The Reader Who Stopped Seeking

A correspondence, over the course of about a year, with a reader named Kate. She wrote to me first as a seeker, raised a Christian fundamentalist and long since departed into the spiritual marketplace, still hunting the thing that would fix her. By the end, she had stopped hunting and started writing. I have cut it for length and mended a few broken sentences, but I have not tidied the circling, because the circling is what happened. What follows is published with her consent.

———

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?

———

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.