I found your article of google search. It is interesting. I have also analysed the question of identity. Particularly how the self-supporting connection between self-identity, food, body health, brain function, and thought processes determines whether I can thrive in a cycle of reinforcement and growth or becomes trapped in a loop of dysfunction and distortion. My take is different. I think there is lot to take in your posts.
I appreciate the sentiment, Karl, and I’ll offer a small correction in the spirit of what we’ve been circling.
If anything here helps, it isn’t by forming a club, even a fictitious one. Clubs are another way of softening aloneness by turning it into belonging. That can be pleasant, but it’s not what I’m pointing to.
What’s shared isn’t membership, agreement, or identity. It’s the recognition that the limits we each experience are not personal failures. Seeing that can reduce the sense of being uniquely cut off, without replacing it with a new banner to stand under.
So if there’s a “Saltzman Club,” it has no roster, no doctrine, and no dues. It dissolves the moment anyone applies for membership.
Suppose what is sensed, seen, and spoken as “my-self” were a snake—yet unlike other snakes, bound by nature to shed their skin, my-self-sense snake is firmly committed to keeping theirs for good, at all costs…
And so, over time, this precious skin breaks open here and there—whereby my-self-sense snake touches into, and is exposed to, suffering…
Attributed to “karma” by some, and to having eaten from a forbidden fruit by others, in an effort to keep the unshed skin intact, my-self-sense snake adapts to suffering—whether religiously, philosophically, scientifically, and whatnot…
Would anyone know how the shedding of my-self-sense skin might come about for real? Quite probably not—since the trajectory of our lives is firmly committed to preserving our skin at all costs…
Just as a snake that cannot shed its skin is bound to perish, so too does one who clings to the lie of identity suffocate beneath yesterday’s self…
In an interview you said, "if you are happy in the life you have now, don't try to awaken." I'm not seeing how an "I" makes that decision. That seems to me the truth to which you point. Am I missing something?
You’re not missing anything. You’re noticing the same grammatical strain Larry pointed to earlier.
The sentence uses ordinary agent-language because there isn’t another way to speak intelligibly in ordinary conversation. But I’m not implying that there’s an “I” standing outside the process, weighing options, and then choosing awakening or not.
What I was pointing to is much simpler and much less volitional: when a life is functioning smoothly and feels settled, the pressures that tend to destabilize familiar meanings usually aren’t present. In those conditions, the kinds of questions that get labeled “awakening” rarely arise, and when they do, they don’t tend to stick.
Conversely, when those pressures are present—disruption, dissatisfaction, loss, curiosity that won’t resolve—there’s no one deciding to awaken either. The inquiry happens because the loop is already unsettled.
So the line isn’t advice or instruction. It’s a description of how this tends to unfold. The language makes it sound like a choice because English almost always does. But nothing stands apart, making the call.
The two claims only clash if identity is doing the same work in both sentences. It isn’t.
When I say “identity is nothing but a lie,” I’m talking about identity as a self-description: a story about who or what one is, anchored in traits, roles, histories, affiliations, or metaphysical positions. That kind of identity always overreaches. It takes patterns and reifies them into an entity.
When I say “our true identity is this aliveness, this capacity to be aware,” I’m using the word identity in a deliberately deflated way, almost reluctantly. It’s not pointing to a thing you are. It’s pointing to what is already the case before any self-description gets going. You could just as well drop the word “identity” altogether and say: there is aliveness, there is awareness. Nothing personal is being asserted there.
So there’s no positive identity replacing a false one. There’s a withdrawal from identity-making, and then a gesture toward what remains once the gesture itself is seen through.
On your second question: yes, it can be heard that way. Recognizing that this solitude is shared can soften the sense of personal isolation. But it doesn’t erase the solitude itself. Knowing that everyone else is also confined to their own point of view doesn’t grant access to theirs, and it doesn’t dissolve the fact that experience is singular.
So it can cut both ways. For some, it reduces the feeling of being uniquely cut off or defective. For others, it sharpens the realization that no final merging is available. Neither response is wrong. They’re different inflections of the same recognition.
