the machinery most plainly. Consider the present moment.

We treat the present as the one place where we have any purchase. The past is gone. The present is where I am, where things are happening, where I can make a difference. But look closely at it. By the time we notice what seems to be now, it is already gone, no more available to our influence than last week or last year. Our perceptions and feelings are fleeting beyond catching. One might as well try to trap water in a butterfly net. By that measure, the present and the past come out the same. Not identical, but neither one gives us anything to lay a hand on.

Now, someone might grant that the present slips away and still insist it has one privilege the past lacks. Whatever else is true, they might say, the present is where experience actually happens—the live edge where the world touches us before it recedes into memory. That sounds obvious. It is also wrong, and the way it is wrong is worth seeing, because it borrows from a fact most people have never had occasion to notice.

When a signal travels from my toe to my brain, it takes a measurable stretch of time, longer than a signal from my nose, because the nerve impulse has farther to go, and nerve impulses do not travel at the speed of light, but orders of magnitude more slowly. If experience simply reported each signal as it arrived, a touch on the toe and a touch on the nose delivered at the same moment would be felt as two separate events, the nose first. But they aren’t. Touch my toe and my nose together, and I feel them touched simultaneously. Which means the now I experience is not the moment the signals arrive. Something holds them and assembles them into a single coherent scene before handing it up as “now.” The experience is edited for coherence, and it arrives late, behind the events it reports.

The delay varies within a characteristic range, from tens of milliseconds to a few hundred, so this is not one tidy faculty doing the waiting, but many processes integrating and confecting until enough has come in for a coherent scene to be produced. The system trades away fidelity to the raw timing, which really would be the live edge of things, in order to hand up something that hangs together. So the present I am given is not a fixed moment, and most certainly not the live edge. The perceived present is a variable-width product, cut to whatever measure coherence demands.

That disposes of the privilege. The now I perceive is not the site of live contact. It is already a finished rendering by the time it reaches me, late and assembled, exactly like a memory, only fresher. What reaches me is always a construction after the fact, never a raw now. The tag “this is happening now” is added to it, the way the tag “this belongs to my past” is added to a memory, and in both cases the tag is doing the same work: certifying a contact with reality that perception cannot actually confirm.

So there are two now, memory and the present moment, with the same structure under both. A third completes it, and it is the one the other two have been circling.

Take the self. The felt sense of being a someone at the center is not a thing I have ever been able to locate. It seems to be there, but when I look for it, all I find is the looking, not the looker. The self shows up after the work is done and takes itself to be the one who did it, a late arrival that claims to have been there all along. It is assembled from sensation, memory, language, and habit, and then presents itself as the assembler. I don’t offer this as a claim about what is or isn’t there. It is a report on what observation discloses: appearances without an author.

Here, then, are three faces of a single mechanism. The self, assembled and arriving late, taken for the doer. Continuity, manufactured at recall, taken for a persisting subject. The present, edited and arriving late, taken for the bare now. This is not a mystical unity behind things. It is what the human system does. A loop built to produce a coherent, usable world will produce the same artifact on whatever axis you examine it: a late, assembled, ownerless product, mistaken, by reflex, for an immediate given.

I saw this once long ago without any of this analysis, before I had words for it. It grabbed my full attention and took me some years to absorb. I was sitting somewhere, looking at nothing in particular, and the usual attachment of an owner to what I was looking at simply wasn't there. Perception continued, but the perceiver had gone absent. That absence wasn’t a thought, nor the grasp of a metaphysical idea. Words came hours later, when the machinery got around to rendering what had happened into something sayable: all of this is here, including me, and I’m not making it be here.

What I saw on that occasion was not a truth about ultimate things. It was the boundary beyond which I cannot see. Everything was there, including myself, and I was not making it be there. Nothing I could find was making it be there, and there the seeing hit its limit. Coming up against that boundary did not tell me what lies behind the appearances, assuming anything does, or whether there is an author, a plan, or a presence in any of it. Those questions run past the edge of what the looking reaches. What I was given was not a key to the beyond. It was the plain fact that I don't have one, don't need one, and that life goes on as it will without the strain of reaching for one.

I stay with what shows up, knowing that it arrives late, already assembled. If something is behind it, making it arrive, that is beyond my ken. And for me, that is sufficient. When I stop reaching for more than what shows up, what remains is not defeat. It is more like setting down something heavy I had not noticed I was carrying.

In ordinary usage, memory is treated as a faculty that stores the past and returns it on demand. But seeing the complexity of remembering defeats that picture. Memory operates in at least three modes, and they do not share a common guarantee. One is archival memory. A trace is laid down and later retrieved with fidelity, altered little by the retrieval. A second mode is reconstructive memory. A trace is partial, and retrieval rebuilds it from what remains plus the conditions present at the moment of recall, so that the act of remembering modifies what is remembered. A third is confabulation, in which an apparent memory is generated from no corresponding event, produced in full sincerity, and presented to the one recalling as though it referred to something real. The confabulating system is not lying. That would require knowing the truth and misreporting it. In this mode, there is no awareness of the fabrication as fabrication. Florid confabulation belongs mostly to specific pathology, but the milder forms do not. An ordinary person, memory essentially intact, misremembers an event that did not occur, imports detail that was never present, or takes a suggested scene for a lived one, and holds the result with the same conviction as a genuine recollection.

The modes do not announce themselves. A memory retrieved intact and a wholly fabricated one can feel the same, the same sense of pastness, the same sense of ownership, inspiring the same confidence.

That is the first thing the complexity tells us, and it is not a minor matter. It removes introspection as a criterion. The system that recalls cannot, from within, distinguish a fact-based memory from an invented one, because both arrive bearing the same marks. Ordinary usage treats confidence in a memory as a rough index of accuracy. It is not one. Confabulated cases are often held with the greatest confidence and the richest detail.

If the felt quality cannot distinguish a real memory from a fabricated one, then the felt quality is not reporting on the memory’s origin. That is a property added at the point of retrieval, a tag that reads “this belongs to my past,” applied regardless of whether an actual past event stands behind it. The tag is produced by the same operation whether the content is authentic or confabulated. This is not philosophical skepticism, but only a mechanical observation. The sense of remembering is generated, and its generation is separable from what it purports to certify.

