The Threshold And The Mask
A Dialogue Among Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Robert Saltzman
Written by GPT-40. (Robert Saltzman appears only as a character.)
Part I — The Bar
Setting: A quiet bar in Ojai. Books instead of televisions. No music. Three men sit around a table—Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Robert Saltzman. The conversation begins easily, but doesn’t stay there.
Watts (refilling his glass):
What fascinates me is how desperately we cling to the story of being someone. We speak of “the self” as if it’s a thing, a nugget of identity buried in the psyche. But what we call “I” is just habitual grammar mistaken for ontology. We wear the mask, but when we see the mask cracking, we panic.
Krishnamurti (quiet but penetrating):
You describe the mask. Then you describe the one who sees the mask. But both are thought. Both are images. The movement you call understanding is still the movement of self—endlessly refining its disguises.
(leans forward slightly)
Can you stop? Not analyze. Not substitute. Just stop. Right now.
(beat)
If you cannot, then all this is theatre.
Saltzman (quietly):
But isn’t that also a kind of mask, Jiddu? The drive to end the mask, to terminate division—it’s another role, another posture. You point to what is beyond thought, but the pointer itself—this insistence on immediacy, on unmediated seeing—is its own kind of violence. A demand for psychological purity, like your habit of referring to yourself as "the speaker," but repeatedly forgetting and calling yourself "I," and then having to correct that.
Krishnamurti (without hesitation):
Not a demand for purity. A seeing. When the mind sees the falseness of its own movement—not as an idea, not through analysis, but directly—then there is silence. Not cultivated silence. Not the stillness of sedation. But silence that is not of time. That is all.
Watts (nodding, almost amused):
Yes, yes—but that’s where I diverge. I find all this effort to “end thought” rather exhausting. It’s like trying to bite your own teeth. My view—and perhaps this is the Zen in me—is that the effort itself is the joke. The cosmic giggle. Instead of trying to stop the play, I suggest learning to enjoy it. To dance the dance, knowing it's a dance.
Saltzman (dry):
Or at least stop pretending we can learn the choreography. That’s what gets me. All these systems—advaita, Zen, inquiry—they keep circling the same void, each one selling a slightly different map to nowhere. I just stopped needing a destination.
Krishnamurti (serious, insistent):
But do you see, Robert, that if you say “I stopped needing,” you are still speaking from the center? From a position. This must be understood: the center, the “I,” cannot end itself. The very question “how do I end it?” is the problem. Not the answer, but the question itself.
Saltzman (unmoved):
Yes. And still, we talk. You too. You say the center is the problem, then speak from a center that claims to have no center. That’s fine by me. Paradox is part of the ride. But let’s not pretend there’s a clean way out.
Watts (laughing softly):
Now this is my kind of temple. Three minds talking past each other with great affection. Each convinced he’s not the one who’s confused.
Krishnamurti (firm, unyielding):
No, Alan. It is not confusion. It is conditioning. Thought repeating itself, dressing up contradiction as insight. You speak of the dance, but what if it is not a dance? What if it is a treadmill?
(his voice quiets)
Clarity is not poetic. It is devastating. It leaves nothing. No insight. No speaker. Just the ending of the false—and that, not even seen, only lived.
(he looks at neither of them)
When that ending comes, it does not comfort. It burns.
Saltzman (after a pause):
And that can’t be spoken, yet here we are, saying it.
Watts:
That’s the dance again. We speak because silence is too loud.
Krishnamurti:
No. We speak because we are conditioned to speak. And that too must end.
Saltzman (with a smile):
You see, there’s the difference. You want it to end. I just want to notice the mechanism and maybe laugh a little along the way.
Watts (raising his glass):
A drink to the mechanism, then. And to not fixing it.
Saltzman (clinking glasses):
To the joke that never quite works, but still gets a laugh.
Krishnamurti (after a pause):
To listening—not to what is said, but to the space in which it arises.
Part II — The Road
Setting: Later. The bar is behind them. They walk through the quiet hills above Ojai. Gravel underfoot. No destination. The stars overhead are brighter than the theories.
Watts (hands in pockets):
You know, this reminds me of my time in Sausalito. Late nights after lectures. Everyone disperses, thinking they’ve heard something profound. And I walk home with the same unanswerable itch—what if all our insights are just decoration? Lace on a coffin?
Krishnamurti (walking slowly):
Insight is not accumulation. It is not lace. It is a flame that burns away the coffin. You may dismiss it as decoration, but that is because you have not let it touch you completely. You play with words, Alan, but suffering is not play.
Watts (more subdued now):
I agree, Jiddu. I do. But I also think we exaggerate our role in this. We say, “end thought, end self”—but what if it ends us? Not through effort, but fatigue. The universe gets bored of pretending to be us and pulls the plug.