What matters, for me, is not whether loneliness is amplified or dispelled, but that it’s no longer misdiagnosed. Once it’s seen as structural rather than personal, it stops being something one has failed to overcome. It becomes part of the terrain, not a verdict.
I appreciate the thoroughgoing detail of your response.
I have also gleaned the understanding that this article was actually written some time ago and that you’d be unlikely to use a phrase like “our true identity” today.
Regarding your definition of loneliness as “the lived fact that no one—not even those closest to us—will ever fully know what we’ve seen, suffered, or felt”…. Does such loneliness necessarily come freighted with the kind of dolor the word generally suggests?
And, as “the price of awakening “, do you consider this loneliness mandatory or inevitable?
Thank you, Tilts. You have that right. This is a version of something I wrote years ago, and today I would not likely say anything about our “true identity.” I don’t have reliable information on that.
On your question about loneliness and pain: no, the kind of loneliness I’m pointing to does not necessarily come freighted with the dolor the word usually carries. It can hurt, but in my experience, it hurts far less than the alternative—namely, resisting aloneness and trying to live up to the expectations of others, or feigning respect for values I don’t actually share. That effort carries its own, more corrosive cost.
I think 'inevitable' is a better word than 'mandatory'. There’s no rule requiring anyone to feel alone, and many people find ways—more or less successfully—to avoid feeling that way. I’m simply not one of them.
At the time I wrote this, I was using 'awake' in a metaphysical sense, and people were asking what I meant by that. The idea that existential loneliness accompanies that orientation was the essay's central theme.
In the years since, while continuing to write and respond to questions, I’ve lost interest in metaphysics. I find that staying close to what is directly observable serves me better. Your careful reading and focused skepticism suggest that an update would probably be warranted. Still, since the essay seems to be landing as it is, I’m content to let it stand.
Thank you for pursuing this. I appreciate the care you brought to it.
Well, I recognise what your definition is pointing to and, of course, like anyone, I have occasionally known the ache of loneliness but I cannot say that it features in my experience in the way you describe.
Whilst I love to communicate (and it’s wonderful to feel understood) there is no pressure or demand that anyone “fully know “ what I’ve “seen, suffered or felt”. Whatever I’ve seen, suffered or felt will be there in the communication… got or not.
If you will allow, I would even suggest that loneliness, as you defined it, is itself a kind of misdiagnosis; an outcome of the “cold rigor” which midwifed the idea.
I’m with you on the “structural” loneliness you describe—no one can fully inhabit another’s inner life. I’m curious if you also distinguish that from a more relational loneliness: the pain of not having secure, nourishing attachments (something many researchers argue we’re built to need).
I ask because some readers might hear “loneliness is unavoidable” and miss that the relational kind can sometimes be improved—even though the existential gap remains.
I do distinguish them, but probably not in the way “two kinds of loneliness” is often meant.
There is a structural solitude that comes with having a point of view at all, and there are relational dynamics that can be more or less painful, stable, or workable. Those aren’t the same thing, and I’m wary of calling the latter “loneliness” in the same sense, because that word quietly invites a repair narrative, as if loneliness were something local and remediable rather than an ambient condition.
Attachments are indeed part and parcel of mammalian life. We concur there. And it’s certainly true that some relationships function more smoothly than others: patterns soften, conflict decreases, and regulation becomes easier. But it isn’t obvious to me that this reflects improvement so much as reorganization under changing conditions. Calling all of that “improvement” quietly assumes a hierarchical view of how attachment is supposed to look. Yet sometimes circumstances change, expectations shift, people learn new scripts, or stop insisting on old ones. Sometimes bodies settle. None of that requires positing that something essential was lacking and then added.
So yes, relational suffering can modulate. It can intensify or ease. But that doesn’t mean the underlying structural features have been corrected, or that something missing was supplied. The existential gap doesn’t close, and the mammalian need for attachment doesn’t disappear. What changes is how the loop stabilizes.
We "construct" our "world" and our "identity" with STORIES.
