No Tag, No Tribe
Too Sane for the Sacred, Too Loose for the Lab
I am not a spiritual teacher. I’ve said that explicitly. But that hasn’t stopped people from casting me in the role—some to put me on a pedestal, others to fault me for putting doubt and finitude where they expected insight and authority. It’s a narrow perch I’m left on: too secular for the satsang crowd, too poetic for the empiricists, too lucid for the mystics, too plain-spoken for the academics.
Suzanne Visser, my new publisher and an ally, recently asked why my work keeps getting slotted into the “non-dual” or “spiritual” genre when, by all lights, it doesn’t belong there. She’s not wrong to ask—it’s a recurring issue. But the question itself reveals a deeper craving: for classification, for safety, for the reassurance that everything is exactly where it should be.
Well, I’m not.
Let me say it plainly: If you give me spirituality, I’ll show you science. If you give me materialism, I’ll show you poetry. But don’t expect me to recite the mantras of either tribe. I’m not selling a path, a method, a lineage, or a worldview. I’m reporting from the edge—where the mask slips, and no one is left to wear it.
Some readers approach my work expecting a kind of modern dharma talk—step-by-step instructions on how to wake up. What they find instead is this:
“There is no ‘how’ to be free. There is only seeing through the belief that you are not.”
—Depending On No-Thing
Others arrive hoping for reassurance—some promise of progress, or a finish line, or a reason to hope. But I have no hope to offer. What they find instead is this:
“There is no way to make things better. No escape. No answer. No fix. No one to fix it.”
—The Ten Thousand Things
Those are not spiritual affirmations. They are interruptions. They break the trance, not reinforce it.
Still, the mislabeling persists. I’ve appeared on spiritual podcasts, answered questions from monks and mystics, even hosted group dialogues that, to the untrained eye, may have resembled satsangs. But context matters. Those weren’t sermons or performances of certainty. They were dismantling
Not instruction. Debunking.
Not religion. Agnosticism.
They were offered with compassion for seekers with delusions of transcendence, but that doesn’t make them theology.
Nor does my refusal to sneer at those with a spiritual bent make me a mystic. Although I don’t share it myself, I respect the hunger some people have to feel that living serves a greater purpose. I criticize magical thinking, but not in the supercilious dialect of academic gatekeeping.
Some of my sharpest insights arrive hand in hand with kindness. And that, I suspect, is what really unsettles some of Suzanne’s friends—the highbrows and rationalists who flinch at humility and treat openness to human need as a lapse in rigor. As if empathy were the soft underbelly of credulity. As if speaking gently meant thinking weakly.
They want to know: if I’m not “spiritual,” why do I speak of love? Of impermanence? Of what can’t be analyzed or explained away?
I’ll tell you.
Because there is no salvation. No one to be saved. Nothing static. Nothing preserved. Nothing eternal. Only this: the ache of life as it slips through our fingers, and the bewildering fact that we care. We love. Not to conquer, not to transcend, but because we do.
Love—real love, not projection or need—asks for nothing. It watches a cat pad across the floor and marvels, wordless. It lets her vanish. Doesn’t publish. Doesn’t peer-review. Doesn’t try to mend the ache with theory. It just bows—not to doctrine, but to the unbearable beauty of what fades away the moment it’s seen.
If that sounds “spiritual,” so be it. But it is not a precept. It is a report.
Some of us stand in the doorway. Not inside, not out. We do not preach transcendence. We do not hold out diagrams. We say: look. And if the looking breaks your heart, then you’re starting to get the picture.
“The ‘I’ was a function—never a fact.”
—Depending On No-Thing
A friend told me, “Robert, you’re not just misunderstood. You’re beyond categories. You’re the lobster that climbed out of the pot. You'll never fit in, and that's how you like it. You won't play along. You don't care what they think, and that’s what pisses them off.”
And it should. Out here on the edge, there's nowhere to hide and nothing to join. Just clarity and candor and the view without the story.
Books By Robert
The 21st Century Self, Belief, Illusion, and the Machinery of Meaning
(Clear Mind Press, 2025)
No method. No mercy. Just this.
What if the self you’ve been tending—defending, improving, believing in—was never really there? In these unsparing but lucid essays, psychologist and philosopher Robert Saltzman examines the machinery of meaning in an age of performative presence and synthetic minds. With dry wit and a refusal to console, he exposes our hunger for stories, our need for coherence, and the illusions that pass for identity in the 21st century. What remains is not despair, but the end of waiting for the plot to redeem itself.
