Utter Simplicity of the Natural State
A note on how this article came about
From a few thoughts in the car to an article
This article began as some spontaneous reflections I recorded while driving one day. I was not giving a formal talk or working from an outline. I was simply speaking my thoughts aloud—circling around a point, following a connection, then remembering something else I wanted to add. Naturally, there were repetitions, unfinished sentences, and a few things that needed explaining more carefully.
I also wanted to try out a program I had made, Cosmic Transcriber, on my own recordings: how well could it get my spoken words into text? After transcribing the recordings, I used AI to help bring the material together into a coherent article, remove repeated explanations, improve the flow, and expand points that needed clarification. What follows is therefore an edited and expanded essay based on those spoken reflections, rather than a verbatim transcript.
The article itself was produced from one main prompt asking AI to turn the transcripts into a coherent, well-styled essay while preserving my points. I then followed up with a simple request to review it, including a few wording corrections and an additional reference. That was the basic process—no elaborate sequence of drafting prompts.
Cosmic Transcriber: audio to text. My Windows application turns audio recordings into text using your own OpenAI API account. It is designed to handle long recordings and batches, with resumable progress and TXT or Markdown output—useful for talks, interviews, and notes like these.
CloudScribe Pro: text to audio. My companion Windows application turns reviewed text into synthetic MP3 narration using your own Google Cloud Text-to-Speech credentials. It provides the other half of the workflow: making written articles, translations, or transcripts available for listening.
Both applications are free to download; the underlying API services have their own usage charges. You can find the downloads, source-code links, and setup instructions here: Cosmic Transcriber + CloudScribe Pro.
The question running through these recordings was a simple one: if liberation is the natural, unfabricated condition, why does the path sometimes seem so complicated? The reflections below explore that apparent paradox—and why recognizing luminosity, realizing anatta, and penetrating emptiness must not be collapsed into the same thing.
Reflections on view, realization, and practice
Utter Simplicity: Why Liberation Is a Path of Undoing
On the contraction of self, the radiance of appearances, and the wisdom that allows grasping to release.
In this article
- We are not building a golden castle
- How ignorance becomes contraction
- Why the cycle does not stop by wishing
- The whole of experience unclenching
- Why “just relax” is not enough
- In the seen, just the seen
- Radiance is the appearance itself
- Anatta is more than non-doership
- From the witness to one infinite presence
- When luminosity becomes another knot
- Luminosity is blissful; emptiness liberates
- Dependent arising without inherent production
- The Tathāgata is “Such”
- View, experience, realization, and practice
- What I mean by the natural state
- From a hundred graspings to zero
1. We are not building a golden castle
Many people imagine the spiritual path as an enormously complicated undertaking. You meditate for years, perhaps decades. You study with teachers, read scriptures, undergo retreats, and slowly accumulate enough experience to have a chance of glimpsing enlightenment. Somewhere in the distance stands a magnificent attainment, and the task is to build your way towards it.
There is something understandable about that picture. Practice does require dedication, and deep conditioning does not necessarily unwind quickly. But the picture can also mislead us about what the path is actually doing. We begin to imagine that liberation is an extraordinary structure we must construct: a golden castle built one brick at a time, into which we will eventually move.
That is not how I understand it. We are not manufacturing the luminous and empty nature of experience. We are not producing a new, inherently existing Buddha out of an inherently existing ordinary person. The path is an undoing of the ignorance and grasping through which experience is misapprehended.
Our nature is not made luminous by spiritual effort, nor does it become empty only after we meditate. Yet this does not mean that we are already free of obscuration in our lived experience. The nature of experience and our realization of that nature must be distinguished. Otherwise, “already so” becomes an excuse to overlook the very conditioning that keeps us bound.
When I speak of our nature as originally complete, boundless, or centerless, I do not mean an infinite substance hidden underneath appearances. I mean that no independently existing center or self can be found, and that the vividness of experience has never required such a center. The absence of an inherent self is not something we create. What needs to cease is the ignorance that assumes and grasps at one.