The words of a good story spark an ASC (which is a form of hypnosis) inducing a fantasy in which the reader/hearer imagines he/she has actually entered the story-worlds of the stories (hallucination?). If that’s not magic, what else can you call it?
Agreed...we can only perceive what we perceive, and our perspective is unique in each moment - sometimes similar to that of some others at that moment, sometimes radically different.
Given this, an "objective" reality can never be directly experienced, and must, therefore, be confined to specilation. However, what we each perceive is experientially real to us when we perceive it...
Stark. Unpleasant. But I think I basically get what you’re saying. But here’s where the push back comes in: my direct experience does not confirm the benign indifference of the universe. Does it confirm the opposite? No. So I am trying to stay open to what is. I greatly appreciate your applying discipline to the ‘direct’, if only so I can see when I’m falling into projection, assumption, perhaps in your definition - self delusion. Fair enough.
Thank you Robert, and as you have said “fair enough”. Truthfully, I was bracing for a bit of a harsh “Robert” push back, and I greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts. Your statement “experience doesn’t confirm cosmic attitudes” points to something I am struggling with: “what are they”? They occur, they are “experienced” (brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department), but I can’t seem to leave them alone…or my “thoughts” won’t leave them alone. Pressure to interpret rather than let them “be”.
Yes, that’s exactly the spot where the loop shows itself most clearly.
Those “cosmic” thoughts aren’t things in the world waiting to be discovered. They’re patterns of sense-making that arise alongside experience, almost automatically. A mood appears, a thought follows, and very quickly the mind asks what this says about reality as a whole. That move feels natural because it’s familiar, not because it’s warranted.
As thoughts, they aren’t in question. They occur, they’re experienced, and they can have real psychological force. Their occurrence, however, amounts only to this: interpretations arise, recur, and feel compelling. Observation reaches that far and no further. It never delivers evidence about the universe’s stance toward us. The move from appearance to conclusion is where interpretation hardens.
The pressure to keep one foot in, to hedge, to not quite let go of a larger story, isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s just how the loop operates. Thought doesn’t like leaving things open-ended. It keeps circling, offering orientations, explanations, and candidates for meaning.
Seeing that happening doesn’t require stopping it or purifying experience. It’s enough to notice that these interpretations arise as part of the same process as the sensations and moods they comment on. They’re included in experience, not authoritative over it.
So yes, one foot in is part of the loop. Not a mistake to correct, just another movement to recognize.
That’s a fair pushback, and it lands where it should.
Nothing I’m saying depends on the universe being benign, indifferent, hostile, or anything else. Those are all readings laid over experience, not findings delivered by it. Your direct experience doesn’t confirm benign indifference because experience doesn’t confirm cosmic attitudes at all. It delivers sensations, moods, meanings, resistances. The story about what the universe is like comes later.
Stark and unpleasant are reasonable reactions. When familiar consolations are removed, what’s left isn’t automatically gentle.
Nothing here turns on adopting a verdict about reality. Whatever sense of indifference, care, hostility, or meaning arises is part of experience, not a disclosure about the universe itself. The discipline is simply noticing when interpretation hardens into conclusion, especially when it feels justified by sincerity or depth. Projection isn’t a failure. It’s a default. Seeing it occur is already the correction.
If by “no identity” you mean the absence of a fixed owner or essence, then nothing essential about love disappears. What drops out is authorship, not contact.
Love, in that sense, is not a property of someone, nor a stance adopted by an identity. It is a pattern of attunement, responsiveness, regulation. Bodies coordinate. Attention adjusts. Care appears as behavior, timing, restraint, warmth. No one needs to have it for it to function.
Relationships don’t require identity as essence either. They require history, sensitivity, memory, expectation, and ongoing mutual influence. All of that operates perfectly well without positing a self behind it. The system still differentiates, still responds to this body rather than that one, still forms stable patterns over time.
What vanishes is the idea that love is something owned or that relationships are contracts between inner entities. What remains is interaction without a proprietor.
So yes, there are relationships in which identity is not of the essence. They are not impersonal. They are simply unowned.