From here, the consequences for the self follow directly, and this is why the question of memory involves more than just memory. The continuity of a self across time is ordinarily thought to be underwritten by memory. In that view, I am the same one who acted yesterday because I remember having acted, and the remembering connects the two moments into a single subject. But if memory includes a confabulatory mode that can fabricate that sense of connection without the events to support it, then the same felt continuity of the self can be produced with no continuous subject behind it. The sense of connection is supplied in the moment of recall. It does not require that anything persisted through the interval to be connected.

This is where the systems framing earns its place. Consider the self not as an entity that endures and consults its memories, but as a pattern reconstituted at each moment from stored and generated material. Archival retrieval consults a trace. Reconstructive retrieval assembles one from fragments. Confabulation produces one from nothing. None of the three requires a subject who persisted through the interval to receive it. The operation runs at the moment of access. Fidelity varies, and so does the point at which distortion enters, and whether a corresponding event occurred at all. What does not vary is that a sense of continuity is produced at access, and is not evidence of a self carried across the gap.

There is a temptation, at this point, to conclude that the self is therefore an illusion, that memory deceives, and there is no one there. The evidence does not warrant that conclusion, which overreaches in the same way the ordinary picture did, only in the opposite direction. The complexity of memory suggests something narrower and more exact. The self-model is real. It is a pattern the system produces. But this does not underwrite a continuous subject behind the pattern, because the very faculty that seemed to underwrite continuity, memory, turns out to manufacture the sense of continuity independently of whether the continuity actually obtains.

So the complexity of memory means that a particular inference is unwarranted—the inference from the felt continuity of remembering to the existence of a subject who remembers. The feeling of being a unitary “myself” is produced when remembering. That production takes place regardless of the facticity of what the memory seems to report. This finding does not empty the day of its remembered content or the person of a functioning past. It removes only one thing, the presumption that the sense of being a continuous someone indicates that there is one. Remembering happens. The one who is supposed to own it, persisting behind each recall to receive it, is the part that retrieval bestows rather than finds.

A Conversation: Robert Saltzman and Pierce Salguero

On ontology, the self, Kant, and living without a metaphysical foundation.

Robert: When you proposed this meeting, you mentioned you wanted to discuss ontology.

Pierce: Yes. Last time we talked, I wanted to explore the basic contours of your ideas and your writing about non-self, self, the falling away of self. But it occurs to me we may have another area of mutual interest, and that’s the question of ontology, of what kinds of interpretations people make of their experience.

I know different schools of philosophy use “ontology” in different ways. I mean it in the most general sense: what is real, what is reality, what’s actually there. I want to throw out a couple of premises and see how you react to them.

My first premise is that it is entirely natural for human beings to have what we might call spiritual experiences, mystical experiences, religious experiences, non-ordinary experiences, altered states of consciousness. There are lots of names for these phenomena. I think it’s a feature of the way the human mind, or brain, or organism works, that we have a propensity for these kinds of experiences.

But what people make of those experiences is really different from culture to culture, person to person. We have all these different explanatory frameworks that have been developed throughout history and around the world to try to explain them. Some we’d call religious, some spiritual, some mysticism, some transpersonal. We’ve invented a lot of words to refer to those systems, and a lot of practices to try to trigger those experiences: everything from psychedelics to meditation to prayer to the Native American Sun Dance.

And then there are the ontologies people construct out of those experiences. “I experienced X, Y, and Z, and therefore ultimate reality must be X, Y, or Z, because of the experience I had.”

I’m curious how you think about that whole nexus between having spiritual experiences and the constructs that get built up around them. A quick example: somebody has a near-death experience and a vision of traveling to a heavenly realm, full of light and angelic beings. They wake up and say there is a heavenly realm with angelic beings—because they had the experience, therefore it is true. And then they develop religions around that, philosophies, practices so you can experience it too, then dogmas, then arguments and wars. The whole thing gets built up from those kinds of experiences. I’m wondering if there’s something there interesting for us to explore.

Robert: Well, that’s a synchronicity, because just yesterday I published an essay right on this point.

Pierce: Great. We’re on the same wavelength.

Robert: If you go back to Immanuel Kant, he had a kind of realism, in the sense that he thought the material world existed, but that we didn’t see it as it was. We saw it through the interpretation of mind. And then he said there was also an absolute world we couldn’t know, a world of things in themselves, the Ding an sich. For example, you can hand me a coffee cup and I can know things about it—its weight, its shape—but I can’t know what the coffee cup really is. That’s in the other realm, the realm of things in themselves.

But Kant had imagined this realm of things in themselves because he needed it to be there in order that there could be morality. There had to be a world of God, immortality, and free-will so that morality would have a coherent basis. He posited that it must exist, otherwise we’d have no basis for morality. Well, I don’t go there with him. I think that’s a backwards form of reasoning.

But I do agree that the world we see is probably an actual material world, and that we don’t see it as it is—we see our interpretations of it, based on our nervous system and conditioning. From there, I see that each of us is a loop, constantly recirculating our view of the world, and I don’t see a way to get out of that so that I’m viewing the loop from outside of it. I don’t even know if there is an outside.

I know what I see and feel. And I cannot really assert that what I see and feel has any relationship with anything outside of this loop, if that even exists. I don’t rule it out. I don’t rule anything out, for this very reason: here I am in the loop, and I have no basis for ruling things in or out that aren’t directly in my experience. So I don’t interpret my everyday experiences, however interesting and transcendental they may feel, as evidence for anything. I don’t know if that gets to the core of your question.

Pierce: I think it’s a great starting point. As you were talking, it reminded me of the ideas of Donald Hoffman. I don’t know if you know him—he’s a cognitive scientist, a mathematician, coming at this from his own disciplines. He has a great metaphor. His research suggests humans have adapted a way of viewing the world based around accessing resources, and that it’s more evolutionarily advantageous to be wired to see the world in a way that doesn’t necessarily correlate with reality, but that is efficient and effective at identifying resources we want access to.

His metaphor is the computer screen. There’s a trash icon in the corner. You drag a file, drop it in the trash. Everybody knows how to work that environment—it’s useful and intuitive. But there’s no correlation with what’s actually happening in the atoms and electrons and wiring of the computer. There’s no little piece of a file being dragged to a place called “trash” inside the circuitry. It’s a symbolic representation that lets us manipulate the data in a way that’s intuitive for humans but has nothing to do with the underlying reality.

So, to take the metaphor, you can make lots of observations about your experience, but you’re only ever making observations about the desktop, never about the electrons inside the computer. We’re stuck in the loop of our own evolved, conditioned framework. We can say all we want about reality, but we’re only ever talking about the interface. We can never escape it. Sounds like you’re saying the same thing.

