the undeniable understanding that all conjecture on the subject of “myself” falls short—must fall short—of actually explaining anything. In each moment, I find myself here as an apparent focus of awareness without ever having chosen to be here, without knowing what I “really” am, and without needing to know. I am well aware that what I see and feel is a concoction of some sort or another, but this world is the world I have, and so I, an apparent constituent of this world of mine, live in it and with it—not in a world of conjecture, supposition, and mysticism about ultimate matters, but here and now. That is what I mean by “awake.”

so far as any of us knows, no one is making this stream of consciousness—the river of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts that in each moment is “myself.” You can tell yourself that “God” is making that stream, but hanging a name on the incomprehensible does nothing to explicate or illuminate the actual, front-and-center mystery of aliveness—the astounding fact of being at all, prior to concepts about the supposed source of this aliveness.

If someone finds enjoyment or meaning in religious practice, fine by me. I don’t walk through this world criticizing. But since you are asking about my experience, I must reply that “spirituality” has nothing to do with it, and the embrace of unsubstantiated spiritual beliefs, far from providing a path to comprehension, more often seems to impede it.

what Chögyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism,” which rests upon the idea that there is something to gain, and that one will gain it through effort.

awakening is not gradual, but sudden, instantaneous. It is not about practice. All at once you see that you are not doing anything. Not deciding anything. Not choosing anything. There is no such choosing/ deciding “myself” except in fantasy. That fantasy fades, leaving no exit from the inevitable, ceaseless stream of consciousness. The old stories don’t apply any more. In each moment things are as they are and can be no different, whether you like it or not.

Whatever you feel, think, and see is you. There is no choice in the matter—no escaping you. That is what I mean by the word “awakening”—a sudden awareness, quite undeniable, that everything you see, feel, and think is you. The boundary between self and other dissolves. The apparent “other” is not located “out there” somewhere, but constructed of your perceptions, your feelings, your thoughts. You see what you see. That is all you see. And that seeing is you.

The deity belief was injected into your mind by random cultural osmosis at the very least, or very likely by osmosis plus intentional inculcation by caregivers beginning before the age of reason. So, that belief was put in your mind—in all of our minds—which is not your fault. Nothing is your fault. You never chose that belief or anything else. No choice, no blame.

a kind of self-hypnosis that I call magical thinking. If you are thinking magically about the Absolute, or non-duality, or self-realization, or karma and causality, you are not awake, I say, but hypnotized. You don’t know anything about those things. You heard about them at some point, and accepted what you heard. Embracing and constantly repeating such dogma induces a trance state of credulity. Your beliefs are your beliefs merely because you believe them, which indicates nothing about their facticity. Absolutely nothing. Zero.

The traditions of “spirituality” rest upon a bundle of bald assertions that, being neither falsifiable nor in any way demonstrable, abide always in the twilight zone of pronouncements that will never be facts. Awakening mind finds no interest in that—no interest in searching for what others say they have realized spiritually.

what is called “I” is nothing but a point of view, the one unique to “me” in this moment.

The “I” who is replying to questions here is not a “person” at all, which is really only a legal and social designation, but an indefinable, unrestrained flow of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. That flow is not happening to me. That flow is me. In the eyes of the world Robert may be a person, but to myself I am not a person, but a happening, 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.

No one knows what “myself” is. No one. Assertions are made, but an assertion is not a fact. So-called “spirituality” is comprised almost entirely of assertions on the subject of “myself.” But no one knows the first thing about that.

No one knows how electrochemical changes in the brain become sights, sounds, flavors, odors, textures, and the rest of what we see and feel. Those qualia somehow exist and are perceived, but no one knows where they are located, what perceives them, how they are perceived, or what they really are. No one knows the wellsprings of feelings, thoughts, emotions, and memories either.

Everything you see, feel, and think is you.

the inauthenticity of imitators who adopt, and sometimes even preach, the guru’s world view instead of facing the uncertainty and loneliness involved in living by one’s own lights.

forget what some “saint” says about life, and make your own way.

The notion of an eternal, changeless “Self” as an imagined goal to be attained through “realization” engages me not at all. I have no spiritual goals myself, and would not accept someone else’s if proffered on a silver platter with gold-plated guarantees.

I’m out to see what I see, not to confirm or “realize” what someone else saw. The fierce inevitability of seeing, in this moment, whatever one sees, like it or not, is what one “wakes up” to, I say.