That’s the pressure point in the neural foundry that many people move past too quickly. When it isn’t resolved, but simply left in place, it begins to show what it’s actually made of.
The loneliness I’m describing isn’t something to be healed or overcome. It isn’t a pathology or a personal shortcoming. Like all experience, it is psychological. But it isn’t contingent on conditions. It’s what remains once the fantasy of full mutual transparency drops away. It goes with the territory.
No one is trapped in their perceptual field as a problem to be solved; it’s the condition of having any perspective at all. Experience is singular by structure. Wanting to be fully understood isn’t wrong, but it is structurally unattainable. Seeing that can sting, and in the same motion, withdraw the barb.
What usually moves in to cover that sting is identity. Not because identity is true, but because it’s soothing. Shared labels stand in for understanding. They evoke a sense of contact without requiring the impossible. That’s compelling. It’s why letting go of them can feel like standing in open air.
Sitting with that openness isn’t an achievement. It’s what happens when nothing rushes in to fill the space. No replacement identity, no upgraded framework, no better story about who one really is. Just the bare fact of experience happening, without an owner.
The madness in the parable isn’t irrationality. It’s consensus. Most of what we call sanity is simply agreement. Clarity costs belonging, at least in its familiar forms. That doesn’t make belonging degrading. It just makes the tradeoff visible.
I found your article of google search. It is interesting. I have also analysed the question of identity. Particularly how the self-supporting connection between self-identity, food, body health, brain function, and thought processes determines whether I can thrive in a cycle of reinforcement and growth or becomes trapped in a loop of dysfunction and distortion. My take is different. I think there is lot to take in your posts.
Thank you for helping us feel less alone Robert, we all feel like we are part of some kind of “Saltzman Club”, however fictitious it may be
I appreciate the sentiment, Karl, and I’ll offer a small correction in the spirit of what we’ve been circling.
If anything here helps, it isn’t by forming a club, even a fictitious one. Clubs are another way of softening aloneness by turning it into belonging. That can be pleasant, but it’s not what I’m pointing to.
What’s shared isn’t membership, agreement, or identity. It’s the recognition that the limits we each experience are not personal failures. Seeing that can reduce the sense of being uniquely cut off, without replacing it with a new banner to stand under.
So if there’s a “Saltzman Club,” it has no roster, no doctrine, and no dues. It dissolves the moment anyone applies for membership.
Suppose what is sensed, seen, and spoken as “my-self” were a snake—yet unlike other snakes, bound by nature to shed their skin, my-self-sense snake is firmly committed to keeping theirs for good, at all costs…
And so, over time, this precious skin breaks open here and there—whereby my-self-sense snake touches into, and is exposed to, suffering…
Attributed to “karma” by some, and to having eaten from a forbidden fruit by others, in an effort to keep the unshed skin intact, my-self-sense snake adapts to suffering—whether religiously, philosophically, scientifically, and whatnot…
Would anyone know how the shedding of my-self-sense skin might come about for real? Quite probably not—since the trajectory of our lives is firmly committed to preserving our skin at all costs…
Just as a snake that cannot shed its skin is bound to perish, so too does one who clings to the lie of identity suffocate beneath yesterday’s self…
In an interview you said, "if you are happy in the life you have now, don't try to awaken." I'm not seeing how an "I" makes that decision. That seems to me the truth to which you point. Am I missing something?
You’re not missing anything. You’re noticing the same grammatical strain Larry pointed to earlier.
The sentence uses ordinary agent-language because there isn’t another way to speak intelligibly in ordinary conversation. But I’m not implying that there’s an “I” standing outside the process, weighing options, and then choosing awakening or not.
What I was pointing to is much simpler and much less volitional: when a life is functioning smoothly and feels settled, the pressures that tend to destabilize familiar meanings usually aren’t present. In those conditions, the kinds of questions that get labeled “awakening” rarely arise, and when they do, they don’t tend to stick.
Conversely, when those pressures are present—disruption, dissatisfaction, loss, curiosity that won’t resolve—there’s no one deciding to awaken either. The inquiry happens because the loop is already unsettled.