We are not building a more magnificent place for the self to reside. We are seeing through the grasping that keeps establishing a residence.
This is why the path can involve sustained effort while its fruition is described in terms of simplicity, non-grasping, and freedom from contrivance. Effort has a purpose: to bring about the conditions for understanding and release. It does not manufacture an ultimate substance called liberation.
2. How ignorance becomes contraction
What is being undone? At the root is ignorance: the misapprehension of mind, consciousness, and appearances. We take what is empty of intrinsic nature and impute an independent existence to it. We take a dependently arising process and imagine a self at its center.
That imagined self seems to be the knower behind knowing, the experiencer behind experience, the doer behind action. It seems able to stand apart from the unfolding of conditions and survey everything from a private vantage point. There is “me in here,” looking at a world “out there.”
From there, appropriation follows readily. This is my body, my mind, my home, my partner, my achievement, my future. When things go as desired, there is reassurance. When they do not, the supposed center feels threatened. We grasp, resist, compare, defend, and fear loss.
At the same time, the world becomes populated with seemingly self-existing objects. Each thing appears to possess its own independent core: something that arises, remains, and disappears in its own right. Subject and object reinforce each other. A supposedly real observer stands over against supposedly real things.
By “reification,” I mean this taking of persons and phenomena to exist from their own side. It is more than using ordinary words. Saying “I am going home” does not by itself constitute the problem. The problem is the deeply felt and often unexamined assumption that the “I” and the things encountered possess the independent reality we attribute to them.
This is also what I mean by contraction. It is not merely a tight muscle or an unpleasant mood. It is the organizing of experience around an imagined center, together with the grasping and resistance that follow. Bodily tension may accompany it, but the issue goes deeper than physical relaxation.
We did not sit down one morning and decide to create this structure. Nobody consciously chose, “Today I shall contract into a separate self, and tomorrow I shall stop.” The pattern is already operating before we notice it. That is why an instruction to stop identifying, however well meant, does not necessarily reach its root.
Ignorance is not overcome by another command issued from the very center it has fabricated. It is overcome by wisdom: seeing that what was taken to be independently real has never existed in that manner.
3. Why the cycle does not stop by wishing
The twelve links of dependent origination place ignorance at the beginning of their familiar exposition. Conditioned by ignorance are volitional formations; conditioned by formations is consciousness; then name-and-form, the six sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming, birth, and aging-and-death, with the suffering bound up with that process. The teaching also describes cessation through the cessation of the relevant conditions. [1]
“Beginning” here does not mean a first event in the history of the universe. Nor should consciousness in this formula simply be translated as “dualistic consciousness”: the discourse identifies six classes of consciousness. My concern is how ignorance conditions the appropriation and misapprehension of experience, and how that sustains bondage.
In the traditional Buddhist account, this is not confined to the frustrations of one lifetime. Ignorance, craving, and karma sustain saṃsāra, the repeated movement through birth and death in the six realms. Greed, hatred, and delusion propel unwholesome actions; wholesome actions can support more fortunate circumstances. But a fortunate rebirth, by itself, is not freedom from the cycle.
People sometimes say that they would prefer to remain in saṃsāra. Yet that preference can overlook what the teaching is pointing to: not merely familiar pleasures, but the vulnerability of conditioned life, repeated loss, and the inability to guarantee where its momentum will lead. Traditional accounts of the Buddha’s recollection of past lives place this problem against an immense horizon, far beyond what we remember of the present lifetime.
Our wishes and intentions matter as conditions. They are not the decrees of a sovereign self standing outside causality. Wanting a particular life is not the same as possessing an unrestricted choice of rebirth, and wishing to end suffering is not the same as having uprooted its causes.
There is also a distinction, within Mahāyāna accounts, between rebirth driven by affliction and the compassionate activity of advanced bodhisattvas, sustained by wisdom and vows. I had the eighth bhūmi especially in mind in the spoken reflections: its descriptions emphasize immovability and effortless activity supported by prior aspirations. Descriptions of emanation and freedom from compulsive rebirth belong to that advanced-path context, rather than to an ordinary person’s claim to have freely chosen every circumstance of life. [2]
We cannot simply press a button and stop the pattern. But this is not fatalism. Because bondage is conditioned, the conditions can be addressed. Listening, reflection, ethical conduct, meditation, and insight matter precisely because they participate in that transformation.