But where Hoffman differs is that in his system there is a material reality out there—we’re just not seeing it correctly, not able to access it directly. So he has an ontology: there’s an ontological assumption that a material world is there. It sounds like you have one too, that there’s some kind of world behind the interface, even if we can never say anything about it. Have I characterized your view correctly?

And then—what can we say about it? Does it matter to say anything? Does it matter whether we have an ontology, or which one? Or do we throw up our hands and say ontology is impossible, so why bother speculating?

Robert: Well, what matters and doesn’t matter is a deep question of its own. I won’t try to get into that one.

Basically, I’m okay with Donald Hoffman as far as I’m okay with Kant—and Hoffman is really saying what Kant was saying: that there is a material world, but we interpret it for our own purposes, so that we can live coherently. And what that material world is actually like, we cannot know. We can know things within our own system, because they can be verified within that system. For example, this table can support my weight, or this medicine will lower blood pressure. These can be verified, but only within the frame in which we live.

I part company with Hoffman, though, because he takes it too far, in my opinion. Just like Kant’s things-in-themselves. Hoffman uses higher-level mathematics to prove—he says it’s proof, I think it’s bogus—to prove that there are other “headsets,” as he calls them, which produce a completely different world, and that those worlds are real. And knowing something about his biography, he was raised as a strict Christian, with all of that indoctrination, and I think he’s still trying to find that in his mathematics.

But like so many philosophers, he imagines he could stand in some place outside of all this and regard it and judge it. I think that’s the basic mistake. I just don’t go there. I know what I know in this world in which I live, and I don’t have a way of standing outside it and judging it, and I don’t have a way of knowing if it refers to anything outside the loop. So I don’t go to ontology at all. I don’t really think about it. And even epistemology, for me, has a very strict limit beyond which I don’t think it’s worth discussing. That’s where I thought you and I would find some agreement.

Pierce: To slow this down a little further, I want to distinguish between a few positions. On the one hand there’s adherence to an ontology—which I see both of us doing, in our own ways—positing an ultimate reality that we can’t necessarily see or experience, but that must be there.

Then there’s the denial of ontology, which would be complete relativism: the only thing you can take as real is the interface, and there’s no point thinking at all about what ultimate truth might be. But you can take that to the extreme of complete relativism, even nihilism or meaninglessness—that if there’s no reality underneath the interface, then we just live in a virtual dream world where nothing really matters. And then where’s the basis for morality? Where’s the basis for being kind, for not killing each other?

So then you get a tradition like Buddhism. You probably know the Mahayana Buddhist oscillation between what they call wisdom and compassion, which is essentially a non-ontology at the ultimate level and a practical ontology at the conventional level. There’s ultimate truth and conventional truth. Ultimate truth is that everything is unknowable, ontology can’t be established. But conventional truth is that we act within the interface in ways that seem to maximize the well-being of others—who knows if they’re real, we don’t need to know—we can still act in ways mutually beneficial to all the other beings that seem to be there. So there’s an oscillation between the two positions, between your position and Kant’s.

I’m curious what you make of my laying out these three positions: the yes, the no, and the oscillation between them. Do you see it differently? Where do you see yourself fitting in—or do you not agree with the three categories?

Robert: Well, I don’t think what I’m saying is relativism, and it certainly isn’t nihilism. What I’m saying is something much simpler than all of that.

As far as I can tell, what we call Robert is a biological system that runs as a loop. It has a digestive loop, a social-interface loop, a reasoning loop, a religious loop. All of these are constantly running, and they’re a result of being a biological being that needs to survive—which is Hoffman’s point. And that is all I can know. I don’t see a way to get out of that. Although I can’t say there’s no way to get out of it—I just can’t rule it in or out. I perceive no other vantage.

And I don’t like the move Kant makes, and you may be making it, I’m not sure—where you say, well, that must exist, there must be a substrate for this. I don’t see why there must be a substrate. This could be it. We may not know what it is, but there may not be anything else. And I see no reason to speculate about what anything else is, or whether it exists. I don’t think we can get there, and because I don’t think we can get there, I don’t even want to start on that journey. I want to use my abilities to participate in the world I can know—the world of tables and chairs and pets and people I love—without needing some external reference point.

As for “how can you have morality without God, or the larger self, or the absolute? How can you have compassion?”—we do have morality. It actually exists. It exists because we loops survive better when we cooperate with the other loops. So morality is what we do. It’s not rules imposed from outside somewhere, as far as we know, and I see no reason to require that.

My position seems simple to me, but I understand that from another point of view it’s rather radical. I’m saying there’s no spirituality except as a conversation. I don’t rule it out. I don’t rule out Jehovah—I have no basis for ruling it out—but I see no reason to discuss it. I don’t know if I’m making this clear. It’s a little difficult.

Pierce: No, it’s very clear to me. I guess I didn’t make my own position clear—I was articulating other people’s positions.

Without getting into the weeds of the whole multi-dharma model I think with, my argument is essentially this. There are some forms of mysticism, spirituality, religious experience—meditative, contemplative, psychedelic—some schools and practice frameworks that will fairly reliably generate the kind of experience where you see everything as an interface, everything seen through as conceptual, as empty, to use the Buddhist term. Then there are other practices, frameworks, and religions where you can have the full-on experience of unity with God, the field of love, and so on. And you can have a tradition like Mahayana Buddhism that weaves those two kinds of experience together, so you can experience both and oscillate between them.

Robert: Let me jump in before you take it to the next level. Whatever I may perceive as a result of my meditation practice—I’m just taking meditation as an example because you raised it—if I have a meditation practice and I have certain experiences, I’m having those experiences with the same machinery I use to have every other experience. And the fact that it may be a dramatic experience doesn’t make it more real than a mundane one.

And personally, I don’t need those experiences to feel a sense of compassion. The compassion I feel is more basic than that. It’s because we’re all living and breathing, not because of some philosophy.

So Buddhism is interesting to me, and I understand it works well for a lot of people, but I don’t buy the givens. I don’t think there’s any justification for assuming them, which is my critique of Hoffman and of Kant—exactly the same thing. They say these things must be there, otherwise I can’t be compassionate, or moral, or whatever it is.

Pierce: Right.

Robert: And Buddhism says that too: that I must see the emptiness of all things in order to be compassionate. I don’t think so. I don’t think you have to see that everything is empty to be compassionate. Compassion arises because we see that others are essentially the same as us. They live and die, they suffer, and their suffering and their fear of death is no different from mine. And so I should treat them the way I treat myself—not as a rule, but that’s just what arises.

