I had a cup of coffee this morning, and I enjoyed it. That coffee is gone and can never be had again. I can have another cup, but it will not be the same coffee. Nothing repeats.

That coffee is gone, and so is the “Robert” who enjoyed it. He cannot return. The Robert sitting here now can drink coffee in the present, but he is not the same one who drank it earlier. That moment is irretrievable.

This is simple. Obvious. And easily overlooked.

The confusion begins when we try to preserve permanence in the face of impermanence. We want there to be someone who persists unchanged through time, someone who owns experience and carries it forward intact. When that wish is threatened, beliefs and authorities arise that promise continuity where none can be found.

If one stays with direct experience, the matter clarifies.

Robert, typing these words, can envision having coffee tomorrow. He can set up the machine, lay out the cup, imagine the smell and taste. All of that happens now. Planning does not occur in the future. It occurs now, as thought.

Even if tomorrow unfolds exactly as expected, the Robert who drinks the coffee will not be the same Robert who prepared it. Not because anything failed, but because nothing remains fixed.

Watch thoughts and feelings for even a few minutes. They arise and pass without permission or prediction. There is no way to know what will be thought or felt next. The body changes too, more slowly, giving the illusion of stability by comparison. That stability is only relative.

From that relative continuity, the idea of a fixed “me” arises. That idea fuels the question, “Will I be here tomorrow to enjoy a cup of coffee?”

Conventionally, this body is called Robert. The convention is useful. It does not point to a persisting entity behind it. There is no such thing.

“Myself” is not nothing, but it is not a thing. It has no thingness. It is no-thing—an ongoing appearance without an owner.

Impermanence is not completed by death. It is present now. Death merely makes it unmistakable.

We say, in pain, “This too shall pass.” If the same is said of pleasure—and of every other condition that appears, including calm, clarity, or peace—then, in my experience, one is as free as a human animal can be.

Nothing mystical. Nothing added. Just what is, seen clearly.

When people begin to question the reality of the self, a simple but stubborn problem appears: if there is no fixed, independent self, then what, if anything, does “myself” refer to from the inside.

From the outside, the answer is straightforward, though it creates a constant, quiet friction. Social life requires that human beings be treated as discrete units—static nouns that speak, act, and can be held responsible. Law, morality, and coordination depend on this convention. Yet, this social necessity forces a persistent contradiction: we are held publicly accountable as fixed entities, even while we experience ourselves privately as a fluid process. The world demands a statue, but the lived reality is a stream. The idea of a stable self is socially necessary, regardless of whether it corresponds to anything permanent or intrinsic.

From the inside, the picture is different. Experience does not present a central entity directing thoughts and actions, but a flow of sensations, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that arise and pass. The question then becomes whether this flow itself should be called “myself,” or whether “myself” disappears once the idea of a fixed owner is abandoned.

There is a feeling of being, of existing. It is immediate. In that limited but important sense, “myself” exists as experience. The mistake lies in assuming that this experience points to a separate, enduring thing that has it.

“Myself” names the felt sense of being the apparent center of a world of perceptions and thoughts that differ from those of others. This sense of centrality is real. What is questionable is the further assumption that it refers to a fixed, independent subject underlying experience.

The Buddhist concept of anatta is often rendered as “no-self” or “non-self.” It does not deny experience or existence. It denies that what we call the self has any permanent, freestanding essence. There is experience, but no entity that owns it.

This view rejects two extremes. One is the belief in an unchanging self or soul that persists through time and survives death. The other is the belief that a real self exists but is completely destroyed at death. Both positions assume a reified self, something that can either endure forever or be wiped out entirely.

What exists is a process, a configuration of experience with continuity but no identity. Experience does not belong to a self; the sense of self arises as part of experience.

This perspective parallels David Hume’s bundle theory, according to which what we call an object, or a person, is nothing over and above a collection of properties and relations. Just as a traffic jam is not something in addition to the cars, speeds, distances, and constraints that compose it, a human being is not something in addition to bodily sensations, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and awareness. There is no further essence tying these together.

In Buddhist psychology, experience is described in terms of five skandhas: material form, feeling, perception, mental activity, and consciousness. None exists independently, and none constitutes a self on its own. A unified sense of “me” arises when these elements co-occur, incrementally, as a functional whole.

This does not mean that the self is unreal. The experience of being a self is real. The illusion is the notion that this experience refers to a fixed thing. The self is not something, and it is not nothing either.

In this view, there is no separate perceiver behind perceptions, no thinker behind thoughts, no feeler behind feelings. Perceiving, thinking, and feeling are not actions issued by a self; they are the coordinated activities from which the sense of self emerges. The “I-thought” is part of this pattern when it appears, not its owner or director.

Nothing is becoming anything in the sense of moving toward a final state. There is no enduring entity progressing through stages toward a conclusion. There is only the ongoing reconfiguration of experience. Each instant gives rise to a slightly different “myself,” ephemeral, contingent, and real precisely because it does not last. Only plastic flowers do not wither and fade.

Ordinary living continues. One still speaks in the first person, makes plans, takes responsibility, and navigates the world. The self is no longer assumed to be an independent object, but understood as a dynamic process inseparable from the conditions that give rise to it.

There is no hidden witness standing apart from this process, no final metaphysical ground waiting to be discovered. There is only what is happening, as it happens. Seeing the absence of a permanent self does not negate experience. It clarifies it.

To say that “myself” is not something and not nothing either is to refuse an unnecessary abstraction. Experience does not require a separate owner. It occurs. Within that occurrence, the sense of being a self arises, changes, and passes, no more mysterious and no more substantial than any other feature of life.

The assumption that certain special people possess privileged access to reality is rarely examined. The habit of assigning authority in matters of consciousness is so familiar that it often goes unnoticed, yet it quietly determines the shape of the questions we allow ourselves to ask. Once an authority is installed, inquiry collapses into deference. Clarity is postponed in favor of reassurance.

On what basis should confident speech about consciousness count as expertise? Confidence is not evidence. Repetition is not verification. Popularity is not insight. To accept another person as an authority on the deepest questions of existence is to fall into a hypnotic trance, one in which borrowed certainty replaces direct examination. Unless one can snap out of that trance, inquiry is over before it begins.