So the line isn’t advice or instruction. It’s a description of how this tends to unfold. The language makes it sound like a choice because English almost always does. But nothing stands apart, making the call.
I feel that loneliness is more about having stories to tell, but nobody who wants to listen.
No objections — that’s exactly right. Your post made the “being so” much clearer. Thank you for putting it into words.
Sufi parable: very fun and intriguing.
“Identity is nothing but a lie”…
“Our true identity is this aliveness, this capacity to be aware”…How to reconcile these two claims?
Also, could the fact that “original solitude” is shared by us all actually serve to dispel the sense of loneliness not amplify it?
The two claims only clash if identity is doing the same work in both sentences. It isn’t.
When I say “identity is nothing but a lie,” I’m talking about identity as a self-description: a story about who or what one is, anchored in traits, roles, histories, affiliations, or metaphysical positions. That kind of identity always overreaches. It takes patterns and reifies them into an entity.
When I say “our true identity is this aliveness, this capacity to be aware,” I’m using the word identity in a deliberately deflated way, almost reluctantly. It’s not pointing to a thing you are. It’s pointing to what is already the case before any self-description gets going. You could just as well drop the word “identity” altogether and say: there is aliveness, there is awareness. Nothing personal is being asserted there.
So there’s no positive identity replacing a false one. There’s a withdrawal from identity-making, and then a gesture toward what remains once the gesture itself is seen through.
On your second question: yes, it can be heard that way. Recognizing that this solitude is shared can soften the sense of personal isolation. But it doesn’t erase the solitude itself. Knowing that everyone else is also confined to their own point of view doesn’t grant access to theirs, and it doesn’t dissolve the fact that experience is singular.
So it can cut both ways. For some, it reduces the feeling of being uniquely cut off or defective. For others, it sharpens the realization that no final merging is available. Neither response is wrong. They’re different inflections of the same recognition.
What matters, for me, is not whether loneliness is amplified or dispelled, but that it’s no longer misdiagnosed. Once it’s seen as structural rather than personal, it stops being something one has failed to overcome. It becomes part of the terrain, not a verdict.
I appreciate the thoroughgoing detail of your response.
I have also gleaned the understanding that this article was actually written some time ago and that you’d be unlikely to use a phrase like “our true identity” today.
Regarding your definition of loneliness as “the lived fact that no one—not even those closest to us—will ever fully know what we’ve seen, suffered, or felt”…. Does such loneliness necessarily come freighted with the kind of dolor the word generally suggests?
And, as “the price of awakening “, do you consider this loneliness mandatory or inevitable?
Thank you, Tilts. You have that right. This is a version of something I wrote years ago, and today I would not likely say anything about our “true identity.” I don’t have reliable information on that.
On your question about loneliness and pain: no, the kind of loneliness I’m pointing to does not necessarily come freighted with the dolor the word usually carries. It can hurt, but in my experience, it hurts far less than the alternative—namely, resisting aloneness and trying to live up to the expectations of others, or feigning respect for values I don’t actually share. That effort carries its own, more corrosive cost.
I think 'inevitable' is a better word than 'mandatory'. There’s no rule requiring anyone to feel alone, and many people find ways—more or less successfully—to avoid feeling that way. I’m simply not one of them.
At the time I wrote this, I was using 'awake' in a metaphysical sense, and people were asking what I meant by that. The idea that existential loneliness accompanies that orientation was the essay's central theme.
In the years since, while continuing to write and respond to questions, I’ve lost interest in metaphysics. I find that staying close to what is directly observable serves me better. Your careful reading and focused skepticism suggest that an update would probably be warranted. Still, since the essay seems to be landing as it is, I’m content to let it stand.
Thank you for pursuing this. I appreciate the care you brought to it.
Well, I’m glad that it hasn’t weighed too heavily on you.
For some, there could be a quiet temptation to identify with a kind of painful, existential loneliness as a mark of being awake!
What are your feelings about this aspect of the human condition, Tilts?
Well, I recognise what your definition is pointing to and, of course, like anyone, I have occasionally known the ache of loneliness but I cannot say that it features in my experience in the way you describe.