I follow no path at all, and would not follow one if you told me it led directly to the Seventh Heaven. When the path peters out, and you find yourself alone and without assurances of anything, this aliveness, unmitigated, is apparent. Unless you find yourself alone like that, without taking refuge in second-hand notions, no matter what their source, you will never be free, but will remain always an adherent, forever a disciple or an epigone.

Ramana’s advice about making “spiritual progress” advocates taking control of, and thus hindering, the natural flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Such advice—again, straight out of yoga dogma—is about disciplining the “mind,” about mastering it. That dogma advises judging pure from impure, and sticking only with the pure. It is about focusing the stream of consciousness and channeling it into one and only one quest: union with the supposed eternal, changeless Self. That is not my way at all. Awake, I am co-existent with whatever thought, feeling, or perception happens to be front and center—“ pure” or not (and who is to judge?)—until it isn’t. Far from trying to control the stream of consciousness, for me it’s all about non-resistance to the motion of that stream, which is “myself.” This has nothing to do with progress, but with the inevitability of continual self-expression through thought, word, and deed in each and every moment. It’s about the mercurial impermanence of aliveness, which is never still, never changeless.

The “spiritual progress” you mentioned aims at a goal to be attained in the future through yoga, mental concentration, austerities, and philosophical inculcation. I aim at nothing. This is it—right here and right now.

Suppose there is no “Supreme Soul” at all. Suppose, in other words, that the evolved brain—not some “higher power”—is the original source of consciousness, so that religions and their spiritual goals are, like the rest of human culture, a projection of desires, aversions, and basic animal drives.

one can just be, and let the stream of consciousness flow where it will. That is what I mean by “awake.”

Choice is a story we tell ourselves after the actual “decision”—there never was any decision—has already been determined unconsciously as the resultant of the interplay among different parts of the brain. What feels to us like choice is not a voluntary decision at all, but the attribution of that neuronal dance to a fictional boss or overseer called myself. The overseer-myself is a ghost in the machine. There really is no little “myself” sitting in the middle of your skull deciding anything.

Myself is like a river of thoughts and feelings that cannot be controlled, but keeps flowing, like it or not, where and as it must. No one can stop that flow. The myself of the last moment is gone forever—water over the dam. Even this moment—this present “myself”—slips away before we can begin to get a grip on it.

Observe the stream of consciousness you call “myself”—not the content of consciousness, not the details of thoughts and feelings—but the stream itself. Notice how thoughts and feelings morph and change endlessly—one thought or feeling flowing into the next. That flow, I am saying, is “myself”—the only myself one will ever really know.

The seeming continuity of myself is an illusion that arises partly due to cultural indoctrination, but also because the apparent center of awareness always calls itself by the same name: “me.” That unvarying name suggests an identity which also does not change: me, the perceiver of perceptions, the feeler of feelings, and the thinker of thoughts. However, although the name never changes, that ostensibly unchanging center of awareness is flowing along with everything else, in no way separate from perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. If locked into a point of view that sees oneself as the thinker of thoughts, it will never even occur to that myself that “myself” is also a thought, ephemeral and entirely transient like any other thought. Yes, there may be a thought in the next moment also called “me,” along with a presentation of feelings and thoughts about “me,” but it will not be the same “me” as the previous “me-thought.”

That “used to be” is a story you tell yourself confected from memories and images of countless events, each of which happened to a different “me”, which now are blended together as if they all happened to one durable, but now bygone “me.”

In my student days, American universities were cauldrons of free speech with students defying all attempts to limit their self-expression. Nowadays, many students clamor for the polar opposite. It is not the right of uncensored expression they are demanding, but the “right” to be kept safe from such expression—safe from having to even hear ideas they do not like. In this new version of what a university should be about, professors have been fired from their jobs because they used a “trigger word” in a lecture, or even because they put a “trigger book” on the syllabus.

have since been thinking of trauma almost like a toxic spill in a river. The poison becomes part of the river in the same way that trauma becomes part of one’s life experience. This toxic spill can be felt, and possibly cleaned up some through therapy or whatever method one uses to heal. But I don’t know that it can ever fully be removed because you can’t undo an event. At least in my experience, once something comes into awareness, it doesn’t seem to want to leave. Before I was looking for ways to make it seem like the trauma never happened, but now I get it. It happened, and I will be forever changed by it. There is no going back, period, no matter how hard I try.

even if there is a tree “out there” in some ultimate sense—a tree, I mean, that exists separate from your perception of it—you are never actually seeing it. All you know is mind. The tree you see is an impression upon mind. So you know impressions, not trees.

