nobody knows what any of this is or how it got here

Q: Dear Robert, I heard you on a podcast where you shared wisdom with the following words:

“This is your life. It belongs to no one else. And to be here, you pay a high price in pain and suffering. Do not let anyone tell you how to live. Just find your own mind here and now.”

That is as I remember it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by finding your own mind? By the word mind I understand thoughts and feelings. Is that also how you define it?

Domingo, Temprano Por La Mañana, 2015

Hi. In my view, the entire matter of being here—being conscious, I mean, of one’s human primate animal subjectivity, which you called “thoughts and feelings”—is an enigma.

nobody knows what any of this is or how it got here

Nobody knows what consciousness is or isn’t. Nobody knows what matter is. Nobody knows what spirit is. Spirit and matter are just words. What they mean is what we understand them to mean.

Nobody knows anything about God, karma, life after death, or what the "self" is or isn't--none of that. Zero. Bupkis. Nada.

No one has factual answers to ultimate existential or metaphysical questions. Such topics can be discussed endlessly but never resolved. An answer may persuade, but persuasion is about enhanced belief, not truth or facts, and so being convinced cannot substantiate truth nor corroborate facts.

To live without seeing the difference between fact and belief is to inhabit a trance state in which one imagines having factual answers while unknowingly enveloped in a cloud of learned ignorance.

On awakening from that trance, here I am, as usual, without knowing how or why or the ultimate meaning of anything. One understands that no one has secret inside information about ultimate matters, only belief and conjecture. One is left with nothing to fall back on. Nothing to trot out in times of need. No cut-and-dried explanations of anything. In that condition, thoughts and feelings continue to arise, but one does not need to scribble over them with other people’s judgments and interpretations.

One walks through this world, seeing what one sees and feeling what one feels without coming to conclusions about any of it. You are naked and alone. That’s what I mean by your own mind.

In The Midst Of This Aliveness

Depending On No-Thing audiobook, chapter 29

Read by David Matt

Child, 2018

Identifying As A Human Primate Animal

Crispin Bennett: Robert, You say that "what ‘I’ am is best understood to be a human primate animal body/mind, including the perceptions, feelings, and thoughts that such body/minds—gifted with human primate nervous systems—experience without the necessity that some exogenous ‘presence’ either take control or else stand aside in a posture of superiority as if the other ‘I’—the one who thinks, feels, and perceives—were the illusion.”

This is the bit that most puzzles me about your position. It doesn't seem to emerge from the same sceptical attitude towards scientistic consensus reality that you cast upon 'spiritual' worldviews. I take your point about the latter. It's clear much 'inner' or 'spiritual' investigation, done with the ghosts of Nisargadatta and Maharshi (et al) hovering, seem to be a form of self-indoctrination.

But consciousness really is a mystery, and the notion that it magically arises from 'nervous systems' is nothing more than a shibboleth of contemporary culture. We have no idea how or why such a thing might happen. At the moment all we have is desperate promissory notes and hand waving. Even "best understood" is a substantial overstatement. There isn't even a viable sketch of what a physicalistic theory of consciousness might look like yet.

Why not be equally sceptical here? You don't seem in general to be averse to a plain "I don't know" (I'm writing as someone firmly planted on the "I don't know shit" bank of the creek). It's possible to accept mystery without going all mysterian.

Hudson Street, NYC, 2019

Robert Saltzman: I am skeptical of all supposed facts, Crispin. To be considered factual, an idea or a perception requires supporting evidence, the more robust, the better. My first question is always, "And you know that how exactly?"

But skepticism does not mean disregarding evidence or arguing that facts and beliefs are equally valid “stories.”

When I awake needing to pee, I am faced with compelling proof of my animal nature, which is confirmed later when I observe my donkey peeing in very much the same fashion. Organs and tubes.

The lack of a “physicalist theory” of consciousness deters me not one iota from “identifying” as an animal, specifically a human primate mammalian animal. Since, like my donkeys, I bleed when I am cut and evince awareness of the features of my surroundings, it would be a hard lift to convince me that I am not an organic living being with all that entails.

Alternate views can be suggested, but any point of view entaills at least one axiomatic assumption—one hypothesis that must be taken as a given. With some guidance from Occam’s Razor, I prefer the hypothesis at the heart of naturalism:

Everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are unnecessary.

Am I certain of that? Of course not. How could I be? What if spirit and matter are two entirely different ontological categories that never coincide? Or what if it’s all spirit, and we are non-material entities just dreaming a natural world?

Since we do not have complete information, anything is possible, even far-fetched ideas cannot be ruled out entirely—how can you prove a negative? However, from my perspective, the evidence for naturalism is not only all around us but includes us—we who eat, sleep, etc., just like other naturally occurring living entities, and like them, are vulnerable to disintegration.

When various brain areas are damaged, predictable changes in consciousness—including, at times, its total absence—occur. That is strong evidence, in my view, that brains and consciousness are somehow correlated, entangled, implicated, enmeshed, and affiliated—not necessarily causally, but perhaps in ways we humans cannot even imagine.

I would not chalk those neurological observations up to “scientism,” as you do. To me, biology and physics—science, not “scientism”—are among the best ways to investigate “reality.” Apparently, not for you.

