You mean now I just have to trust myself?

Dear Robert,

I'm sitting here watching The Gathering. Mooji is a great performer. He sells sand and everyone pays for his kingdom. What a deal, eh!? Tony Moo is a bit of a disappointment . . . to say the least!

But those other saints? They’re just ordinary people too? You're killing me, man. You mean now I just have to trust myself? What a bummer. Face the void unsupported?

You guys are cracking me up!

Muchas gracias.

De nada, amigo.

I removed some of your Mooji observations because I don't want to spread rumors. Joan Tollifson called me out on that, and she’s right. All I know about Mooji is what I have seen in a couple of videos. People do kiss his feet, which I find pathetic, but as for the rest you wrote, I have no information. Nevertheless, selling bottles of sand, absurd as that sounds, is a fact. Nothing tittle-tattle about that. A photo of the Mooji gift shop shows a selection of bottles of sand where his sacred, blessed, incomparable feet have trod. I guess if he's not around to have his feet kissed, his fans can lick the vials instead.

Platitudes about “Love” never go down well with me. Human nature is not just one way or another. Love is part of it, but so is violence. Tales of war and all manner of viciousness extend to the farthest reaches of human history and figure ubiquitously in mythology as well. When those “saints” speak of a “Higher Love,” superior to this human primate aliveness, that is pie in the sky.

So yes, you will have to leave behind all those other saints as well. Judging from your sense of humor, you already have left them behind, and that's not as easy as it sounds. In fact, going it alone without a road map is quite unfamiliar ground, possibly not for everyone. Somewhere in my interview with Rick Archer, I said if you are already happy with the life you have, don’t try to “awaken.” You won’t like it. That’s what I meant.

Yes, facing the void unsupported and without anything to depend on besides one’s own perceptions, feelings, and thoughts—one’s own mind—is the name of the game, as I see it. No “expert” to lean on. No religion. That’s the deal.

In the 1960s, a psychologist named Julian Rotter introduced an idea he dubbed the “locus of control.” People with an “external locus of control,” he said, tend to feel that their thoughts and actions don’t matter much because que será, será, whereas those with the internal locus of control tend to overestimate their influence on events and outcomes.

When Rotter’s schema was applied to real-world subjects, it was found that an internal locus of control was associated with greater worldly success and that belief in oneself as the controller of events was associated with better overall mental health. The external locus of control types, on the other hand, were more often depressed and prone to letting things slide.

Now, an external locus of control seems implied in statements such as “I am not the doer,” “all of this is just arising,” or “things just are as they are,” which is language that I employ myself. But speaking personally, although melancholia is not unknown to me, I am not depressed, and my mental health seems just fine.

Even so, it is one thing to talk about “no doer” and quite another to walk through this world feeling that way. It may seem paradoxical, but to live with “no doer” and be OK with that feeling seems to require a kind of strength.

I don’t mean the version of “no doer” in which I am not the doer, but some benign “God” or “Source” is in charge as the "locus of control." I call that splitting. In that view, “myself” is split into top dog and underdog, and the top dog is projected “out there” somewhere.

There may be some manner of superhuman intelligence running the show, but we, I say, cannot know that. Perhaps there is no locus of control at all, neither internal nor external, but only things as they are without a separate controller over and above things as they are. Nor are we in any position to judge if such an intelligence, assuming it exists at all, would be benign, malign, neither, or something beyond our power to imagine.

No one knows how any of this got here, where it comes from, or what any of it means. People believe all kinds of things, but no one knows.

There is a type of emotional resiliency required to tolerate insecurity, ambiguity, and one’s complete and total ignorance of ultimate matters. I mean a strength that participates in this aliveness, including the side of it that we call “death,” without hope and without explanations for any of it.

If that strength is not there—and no one can make it be there—there may be danger indeed in flirting with emptiness. One might fall into depression or despair and be there for a long time.

Exploring outside the village and beyond the pale may involve a long walk through the dark parts of the forest before one can return, if at all. I’m being as clear as I can here.

No wonder the masses like preaching about so-called “Truth” and genuflect to those who provide it. It’s possibly all they can tolerate.

Video interviews with Robert Saltzman, author of

The Ten Thousand Things and Depending On No-Thing