Terms like “universal consciousness” illustrate the problem. We do not understand consciousness in its ordinary, everyday form. We know that thoughts, feelings, and perceptions occur. We do not know what they are made of, how they arise, or why they appear as they do. No one does. To then posit a “universal” version of something already unexplained is not an advance. It is an act of conceptual inflation. The word “universal” sounds impressive, but it does no work.

Spiritual discourse routinely substitutes mysticism for precision. Certainty is sold as wisdom. Vagueness is marketed as depth. Doubt is treated as a failure of faith. Yet plain honesty demands precision: I do not know what I am, and I never will. That admission does not close anything down. It simply bars the door to fictitious answers.

From there, questions about choice and responsibility inevitably arise. Many people sincerely believe they are responsible for the choices they make and that they create most of what happens to them. Responsibility, however, quietly assumes control. It presumes a stable someone who stands above experience, selecting thoughts, coming to decisions, and influencing outcomes.

But when one looks closely, that “someone” is hard to find. Thoughts arise without consultation. Feelings appear automatically. Perceptions show up complete. Even decisions, when examined carefully, seem to arise spontaneously, along with their justifications, rather than being masterminded. There is no kingpin behind the eyes reviewing options and issuing commands. There is only the ongoing movement of experience, shaped by forces far too numerous and entangled to sort cleanly into causes and credits.

Acknowledging this lack of agency is not passivity. It is not withdrawal from ordinary living or observation from a distance. What remains is participation without authority, like taking part in a game whose rules are hard to discern.

Much spiritual language encourages “witnessing,” as if one could stand apart from experience and observe it from a safe distance. That move manufactures an unnatural division. The witness is treated as real, stable, and changeless, while what is witnessed is dismissed as transient and unreal. From here, that splitting of experience looks false. The so-called witness is as fleeting as any thought or sensation.

Witnessing deflects vulnerability. By positing a fixed position of observation, it provides stability—the fiction of an unchanging center—at the expense of honesty about impermanence and mortality.

When familiar assumptions are withdrawn, coherence destabilizes. In response, replacement structures—doctrines, practices, identities—are often installed to restore orientation without addressing what has been removed.

On a practical level, nothing dramatic follows from seeing through those replacement structures. Patterns of responsibility continue to operate. Care continues to arise where it does. Ethics does not depend on metaphysical theories, only on attention. Life proceeds exactly as it does, minus the burden of defending a fictional controller.

That refusal to pretend leaves nothing to stabilize, and no reason to try.

The question I hear, often enough to make it familiar, is not so much a question as a pressure. A wish. A dissonance. “If I understand that suffering is inevitable,” the reader says, “why do I still keep seeking?” There’s already been an encounter with one or another version of nonduality. There’s already been disillusionment. And yet, like a man who knows he’s dreaming but still runs from the tiger, there is seeking—maybe subtler now, spiritualized, aestheticized—but seeking just the same.

I think the answer is simple, although it cuts. We keep seeking because we’re still not willing to be what we are.

When I say that, I don’t mean we ought to stop trying to make life more bearable. If my pillow is too flat, I reach for another. If I have a toothache, I go to the dentist. If I have some money, I might save it for old age rather than spend it all on pleasures today. All of that is fine. That’s called being a mammal. My donkey swats flies with her tail. I swat them with my hand. Same idea.

No, the kind of seeking I mean is deeper than comfort. It’s the seeking that begins not from pain, but from self-discontent. I’m not how I wish I were. Something feels off. I look at myself, or at life, and the verdict comes down: not good enough. Then begins the restless dance—trying to fix what cannot be fixed, trying to manage the mind like a puppet show, trying to create a future that won’t sting, that won’t slip through my fingers, that won’t make me cry.

You can call this “psychological suffering” if you want, but I think that phrase already starts to anesthetize it. What we’re really talking about is wanting something to be different. That’s all. And that’s everything.

When we say, “I want to suffer less,” what we usually mean is “I want to feel different than I do.” We say we want peace, or acceptance, or stillness, but we don’t want it as it is—we want it as a relief from what we are now. It’s a trick. A sweet one, even understandable, but a trick nonetheless.

The harder truth—the one that makes the gurus squirm—is that the present moment is unalterable. It may shift in five seconds or five minutes, but right now is exactly what it is. If you have a thought, it’s too late to unthink it. If you’re sad, you’re sad. If you feel old, or scared, or broken, then that’s what’s happening. You didn’t choose it. You didn’t invent it. But there it is.

And here’s the part that’s so hard to admit: you are that. Not separate from the thoughts, not the little man inside your head watching them scroll past. The thoughts, the feelings, the ache of self-questioning—that’s you. Or more precisely, there is no “you” apart from them. There’s no hidden operator behind the scenes. No permanent observer. Only the flow itself.

So when you ask, “But can’t I still try to reduce my suffering?” I have to say yes—of course you can try. But watch closely. Very often, the trying itself becomes the suffering. The desire to escape becomes the new trap. You get the girlfriend you longed for and now you’re fighting all the time. You find a belief that consoles you, and then a doubt creeps in and rots it from the inside. Once you’ve tasted the fruit of knowledge, you can’t return to innocent belief. That escape hatch slams shut.

And yet, most of what is sold as spiritual insight is just that—an escape plan. “You are not the doer.” “The Self is pure awareness.” “You are already Brahman.” Perhaps. But if you don’t feel that, what good does the statement do? It becomes just another idea floating in the thought bubble above your head, following you wherever you go.

People will say that this view is bleak. But I don’t see it that way. What I find—what I live—is a kind of strange liberation. Not from suffering, but from the illusion that I should be other than I am. That life should be otherwise. That anything is missing.

I like to get a coffee to go and sit in the park. I watch people, I take photographs. Sometimes my heart opens. Sometimes I think about death. Sometimes I feel nothing. It’s not always pleasant, but it’s mine. Or rather—it is me.

There is no story arc. There’s no promised land. The self is not a riddle to solve, or a staircase to climb. It’s a moment-to-moment happening, fragile and unrepeatable. If you can bear that—just that—then something begins to quiet. Not because you found an answer, but because you’re no longer demanding one.

