The Canon / Living / Contemporary Nonduality
Living · 2017
The Ten Thousand Things
Radical NondualityThe Ten Thousand Things is Robert Saltzman's frank, unsentimental account of awareness and selfhood within the contemporary radical-nonduality current. Its central claim is that there is no separate self standing apart from and authoring experience: the felt sense of a controlling "me" behind thought and action is a construction rather than a doer.
The book proceeds not as systematic teaching but as candid first-person report. Writing as a psychotherapist and artist rather than an enlightened master, Saltzman brings a clinician's attention to mind and self-image, keeping the inquiry concrete and experiential. He insists that clear seeing of the absence of a separate self produces no permanent special state, only an honest relationship with life as it actually unfolds.
Its tone is markedly skeptical toward popular spirituality, idealised advaita, and manifestation claims, foregrounding uncertainty and lived ambiguity. By reframing "awakening" away from attainment and guru authority toward ongoing, honest observation, the book occupies the sober, critical edge of the contemporary nondual field.
In its words
In the eyes of the world Robert may be a person, but to myself I am not a person, but a happening, a stream of consciousness over which I have no control. We are all like that, but not all of us know it.
The aliveness is the meaning.
The 'I' who is replying to questions here is not a 'person' at all, which is really only a legal and social designation, but an undeniable, unrestrained flow of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. That flow is not happening to me. That flow is me.
We are lost in a fantasy of separation in which I am 'in here' while the world I see—the ten thousand things—is 'out there.' It is from that confusion that one awakens.
Like everything else, 'myself' is always changing, and so the understandings of this moment may be outshone in the next by a clearer vision, or may even appear to have been only a misunderstanding.
For me, an apparent personal self is still present, but has lost the authority of its judgments, certainties and pet beliefs.
In each moment, things simply are as they are, whether "I" like it or not.
The ideas it carries
Practices it teaches
Returning to the Root — emptiness, stillness, and watching the return
Chapter 16 of the Tao Te Ching is its most explicit contemplative instruction. Where most of the text is aphoristic, here Lao Tzu gives a concrete sitting practice: empty the mind to its utmost, hold firmly to…
Lineage
The author
Robert SaltzmanNo separate self that authors experience
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