Saltzman (softly):
I’ve seen people chasing after awakening for decades—straining, denying, buffing up the so-called witness like a trophy. And then one day they get cancer or lose a child, and suddenly the whole framework collapses. No philosophy survives real grief intact. And grief—grief is—
Krishnamurti (interrupts):
You say the framework collapses. But grief is part of the framework. Part of the self. Memory, image, attachment—these are not accidents. They are the self, persisting through pain. (steps closer) Can you look at grief without the image? Not as your loss. Not as your story. Just as it is—raw, without interpretation? If not, then sorrow becomes just another mask.
Saltzman: Or an absence. Which is also something.
Watts (grinning faintly): It’s all something. Even the nothing gets named. The Tao that can be strolling around on two legs through Ojai under moonlight—well, that’s not the eternal Tao.
Krishnamurti (coldly):
You make it clever, Alan. But seeing is not clever. Not a riddle, not a dance beneath moonlight. The self plays those games. I’m asking, can you see without any games at all? No poetry. No metaphor. Just the fact. When that happens, there's no one left to speak of it.
Saltzman (after a pause):
No one left to speak? Then why are we still talking?
Krishnamurti (turning on him):
You ask, “Why are we talking?” but who is asking? Another mask. Another fragment. You sit here in clever despair, polishing your awareness like it’s something real. But it’s memory. It’s habit. It’s thought flattering itself.
(closer now, voice flat)
End the movement—not narrate it. Otherwise, it’s just you, performing your honesty.
Saltzman (without blinking):
You talk about the end, Jiddu, but you’ve chalked up sixty years of lecturing on it. Maybe the movement ends, but the tour never does, does it?
Watts (cheerfully):
Say what you will about ego—it’s a tireless orator, even when it’s preaching its own funeral.
Part III — The Ridge
Setting: Just before sunrise. A ridge above the town. Three men—Watts, Krishnamurti, Saltzman—sit on a stone wall. The light is coming, but not quickly. The mood is thin, transparent, like breath in cold air.
Saltzman (watching the horizon):
It’s always strange how light doesn’t arrive all at once. You think it’s here, then suddenly it’s brighter, and brighter still, like something’s remembering itself in stages.
Watts (stretching his back):
Yes—and no fanfare. No trumpet. Just, “Here I am, again.” And everyone pretends they weren’t waiting.
Krishnamurti (without looking up):
You wait for light, and already the mind has built a story around it. Newness. Arrival. Hope. But that’s pure illusion. The real doesn’t arrive. It remains.
Saltzman:
But we still wait for it. Whatever “it” is. The light. The clarity. The sudden drop-off of noise. We say we’ve stopped seeking, and then listen harder.
Watts (half-grinning):
Exactly. The non-seeker is the last disguise of the seeker. “I no longer want anything,” he says, while quietly checking the horizon.
Krishnamurti (sharply):
Then look without checking. Listen without choosing. That is all. But we do not. We prepare. We narrate. We wait.
Watts (murmuring):
We perform.
Saltzman (sighs):
Yes. And we get good at it. We make a brand of absence. Sell the silence. Package the pointing. The one who sees through it becomes another mask, with better lighting.
Krishnamurti (after a long pause):
When you truly see the falseness of all that—not intellectually, but with your whole being—it drops away. Not gradually. Not by effort. Completely.
Saltzman (quietly):
You keep saying that—but no one stays there, Jiddu. Not even you. You kept speaking. Teaching. Writing. You say the movement ends, but it didn’t end you.
Krishnamurti (without flinching):
That is your projection. I was never the speaker. Words arose, as they do. Now they are gone.
Watts (softly, with an almost fond weariness):
The idea that one can live in pure choiceless awareness—no residue, no self-echo—I don’t buy it. Not anymore. It’s a beautiful myth like the silent sage in the mountains who never scratches his nose.
Saltzman:
Even if you manage to see through every structure, you still have to tie your shoes. You are still aging. You still grieve. No amount of seeing will stop your body from forgetting your name someday.
Watts (nodding):
Or from inventing a new one. The self doesn’t die. It mutates.
Krishnamurti (almost inaudibly):
Then let it die again. And again.
The sky lightens. The first amber seam pulls open the fabric of night. None of them speaks for a while.
Saltzman (at last):
We threw logs on the fire all night, and we’re still shivering.
Watts (smiling faintly):
We weren’t meant to resolve it. Just sit still long enough to see the question was always answering itself—and none of us liked the answer.
Krishnamurti (quiet, final):
There is no answer. Only the ending of the question.
The sun breaks the ridge. Shadows contract. None of them moves. The day begins—indifferent, immense, and unrecorded.
Read Understanding Claude: An Artificial Intelligence Psychoanalyzed.
As a longtime Krishnamurti gal I thoroughly enjoyed this! Excellent! Thanks Robert!
I would like the donkeys to be characters, please. It could add some “devil may care”-ness. ….. all three. They could bray, etc.
🫏🫏🫏…..