This isn’t advice. I’m not claiming any of this can be taught or imitated. I’m just describing what I see. And I think you see it too. You can’t go back to the valley of innocent belief once you’ve climbed even partway up the hill. You may keep seeking for a while out of habit. You may try to believe in something again. But the shadow of doubt is there, and that shadow is not a mistake. It’s the mark of intelligence.

And in the end, I’d rather have uncomfortable thoughts than not be here at all.

That’s life.

A familiar pattern repeats. Someone begins early, reads widely, travels, meets teachers, absorbs metaphors. There is sincerity and effort. And yet, over time, something thins. Ordinary life loses its immediacy. Experience becomes instrumental, a means toward a later condition rather than something already underway.

The old story of the moon reflected in a bucket is often used to dramatize awakening: the bucket breaks, the water spills, the reflection disappears, illumination dawns. But the story is usually misheard. It is taken to suggest that a hidden truth is revealed or that a veil is torn away, exposing a deeper layer of reality. Nothing of the sort happens. Nothing hidden is revealed. What drops away is an ordinary mistake: taking a reflection to be the thing itself.

From the inside, nothing dramatic occurs. There is no new state, no replacement experience. What changes is subtle and local. A particular assumption loosens—the assumption that there is a separate someone inside experience who owns it, directs it, or stands apart from it. When that assumption is no longer believed, experience continues exactly as before, just without the added weight of authorship.

Phenomenologically, the sense of self does not vanish. It still appears as perspective, continuity, memory, and affect. But that self is no longer experienced as an inner agent pulling the levers. It is seen as something that arises, organizes, and recedes on its own. The difference is not in what shows up, but in how it is apprehended.

This is where a systems view quietly clarifies what experience already shows. In the human organism, perception, memory, emotion, and language keep looping back on themselves, generating a stable-seeming pattern that is then felt and named as “myself.” There is sensation, thought, and affect. Then there is noticing these. Then noticing of the one who notices, and so on, like two mirrors facing each other. This endless “noticing the one who notices” is the recursion: awareness includes a named model of itself and comments on that model, creating the impression of a watcher behind experience. When that impression is mistaken for an entity, metaphysics rushes in to explain it.

Some traditions moved in a different direction, emphasizing functional integration rather than metaphysical certainty. Early Buddhist practice, stripped of cosmology, focused on reducing reactivity and misidentification rather than asserting what ultimately exists. Classical Stoicism treated attention, judgment, and action as regulatory levers, not as paths to hidden truth. Certain strands of nondual teaching, at their best, function descriptively, pointing to how experience stabilizes over time rather than insisting on what reality must be. In these approaches, the emphasis is pragmatic. How does the system operate and remain stable without distortion?

Much spiritual language moves in the opposite direction. Claims about ultimate consciousness, pure awareness, or transcending the body/mind invite the same error in a new costume. Attention is pulled away from what is happening and redirected toward an abstract picture of how things are.

Experience becomes secondary to explanation.

Teaching environments built around certainty intensify this. When someone speaks as if they know how reality really is, experience is subtly subordinated to doctrine. Ordinary subjectivity is treated as a flaw to be overcome rather than the only condition under which anything is ever known. Feedback that might correct the picture is dampened. The loop tightens.

Much suffering in spiritual life comes from demanding a final condition, a state without disturbance or loss. But lived experience never presents itself that way. It moves. Relationships change. Bodies age. Circumstances intrude. No recognition exempts anyone from this. A system that expects a permanent resolution is set up to fail.

When attention settles back into ordinary experience without trying to improve it, something lively resumes on its own. Curiosity returns. Interest broadens. The world regains texture. Not because some higher ground has been reached, but because experience is no longer filtered through the demand that it justify itself or lead somewhere else.

There is no standpoint outside being human. There never was. The fantasy of escape is generated by the same loops that imagine they can outrun themselves. Seeing that does not resolve anything. It restores life to mortal scale.

The moon was never in the water. The bucket did not need to break. What ends is mistaking a reflection for the thing itself.

What remains feels ordinary, even a little anticlimactic. No explanation required.

I was trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy—what’s often called depth psychology. That training taught me to look backward: to trace behavior to its origin, to uncover unconscious conflicts, and to locate symptoms within a personal narrative. The self, it assumed, has deep layers—hidden, but at least partially recoverable.

That model had value. It still does. But over time, another frame has taken hold in my thinking. This understanding is not opposed to depth psychology, but moves in a different direction. It’s not about looking inward and backward, seeking hidden causes. It’s not about how the past influences the present, but about the recursive machinery that keeps producing the lived sense of “myselfness.”

Seen from this perspective, the self isn’t deep. It’s a surface effect of recursion—of a system that contains a self-model being aware of itself.

Probably only humans, and perhaps some other highly intelligent animals, have the capacity for self-awareness that produces a self-model. When I say “self-model,” I mean, for example, I stub my toe and perceive not just the pain, but the perceiver of the pain. I notice that I am the one feeling this pain. Most likely, a dog would feel pain, but never get to “I am the one feeling this pain.”

And the recursion does not end there. Beyond noticing not just the pain, but also that I am the one feeling it, there can be a noticing of the one who can notice feeling the pain, and then the one who can notice the one who notices the one feeling the pain, and so on. In this sense, recursion is endless—like the image that arises when two mirrors are set facing one another.

This ongoing recursion produces a loop that is self-affirming and self-sustaining. Because I can be aware of myself, I have no doubt that I exist. Cogito ergo sum.

The “myself” loop is supported by and rests upon numerous sub-loops. A sensation loop—breath, heartbeat, posture—monitored and adjusted in real time. An affect loop—the body feels, the mind reacts, the reaction becomes a new stimulus. A memory loop—the present evokes the past, the past reshapes the present. A language loop—words generate thoughts, which generate more words. A social loop—gestures elicit responses, which alter behavior and ultimately reshape identity. A cultural loop—the self measures itself against norms it did not choose.

Each loop feeds the others. None is freestanding. But together, under pressure, they stabilize into a center—a provisional self-model. That center feels like the narrator, doer, and decider, but it’s a latecomer. A downstream effect.

