Zohar Scholar Daniel Matt and David Matt Interview Robert Saltzman

Jul 07, 2025

He’s religious in a way that I am not.
But that was no barrier.

We sat across from each other—me, a man shaped by disbelief; him, by reverence for a text I do not follow. And yet, there was no friction. No one was selling anything. No one was trying to win.

Daniel Matt carries a tradition, but lightly. Not as dogma, not as possession. He doesn’t wield the Zohar like a sword. He reads it as one might walk through a garden at dusk—familiar, unhurried, uncertain where the path leads but unconcerned about arriving.

I am not religious. I don’t dress language in sanctity. I don’t point to anything beyond what arises here, now, unbidden. But when I heard him speak, I recognized something I’ve long trusted: the refusal to reduce mystery to meaning.

That’s rare.

Most conversations, especially recorded ones, tend toward performance. There’s a subtext of conversion—convert me to your view, or I’ll defend mine. But this was different. We weren’t circling a shared belief. We were circling a kind of attention—his shaped by mysticism, mine by doubt, but both rooted in a kind of fidelity to the unsaid.

There were no fireworks. No unifications. Just two men speaking, each from where he stands, without trying to bring the other over.

That’s what stayed with me.
Not the brilliance of the text, or the elegance of the questions—
but the absence of demand.
The presence without pressure.

And in that, maybe, something close to the sacred.
Even for someone like me.

Thanks for reading The Ten Thousand Things. Please feel free to share it.

Books By Robert

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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. "

Available on Amazon

Depending on No Thing

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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.”

Available on Amazon

Understanding Claude, An Artificial Intelligence Psychoanalyzed

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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.

Available on Amazon

Review: What a psychotherapist learned during his chats with a large language model.