A Conversation. Pierce Salguero and Robert Saltzman.

Not the best quality recording, but a conversation worth hearing, I think.

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