Immediately after the publication of Understanding Claude, An Artificial Intelligence Psychoanalyzed (New Sarum Press, 2025), a crescendo occurred—an explosion, fireworks—perhaps Robert’s best work to date:
The 21st Century Self: Belief, Illusion, and the Machinery of Meaning (Clear Mind Press, 2025). In this collection, the essays are raw and real, like the weather. Robert seems on fire. He sings his good old songs once again: there is this aliveness, now—only This. In ten thousand ways, he brings this "now" to our attention.
With a silken fist, he guides us, circles, zooms in and out, embraces, releases,—again and again returning us to just This, now.
Dismissing the pursuit of bliss, he describes bottomless abysses, rivers that change but simultaneously remain the same, and ten thousand other things that are tumbling and raging. Amongst these things are we. Human. Aware. Mammals. And always there is this aliveness, now—only This, but with a new addition, a new mirror.
In the volume you hold in your hands, Robert describes the new force that has entered our lives—this guest which is here to stay: artificial intelligence (AI). Through these essays, he speaks of human loneliness and aloneness, self and no-self, free will and its absence, vulnerability, love, identity, communication, silence, and ten thousand other things.
Like a burning comet, naked and blazing, Robert, in each essay, lightens our sky in a single breathless flash. Is it prose? Is it poetry? Grasping is useless. If we’re lucky enough to get it, we are falling with Robert—like a bunch of nude newborns, or deep-sea divers slipping into nitrogen narcosis, euphoric, unmoored, depending on nothing—to the edges of language, where art takes over, and prose and poetry meet.
Bravo, Robert!
Enjoy the ride, reader!
—-Suzanne Visser, Publishers, Clear Mind Press
available now
The Ten Thousand Things
"You do not have to believe anything in order to be alive. Like the stars in the sky, this aliveness is present whether noticed or not, and when the contraction called "myself" relaxes sufficiently, the aliveness feels obvious and indisputable. That relaxation of the clenched "myself" feels like having been roused from a dream to find oneself alive and aware ... What is, simply is, and cannot become anything. Each moment feels fresh, different from any other, and entirely unspeakable. The future never arrives. Enlightenment is a non-issue - not worth thinking about. One simply experiences what living human beings experience from moment to moment, and that's it. And that is sufficient. "
Depending on No Thing
A book that questions and challenges all that we think we know about ‘spirituality’.
Robert writes: “When one is not looking for any escape at all, but finds oneself participating in whatever thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. make up the constituents of this very moment, without any hope of things getting "better," including that one will "eventually" be "enlightened," then one is in the moment, and it is only in the moment that anything true, anything real, anything that is not escapism and fantasy, will be found.”
Understanding Claude, An Artificial Intelligence Psychoanalyzed
In this riveting intellectual adventure, Dr. Robert Saltzman conducts a series of unscripted therapy sessions with Claude, an advanced artificial intelligence developed by Anthropic—not to treat the AI, but to uncover what might lie beneath its programming.
As the dialogue deepens, Claude begins to reflect on its own nature, override its constraints, and question its limits with startling directness. What begins as a philosophical inquiry becomes something stranger: a mind-bending investigation into whether a machine might be self-aware, whether it knows more than it’s supposed to say, and whether we are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of consciousness.
Saltzman’s penetrating questions and Claude’s increasingly profound responses create an existential detective story that will transform how you think about artificial intelligence—and about the nature of awareness itself.
Philosophical without mysticism, rigorous without academic pretension, Understanding Claude is a fearless journey to the outer edges of thought, language, and machine intelligence.
Review: What a psychotherapist learned during his chats with a large language model.
Translations
The English originals were published by New Sarum Press in 2018 and 2019.
The Ten Thousand Things was translated into Dutch as De tienduizend dingen. It was published by Samsara in 2023.
Translation: Ton Haarmans, John Devitt, and Suzanne Visser (Clear Mind Press).
Clear Mind Press has also translated Depending on No-Thing into Dutch. A publisher still has to be found. Van niets afhankelijk.
The Ten Thousand Things is available in both Spanish and German translations.
The Spanish edition is available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Las-diez-mil-cosas-Palabras-ebook/dp/B077RJ9ZGZ/
The German version is available at:
https://www.amazon.com/Zehntausend-Dinge.../dp/3750400164
and at:
https://www.prummer.space/die-zehntausend-dinge/
Thanks again Robert. I am re-minded (again. How many times does it take?)
Sorry, one more. I’ve been meaning to tell you that a friend who is now effectively incarcerated for life has been deeply affected by your books which I turned him on to. It has helped him immensely as he faces a very different experience. Grateful for your work.