The knowledge that uproots ignorance is not merely being able to repeat, “Everything is empty.” Intellectual understanding can orient us, and careful reasoning can expose contradictions in our assumptions. But the view has to become directly evident. We have to see through the self and the intrinsic existence we have been taking for granted.
4. The whole of experience unclenching
A simpler image is a clenched fist. Imagine holding something so tightly, for so long, that the tension has become familiar. Eventually, you may not even recognize the holding as holding. It just feels like the way your hand is.
When the fist opens, nothing splendid has to be added to the hand. There is a release of contraction. In a similar way, spiritual liberation is not the installation of an extraordinary object into experience. It is the release of the grasping that has made experience into a struggle.
The analogy points towards the whole of experience unclenching, as it were. The grasping at body, mind, consciousness, self, and phenomena is released. There is no longer the same insistence on establishing a center, defending it, and securing a world around it.
This is much more than deciding that we no longer care about a particular person or possession. “I used to be attached to this relationship, but now I have let go” may describe a useful change. It does not necessarily touch the one who still stands apart, claiming to have let go.
Even the conceit “I am”—asmi-māna—must be relinquished. We cannot leave an ultimate self safely installed within the five aggregates, outside them, or as their supposedly eternal background. Releasing ordinary attachments while protecting an invulnerable spiritual identity does not complete the work.
Another image is holding a hot coal. The obvious advice is to put it down. Yet what if the holding has become so deeply habitual that we do not know how? Repeating “let go” may describe the desired outcome without revealing the condition that makes release possible.
The condition that matters is wisdom. If the imagined holder and the imagined ground of security are seen through, release is no longer simply an act performed by a self trying to manage its attachments. The very structure of grasping begins to unravel.
5. Why “just relax” is not enough
Falling asleep offers another useful analogy. For someone who normally sleeps easily, falling asleep can be utterly effortless. When the conditions are right and the body is ready, they lie down and sleep comes, following the body’s natural rhythm. They do not have to construct sleep piece by piece, supervise the transition, or keep issuing instructions for it to happen.
There may not even be a deliberate act of letting go. They are not thinking, “Now I must release this thought, then relax that sensation, then make myself fall asleep.” The rhythm unfolds without that extra management. What seems almost impossible when one is anxiously trying to make it happen can be completely ordinary when it happens naturally.
This is what makes sleep a useful analogy for the natural state: the simplicity of a happening that does not require a separate agent to manufacture or sustain it. In the natural state, appearances unfold as the radiance of pristine consciousness, effortlessly and lawfully through dependent origination. Seeing, hearing, sensing, and thinking do not need an extra self/Self behind them, keeping the display alive. Their luminosity is not a task to perform.
The analogy concerns this freedom from contrivance. Sleep itself is not the natural state or liberation: falling asleep does not uproot ignorance, and familiar grasping can return upon waking. The natural state is natural spontaneous presence: the inseparable union of luminosity and emptiness, with all appearances unfolding effortlessly through dependent origination. Luminosity is their vivid radiance as pristine consciousness; emptiness is their absence of intrinsic nature, including the absence of any inherently existing consciousness. These are inseparable in the very appearing, with no agent, self/Self, or ultimate background. Nothing needs to be held in place as pure presence or knowingness. The resemblance lies in the naturalness of the unfolding, not in equating awakening with sleep.
But tell someone struggling with sleeplessness, “Just relax. Don’t think so much. Let yourself fall asleep,” and the instruction may be almost useless. The words are simple; the condition they point towards is not available on command. Trying harder to relax can itself become another layer of vigilance.
Something similar happens in practice. We hear about effortless awareness or the natural state and try to produce effortlessness. A subtle manager remains busy checking: Am I relaxed enough? Am I present enough? Have I stopped grasping yet? The attempt to supervise release can continue the very contraction we want to undo.