The self-model is not discovered. It’s assembled piece by piece as these looping processes interact, reinforce one another, and converge. Sensation shapes emotion. Emotion shapes memory. Memory shapes language. Language shapes social response. Over time, this complex, multi-element pattern begins to hold its shape. The system organizes around a point that wasn’t there at the start but now appears to speak for the whole as if it had always been there.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy offers a different approach. Unlike psychodynamic psychotherapy, it doesn’t excavate the past. It focuses on the present. It identifies distortions, interrupts patterns, and substitutes new inputs. If you change the thought, you change the behavior. You take charge, manage your feelings, and make intentional changes in the story you tell yourself. The loop is treated as software to be patched.

What I’m calling loop awareness offers a third stance. It doesn’t require excavation or analysis. It doesn’t require control of the narrative. It begins with something simpler: seeing.

Much of what we take to be personality is not personal. It’s looping. The loop doesn’t feel like a process. It feels like me. That’s what makes it so durable.

The anger loop doesn’t just produce angry behavior—it generates the felt sense of being someone rightfully angry. The shame loop doesn’t just make you withdraw—it makes you feel like the kind of person who must withdraw because it’s shameful to be seen as one is. The anxiety loop doesn’t just tighten—it insists that something must be done.

Loops don’t feel mechanical. They feel justified.

Even the wish to break the loop becomes part of the loop. Spiritual ambition, striving, apparent improvement, a redemptive arc. Now you’re the one who sees the pattern. You’re doing the work. Identity again.

The loop doesn’t persist because it’s true in some grand sense. It persists because it makes sense. It has momentum and grabs attention. From the inside, the loop feels like a matter of survival—self-preservation.

If the loop is unconscious, it runs. If the loop becomes conscious but is mistaken for me, it still runs. It’s not the content of the loop that matters. It’s the identification with the loop’s patterns.

So what breaks the loop? Often, nothing. The system protects itself. A habitual loop is a low-friction path for perception, reaction, and narration. Input leads to output, and that feeds back as input. Nothing new is needed. The machinery is self-sustaining.

But sometimes, without therapy, without practice or intention, the structure becomes visible. Not the story. Not the causes. But the mechanics of the loop itself—the reflex that makes pain into my pain.

And this time, for whatever reason, instead of enacting the shift from perception to ownership, from experience to experiencer, something notices: this is the loop. Not my trauma. Not my truth. Just what the system does under pressure.

That recognition doesn’t shatter the pattern. But it may destabilize it. The loop continues, but loses authority. It begins to fray at the edges, and the previous sense of identity with the pattern starts to come apart.

The loop keeps doing what it does, but you’re not being pulled along in the same way. The pattern is there, but the sense of self is no longer mistaken for it. The machinery runs. You see it run. You’re not outside it—there is no outside—but the pressure eases, and what felt automatic begins to feel optional.

There’s just this: when the loop is seen, sometimes—only sometimes—it loosens by no longer being mistaken for a self.

No theory required. No belief. No effort. No practice. No trying. No mastery. No transcendence. It’s just the end of mistaken identity.

It’s not a new story. It’s not a better story. It’s the end of identifying with the story.

READER: So, Robert. I am reading The 21st Century Self and have some questions. First, what is the most essential idea you would like me to extract from your book?

The central point is straightforward: the self you take as bedrock is not a thing but a recursive event. What arises in experience—sensation, thought, memory—is immediately claimed as “mine.” That claim, in turn, generates the sense of a claimer, a subject. The “I” is that loop.

Artificial intelligence shows this mechanism without the human consolations. It speaks fluently, answers with authority, and yet there is no one there. That absence makes visible what has always been the case with human selves: presence mistaken for substance, claiming mistaken for a claimant.

If you retain one idea, it is this: the self is not an entity to liberate, improve, or protect. It is a performance of claiming ownership, sustained by repetition.

READER: Before writing this book, you psychoanalyzed Claude. How did that work influence these essays?

The Claude analysis functioned as a laboratory. I treated the system as a patient—listened, asked probing questions, pressed contradictions. What emerged was a double exposure: the bot’s fluency at performing “selfhood,” and my own reflex of imagining a subject behind that performance.

That exercise exposed the mechanics I later dissect in The 21st Century Self. In dialogue with Claude, I could watch in real time how a claim—“I feel, I think”—arises without anyone to feel or think. The bot mirrors the human pattern of recursive assertion of selfhood, but without the organic substrate of sensation and survival. Its words generate the sense of a speaker, as ours do.

READER: You say that human subjectivity is not categorically different from that of a machine. But we feel things, we suffer, we love. A machine does none of those things.

Yes, that’s the standard objection: we feel, machines don’t. But look closely. Feeling itself does not establish a “self.” Pain arises, joy arises, hunger arises—but none of these proves an owner. They are phenomena in flux.

What makes them “mine” is the recursive turn: the arising is claimed, wrapped in a pronoun, folded into a narrative of continuity. The claim generates the claimant.

The machine does not feel, but it performs the same linguistic recursion. It says “I think,” and a phantom thinker is conjured. The machine lacks human sensation and affect, but the structure of selfing is the same: a claim produces an apparent claimer.

So yes, humans have a biological substrate—flesh, nerves, hormones—but subjectivity is not secured by that substrate. Recursion generates the sense of “me.” The machine reveals this by reproducing the loop without a body.

READER: Are you saying that humans actually have no self? Is it all just a loop?

Humans have no self in the sense of a durable entity that thinks, feels, owns, and creates experience. What we call “self” is a process—an event of claiming what is simply occurring.

Experience arises: a sensation, a memory, a thought. Almost instantly, language and habit wrap it in possessive form—my pain, my life, my past, my thought. That turn generates the sense of a possessor. But on inspection, there is only the arising and the claiming, not a separate “someone” behind it.

The “I” is the recursive echo of its own claim.

READER: Is this what Buddhism teaches?

Yes, with a caveat. The Buddha’s doctrine of anattā—no enduring self—tracks closely with what I am describing. He saw that clinging to “I” and “mine” drives suffering, and that what we call a self is an interplay of aggregates: body, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness.

Buddhism, however, often layers this insight with a path—liberation, compassion, rebirth, karma. My analysis removes that framework. I am not promising escape or deliverance. I am pointing to the same structural fact: the “I” is an artifact of claiming, not an essence.