I never chose to prefer naturalism. My preference for commonsense realism is part of what “I” am, just as your resistance to “physicalism” seems part of what “you” are.

I have never said that '‘consciousness magically arises from nervous systems,” so that’s nothing but a straw man I suspect you have trotted out often. No one knows whence consciousness comes. But to doubt that one is an animal requires ignoring countless everyday observations. I see no justification for that.

Borges And I

Tom Ryle: Robert, thank you for your books and videos. I have read both books and viewed many of your chats and Zoom meetings. What you say rings true, but I am left with one question. You often discourage the idea of the witness or witness consciousness. You say that creating an observer of oneself is a kind of false move that you call splitting, but then you speak about yourself in the third person as if “I” and Robert were two different people. Why isn’t that splitting? In your BATGAP interview, you said, “Robert has opinions,” as if you are somehow not Robert, but outside of him observing him having opinions. Could you comment on that, please?

Nata Mudra, 1984

A: Hi, Tom. The feeling of standing outside of oneself and watching what “myself” thinks and does is a common, perhaps even universal, experience that seems to arise naturally and automatically for all of us. I do not deny that such experiences exist, nor do I think they should be suppressed or avoided. What is, is.

However, from my perspective, the perception of a division between the observer 'I,' who watches without involvement, and the 'I' who is the agent and doer, is an illusion arising from an overly narrow definition of “myself.”


That illusion is favored and cultivated by people who, understanding that bodies and brains are perishable and subject to death, prefer to imagine that what I “really” am is a deathless, timeless “presence,” independent of the physical body and existing prior to it. Consciously assuming the role of the observer as if it did not already arise automatically and choicelessly is a practice aimed at instantiating and concretizing one’s identity as a “presence.”

By my lights, what “I” am is best understood to be a human primate animal body/mind, including the perceptions, feelings, and thoughts that such body/minds—gifted with human primate nervous systems—experience without the necessity that some exogenous “presence” either take control or else stand aside in a posture of superiority as if the other “I"—the one who thinks, feels, and perceives—were the illusion.

Jorge Luis Borges, whose poems and essays I recommend, addressed this phenomenon in a way close to my experience. Here are Borges’ words in the original Spanish first, with an English translation following:

Borges Y Yo
Al otro, a Borges, es a quien le ocurren las cosas. Yo camino por Buenos Aires y me demoro, acaso ya mecánicamente, para mirar el arco de un zaguán y la puerta cancel; de Borges tengo noticias por el correo y veo su nombre en una terna de profesores o en un diccionario biográfico. Me gustan los relojes de arena, los mapas, la tipografía del siglo xviii, las etimologías, el sabor del café y la prosa de Stevenson; el otro comparte esas preferencias, pero de un modo vanidoso que las convierte en atributos de un actor. Seria exagerado afirmar que nuestra relación es hostil; yo vivo, yo me dejo vivir, para que Borges pueda tramar su literatura y esa literatura me justifica. Nada me cuesta confesar que ha logrado ciertas páginas válidas, pero esas páginas no me pueden salvar, quizá porque lo bueno ya no es de nadie, ni siquiera del otro, sino del lenguaje o la tradición. Por lo demás, yo estoy destinado a perderme, definitivamente, y sólo algún instante de mi podrá sobrevivir en el otro. Poco a poco voy cediéndole todo, aunque me consta su perversa costumbre de falsear y magnificar.

Spinoza entendió que todas las cosas quieren perseverar en su ser; la piedra eternamente quiere ser piedra y el tigre un tigre. Yo he de quedar en Borges, no en mí (si es que alguien soy), pero me reconozco menos en sus libros que en muchos otros o que en el laborioso rasgueo de una guitarra. Hace años yo traté de librarme de él y pasé de las mitologías del arrabal a los juegos con el tiempo y con lo infinito, pero esos juegos son de Borges ahora y tendré que idear otras cosas. Así mi vida es una fuga y todo lo pierdo y todo es del olvido, o del otro.

No sé cuál de los dos escribe esta página.

Borges And I
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Posted By Request: The Batgap Interview

Hello, Robert. I have heard that you were interviewed by Rick Archer on BATGAP but the interview is no longer available there. Is there some way I can watch it?

Hi. Yes, click on the copy at the foot of this page.

The original is no longer available. Rick removed it after a bizarre episode involving fake quotes attributed to Albert Einstein in which Rick took the side of the people who had promulgated the fakes and blamed me for calling attention to their vandalism in putting their “spirituality” nonsense in the mouth of that great man.

So much for “Truth.” If you are interested, you can find out more about that countertemps on YouTube.

I’d enjoyed the interview with Rick, which his wife, according to Rick, said was the best interview he had ever conducted (he now denies telling me that), and was sorry that it had disappeared, apparently forever. I’d tried to view it again myself and couldn’t.

About a year ago, I was sent a copy of the interview from an anonymous source. I posted that copy on my YouTube channel, but Rick had it removed by claiming that sharing it was a copyright violation. I disagree. These are my words and my image for which I was not paid and which I present here for nonprofit educational purposes only, so legally, this constitutes fair use. Enjoy the interview.