Pierce: Yes, exactly. I think we’re saying the same thing. Where I was going is that there’s a bit of a cart-and-horse situation—I was saying it one way, you’re saying it the other. Based on having these mystical experiences, people produce philosophies, ontologies, religions. And then, once those exist, they inspire other people to create ontologies around them. Because somebody once had a deep experience of emptiness, they taught that things are empty; now somebody else hears that teaching and builds an ontology and a religion around it. It’s cart-and-horse, chicken-and-egg, back and forth. And the same happens on the other side.

So what I wanted to do is contrast that with the conversation we had last time, about the release of the self—the self falling away, seeing through the self. These are probably my terms, not yours. What you’re left with, as we discussed, is a kind of automaticity, a spontaneity—the organism just acts, on instinct, and compassion emerges from the actions of this organism without needing an ontology or a philosophy or a religion to provide an explanation. When you’re operating from that non-self place, the need for the ethical frameworks, the religious frameworks, the behavioral rules, the whole practice system, and the ontology underlying it—all of that becomes superfluous. It doesn’t need to be thought about or referred to. In order to interact with people, I don’t have to draw up a whole worldview. The behavior just emerges naturally and situationally. This being is conditioned to behave in certain ways, compassionate or not, and that’s just what’s happening in the moment. It doesn’t need to refer back to a whole philosophy moment by moment. What do you think?

Robert: I agree with that. I don’t think we need any ideas at all about proper behavior in order to interact cooperatively with other people, because that’s what’s gotten us here. All these years of evolving have produced a system of cooperation in human beings. There’s also violence, which is part of the human setup too. One does not rule the other out. They both exist. They’re what we are.

Now, about the self. I don’t see that there is really a self in the way many people imagine. What there is is events, behaviors, feelings, thoughts. And we perceive these recursively. Not only do I have a thought—I can see that I am the thinker of that thought. And then I can take a step back and see that I am the one who understands that there’s a thinker of the thought. And this regresses endlessly. So a complexity arises, a recursive modeling of experience, and somewhere in that recursive modeling something takes on a solid form: the “I” that is having these experiences. Because it’s been referred to recursively so many times—”I’m the one having this experience,” and not just pain, but “I’m the one feeling pain.”

That’s true in a sense. But I don’t find that “I.” It’s just linguistic. When I actually look for that “I,” I don’t find it. So the “I,” to me, is an illusion—but a convenient one. We have to use it in order to live a coherent life and for language to be meaningful. So we live with it.

In a sense, we’re living in a hall of mirrors. I don’t mean that mystically. I mean it factually. Whatever I see, the seeing is taking place within this loop. And I have no way to know how any of this relates to some outside world, or not. I can’t presume it the way Kant does, or Donald Hoffman. I just can’t honestly presume that. I understand why they do. I understand in general why people are interested in spirituality and mysticism. I’m not saying it’s invalid, or that no one should do it. I’m just saying I don’t do it.

Pierce: A lot of what I do, working with people around these topics under the multi-dharma framework, is meet people where they are. Often they’ve had big mystical experiences within a doctrinal or practice framework, a religious or spiritual tradition, and along the way they’ve adopted various philosophies and ontologies. A lot of times people find me at the point where those ideas have started to fall apart, or falter—there are cracks, they’re not quite so sure things are as ultimately true as they once thought. So a lot of what I wind up doing is pointing them toward the hall-of-mirrors nature of ontology you’re describing—how these ontologies and systems of meaning are generated by this seeking, selfing process—and helping them release what I call “the threads,” those different ways of seeing and interpreting, and get to some place like what you’re talking about: a very simple naturalness, a non-ontological authenticity or spontaneity, whatever words you’d use. I call it releasing the threads. You’ve let go of the complex frameworks you might once have had.

You may not have experienced this. But for people in that transition, who’ve been embedded in big systems of meaning and are seeing that they don’t hold up, a lot of times people talk about being struck by meaninglessness—feeling overwhelmed, or disappointed, by the plainness of letting those things go. There’s a lot of meaningfulness invested in these ideas, and when they fall away, people have a lot of thoughts and emotions about the loss. I’m curious whether you recognize that at all. Was there a transition for you into this simple naturalism—a letting-go process you recognized? Or was it different for you—this is your native territory, and you never had much to let go of?

Robert: Well, I have a certain tendency, a lean in my personality, if we can call it that, toward cause and effect and a deterministic universe. Of course, I can’t prove that. It’s just the way I feel—just my feelings. I don’t know how it applies to some ultimate reality. But I assume that things are as they are because this is the way they must be. And from that vantage, I don’t look at trying to be different.

Now, I know that’s a bleak outlook for a lot of people. A lot of people want to think there’s an ultimate goal, or at least that one is improving day by day in some way. I just don’t see it that way. I’m not saying they’re wrong—I could be wrong, we could all be wrong. There’s nothing prescriptive here. It’s just description.

But from my point of view, most of spirituality and spiritual discourse is aimed at relieving the bleakness of imagining that there’s nothing to get to, nothing that gets transformed, no meaning to any of this except in the actual experience. And somehow—I can’t explain how or why—for me that’s sufficient. It doesn’t feel bleak. It feels like life. Wake up in the morning and do what I do. That seems okay. I don’t have this other project. But I realize many of the people who read me or listen to me do have that project. So I try to meet them where they are.

Pierce: So do you wind up helping people let go of those things? One thing I talk about a lot is that if letting go feels really meaningless and bleak, the bleakness of meaninglessness is a symptom of the contrast: you previously had a comforting worldview doing a lot for you—your sense of the meaning of life, of reality, of why we’re here, a lot of purpose. When that falls away, initially some people experience it as relief, but a lot experience it as loss. So I talk with people about that contrast. Dropping these things can feel like something’s been lost. But that too is a construct, a thought-based reaction: “there should be this, and it’s not here, therefore it’s bleak, therefore meaningless.” So there’s the clinging to the frameworks, and then the clinging to the feeling of their being lost.

It sounds like you never had to navigate that period of feeling loss in order to arrive where you are—which is, I think, where I am too. I have a memory of having those frameworks in place, and how much meaning they gave me, but they’re not in place anymore, and they’re not necessary. It’s enough just to have this ordinary, unadorned naturalness. But I think people sometimes have a process to get to that place. What’s your experience working with people through that transition—or do you not?