The body’s natural rhythm is itself conditioned. Sleep is affected by many conditions, including schedules, environment, substances, stress, and bodily factors. [3]
The point is that something can be natural without being accessible through an act of will. Its simplicity does not mean that the obstructions are imaginary or that telling someone to relax will remove them.
Likewise, the simplicity of liberation does not make insight unnecessary. We have to understand and penetrate the conditioning that keeps appropriating experience. Otherwise, “just be natural” is heard and enacted through the same old assumptions.
The language of non-forcing or wu wei suggests this release from contrivance. In Buddhism, that release reaches its root through the undoing of ignorance about the nature of self and phenomena. Liberating wisdom makes genuine non-grasping possible.
6. In the seen, just the seen
The Buddha’s instruction to Bāhiya is one of the clearest pointers. It directs training towards just the seen in seeing, just the heard in hearing, and likewise for sensing and cognizing. Crucially, it connects this with the absence of a “you” in relation to these experiences. The discourse reports Bāhiya’s liberation upon hearing the teaching. [4]
This must not be reduced to a technique of intense concentration. It is not a matter of staring at a visual object while refusing every distraction: “I must focus only on what is seen. Do not speak to me. I must not allow anything else into attention.”
Such an exercise may involve concentration, but a concentrated observer can remain entirely intact. There can still be a strong sense of “I am over here, keeping my attention fixed on that.” The subject-object structure has been narrowed and stabilized rather than seen through.
The instruction points to something more radical. Seeing does not require an additional seer behind it. Hearing does not require an additional hearer standing apart from sound. The task is to realize that experience has never required an independent agent, a separate self, or an ultimate Self behind it.
We habitually add appropriation: I see this; this belongs to me; this threatens me; I must hold on to it. We also add the sense of an experiencer behind what is seen. In the absence of that reification, the vividness of seeing is not diminished. What falls away is the imagined separation.
There is no need to make the cloud more special, the sound more spiritual, or the ordinary scene more radiant than it is. Nor does this require suppressing thought. The instruction includes cognizing. A thought, too, can be understood without inserting a separate thinker, agent, or self/Self behind it.
The distinction is between concentrating on an appearance and realizing its nature. Attention can become extremely steady while the assumption of a separate observer remains untouched.
The sutta’s language is an instruction to train, so “already so” does not cancel practice. Rather, practice serves the realization that an inherent observer was never present—not the creation of a temporary condition in which an otherwise real observer disappears.
7. Radiance is the appearance itself
This brings me to luminosity. By luminosity, I do not mean that everything becomes visually brighter or that a mystical light appears behind the world. I mean the vivid, knowing character of experience as pristine consciousness—the immediacy of colour, sound, sensation, and thought. This is Mind that is no-mind by nature: vividly knowing, yet empty of any inherently existing mind, separate knower, or self/Self. Pristine consciousness is not a hidden substance or ultimate background behind appearances; it is their very vividness, inseparable from emptiness.
That radiance must not be turned into an illuminator. There is not an unseen lamp called Awareness standing behind appearances, casting its light upon otherwise inert objects. Nor is there a reservoir of consciousness out of which appearances emerge and into which they subsequently dissolve.
All appearances are the radiance of pristine consciousness. This radiance is the very appearance itself, not something emitted by a separate source or illuminated by a background awareness. Colour, sound, sensation, and thought are the vivid display of Mind that is no-mind by nature—luminous and empty, with no independent agent and no self/Self. The vivid appearing of colour is not separate from its being known. Sound does not need a second, hidden act of awareness to arrive afterwards and make it manifest.
All appearances are the natural radiance of pristine consciousness, unfolding effortlessly and lawfully through dependent origination. No agent directs this unfolding, and no self/Self supplies an extra effort to make it appear or be known. Its vividness is already the functioning of conditions, not a light that someone must switch on or sustain. Spontaneity and conditionality are inseparable.
