Robert Saltzman
The 21st Century Self
Belief, Illusion, and the Machinery of Meaning
(Clear Mind Press, 2025)
Reader's reviews:
"This book is a sustained, powerful and challenging vehicle for clarity and insight into the mechanics of the self. Saltzman's unwavering intellectual honesty and fearlessness is as bracing as it is effective. This is not spiritually consoling "Kumbaya" around the campfire. It's something much better. It's an invitation to grow up and put away the consoling delusions of our psychological childhood in favour of the real, which is far, far better and well worth the price. It's also a fascinating and somewhat terrifying exploration of large language model artificial intelligence, both its dangers and what it can teach us about ourselves. Saltzman deeply explores the similarities and the essential differences between us and generative A.I., as well as how much of what we take to be our volitional, performative self is mechanical and logarithmic in the same way as it is."
Sam Blight (Perth, Australia)
"This most recent piece of work by Dr. Robert Saltzman, exploring our true nature, is flawless in my view. I say that in all sincerity! Complete. No shoe left to drop. Left me speechless. The native innocence and honesty shine through the words, unencumbered, trustworthy. The detail of Robert’s confession is exquisite. I hear and feel heard. Affirmed. An equality of vision. The narrating “I”-self has lost the primacy of existence yet returns like a ghost. The residuum, Ten Thousand Things as a play of systemic consciousness and benign stillness. The understanding of AI as a reflection of our own narratives is a real eye-opener. The dilemma of apparent choice nullified by systemic causation. All communicated without the slightest whiff of pontification or spirituality. Just honesty without any capital T Truths. Refreshing, to say the least. Affirming for those with ears to hear. Robert is clearly awake as an ordinary secular human being. An authentic sage for our time."
John Troy
Dear Robert, I have just purchased your new book and have read to the end of chapter 3 on Loneliness, I wanted to pause and to write to you. This chapter is intimate and beautiful. I carry that ache, and I know it so well, I feel very, very blessed to have read this, it spoke to me immediately and deeply, with much pathos and tenderness, it brought tears of recognition to my eyes and a quiet confirmation that there is not a wrongness there in me for this feeling - thank you so much. I can trust life and lean more into the fullness of my experience from reading this. What a gift you are giving as you age - as they say - like a fine wine…
Hi Robert Saltzman, I just read the first chapter of your new book, and it was like tasting an ice cream with every word, some new taste appeared. Thank you for sharing this with us all. Like with your other books, this one is again a masterpiece.
Hi, Robert. Just a sincere thanks for writing The 21st Century Self. I finished it yesterday. Reading it was challenging, stunning, disorienting. And also I felt grateful, refreshed, full. It reminded me of the first time I read The Tao. To me it's up there with the small handful of books I've read that I can only categorize as special. Not because I can tell you why, but because they leave me quiet. Thank you, I so appreciate what you're able to capture in words. Onward.
Free State of Kate
A must-read for every seeker of truth in this confusing age. Dr. Robert Saltzman’s The 21st Century Self is not just a book—it is a mirror held up to the illusions we live by. With razor-sharp insight and rare humility, he tears through the modern myths of identity, ego, and spiritual posturing. No jargon, no preaching—only deep seeing. This work touched my heart and shook my assumptions. Highly recommended.
— Anirudh Sharma, Pune
The 21st Century Self
Belief, Illusion, and the Machinery of Meaning
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.
Robert Saltzman, Ph.D. is a psychologist, philosopher, and author of The Ten Thousand Things, Depending On No-Thing, and Understanding Claude. His work explores selfhood, belief, and the illusions that pass for reality in the 21st century. He lives in Mexico with his wife, Catanya.
Immediately after Claude, 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 bundle, 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!
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. "
Depending on No Thing
Robert has written a book, both wide and deep, 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.
So whereas most of the "teaching" points elsewhere—points, I mean, to an improved condition that you will attain by following the teaching—I point only to what you are right now in this moment. The one who is reading these words is IT, and there is no other.”
Understanding Claude
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.
Translations
The English originals were published by New Sarum Press in 2018 and 2019.
The Ten Thousand Things was translated into Dutch as De tienduizend dingen. It was published by Samsara in 2023.
Translation: Ton Haarmans, John Devitt and Suzanne Visser (Clear Mind Press).
Clear Mind Press has also translated Depending on No-Thing into Dutch. A publisher still has to be found. Van niets afhankelijk.
The Ten Thousand Things is available in both Spanish and German translations.
The Spanish edition is available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Las-diez-mil-cosas-Palabras-ebook/dp/B077RJ9ZGZ/
The German version is available at:
https://www.amazon.com/Zehntausend-Dinge.../dp/3750400164
and at:https://www.prummer.space/die-zehntausend-dinge/