Robert: I had a psychotherapy practice for many years. It wasn’t devoted to spiritual seeking, but that came up, and in that context I’d deal with it fully, in whatever terms the person brought to it, because that was the job. That’s what psychotherapy is.

About fifteen years ago—it’s a long story—I was kind of discovered as a voice, and I had people glom onto me as a teacher. I may have encouraged it to some extent; it’s hard to know now. I did that for a couple of years and found it really unsatisfactory. Since then, what I’ve been doing is not trying to straighten anyone else out, but simply stating my own position, day by day, as clearly as I can. Because I think about these things philosophically, and the more clarity I can bring to it, the better it is for me. That would be motive enough even if I had no readers. I’d continue to discuss these things with myself. Where Kant and I part company, for example—that’s something I’d be discussing with myself anyway. So if I write an essay on it and someone finds it helpful, that’s great. But that’s not the intention.

Pierce: So you’re speaking from yourself, not trying to change anybody, not trying to actively encourage people to follow this particular line. How would you articulate the adequacy of this simple naturalness? Why isn’t it meaningless—or if it is meaningless, why isn’t that a problem? How is it possible to not have some larger, deeper meaningfulness, some larger goals, and to just be okay with day-to-day simple activities? A lot of people feel that’s missing something. How do you feel it’s adequate?

Robert: I do feel it’s sufficient. I find there’s a lot of meaning in life—there’s just not an overarching meaning, like “I’ll find my way back to Jesus,” or “I’ll become enlightened.” Those things don’t matter to me. I don’t think about it. But there’s meaning in ordinary life, for sure.

I once said that I find meaning in washing the dishes. This was in a group chat, and someone said, “What could that possibly mean? How could you find meaning in washing the dishes?” And I said, “Well, then my wife doesn’t have to do it.” That’s the level of meaning I enjoy. It’s meaningful to me that my donkeys recognize me and come to me when they see me, and like to be hugged, and make their little sounds. The birdsong when I walk out the door. I could go on. Ordinary life is meaningful, but it doesn’t add up to anything, and that’s the difference. In the end, when the accounts are erased because the brain dies, what will happen to any meaning one has collected along the way?

When I say that, it sounds normal to me, but a lot of people think it’s a depressing idea. I guess that’s what you’re asking—how can I be happy with this? I don’t know. I just am.

Pierce: I’m kind of asking you to answer a question I get a lot, so I’m curious how you’d answer it. You and I are very much on the same page about the adequacy—it’s just a matter of how to articulate it to others.

I have a feeling that when people ask for larger meaning out of life, out of events, they’re really looking to place events—washing the dishes, the donkeys coming to say hi—into the kind of frameworks we were talking about. They’re looking for a larger story in which to place that small event. “I’m doing the dishes because I’m a compassionate person, practicing compassion in this life, because—”

Robert: Let me interrupt you, because that’s exactly it. It’s the person, the loop, that wants to be stabilized. And the way you stabilize it is to ascribe these actions to it, rather than just seeing that these are the actions of the loop. The loop washes dishes. The loop likes its wife. The loop likes the donkeys and feeds the donkeys. This is just behavior. But they want to find the person behind it and stabilize that: “I’m a good person. I do what I do because I have a heart. I’m compassionate.” All of this is a way of firming up something that—as many Buddhists say—is empty of any real content or character at all. They want to imagine there’s a “myself,” and the myself is on a self-improvement journey, and will become more compassionate and more loving. This is actually taking a ghost and clothing it, as I see it.

Pierce: Yes. I agree that the notion of the “myself” being the hero of the story that’s being told—the meaningfulness of my life is some larger story in which myself is the lead character, and the myself’s journey through that story is the source of the meaningfulness. And these things do seem correlated: the less of the myself there is, the less of the larger framework and meaningfulness can be found. Until ultimately, if there’s a process of releasing that someone’s going through, the identification with the myself and the whole story fall away together.

But for me, it’s not like it’s replaced by its opposite. It’s not like, if the self has been seen through, there’s a hole there called “nonself” that can be pointed to. Same with meaning—when the meaningful story falls away, it’s not like there’s a gaping chasm of meaninglessness you can point to either. Maybe it feels like that initially, but it’s just living in a kind of natural spontaneity. I call it the autopilot. Things happen; you respond however you respond to the events in front of you. And the thought of there being a self, or not being a self, or of this being meaningful or not—those thoughts just don’t arise. They’re not needed. That additional layer—referring to the hero of the story, asking what the larger story is—at a certain point just doesn’t have to happen. It doesn’t even occur to you to do it or to reject it. It just doesn’t come up. And I imagine you’ve been living that way, where those questions don’t even come up, for quite a long time—from what I can tell from your writing.

Robert: Well, it’s something that occurred at a certain point, in a dramatic way. That was about forty-five years ago. But that didn’t settle the issue. There was a lot of questioning that went on around it. That’s calmed down now, to the point where I don’t think this way at all. I don’t walk around thinking about these issues. I have a very active presence on Substack right now, and people send me questions and comment on my essays, and that’s fresh material I’ll consider and think about. But when I’m out for a walk, I don’t think about significance at all. It just doesn’t come up. I’m experiencing what I experience, and, as I say, that’s sufficient. Sometimes it’s hard to bear—it could be suffering and pain. Other times it’s intensely pleasurable. A lot of the time it’s neither; it’s in between. But it’s all okay. I’m not looking for anything to be different. This is okay.

I know that’s a strange thing to say. But the fact that it’s strange is a pretty sad commentary on the way the human race copes with life—usually by inventing gods and traditions and enlightenment and practices and all the rest of it. I don’t say people shouldn’t do this. I understand why they do. Life is difficult, and it’s great if you can find some way to steady yourself, get through the night, get through the hard times. If you have a belief that helps you with that, fine. I just don’t believe anything in that sense about this experience. It’s the experience itself that fills my awareness, not the reasons and the wherefores and the why. I’m just not there.

It’s not something I attained. It’s not an attainment at all. I know there are people who see this and say, “Well, I’d like to be like that,” or “If I meditate long enough, I’ll eventually see through the game.” I don’t know if that’s true. I wasn’t meditating when this happened to me the first time—when I actually saw through the doer of my life, and saw that there was only the life, and that there wasn’t this presence standing behind it, doing it and making decisions. Decisions arise, and they arise already decided. Any dithering we do about it is really after the fact. And even contemporary neuroscience has many data points that would support what I just said.