Whilst I love to communicate (and it’s wonderful to feel understood) there is no pressure or demand that anyone “fully know “ what I’ve “seen, suffered or felt”. Whatever I’ve seen, suffered or felt will be there in the communication… got or not.
If you will allow, I would even suggest that loneliness, as you defined it, is itself a kind of misdiagnosis; an outcome of the “cold rigor” which midwifed the idea.
I am so glad you sent this out again. Even more powerful the second time I have read it. I just goes "clunk" for me (meaning it makes total sense)
Thanks, Scott--
This is quite foundational to some other ideas I write about. I posted it again because I have many new readers who will not have seen it.
sooo glad you did. just sent it to a friend who is being introduced to your writing.
I’m with you on the “structural” loneliness you describe—no one can fully inhabit another’s inner life. I’m curious if you also distinguish that from a more relational loneliness: the pain of not having secure, nourishing attachments (something many researchers argue we’re built to need).
I ask because some readers might hear “loneliness is unavoidable” and miss that the relational kind can sometimes be improved—even though the existential gap remains.
I do distinguish them, but probably not in the way “two kinds of loneliness” is often meant.
There is a structural solitude that comes with having a point of view at all, and there are relational dynamics that can be more or less painful, stable, or workable. Those aren’t the same thing, and I’m wary of calling the latter “loneliness” in the same sense, because that word quietly invites a repair narrative, as if loneliness were something local and remediable rather than an ambient condition.
Attachments are indeed part and parcel of mammalian life. We concur there. And it’s certainly true that some relationships function more smoothly than others: patterns soften, conflict decreases, and regulation becomes easier. But it isn’t obvious to me that this reflects improvement so much as reorganization under changing conditions. Calling all of that “improvement” quietly assumes a hierarchical view of how attachment is supposed to look. Yet sometimes circumstances change, expectations shift, people learn new scripts, or stop insisting on old ones. Sometimes bodies settle. None of that requires positing that something essential was lacking and then added.
So yes, relational suffering can modulate. It can intensify or ease. But that doesn’t mean the underlying structural features have been corrected, or that something missing was supplied. The existential gap doesn’t close, and the mammalian need for attachment doesn’t disappear. What changes is how the loop stabilizes.
Language - words - hypnosis - We SPELL words - WISH-Craft - Magic
We have been hypnotized by the Master Magician who created the Word, (WORDS, Language).
God put Adam to sleep but never woke him up.
Awaken, thou that sleeps.
Awaken to the fact you have been hypnotized.
We "construct" our "world" and our "identity" with STORIES.
The words of a good story spark an ASC (which is a form of hypnosis) inducing a fantasy in which the reader/hearer imagines he/she has actually entered the story-worlds of the stories (hallucination?). If that’s not magic, what else can you call it?
WE ARE STORIES. STORIES ARE US.
“We are a storytelling species.”
Sylvia Wynter
Agreed...we can only perceive what we perceive, and our perspective is unique in each moment - sometimes similar to that of some others at that moment, sometimes radically different.
Given this, an "objective" reality can never be directly experienced, and must, therefore, be confined to specilation. However, what we each perceive is experientially real to us when we perceive it...
Nice piece. 🈚️🫶
Stark. Unpleasant. But I think I basically get what you’re saying. But here’s where the push back comes in: my direct experience does not confirm the benign indifference of the universe. Does it confirm the opposite? No. So I am trying to stay open to what is. I greatly appreciate your applying discipline to the ‘direct’, if only so I can see when I’m falling into projection, assumption, perhaps in your definition - self delusion. Fair enough.
Thank you Robert, and as you have said “fair enough”. Truthfully, I was bracing for a bit of a harsh “Robert” push back, and I greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts. Your statement “experience doesn’t confirm cosmic attitudes” points to something I am struggling with: “what are they”? They occur, they are “experienced” (brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department), but I can’t seem to leave them alone…or my “thoughts” won’t leave them alone. Pressure to interpret rather than let them “be”.
Yes, that’s exactly the spot where the loop shows itself most clearly.