It is not “my” mind. I don’t own it. I cannot control it. It will not mind me. It seems to flow like water all over the place. Nothing will keep it contained. I cannot force mind to stop coming up with thoughts and images, and like a mirror, whatever is put in front of mind seems to be reflected instantly, whether “myself” likes that or not, and with no effort or intention anywhere to reflect anything. So the notion of “my mind and your mind” seems questionable. Is there a “myself” that has a mind? Or is “myself” better understood not as a possessor of mind but as a collection of impressions in mind like the tree?

“I” am not observing anything. The observer is the observed. A dividing line between inside and outside is a feature of Fantasyland, and I don’t hang out in that theme park. It’s all me. I have no way to distance myself or be rid of anything. After all, where would I put it?

The human neural complexity seems to leave available a surplus of brain-power which may be devoted to self-justification, self-aggrandizement, religious fantasy, and other such cogitation. But all of that is a fool’s errand in my book.

each of us experiences not “the world”—although we call it that—but “a world,” a personal realm built of our perceptions, feelings, and thoughts—particularly the kinds of thoughts called beliefs. My seeing, feeling, and thinking is my world, and your seeing, feeling, and thinking is your world. You can talk to me about your world, but I cannot know it, and you cannot show it to me. Each of us lives, I am saying, in his or her own world.

There is no you who has thoughts—no homunculus sitting in the middle of your skull doing thinking. You are thoughts. You are feelings. You are perceptions. “You” are in no way separate from them, nor are you the owner of them.

We humans, whose minds evolved under pressure to identify threats, are voracious in our appetite for explanations, and thus prone to seeing false causality everywhere.

That’s how thoughts enter the mind; we pick them up by contact. That contact can be random, or someone may intentionally inject those thoughts, such as parents do with children “for their own good,” or spiritual teachers preaching to their flocks. Thoughts, including the kinds of thoughts we call intentions, arise unavoidably, and there is no “myself” apart from them except as another thought.

We are what we are in this moment.

The understanding that awareness is choiceless is the birth of compassion both for oneself and for one’s fellow beings who, one sees, have no more choice than you do but to be what they are.

mind engaged in denial will never notice that freedom is a natural quality of mind that does not have to be earned or deserved, but only noticed and appreciated.

a so-called “spiritual path” is a means, however unconscious, of avoiding freedom, not finding it. Here and now, in this very moment, is where freedom exists, not in some imagined location farther along the imagined path.

the escapist dream of the quest, the path, and the method.

We are, I mean, so identified with the concepts with which we have been impregnated as to be rendered incapable of noticing the freedom and ease of not knowing answers to ultimate questions—of not believing in dogma of any stripe—unless that freedom comes right up and slaps us in the face.

In each moment, I see what I see, and that seeing is me. When I comprehend that—not just in words but moment by moment—I don’t have to believe in anything. And, since I don’t have to believe in anything, I am relieved of having to question anything. That is what I mean by freedom: just be.

Facts are facts whether you in particular believe them or disbelieve them. Articles of faith, on the other hand, are never facts, even if you and millions of others believe in them.

belief does not make something true, nor disbelief falsify it.

As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Long before the age of reason, by means of reward and punishment, cultural norms are foisted upon the child, wedding that child to a permanent identity called “me.” A chief aspect of that identity is the supposedly clear, unambiguous separation between myself, the doer, and what that doer does. That erroneous separation benefits the individual not at all, I say, but societies require it so that each person (“ person” is a cultural designation, not a biological fact) can be held legally and socially responsible.

“Myself,” I say, is better understood not as a fixed entity, not as a doer, not as a person, but as the entirety of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in this very moment. Except as a social convention, there is no other “myself.”

Myself is a flow—a process, not a “thing.”

the flow is a fact, whereas the person, Johnny, is fictitious—only a social construction.

we fall readily into the illusion of a myself that is not a flow, but a fixed presence that persists over time, and the frequent replay of memories—including nowadays photographs, recordings, and other memorabilia—seems to confirm the existence of “myself” in the past, deepening the illusion of permanence. But an image in a photograph is not myself. It never was. The photograph portrays a body, not a self.

Perceptions, feelings, and thoughts are not objects, so they cannot be recorded by a camera. And even if the photograph seems to evoke somehow a myself who existed in the past, that myself is not here now and can never come back again.

That flow of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts is me.

The stream of consciousness—including any thoughts about decisions and choices—is a river that just keeps flowing as it must, and that river is me, the only me I can ever know.

Perceptions, feelings, and thoughts are revealed only moment by moment, never in advance.

Except in fantasy, “future” has no existence. Future is everything we don’t know.

You have tried the religious approach, as I understand is central to your social milieu, and it’s not working for you. And so you find yourself resorting to me, whose view of “God” is this: “Just because something can be conceived of and named does not mean it really exists.”