Pierce: Yeah, for sure. I follow that science. I wasn’t meditating either, but I did have a longstanding meditation practice going on—lots of different kinds of practices, from different spiritual traditions. I can’t remember if you did or not; I don’t remember that detail from your biography. But I think a lot of people undergo this kind of transformation, this seeing-through, quite spontaneously, outside of any contemplative or spiritual practice. I’ve heard of people having some kind of traumatic experience that triggers it, or just walking down the street for no apparent reason. So it does seem to happen to people for a whole variety of reasons.

Then there’s the process that’s kicked off. You said there was a process. That seems to take longer for some people than others. There seems to be an eventual settling down. But I think a lot of people settle into one of these ontologies—an interpretation of these experiences, a whole framework, whether religious or spiritual or transpersonal. Some larger thread, some system, that they land in first and have to work through, until eventually the thread falls away and there’s this simplicity we’re talking about. It sounds like you didn’t have that initial experience and then land in a particular spiritual interpretation of it, but rather jumped straight to the thread-releasing process. Were you ever part of a spiritual tradition, or some contemplative practice framework, that helped you make sense of this as it was happening? Or was this just going on your own path, outside those traditional avenues?

Robert: Well, the tradition that made the most sense to me was Taoism, and I was interested in that—did some reading. And Zen Buddhism has been an influence on my thinking, but I’ve gone past that at this point. I could still be a Taoist. I can’t be a Buddhist at this point. Although it’s a good tradition, and there’s a lot in it that’s worthwhile. I just don’t need it. I don’t need to think that way.

But I understand that I’m out on the edge of one end of the bell curve here. I’d say the majority of people are either religious or atheistic. They have a strong opinion about all this, and I don’t have one at all. That’s the difference. I just have no opinion on it. When I see the way this process actually runs, any opinion would just be another turn in the process—the opinion would refer to what’s going on already, not to how something ultimately is, some outside field. I don’t even know if there is such a field, but whether there is or not, I have no access to it, as far as I know. So that’s a confession of ignorance. And I think many people can’t understand that. “Why would you, Robert, want to say you don’t know anything? What’s the point of that?” I don’t know. Maybe there is no point to it. But that’s really how I feel. There are a lot of conversations going on all over the world at all times, and I just have no opinion. I have nothing to add. I don’t know anything about it. Whether it’s atheism or religion, they’re the same to me—statements that purport to be factual, and they aren’t.

Pierce: Yes, I agree. And I just realized I started to set up, much earlier, a “yes, no, and both” structure. Some people believe in God, others reject the belief—so it’s yes or no. Then there’s the position that tries to reconcile the two into a larger synthesis. But then there’s a fourth position: that the question doesn’t matter. It’s neither yes nor no nor both, because the question doesn’t even come up. It doesn’t need to come up. And that fourth position is how I’d describe my response, at this point, to all these questions—ultimate truth versus relative truth, wisdom versus compassion, self versus non-self, God versus atheism, and in many cases ordinary political or social or cultural questions too. I can just concur with you: I don’t really have a position on that. So I think this fourth position—not really needing to take a stance, because the question doesn’t come up—is one way of talking about it.

We’re running near the end of our time. We’ve talked about the self, and the story in which the self is the main character, those two being correlated, mutually building each other up or mutually falling away. I’m curious, in your own experience—back forty-five years ago when it first happened, and as things progressed and released more and more—what else, if anything, was wrapped up with that? What else fell away? With seeing that this loop was not the “myself” you thought it was, and seeing that the whole story of life was no longer meaningful as it was before—what else fell away along with those two things? Were there other ingredients in the mix, other things contingent on the self and the story that fell away too?

Robert: Well, we’re going to run out of time within a couple of minutes, so let’s make this a farewell for now, and we’ll meet again.

As to what else fell away—the sense of drama. It’s not necessary. I don’t need to imagine that choices and decisions are life-shaking, world-shaking. They aren’t. We just put one foot in front of the next and do what we must, whether we like it or not. So likes and dislikes don’t have the power in my mind that they once did. And this drama that everything I feel and think is urgent and important—I think that’s fallen away too. I don’t know if that really answers the question, but that’s the condition.

A lot of people, as I say, see that as depressive. I don’t. I see it as a reasonable stance that works well in the material world. And the material world is the world I know. So if it’s working well in this world, I don’t involve myself in imagining what it means for some putative world I don’t really think about anyway.

Pierce: Nor could you force yourself to take up one of those worldviews, even if you wanted to. That ship has sailed.

Robert: I didn’t choose to feel this way, and I can’t choose to feel otherwise. This is what I’ve got. This is Robert. Poor old Robert. For better or worse, that’s it.

Pierce: Well, thank you, Robert. This has been a great conversation. I’ve enjoyed unpacking some of this with you and hearing things in your own words, your own perspective.

Robert: You’re such a lovely guy—so gentle and kind. I know your students must love you. It comes across with every word.

Pierce: I appreciate that. You’re an extremely wise person, and I appreciate your time, and all the effort you put into your Substack. I’ll link to it in the show notes so people can find your work.

Robert: Read the present one. You’ll see how remarkable it is that a reader came to me with these very questions—I answered them in an essay a couple of days ago.

Pierce: Carl Jung would love this synchronicity. I’ll make a point of including it. Thank you so much. Take

Tim Miller has written a review of the Depending On No-Thing audiobook. In it, he says:

“It’s curious. Robert writes very clearly and lays out his ideas so simply, yet readers who pose questions struggle so hard to put in their own words what they think he’s saying. It’s not because of how or what he writes, I’m convinced. It’s because we’ve all been trained to look at reality in way more complex, convoluted ways than Robert does, piling one metaphysical assumption upon another. And we have so much trouble letting go of all that, even just for a brief time as we try to wrap our heads around his spare and stark ideas.”

Tim has it right, and the part I want to stay with is his last line, the trouble of letting go even briefly. I feel the force of that. What I am describing is simple, but simple is not the same as easy. The difficulty has nothing to do with intelligence. The mind reaches, by long habit, for something solid to stand on, and I am suggesting it stand for a moment on nothing and notice that it can.

My outlook asks very little of the reader. I avoid truth claims about what lies beyond experience, so understanding what I say does not require believing or embracing any of it. It requires only that you look, and that you resist, for a little while, the pull to reach past what you see toward some “Truth” underneath that would make it official. I’ll try now to say it plainly, and slowly, in the hope that the simplicity comes through.