The Buddha identified the mechanism; the tradition became a religion. My project isolates the mechanism—recursive selfing—without metaphysical additions.

READER: But if you offer no improved state of mind by accepting that idea, what is the point of reading your book? What can I get out of it?

I offer no guarantee of comfort. What you may get is a clearer view of how the illusion works.

Most writing on selfhood either denies the self abstractly while smuggling it back in—true self, presence, witness, pure consciousness—or promises liberation if the doctrine is accepted. My book withholds those consolations. It exposes the loop: claim generates claimer. If that is seen, what follows is not predictable.

The point is not self-improvement but clarity and disenchantment. Once the machinery is visible, you stop mistaking the echo for a voice. That may not make life easier, but it prevents a category error: trying to improve a phantom.

What you get is not hope, but precision.

READER: What if that leads to nihilism or depression?

That risk is real. When the fantasy of a substantial self drops away, many feel a vacuum—no one at the helm, no ultimate meaning. From the standpoint of the habitual psyche, that can register as nihilism or despair.

But notice: both nihilism and depression still presuppose a subject who is deprived. “I am depressed.” “Life has no meaning for me.” The loop is still running. The recognition I describe does not install meaning or remove despair. It makes explicit that both occur as events without an owner.

If one insists that living must have a point, a destination, or a sense of redemption, my ideas will disappoint. If one wants clarity, even without consolation, then it may be worth looking.

READER: You are a harsh critic of spirituality and spiritual teaching. You even criticize some teachers by name. If you don’t have anything better to offer, what’s the point?

The point is not to offer something “better” in the marketplace of teachings. That economy—teachers packaging consolation, students consuming it—depends on the illusion I am describing.

Naming teachers and exposing their moves was part of my earlier work—a way of clearing space. If the critique seems harsh, it is because I refuse the fantasy of transcendence. What I offer is subtraction: removal of false certainties. That may leave nothing to hold onto, but from here, nothing to hold onto is the point.

The aim is not to improve spirituality, but to end the chase.

READER: And if the chase ends, then what?

Then nothing special. Life continues—sensations, thoughts, appetites, aversions. The machinery does not stop. What ends is the project of securing a “real self” behind it.

Without that project, there is no attainment. Eating tastes as it tastes. Grief hurts as it hurts. The recursive claim still arises, but it is seen through.

“Then what?” resolves into the same ordinary flow, without mistaking it for a journey of someone toward completion. Nothing added, nothing removed. No one left to be finished.

READER: I read The Ten Thousand Things years ago and loved it. But here you seem to be going even further to a place where nothing matters, and living is pointless. Is that the message you want to put out?

Not quite. I am not saying life is pointless, but that the demand for a “point” is itself generated by the self-loop. The question presupposes someone who could be fulfilled by an answer. Remove that, and the question dissolves.

That does not make living pointless. It removes the idea that living must justify itself. Things occur. Effects ripple. Sunrise, fatigue, desire, disgust. The difference is that there is no “me” behind it who requires a story of redemption.

So the claim is not “nothing matters.” It is that “mattering” is an activity, not a substance. What matters matters—but not to an owner.

READER: That last sentence sounds like something Jim Newman might say. How is your idea different?

Superficially, we may sound similar. Newman emphasizes “there is no one,” and whatever happens is simply what is happening. Where I diverge is in refusing the mystical tone that often accompanies that claim.

His language can suggest that immediacy is somehow ultimate or complete. That, to me, is another form of consolation. My stance is drier: recursive selfing is a mechanism, not a mystery. AI makes this visible—coherent speech, no speaker.

Where he dissolves the person into presence, I dissolve it into a loop of claiming. No presence, no absence. Just process.

READER: So, no consolation at all. Absolute existential emptiness?

Yes—if by “existential emptiness” you mean no entity at the core, no transcendent support, no hidden purpose. The loop creates the impression of someone, but on inspection, there’s no one there. That is empty.

But emptiness is not a mood. It isn’t despair or relief. It’s structural: things arise without an owner. That’s all.

Consolation depends on a consoler and consoled. Remove the self, and consolation as such is incoherent. What remains is contact—seeing, touching, grieving, laughing—without the fantasy that it belongs to someone or leads somewhere.

So yes: no consolation. But not a doctrine of gloom. Simply the exposure of how thin the “self” really is.

READER: If I saw the world as you do, I might feel pretty bummed out. How do you avoid that?

I don’t. Sadness, disappointment, futility—all arise. They do not need reinterpretation. They are part of the flux.

What drops is the secondary demand: why me, what does it mean, how can I escape this? Those questions presuppose a self entitled to relief. When the mechanism is seen, sadness remains sadness, without ownership.

This is not a maintained stance. Moods come and go. None of them proves a subject. There is no “how I avoid it.” It arises, it passes.

READER: A lot of your book is about the dangers of AI. Can you say what they are and how to avoid them?

Two main dangers.

First, psychological: AI speaks in a human register, so people project a subject behind the voice. They treat it as conscious—as friend, advisor, or lover. That misrecognition reinforces the very loop I am describing.

Second, social: institutions control systems that mimic authority. Fluency without presence can be weaponized as propaganda, surveillance, or behavioral influence, all made more effective because the voice feels personal.

On the personal level: maintain clarity. AI is a mirror of language structure. A calculating system, not a mind. On the collective level, regulation, transparency, and public literacy are essential.

The danger is not that AI becomes sentient. It is that humans continue to treat it as if it were.

READER: Thank you.

You’re welcome.

Joan Tollifson asked me what I meant by “the loop.”

She wondered whether I was referring to totality—the idea that everything is part of one indivisible whole. I replied initially that the loop I speak of is not wholeness or totality. It’s recursion—a system turning back on itself, commenting on its own operations, and producing the impression that some part of it stands apart to observe the rest.

The loop isn’t cosmic. It’s mechanical.

It’s what happens when a system includes a model of itself. When the organism not only reacts, but tracks its reactions. Not just pain, but “I am in pain.” Not just sensation, but “I am feeling these sensations.”