Those “cosmic” thoughts aren’t things in the world waiting to be discovered. They’re patterns of sense-making that arise alongside experience, almost automatically. A mood appears, a thought follows, and very quickly the mind asks what this says about reality as a whole. That move feels natural because it’s familiar, not because it’s warranted.
As thoughts, they aren’t in question. They occur, they’re experienced, and they can have real psychological force. Their occurrence, however, amounts only to this: interpretations arise, recur, and feel compelling. Observation reaches that far and no further. It never delivers evidence about the universe’s stance toward us. The move from appearance to conclusion is where interpretation hardens.
The pressure to keep one foot in, to hedge, to not quite let go of a larger story, isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s just how the loop operates. Thought doesn’t like leaving things open-ended. It keeps circling, offering orientations, explanations, and candidates for meaning.
Seeing that happening doesn’t require stopping it or purifying experience. It’s enough to notice that these interpretations arise as part of the same process as the sensations and moods they comment on. They’re included in experience, not authoritative over it.
So yes, one foot in is part of the loop. Not a mistake to correct, just another movement to recognize.
That’s a fair pushback, and it lands where it should.
Nothing I’m saying depends on the universe being benign, indifferent, hostile, or anything else. Those are all readings laid over experience, not findings delivered by it. Your direct experience doesn’t confirm benign indifference because experience doesn’t confirm cosmic attitudes at all. It delivers sensations, moods, meanings, resistances. The story about what the universe is like comes later.
Stark and unpleasant are reasonable reactions. When familiar consolations are removed, what’s left isn’t automatically gentle.
Nothing here turns on adopting a verdict about reality. Whatever sense of indifference, care, hostility, or meaning arises is part of experience, not a disclosure about the universe itself. The discipline is simply noticing when interpretation hardens into conclusion, especially when it feels justified by sincerity or depth. Projection isn’t a failure. It’s a default. Seeing it occur is already the correction.
Stan,
If by “no identity” you mean the absence of a fixed owner or essence, then nothing essential about love disappears. What drops out is authorship, not contact.
Love, in that sense, is not a property of someone, nor a stance adopted by an identity. It is a pattern of attunement, responsiveness, regulation. Bodies coordinate. Attention adjusts. Care appears as behavior, timing, restraint, warmth. No one needs to have it for it to function.
Relationships don’t require identity as essence either. They require history, sensitivity, memory, expectation, and ongoing mutual influence. All of that operates perfectly well without positing a self behind it. The system still differentiates, still responds to this body rather than that one, still forms stable patterns over time.
What vanishes is the idea that love is something owned or that relationships are contracts between inner entities. What remains is interaction without a proprietor.
So yes, there are relationships in which identity is not of the essence. They are not impersonal. They are simply unowned.
That’s the pressure point in the neural foundry that many people move past too quickly. When it isn’t resolved, but simply left in place, it begins to show what it’s actually made of.
The loneliness I’m describing isn’t something to be healed or overcome. It isn’t a pathology or a personal shortcoming. Like all experience, it is psychological. But it isn’t contingent on conditions. It’s what remains once the fantasy of full mutual transparency drops away. It goes with the territory.
No one is trapped in their perceptual field as a problem to be solved; it’s the condition of having any perspective at all. Experience is singular by structure. Wanting to be fully understood isn’t wrong, but it is structurally unattainable. Seeing that can sting, and in the same motion, withdraw the barb.
What usually moves in to cover that sting is identity. Not because identity is true, but because it’s soothing. Shared labels stand in for understanding. They evoke a sense of contact without requiring the impossible. That’s compelling. It’s why letting go of them can feel like standing in open air.
Sitting with that openness isn’t an achievement. It’s what happens when nothing rushes in to fill the space. No replacement identity, no upgraded framework, no better story about who one really is. Just the bare fact of experience happening, without an owner.
The madness in the parable isn’t irrationality. It’s consensus. Most of what we call sanity is simply agreement. Clarity costs belonging, at least in its familiar forms. That doesn’t make belonging degrading. It just makes the tradeoff visible.