“God” is a concept—an idea in your mind—and you didn’t think it up.

This constant juggling of concepts about supreme beings, souls, reincarnation, transcendence, self-realization, and enlightenment serves only as a tactic of postponement. All we really know is now.

Unless we are able find our own authenticity and freedom apart from inherited belief systems, which many humans never arrive at finding, we rely upon the imagoes for a sense of security. That is why it can feel so frightening to have introjected beliefs called into question, even by one’s own logical aspect.

As I see this, mind is conditioned by everything ever seen, heard, or otherwise experienced, as well as congenital tendencies encoded in DNA.

like Rilke on this: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

George Carlin: “I want to live my next life backwards. “You start out dead and get that out of the way. “Then you wake up in a nursing home feeling better every day. “Then you get kicked out for being too healthy. “Enjoy your retirement and collect your pension. “Then when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. “You work 40 years until you’re too young to work. “You get ready for high school: drink alcohol, party, and you’re generally promiscuous. “Then you go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, and you have no responsibilities. “Then you become a baby, and then… “You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in luxury, in spa-like conditions—central heating, room service on tap, and then… “You finish off as an orgasm. “I rest my case.”

To be awake is not some kind of super-attainment, but only the liberty to be at ease with oneself, and to live step by step without making a big deal out of anything or attempting to become something.

“awake” means being naturally present without perfectionistic striving and without chasing after what others claim to have attained.

fantasies of “transcendence,” which, coming from Latin, literally means climbing beyond what one actually is presently, as if one actually could.

much of, if not most of, what is called “spirituality,” which assumes, in one way or another, that one’s present condition is somehow flawed, but can be corrected by following a “path” (subtext: a path that leads back to the “Garden”). Such ideas are what I meant by second-hand concepts about reality.

One may try to be mindful, but no one can try to be awake.

When the fever to attain something permanent comes to an end, and one finds oneself instead flowing along with everything else in the universe, permanent or not, one is awake, I say.

Awake is very simple. In fact, it seems to be too simple for those who would prefer to climb an imaginary hierarchical ladder of spiritual attainment leading at last to “enlightenment,” at which point, they believe, all suffering will cease.

This is about suddenly tumbling into the recognition that everything seen, heard, thought, and felt is me. It’s all “myself.” In that comprehension, the universe begins right now.

No one, I say, chooses what to believe. Most likely each of us is born with a certain propensity to believe what we are told, and then the substance of those beliefs depends upon what we are told. It is as if one is born with a cup waiting to be filled with ideas, but the content of that cup depends on the luck of the draw—one’s family of origin and its mythology, plus the authoritative precepts of the wider cultural surround.

children will have had beliefs presented to them as if they were facts. That’s how the damage is done. Once indoctrinated in that way, many people simply conform, and never even notice having been indoctrinated. Others struggle with their doubts. Some replace one set of beliefs with another. Only a few, it seems, manage to find what Jiddu Krishnamurti called “freedom from the known.”

I regard most of so-called “spirituality” as a collection of superstitious behaviors and baseless conjectures passed from generation to generation via indoctrination beginning in infancy—a schooling principally in magical thinking and self-deception. The worst feature in that landscape of nonsense is the idea that the world we see with our eyes is somehow less “real” than some other “better” world, and that if we could somehow enter that “other world,” either after death, like a Christian or a Muslim, or here and now like the “self-realizers,” the pains of ordinary life would be magically transformed into “perfection.”

The human body has no “spiritual” needs. The body needs air, water, food, clothing, and shelter, not god, salvation, or self-realization. It is not the body that spirituality aims at “saving,” but rather the collection of habitual thoughts, attitudes, and feelings called “myself.” That self—“ myself”—when faced with its own unstable, transitory nature—including the fearful suspicion that “myself” will die when the body dies—craves a way out. In response to that craving, the story arises of another world or another way of being in which death is not “real.” That story, I say, is pure, one hundred percent speculation motivated by wishful thinking. That is the kind of “spirituality” I discredit as escapism.

All the faith in the world—the credulous embrace of scriptures, prophets and saviors, practices, instructions and the rest—says nothing about reality. Absolutely nothing. You ask how I can say that. How can I, an individual person, discount an entire world of beliefs, including gods and saints, which countless millions accept as “Truth”? I say it from a perspective that sees all such beliefs as second-hand ideas imposed upon minds that were hobbled from day one by those ideas.

if you cling too long to a teaching, any teaching, it will blind you to your own life, your own being, your own truth.