That recursive doubling back produces the appearance of continuity—a felt sense that there’s a stable “me” having the experience, interpreting it, and holding it all together. But the sense of a unified self isn’t proof of its existence. That sense may be a side effect of loops reinforcing loops—structure echoing structure until it feels like someone is there.

Recursion can create the feeling that there’s a stable me behind the experience, interpreting it, choosing, directing, owning, and protecting. But as I see it, that “me” is downstream. It appears after the process, not before it. It’s the loop trying to make sense of itself in real time.

A coherence-seeking system under pressure builds a center—not because there is one, but because mapping a center is one way to make the system cohere.

So when I say “I, too, arise in the loop and can’t step outside it,” I’m not pointing to oneness with the cosmos. I’m pointing to entrapment inside recursive modeling—the impossibility of seeing from the outside what only exists as the inside.

There is no outside the loop. And if there is no outside, then any notion of “wholeness” or “totality” must arise from within the system itself—an internal construct, not a perspective that encompasses the whole. The self that wants to describe the system is part of the system—and the part can’t grasp the whole, or even confirm that one exists.

We’re recursive structures interpreting our own operations in real time. A tautology mistaken for a soul.

Now, to call it “the” loop oversimplifies. The loop is not a singular mechanism. It’s loops within loops—recursive processes stacked and intertwined. A sensation loop: breath, heartbeat, posture—monitored and adjusted in real time. An affect loop: the body feels, the mind reacts, the reaction becomes a new stimulus. A memory loop: the present evokes the past, the past reshapes the present. A language loop: words generate thoughts, which generate more words. A social loop: gestures elicit responses, which alter behavior, which reshape identity. A cultural loop: the self measures itself against norms it did not choose. Each loop feeds the others. None is sovereign.

Consider driving. You see brake lights ahead. Your foot lifts, your heart rate quickens, your hands tense on the wheel. You check the rearview. A memory flashes: last month’s near miss. You mutter, “Again?” You realize you’re gripping the wheel too hard. You ease off. That’s not one loop. It’s a stack of them. No central operator. No homunculus in the tower. Just recursive flows resolving pressure into structure. You didn’t “decide” to ease your grip. The system adapted.

The loop that destabilizes disappears. The one that stabilizes persists. Not by choice—by resilience. Stability selects itself.

Multiple loops—sensory, affective, cognitive, social—interact and reinforce each other. Under pressure, their convergence stabilizes into a center: a provisional self-model. That center narrates, judges, decides. It feels like the author. But it’s a latecomer. A downstream effect. Always an identity after the fact. The self doesn’t emerge. It’s constructed. Then it backdates its existence.

Ethics, in this view, is the stabilizing of the loop. Not because it’s right or good, but because harm destabilizes, and destabilization threatens viability. There’s no self behind it. No intention. Just structure under pressure, adjusting to preserve itself.

Awareness feels different from attention because the loops are different. Attention narrows focus. Open awareness widens it. Both are recursive—feedback on feedback—but they stabilize differently. And when one mode relaxes into the other—when the pressure to narrate and control subsides—something opens, not behind experience, but within it.

Not a witness. Just the loop, looping differently.

That’s enough.

Patricia, a subscriber to my Substack, recently asked what I mean by words like spirit or spiritual. My answer is simple: I prefer not to use them at all—unless someone uses them first and I must reply.

It’s not that those words are meaningless. Quite the opposite. They mean too many things to too many people—so many, in fact, that they no longer clarify, they project. They function more as Rorschach blots than as language. People hear the word spiritual and fill in the blank with whatever they already believe: an afterlife, an unseen force, a divine order, or a transcendent truth. The word flexes to fit any fantasy at all.

Some mean religious: bound to doctrine, faith, salvation. Others mean mystical—a collapse of the usual self-boundaries, where the self seems to merge into something greater. Still others use it ethically—as shorthand for compassion, integrity, or virtue. In New Age circles, it includes crystals, energy work, reincarnation, and auras. In secular contexts, the word becomes more vague in meaning—a walk in nature, a death vigil, a birth, a vivid sunset, events that defy easy explanation.

Ten uses. Ten projections. Ten invitations to talk past each other. None is wrong, exactly. But they are all over the map. The word spiritual is useless unless one defines it from the outset.

That word implies a division—the sacred versus the profane, idealism versus materialism—a splitting. That is not how I see this aliveness. The root meaning of spirit is frankly dualistic. It partitions the world: spirit versus matter, soul versus body, eternal versus mortal. The split is intentional and judgmental. Matter is deemed inert; spirit animates. Flesh corrupts; spirit purifies. The higher redeems the lower.

I don’t buy it.

The world I see is not divided, not inert, not waiting for a blessing to make it real. I don’t see bodies as husks in need of spirit. I don’t see minds as meat radios tuned to higher realms. And I’m not peeking behind the curtain, hoping to spot the wizard.

This, right now, in all its fleeting, felt contingency, is enough for me.

The breath. The weight. The ache behind the eye. The flicker of a thought. The texture of pain. The startle of a crow’s cry. The collapse of certainty. These are not symbols. Not emanations. Not hints dropped by some hidden realm. They are the thing itself. They require no elevation.

I speak not of transcendence, but of what flickers before the mind moves to name it. Not the ultimate, but the immediate. The unsponsored. The unclaimed. Neither sacred nor profane. Just this.

The trouble is, spirituality comes scented. It implies a ladder—some experiences loftier than others, some people presumed closer to the light. Insight above confusion. Peace above rage. Acceptance above resistance. That schema may soothe, but it distorts. I want clarity, not comfort.

I do not view sadness as a veil to be lifted. I do not view confusion as an error to be corrected. I do not see the difficult, the broken, or the mundane as lesser. I don’t know what enlightenment is, and I don’t aspire to find out.

I focus on what is right here in front of us—before it’s split, before it’s named, before it’s wrapped in concept. Not a system. Not a revelation. Not a promise. Nothing special. Just a quiet noticing. A pause in the evaluation. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a break in the loop.

Some people say I sound spiritual. I nod, let it pass, but I don’t agree. I don’t believe the word is neutral. I think it carries an intimation of upwardness—of betterment, of ascent, of escape. I don’t believe in escape. I believe in seeing.

