No Bullshit

Awakening to groundlessness

What Is This?

I’ve never found a label that I really like for what it is I write and talk about. “Spirituality” often means something I’m not into at all; “nonduality” means many different things to different people, often things I don’t mean; “Zen” resonates, but might suggest I’m wearing black robes and teaching people to sit in the lotus position, which I’m definitely not. My website is called “The Simplicity of What Is.” Basically, I’m talking about waking up and being alive here and now without answers or certainties. (For more detail, see my previous post, What’s It All About).

Waking Up Can Be Challenging

The awakening journey involves seeing through our stories, identities, beliefs and ideas about ourselves and the world, even seeing that the words we use are conceptual abstractions of an ungraspable and indivisible actuality that never stops moving. Every rug we’re standing on, every authority figure we’re clinging to, gets pulled out from under us until we’re left with groundlessness. This is a never-ending present moment waking up from wherever we’ve just landed and whatever we’re currently trying to grasp, a kind of never-ending freefall—being awake here and now as the simplicity of present experiencing, just as it is.

For most of us, this kind of deconstruction and groundlessness can feel at times scary, threatening, disturbing and challenging. It can often be extremely button-pushing when our most cherished beliefs are being questioned and our sacred cows are being toppled. It is indeed a kind of dying, dying to the known. But it’s only scary when we’re trying to hold on. Once letting go happens, aaaahhhhh! What relief!

But that doesn’t mean we’ll never try to grasp or land somewhere ever again. Most likely, we will. It happens. Grasping is a deeply engrained survival mechanism, and conceptualizing is something humans do, and consciousness easily falls for its own creations and mistakes its maps for the actual territory, so waking up happens again and again, always now, not once and for all. And waking up doesn’t mean always feeling happy and wonderful. It means seeing and feeling and being what is without the comfort of false certainty and without any nifty spiritual moves to dissociate or transcend in order not to feel the pain and vulnerability that come with organic life.

The bodymind is vulnerable and sensitive, and life is not always pleasant. Seeing what’s happening in the world, if we really let it in, can be very painful, and trying to avoid that pain by saying “It’s all a dream,” or “It’s all just meaningless shapes and colors,” or by saying it’s all “Consciousness” or “God” or “Radiant Presence” can be a way of avoiding the pain of actually being awake.

Yes, there’s definitely some profound truth in those statements about reality being dreamlike and all our interpretations of it being questionable abstractions, and I’ve been known to use some of those beautiful and uplifting labels (God, Consciousness, Radiant Presence, Truth) myself at times, and often they feel genuinely descriptive and evocative in a truthful and heartfelt way. So I’m not dismissing any of that, but I’m questioning how such words and assertions are sometimes used.

And I’m always questioning my own use of those lovely sounding word-labels with capital letters because they always run the risk of reifying or concretizing something or papering over pain and uncertainty with comforting spiritual opium. Apparently my internalized Toni Packer is still on the job, with help from friends like Robert Saltzman and Barry Magid, both of whom keep questioning curative fantasies, magical thinking, false certainties, transcendent escapes, wishful thinking, and so on.

Robert in particular has challenged me, and continues to challenge me in ways I deeply appreciate. Robert and I don’t always agree or see things the same way, but fundamentally, we’re very much in accord. So I’m going to share a bit of his writing and a couple of his videos with you below. For those who don’t know, Robert is a photographer, retired psychotherapist, former spiritual teacher, and American expat who lives in Todos Santos, Mexico. He is the author of two books, The Ten Thousand Things (text and photographs) and Depending on No-Thing, and he is known as a kind of iconoclastic critic of much of what is on offer in the spiritual and nondual world.

Words and Images from Robert Saltzman:

“My entire interest is focused upon whatever is arising now in this very moment,” Robert writes. He describes awakening as “coming to a sense of being that is free of beliefs, paths, destinations, and final answers." He describes himself as “an indefinable, unrestrained flow of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts,” and he says, “That flow is not happening to me. That flow is me... a stream of consciousness over which I have no control. We are all like that, but not all of us know it. Most of us were put into a trance state long ago, beginning in early childhood—a kind of stupor in which the emptiness, impermanence, and co-dependency of ‘myself’ goes unseen. We are lost in a fantasy of separation in which I am ‘in here’ while the world I see—the ten thousand things—is ‘out there.’ It is from that confusion that one awakens.”

“In each instant,” Robert writes, “things are as they are and cannot be any different. Whatever one perceives, thinks, and feels in each moment is ‘myself.’ Except in memory or a fantasized future, there is no other myself. No ‘myself’ stands apart from events and phenomena as the ‘experiencer’ of those occurrences. That myself is an illusion. One is not having experiences. One is identical to the totality of experience, conscious and unconscious. That’s what ‘I’ am: experience, and experience is only this aliveness, right now, in this very moment."

“As long as one is looking elsewhere,” Robert says, “here and now remains invisible, overlooked, or undervalued. If you are interested in awakening, it is advisable, I say, to begin by discarding all beliefs you may have acquired, no matter what their source. Just wipe the slate clean and make your own inquiry, starting from scratch without depending on anyone or anything at all. Forget concepts. Forget what others claim to have known. Forget what you know… There is no path from here to here.”

“From my perspective,” he writes, “there has been too much certainty issuing from the mouths of Indian gurus and their Western apostles and followers, and a strange dearth of epistemological humility that lends a cultish air to the entire business. In general, the Buddhists seem better in this regard… Whether consciousness comes first, or bodies and brains do, or some third alternative that we humans cannot even imagine, everything would still look just as it does now. Consequently, I have no interest in those who claim even the slightest knowledge of such final matters… People who trumpet permanence and final answers bore me, and their certainty seems desperate, not ‘enlightened.’”

With all of the above, I whole-heartedly agree and resonate completely.

And now, two videos of his that I think are excellent:

This is a 20 minute video of Robert reading Chapter 8 from his excellent book The Ten Thousand Things:

This is a very short (7 minute) video of words and images by Robert called You Are Here Now which he recently shared on his Substack:

I highly recommend Robert’s two books, The Ten Thousand Things (text and photographs) and Depending on No-Thing. You may not agree with everything he says—I don’t always—but I’ve found his work very liberating and challenging in a good way. He may very well question some of your most cherished beliefs and knock down a few of your sacred cows. He can come across as strident at times, but in my experience of him, he is a very tender and lovely human being with a big heart. Here he is with one of his beloved donkeys:

Robert has a Substack and a YouTube channel, and on the latter, among many other videos, you can find his conversation with me from September 2, 2018, which I linked to and shared in my May 11, 2024 post titled No End to Problems.

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Love to all…