Ten Thousand Things

"The word “awake” can be problematic even beyond the usual uncertainty about what one word or another really means. In the first place, “awakened” might seem to denote a kind of unchanging condition—a fixed state in which some person, the awakened one, remains or abides—but that is not my experience. In the second place, words like “awakened,” and “enlightened” sound rather grandiose for a perspective that seems quite natural—as natural, I’d say, as being roused from an afternoon nap and finding oneself alive and aware. So, before getting to the questions, I should clarify my usage of the word “awake.”

… awakening means the end of “spirituality” in the face of the undeniable understanding that all conjecture on the subject of “myself” falls short—must fall short—of actually explaining anything. In each moment, I finnd myself here as an apparent focus of awareness without ever having chosen to be here, without knowing what I “really” am, and without needing to know. I am well aware that what I see and feel is a concoction of some sort or another, but this world is the world I have, and so I, an apparent constituent of this world of mine, live in it and with it—not in a world of conjecture, supposition, and mysticism about ultimate matters, but here and now. That is what I mean by “awake.”

I don’t recall mentioning a six-year hangover, but I suppose that refers to a serious illness I contracted in 1990, just around six years after the initial break-through about which you are asking. That illness struck hard just on the eve of the opening of an exhibition and book signing about which I had been feeling inflated and self-important. In the event, I was too ill to make it to the opening. Missed the whole enchilada. During the ensuing months of anguish and recovery, I came to see that despite the abrupt experience of awakening, which felt entirely real and undeniable, I still harbored an out-and-out egotism about my work as an artist, as if I were the doer of that work, although I knew quite well that “ego-I” was not a doer of anything. So there it was in stark clarity—the split.

Awakening then must be absorbed by sectors of personality that might be slow to catch on, isolated as they are by the habits and demands of self-interest. Seekers of enlightenment seem often to imagine that awakening will mean the sudden and absolute annihilation of the “personal self,” but that is not my experience.  Awakening, I say, never ends, and neither does personality. Personality or the personal self is necessarily diminished by the emergence of the awakening self…“For me, an apparent personal self is still present, but has lost the authority of its judgments, certainties and pet beliefs. Gone too is the usual intense identification with personal history and autobiography as if one owned the past, or at least one’s little piece of it…Without its certainties and habitual attachment to self-fulfillment, and self-justification, the personal self has nowhere very solid to perch.

… those with a religious background sometimes approach that matter by means of reference to tradition. For an awakening Christian, for example, the experience I call choicelessness (things are as they are and cannot, in this moment, be different) might be exemplified by the words, “Forgive them Lord for they know not what they do” (forgive them because they have no choice). I know nothing about ultimate matters: nothing about submission to the will of God, as in Christianity and Islam; nothing about realizing one’s identity with Brahman, as in Hinduism; nothing about what happens when you die, and nothing about how all of this got here—none of it. All I know is the constantly changing flow of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts in this stream of consciousness…

Spiritual believers of many stripes assert, with unwarranted certainty, that a supreme being does stand apart from that stream. That supposedly conscious being, whether the Brahman of Hinduism, or the God of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, is claimed to be permanent, eternal, and boundless. But in my own heart I do not know if anything is permanent, or even what “permanent” would mean in the vastness of this universe—even that small part of it of which we are actually aware. I have no reason to believe in anything permanent. Nor do I doubt it. I simply do not know, and that “not-knowing” is part and parcel of what I consider “awake.”

I have not a speck of interest in beliefs, conjectures, or faith of any stripe, not because one belief or another has been proven wrong or because I am an atheist or a materialist, but because this moment is suffcient unto itself without my needing to believe anything. In awakening, one sees that concepts about ultimate matters are only passing thoughts in changeful human minds, not “Truth.”

Sometime during my slow recovery from the illness that showed me the split between the undefinable mystery-self and the conventional ego-self, I lost the desire to continue my career in the art world. I was tired of the vanity and the overblown self-promotion on all sides, was put off by the company of all but a very few artists, and often had to drink to excess before being able to attend the openings of my exhibitions. Now I was done. I went back to school, obtained a doctorate in psychology, and began my work as a psychotherapist. So I suppose that is a change in behavior, if that is what you meant...

Two monks happen to meet in the road. In the customary mode of Zen combat, the first asks, “Where are you, brother?”
“Oh me? I’m in the place where nothing ever changes.”
“But I thought everything was always changing.”
“Yes, that never changes either.”

So, in case you are still wanting my advice about the “most important question to
ask” that’s it, and you ask it not of me, but of yourself: “Where are you, brother?”
Not what do I know about religion and spirituality. Not what do I imagine it
would be like to be “awake.” Set all of that aside, and, with no reference to any of
it, just ask yourself, “Where am I right now? ” Sooner or later it will come down
to right now. If not now, when?”

- Robert Saltzman, The Ten Thousand Things

Dr. Robert Saltzman is a retired psychotherapist and non-teacher of non-duality who lives and works in Todos Santos, Baja California. In the midst of his career as an artist and photographer, Robert Saltzman experienced a sudden and profound awakening—a deep vision into the actual nature of “myself.” That abrupt change in point of view, along with a subsequent long illness and slow recovery, changed the course of his life. He left the art world, obtained a doctorate in Depth Psychology, and began his practice of psychotherapy, a work he describes as “days in a small room, face to face with pain and suffering.”

"I recall a moment from a Woody Allen film, Hannah And Her Sisters. Woody has just had his hearing tested. The doctor tells him it’s just some minor hearing loss, but Woody goes into a panic, obsessing about dying from a brain tumor. When he tells his co-worker about it, she says, “You don’t have a brain tumor. You just need to relax. Go to Bermuda, or maybe you just need to get laid.”