what keeps you from realizing that you are awake right now?

Joan Tollifson was an early reader of The Ten Thousand Things and Depending On No-Thing. In her recommendation, she cut to the chase:

What I see as the heart of Robert’s message resonates deeply with me: the questioning of beliefs, escapes, false comforts and magical thinking; the willingness to live in freefall without authorities, final answers or certainties; the recognition of being this ever-changing flow of present experiencing; and the uncompromising insistence that until the search “out there” for some future fantasy ends, until we are willing to stand alone without reaching for a lifeline or an escape, the freedom we are seeking cannot happen. There are some other ideas, assertions and assumptions in his books with which I disagree or which I would question, but the heart of his message is spot-on in my opinion.

Robert: Yes! "Until we are willing to stand alone without reaching for a lifeline or looking for the escape hatch, the freedom we seek cannot happen."

That is not an easy message. It's not unheard of, but relatively unusual for a human to see that what is, is—that things are as they are prior to religious, metaphysical, or philosophical explanations, and that those explanations are not necessarily facts.

Many of us want a story to grab hold of and we fear that if we do not try to "advance spiritually" we will miss out.

People talk about no-doer, emptiness, or no-self, but on getting even a whiff of it, most will hightail, often into some attractive fantasy that, like quicksand, may not allow climbing out again.

Some of Joan's friends see me as rough and disrespectful. Tough shit. The way I am is not a choice. This is it, minute by minute. I am not wearing a mask. What you see is what you get.

You are under no compulsion to attend to a single word I write and have every right to think what you do about me or anything else. It's your mind, after all. If you are easily offended, and love your sacred cows, that’s your problem, not mine.

But consider this: Perhaps "respect" is not always warranted. Consider the possibility that what you think must be "respected" is a kind of mass hypnosis and it takes someone a bit rough (read: who doesn't give a fuck for being approved of) to point that out. Just saying.

Claire: Keep keeping it real Robert, I don't see you as rough but as a revolutionary. Not many people dare to be who they are, and even if we didn't make ourselves to be as we are, it's still worth supporting each other.

Thank you, Claire. I wrote that because when Joan endorsed my books and put them on her suggested reading list, some of her followers complained to her that I was an "abuser." One even called me "insane."

Yes, there is something revolutionary in my perspective--a rebellion against dogma and the fools and wiseacres who claim to know things that no one could possibly be certain of.

This rebellion arises now just as it has for thousands of years against systems of so-called spirituality that try to define what "myself" is or isn't--"I am a dream in the mind of God," or "I am pure consciousness," or "I and Brahman are one and the same," or "This body and brain cannot be the source of consciousness because they are only objects in consciousness," etc.

Rough, disrespectful people like me keep asking, "And you know that how exactly?"

David Matt: Robert makes a unique point here -- one you probably won't hear from anyone else: He is not trying to become better. He says that trying to become better than who you already are is what keeps you from realizing that you are awake right now.