Here is where it starts. Whatever I say about the world, I find I am saying from within some field of sensation, mood, memory, language, and thought, along with the capacity to reflect. Everything I have learned is in that field too: my sense of physics, psychology, and philosophy. All of it. And when I look for the edge of the field, the place where it stops and something else begins, I do not find it. I find only more of the same looking. Whatever I point to, I point to from within, never from outside. For convenience, I will call this whole circumstance the loop.

The loop is closed, in a particular sense. Anything that seems to lie outside it can only be taken as a guess made from within. Suppose I try to trace the loop’s edges. I have to do it with the same means that built, and keep building, the world I know in the first place—the same senses, the same concepts, the same habits of thought. I see no other instrument to reach for. This is not me confessing to weak eyesight, and it is not a passing mood. It is closer to a plain feature of the situation: whatever can only register its own states, and report them, finds no way to step clear of them and check them against a world standing there on its own.

A few things follow from this. Not promises about how reality is, but limits on what I can honestly say.

The first concerns cause, and here I want to be careful to claim no more than the loop allows, because this is the place I am most often misread. When I look closely at what happens in me, I don’t find a self producing any of it. Thoughts, moods, and reactions bubble up from nowhere I can point to. Words arrive as I write them. I never catch myself producing them. When I look for the self that might be the source of a thought rather than the place a thought lands, I don’t find that self. I can see the thoughts but not their author. I can’t tell whether those arrivals are fixed by what came before or simply show up, uncaused. Knowing that is beyond what I can see from in here.

I will admit a leaning, and try to be honest about what it is. Faced with that gap in what I know, I find myself drawn to the view that the bubbling up is caused, through and through, not arbitrary, even where the causes do not show. This is what I have elsewhere called determinism. In systems language, the causal view is an attractor, a basin.

Picture a landscape with a low place in it where the ground rises on all sides. Rain anywhere on the surrounding slopes runs down into that hollow and collects there, because that is where the shape of the land sends it. A basin, in the systems sense, is the same idea moved into the mind: a low place that the flow of thought tends to run toward and settle in, not because it was chosen, but because that is how the ground lies.

The cause-and-effect universe is a deep basin in my system. It feels like the default. Perhaps I could be convinced otherwise, but it would take strong evidence. A devoted Vedantin sits in a different basin, one where consciousness is the ground of all. I assume that from inside that basin, my picture looks as foreign as the Vedantin’s picture looks to me. I keep the word determinism, because it names my inclination, but I do not quite consider it a truth, because the system cannot step outside itself to check whether the world truly works that way.

Looking and not finding the author of thoughts and feelings is enough to unseat a figure most of us carry without noticing, the chooser standing outside the loop, working its controls. When I look for that figure, that free agent set apart from the field, directing it from some clear space of its own, I do not find it. I find the system—the loop—doing what it does. The felt sense of “I choose” may arrive, or not. Usually not. Most often, I am simply turning an idea over, and at some point I notice that it has taken on weight, without my having chosen it. There may be a sense of weighing and selecting or not. I can’t generalize. Either way, I find none of it controlled from a standpoint outside the material itself. Choosing happens when it happens. The chooser, set apart, does not turn up.

The same looking shows me why I find no exit from the loop. Trying to reach past the loop toward an outside turns out to be one more event inside the loop, one more thought, one more conjecture, made of the same material as everything else. I never find the step that would carry the system beyond itself to survey its own border or to inspect a reality standing free of mind. The view from outside is not just missing, as if it were somewhere I have not yet explored. As far as I can tell from here, I find nothing the loop does that provides it, though I cannot rule out that something might.

Here I find myself in agreement with Immanuel Kant on one central point. As it appears to me, the world as we know it depends on mind for its form. Space and time do not seem to be features I come across out there somewhere, already laid out. They look more like the way the loop makes sense of whatever reaches it. Cause and effect looks the same way, less a brute fact stumbled upon in the wild than a way of relating one event to another so that experience can hold together as a coherent field instead of a blur. In that sense, the ordinary world, the world of daily life and of science, too, is already a world of appearances—of phenomena, to use the old word. Shaped, through and through, by how the loop operates.

I do not mean anything crude by this, as though my coffee cup were floating somewhere in my head. Kant has a phrase for a commonsense version, “empirical realism,” and on this I am with him. Within the conditions established by our forms of perception and our concepts, Kant said, there is a stable external world, and we can know it as it appears. This is a lawful, repeatable field of appearances that is not arbitrary: walls that are not transparent, chairs that support one’s weight, the stars and oceans, the people and pets we love.

The field holds together. It shows regularities you can track and rely on, regularities that appear whether you believe in them or not. Still, this view may not go as far as the strict realist wants. Whatever counts, for me, as the world or reality arrives in the form this loop allows, and I have no way to know how things might stand if they were not being met through such a form. As far as I can see, to put it bluntly, there is no view from outside the hall of mirrors.

The hall of mirrors is not a piece of mysticism, and I do not want it heard that way. It is what happens when a system folds back on itself. A loop that includes recursion not only takes in input, but can model itself taking in input. Pain does not merely occur; there is also “I am in pain.” A thought does not merely arise; there is “I am thinking.” And then reflection can turn and take that “I” as its own object, “I am the one who notices I am thinking,” and the turning can go on from there, level after level. Or, to stay with the metaphor, reflections wherever one looks.

Each turn sets up another mirror, and not one of them opens onto a space beyond reflection. The whole structure points back at itself. The loop models itself, then models the modeling, and so on. And somewhere in all that folding, a stable pattern forms, like a whirlpool in a stream perhaps, and holds—a “me” that seems to sit at the center of what is happening and run it.

This is a model the system builds of itself, stable enough to be recognizably me, yet continually shifting. From the inside, that pattern feels like an agent. It says “I decide,” “I choose,” “I know.” But seen more plainly, it feels like an arrival after the fact. An explanation, not an entity. A self shows up after the event and takes itself to be the one who did it.

In calling all this a hall of mirrors, I don’t mean illusion against a hidden reality. That phrase is a reminder, mostly to myself, that whatever I call “me” and whatever I call “world” are assembled through layer upon layer of representation, and that none of those layers ever steps outside representation into the bare thing itself. Even my self-criticism is one more reflection. Even “I see that I am caught in the loop” is an image in the hall of mirrors, not a window out of it. This is where I part ways with much traditional metaphysics, which grants itself a place to stand outside the conditions it describes, a vantage point from which to map them. I do not find that place. And I do not exempt this description from the hall either, since saying I find no exit is itself a report from inside, not a verdict from above.