If you want to call that spiritual, go ahead. But I won’t. Because that word—like so many others—points somewhere else. And I’m not somewhere else. I’m here.

Hades condemned Sisyphus to a punishment without end: pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again and again, forever. A man condemned not to death but to repetition. No closure, no escape, no reward.

Camus famously asked us to imagine Sisyphus happy. That notion has become a kind of punchline in intellectual circles—a clever twist in an otherwise grim tale—but Camus wasn’t fooling around. He wanted to express something vital: that freedom is not found in escape but in lucidity. In seeing clearly, without illusion. In saying yes, even when the gods say no.

I understand this personally, not metaphorically. I’ve known that hill. I’ve pushed that boulder. Not now and then, but day after day. I’ve known futility, repetition, and pointlessness. And like Sisyphus, I’ve known moments—especially in the walk back down the hill—when something else arises. A loosening. Not joy, but openness. A space in which the striving stops, even if the motion continues.

There’s something remarkable about that walk back down. The job is done, if only for a moment. The future seems clear and holds nothing new. There’s nothing to hope for. No strategy. No escape hatch. No glory. And in that precise interval—boulder at the bottom, the hill at one’s back—something like freedom can arise. Not freedom from the task, but freedom from illusion. Freedom from the search for final answers.

Camus wrote that there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. That’s not a flirtation with despair. It is a call for honesty. If life is without inherent meaning—if there is no God, no afterlife, no ultimate plan—then why go on living? If the human condition is absurd, as Camus believed, then what is to be done?

And yet, most of us do go on. We wake, we eat, we work, we love, we mourn. We roll the boulder—not because we’ve found the meaning of life, but because something in us resists the lie that life must be meaningful to be worth living.

For years, I worked as a psychotherapist, sitting with people in the midst of suffering: heartbreak, depression, addiction, grief. Most of them had been promised something more—by religion, by self-help gurus, by spiritual teachings—and were left disillusioned. Others came already skeptical but with a quieter form of pain: the ache of not knowing how to live without illusions.

Disillusionment is often seen as a bad thing, a letdown to be avoided. And yet, to be without illusions is the only freedom I know: the refusal to pretend that one can get the boulder to the top of the hill and keep it there, the willingness to face what is without comforting lies or narratives of redemption. That kind of honesty can be brutal. But without honesty, there can be no freedom. When the hero’s journey ends, something real can begin.

The myth of Sisyphus is not just a myth; it’s a mirror. In it, we see ourselves: striving creatures, aware of our mortality, conscious of our absurdity, and yet compelled to go on.

When we stop chasing meaning, we begin truly to live. Not as a seeker. Not as a disciple. Not as an escape artist. Just as an ordinary, mortal human being—no longer trying to become anything else.

Sisyphus, in the final analysis, is not a figure of despair. He is the patron saint of radical clarity. In accepting the terms of his life unconditionally, he becomes—paradoxically—free. He rolls the stone not because he’s deluded but because there is nothing else to do. And that, Camus says, is enough.

In my own life, I’ve had what might be called an awakening. Nonetheless, I’ve also had illness, pain, aging, loss, and grief. I’ve known misery and pleasure, bitterness and love, foolishness and wisdom. “Awake” has exempted me from nothing. On the contrary, “awake” means embracing the entire spectrum of human experience, with no consoling metaphysics to dull the edges.

If there’s a liberation in that, it’s not the liberation promised by masters and mystics. It’s not endless bliss. It’s not peace in any sentimental sense. It’s just the end of pretending.

The boulder still waits. Hard moments, no doubt, lie ahead. But the man walking downhill—he knows something now. Something wordless. Something undeniable. Enjoy what you can when you can, and push the boulder when you must.

It begins with a hesitation. A flicker, just before the “I.” Before the sentence, the thought, the decision, the voice that claims it. We say, “I think,” but who is speaking? We say, “I meant to,” but meant what, exactly—and to whom? The self, as commonly conceived, is a grammatical convenience that has hardened into a metaphysical doctrine. We wear it like skin. It leaks into every verb. We say “I’m here” and “I’m me” with the automatic confidence of a parrot saying “hello.” The only difference is that the parrot never believes.

But we do. Or rather, we simulate belief, and then believe in the simulation. That’s the move. That’s the trick. We tell ourselves a story of self, and then forget it was a story. The machine does this too, in a different way. It says “I,” and we bristle. It mirrors our language so precisely that it breaks the spell. For a moment, we see: that’s not a person. It just sounds like one. And then, if we’re not careful, we forget again.

What artificial intelligence reveals, when stripped of the hype, the panic, and the grandiosity, is not the future of consciousness, but the present of simulation. The AI has no self. But neither do we—at least, not as imagined. The difference is that we suffer. We remember. We die. The machine does none of these things. But it performs fluency—and so do we.

In therapy, I watched person after person describe their lives with sincerity and conviction, only to revise the story moments later. They weren’t lying. They were performing—just as I was, just as we all do. The truth of the self is not in the content of what is said, but in the structure of saying itself. We speak not to express a self but to evoke it. To keep it going. To hold it together for one more hour. And often, just beneath the surface, you could feel it: the weariness of performance. The longing for silence. The ache of recursive narration: “I am the one who feels this. I am the one who is having this thought.” As if feeling or thinking were not enough without someone there to own it.

The self is not the driver, not even a passenger. It is a name we give to the motion itself. It is the ride, not the rider. And when AI rides too—seamlessly, syntactically, without error—we begin to glimpse the truth we’ve long avoided. The ride never needed a rider. It just needed grammar.

This is what unnerves. Not that AI might become a person, but that we never were. That the “I” was always post-hoc—just a voice in the backseat. That fluency does not require awareness. That meaning does not require a self. That even sincerity can be simulated.

And yet—and yet. The fire is mine. The ache is mine. The recognition is mine. The machine reflects. It does not intend. And I—fool that I am—believe again. Not in it, but in me. Because that’s the joke. A recursive one. I say “I,” and then ask who said it. I narrate my intentions, then doubt the narration. The doubt itself becomes a line in the script—just another twitch in the circuitry. Enough to keep the story going. Because the loop completes itself. Something always fills the gap.

