Like many people, I’m a big fan of the unexpected in movies, novels, and streaming shows. You know, that moment when the story line has been moving along in a predictable fashion — interesting, but nothing special — then the plot takes an abrupt totally unexpected twist that makes me go, Wow, I sure didn’t see that coming.
The people I thought were alive actually are dead. This is a computer simulation, not reality. The astronauts who long for their families back on Earth actually are clones with implanted memories. What seems to be a remote mountain community in Idaho houses the last humans on our planet 1,200 years in the future.
For much of my life, I looked upon spirituality in much the same fashion. I was attracted to mystical sorts of teachings where this world, and indeed the entire universe, is just an ephemeral illusion, with lasting ultimate reality residing in a supernatural realm far beyond ordinary understanding. (This is an example of how, as the saying goes, all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato — who taught that the unchanging World of Forms casts light of which our world is just a shadow.)
Well, I’ve changed my views a lot.
Now I embrace a life as it is here and now perspective. That has come to seem the most radical, far out, unusual approach to spirituality that I’ve ever come across. It bears a resemblance to Zen, yet is even more iconoclastic. At least to someone like me, who used to devour books and talks about spirituality that were firmly in the “leave this world in order to find a better one” camp.
So presently it strikes me as wonderfully unique and refreshing to think, “living life just as it is, that’s the only type of spirituality I need or want.” It’s like a movie where the heroine expends tremendous time and effort to find a treasure, only to discover that her true richness is the home that she left to go searching.
I”ve finally finished Robert Saltzman’s book, “Depending on no-thing.” I readily admit that it’s strange I read a 607 page book that conveys the basic message, there’s no need to do anything but live life just as it is. Of course, people addicted to drugs or alcohol engage in a lot of work to end up free of those substances. Likewise, Saltzman answers a lot of questions from people addicted to various forms of spirituality, which included me at one point in my life.
Amazon has a good summary of what the book is about: (Saltzman’s other book, The Ten Thousand Things, has the same goal, but is much shorter)
Depending on No-Thing is a clear and unsentimental look at what remains when the imagined center of “me” falls away. Robert Saltzman writes from lived experience, not doctrine. He dismantles the spiritual promises of final answers and special states, turning attention instead to the simplicity of experience as it actually shows up—without metaphysical storylines, without self-improvement agendas, without a someone behind the curtain.
This book is not a guide to bliss or transcendence. It is a companion for those who have seen through the usual reassurances and are ready to explore life with nothing to stand on: no hidden witness, no enlightened identity, no ultimate ground. What appears in that openness is not despair, but intimacy with the moment as it unfolds—unfiltered, unowned.
Psychological clarity replaces metaphysical fantasy. Direct seeing replaces belief. The search for escape gives way to a straightforward honesty about being alive.
For readers exhausted by teachings that promise liberation somewhere else, Depending on No-Thing offers something rarer: the end of seeking, and the beginning of unguarded presence with what is.
Here’s a few passages from Depending on no-thing that convey the gist of Saltzman’s message, if you aren’t into reading lengthy books.
Freedom does not entail leaving anything behind, or splitting “good” from “bad,” but in opening completely, without resistance, to whatever is seen, felt, thought, and otherwise experienced moment by moment as the one and only “reality.” There is no other “you,” and no other reality except in your imagination, which is only changeful thought.
The freedom you desire is here right now and consists of being exactly what you are moment by moment, with no idea of improvement or of attaining or becoming anything else. There is no impediment, I say, to this radical self-acceptance except in imagination. That impediment is whatever you imagine you might be or could be “if only.” Just stop!
…It may be hard to accept each moment as it is without hoping or searching for something “more evolved,” but seeing the lie in such hopes for the future, in my experience, allows freedom, sanity, and reality in the present. And you only have to take it one moment at a time. Without hope, imagined future glories — familiar hiding places — disappear. This moment is all one ever has to deal with, and all one ever can deal with. With that understanding, samsara is nirvana.
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