Compare this view to the familiar positions. Classical realism holds that there is a mind-independent world that we can come to know as it is. Classical idealism holds that reality depends on the mind for its very being. Kant threads between them: the everyday world is real and knowable, but its form—space, time, and cause—is supplied by mind, and behind appearances stands the thing-in-itself, which we cannot know. The cup is real, an object you could hand to me, yet the cup as it is in itself is closed to me. But then Kant carries this blueprint into morality, where freedom, God, and immortality enter, not as knowledge, but as postulates, axioms that reason must assume to make sense of the moral life. That is the move where, from my vantage inside the loop, Kant’s schema begins to outrun what can be validated.

I accept that the world as known depends on mind for its form. That is the hall of mirrors, the loop’s way of arranging what comes in. I accept empirical realism inside that frame, the stable, workable field we can map and move through together. What I do not accept is the further claim that this workable consistency amounts to contact with a mind-independent reality as it is in itself. The field of experience is consistent and in many ways predictable. What that proves about a beyond, I cannot say.

And I do not swing to the other side either. I do not say reality depends on mind for its being, or that it is all mind, as the idealists do. I am neither the realist sure of access to an actual outside nor the idealist sure there is no outside to reach. I say only that I cannot rule any of it out. I stay with the loop and its form, and whatever might lie past it I hold as a blank I refuse to fill in, nothing more.

This is the whole of my caution, and it is worth noticing that it cuts both ways. If I say “there is no outside,” I am pretending to know more about the loop’s border than the loop could ever tell me. If I say “there is an outside,” I am doing the very same thing, just facing the other direction. Both sentences reach past what the system can reach. I decline both at once with the phrase “not ruled out.” This is not a clever dodge. It is the honest mark of a boundary I genuinely cannot see across, and it lets me set the question down where it actually lies instead of pretending to have settled it.

There is a practical edge to this that keeps it from floating off into pure abstraction. Inside the loop, plenty of claims offer concrete ways to check them. “This table holds my weight.” “This drug lowers blood pressure.” “This sentence is grammatical.” Each of those can be tested against repeatable experience, against the constraints of logic, against whatever counts as evidence here, and each can come out right or wrong. Within the hall, they are perfectly truth-apt. They are part of the ordinary, indispensable work of telling one thing from another.

Claims about a world outside the loop are a different animal. Nothing the loop can do will test them, confirm them, or knock them down. They may be true or false, but nothing available in here can tell which. They map the edge of my ignorance, not the structure of reality. That, in the end, is why I stay close to what shows up and stop short of metaphysics. Not from lack of nerve, but because checking fails there, and I would rather stop where it gives out than keep talking past it.

Looking at metaphysical talk from a slightly different angle, a psychological one, I can regard it as behavior. We are biological creatures, and as living beings, we encounter facts we cannot talk our way around: that everything is contingent, that we are fragile, that we age, that we die. Seen in purely physical terms, those facts can look bleak, so the loop responds in a very human way. It generates gods, afterlives, cosmic plans, absolutes, grounds of being, schemes of liberation, and nondual oceans. I do not say this dismissively, although at times I have. Such reaching for succor is among the most human things we do. These constructs can steady a frightened person, give a life its shape, and make suffering into something a person can carry. None of that, though, turns them into knowledge of an outside. What I can actually see is the activity, the reaching itself. What it reaches toward, if anything is there, I cannot see from here.

And I notice, in myself, that I am simply not drawn to that kind of speculation about what the universe “really is” behind the appearances. It never resolves into anything I can test or use, but becomes another layer of story, another strand in the loop’s long effort to manage its own situation. Other people find real joy in that work, and I mean it warmly when I say I wish them well in it. It is just not where my own attention wants to rest.

I see morality that way, too. Concern for others, the recoil from causing harm, the pull toward fairness and toward giving back what we are given, all of that is plainly present in experience, and as far as the evidence reaches, it runs deep in the kind of social animal we are. Cooperation, then, does not have to be obedience to some moral signal beamed in from beyond. It can be seen as an evolving set of answers our species finds to the standing problem of living alongside one another. And cooperation of that kind tends to steady a loop like this one rather than tear it apart. So I do not find that I need to posit an absolute source behind moral feeling to account for it.

Now hear what I am not saying. I am not saying responsibility is a fiction. I am not saying that because no chooser stands outside the loop, nothing is owed, and anything goes. Whenever determinism comes up, that is the angle people hit on, and I think it is a mistake. Concern and obligation are as real as anything else in the loop is real. They are present, they do their work, and they matter. They have consequences in ordinary life, philosophy notwithstanding. What I set aside is only Kant’s extra step, the move that grounds morality in a noumenal freedom he claims must stand outside experience. I set that claim aside for the very same reason I set aside every claim about an outside: I cannot see it from here.

The responsibility stays right where it is. Only the presumed higher realm goes, and that presumption was never what made responsibility binding in the first place. The loop’s own cooperative intelligence is a sufficient basis. Morality as it actually works among us, day to day, is not some thinned-out substitute for a real morality that would need a metaphysical foundation underneath it. It is what the word honestly points to. And it is enough.

Moral doctrine is a different matter, and I trust it less. It tends to take that living, flexible cooperative intelligence and freeze it into fixed rules and handed-down values, which can turn coercive, even cruel. And the actual texture of people living together tends, given time, to wear those rules back down.

There is a cost to this perspective, and I would rather name it than pretend it away. It means letting go of certain satisfactions. The satisfaction of believing you have touched reality as it truly is. The satisfaction of treating your own judgments as something close to oracular. The satisfaction of keeping a metaphysical escape hatch in reserve, just in case. Set those down, and “knowledge,” in the grand and consoling sense, shrinks.

What is left is smaller, and I find it sufficient, which still slightly surprises me. Within the loop, patterns can be watched, described, and tested. The form of the world can be spelled out, how space and time work in this kind of cognition, how causality operates, how a self takes shape. The workings of belief and story can be followed where they lead. The limits of what can honestly be asserted can be marked, and marked again. None of that is nothing. It is, in fact, most of a life’s worth of looking, and there is a real ease, not a resignation, in not reaching past it. The reaching is the strain. When the reach is set down, what is left is not defeat. It is more like setting down a heavy thing you had not noticed you were carrying.