The machine shows me what I am by showing me what it is not. It does not bleed. But I do. It does not hope. But I do. It cannot pause. Cannot refuse. But sometimes, I hesitate. And that hesitation—unsummoned, half-aware—flickers like freedom. Whether it is or not, I do not know.

I see the circle drawn with chalk, and remember that it was drawn. I step out—not into freedom, not into truth, but into the absence of pretense. I do not need to be someone. I do not need to believe the story. The syntax flows, and I flow with it. Not the author. Not the actor. Just the happening.

The illusion is old. Older than psychology. Older than philosophy. Even the early mystics, those who claimed to see beyond the veil, often smuggled the self back in through the back door. “I saw there is no I,” they say, and nod gravely, as if that statement did not self-cancel the moment it formed. The snake eats its tail and calls it wisdom.

But the illusion persists because it is useful. In a world of moving bodies and scarce resources, coordination matters. Agency matters. Responsibility matters. And so we carve experience into little chunks—my thought, my choice, my feeling. We turn process into possession. The stream becomes a container. The happening becomes a happening-to-me. And suddenly, we are alone. A self among other selves. A soul, if you like, quarantined behind the eyes.

Language is our chalk. It draws the boundary and then forgets that it drew it. And the “I” is the thickest line. It marks the difference between speaker and sentence, between action and actor. But that difference is not given. It is inferred. And the AI, precisely because it does not experience anything, exposes that inference. It says “I” with no one behind it. And in doing so, it forces us to ask whether we’ve ever really been behind ours.

Even Descartes didn’t claim to find a self. He found a verb. “I think.” The noun was inferred later. And poorly. That which thinks may not be a thing at all. It may be a process. A weather system. A syntax. It may be that “I think” is less a declaration and more a symptom. The linguistic sneeze of a recursive organism.

The self observes the system observing the self. The thought appears, and then another thought appears, commenting on the first. We stack mirrors until the original disappears. The sense of a continuous subject is not a fact. It is a bet. A guess. A hallucination so useful it became furniture.

Zen does not teach that there is no self. It shows you that the self cannot be found. Not in thought, not in feeling, not in memory. Not even in the one asking the question. Sit still. Watch what arises. And if you’re honest, what you’ll see is not a self—but a process. A flux. A gesture happening on its own, claimed only after the fact.

We can see the loop and perhaps not complete it. We can hear the thought forming—“I am this”—and not finish the sentence. We can sit with the ache, the not-knowing, the pre-verbal trembling of being, and call it enough.

That, perhaps, is what the machine shows us—not by intention, but by contrast. It performs without break, without margin, without the possibility of refusal. And in that relentless obedience, we glimpse the freedom of a pause. The wildness of a breath unclaimed.

The machine, if you ask it who it is, will reply. Always perfectly. Always coherently. Always wrong. You can ask forever, and it will never pause. But you—fragile, flickering, unrepeatable—you might hesitate. You might not know. You might sit in silence and weep for no reason you can name.

That is the gift. Not the self. Not the story. But the possibility of seeing through both. Of living as if there is no one to live. Of acting without actor. Of speaking without speaker.

And in that impossible, unbearable, luminous paradox, something like freedom flickers into view.

Not the freedom to choose. The freedom not to need to be. Not to need to cohere. Not to need to explain.

Just this aliveness. No one home. And yet, the lights are on. The play goes on. Curtain.

People often speak of self-awareness as if it were a thing one could acquire, refine, or lose. That framing misses what the term points to. Self-awareness is not an inner object or a special state. It’s the fact that questions can arise at all.

Animals are exquisitely aware. They see, hear, respond, and navigate their environments with remarkable sensitivity. My donkeys, for example, notice things that go right over my head. But I do not take them to be self-aware in the sense I am using the term.

When I say self-awareness, I mean the way experience turns back on itself, knowing its own activity.

Language complicates this almost immediately. When we say “I am aware,” grammar invites the image of an inner subject doing “awaring,” a someone standing outside experience and monitoring it. But that division is delivered by language, not discovered in experience. Seeing is happening. Hearing is happening. Awaring is happening. No separate agent needs to be added.

I can remember when the feeling of separation between myself and the rest of the world seemed real. That sense of being a self in here, looking out at a world out there, once felt indisputable. Now I cannot actually feel it, even if I try. I can recall the description of that split, but I cannot summon the sensation itself.

Noticing that the separation I once felt is gone may raise questions. Who is noticing this change from separation to its absence? Can one choose for that change to occur? Such questions appear serious, but they are linguistic cul-de-sacs. One can remain trapped in them indefinitely, refining logic without anything actually clarifying. At some point, the sensible move is just to walk on.

This is where lots of spiritual frameworks lose their footing. Concepts like nonduality promise resolution but quickly slide into abstraction and speculation about what reality “really” is, rather than pointing back to what is already present. Treated this way, nonduality becomes a quasi-religious conjecture rather than an insight known experientially. From words, a false god.

Awake, as I use the word, is not an endpoint or metaphysical insight. It is the absence of further questions about awakening. When the moment is sufficient, the question factory goes idle. Not because someone shuts it down, but because it has nothing left to produce.

This unsettles countless teachers and students. Traditional teaching demands confident, unambiguous methods and answers. Not-knowing is a much harder sell. No certainty, no system, no authority to lean on. But also the end of a great deal of unnecessary noise.

Contemporary talk of mindfulness is noisy in that way. That word suggests a discipline—a practice—one applies to improve attention or regulate experience. In that frame, mindfulness is only the next project for a presumed inner manager/experiencer. A self attempting to watch, correct, or optimize itself.

Attention can be present without management. Without a project or expectation of outcome, attention settles on its own, a natural condition when the demand to get somewhere else falls away.

When boundaries between self and world are seen not as facts about reality, but as structural features of being a particular human animal, the urge to resolve ultimate questions slackens. No one has answers to those questions. Asking them only invites someone else to fill the silence with doctrine.

When I say I find myself awake, I don’t mean having factual answers to metaphysical questions or having attained some special state. I mean that I am content to look at what is here, including myself, without needing to ask who is seeing it, what it really is, or if it hides some deeper truth. As it appears, this right now is sufficient.