This is the sense in which I sometimes say that the appearance knows itself, or that the cloud is self-luminous. The expression is experiential shorthand. It does not mean that a physical cloud has a private mind, or that each object contains a miniature observer. It points to the absence of a divide between the appearing and its knowing.
Even “knows itself” can sound as though one thing turns around to inspect itself. That is not what I mean. There is simply this vivid appearing, without a separate knower, an additional act of knowing, or a standpoint from which experience must be certified.
When consciousness is seen to be empty, what is revealed is not a blank void. The imagined subject is unfindable, yet colours, sounds, sensations, and thoughts are vividly manifest. Emptiness does not cancel luminosity. It frees luminosity from the imputation of a substance or self.
In this context, to say there is no consciousness apart from appearances is to deny a separate background entity. It is not to declare that everything is made from one metaphysical substance called Consciousness. That would merely reintroduce the very ground we are examining.
This is how I am using the language of pristine consciousness or Buddha nature here: as a pointer to empty luminosity, not as a name for an ultimate person, cosmic witness, or permanent essence.
8. Anatta is more than non-doership
Many people describe an experience of no-self when what they have recognized is non-doership. Actions happen, thoughts arise, and reactions unfold without any apparent controller. There may be a striking sense that everything is occurring by itself.
This can be an important opening. Yet the absence of a controller is not necessarily the absence of an observer. It is possible to feel, “I do not make any of this happen; I am simply the awareness watching it unfold.”
In that case, one role of the self has weakened while another remains. The doer has been questioned, but the experiencer is still standing in the background. Non-doership alone does not exhaust anatta.
By anatta realization here, I mean the direct seeing that no separate knower or experiencer exists behind the vivid display. Consciousness is authenticated as the immediacy of appearances themselves, rather than as an entity that has appearances.
It is not merely that a self becomes quiet, dissolves during meditation, or temporarily loses its boundaries. It is the recognition that the supposed subject has never been an independently existing entity in the first place. The insight concerns the nature of experience, not simply the disappearance of a particular feeling.
Nor is the release of the controller a denial of conventional responsibility. Intentions, actions, and consequences continue to function. What is absent is an independent agent standing outside conditions and directing them from elsewhere.
This brings together both of John Tan’s anatta stanzas. The first reveals activity without an agent behind it; the second reveals the appearances themselves as luminous knowing, without a separate experiencer. Together, they disclose radiance that needs neither a controller nor a witness. The first stanza is not merely a feeling of passively watching things happen. Both penetrate self/Self; their realization must deepen into the emptiness of phenomena as well.
This distinction matters because a partial opening can be mistaken for the completion of the path. If the watcher remains unquestioned, the experience may still be organized around a subtle center even while everything seems spontaneous.
9. From the witness to one infinite presence
To understand why a profound spiritual realization can still leave grasping intact, it helps to distinguish several ways luminosity is recognized. The distinctions between I AM, nondual presence, anatta, and emptiness make this progression clearer.
The certainty of “I AM”
There can be a direct and doubtless realization of presence: the undeniable fact of being aware, prior to identification with particular thoughts and bodily descriptions. This is not merely repeating an idea about awareness. Its immediacy can be overwhelming.
Yet it may be interpreted as an unchanging witness behind experience. Thoughts, sensations, and the world appear to arise within an infinite, formless presence, while that presence itself seems untouched. A familiar image is, “I am the ocean, not the waves.” The waves come and go; the ocean is taken to be the enduring reality of what I am.
Although vastness has replaced the ordinary sense of being a small person, there can still be a background and a foreground. Awareness is treated as a container, and appearances as its contents. The witness may feel infinite, but it remains a position from which experience is known.
Nondual presence, still taken as inherently real
A further opening can dissolve that apparent distance. The waves are no longer separate from the ocean. Everything appears as the manifestation or modulation of one luminous presence. There is no longer simply a witness standing back from the world; the whole world is experienced as that same presence.
This is a significant difference from a detached observer. But the interpretation can still preserve an inherent essence: one great, infinite existence expressing itself as all things while remaining, in its own nature, unchanged.
The grasping has then become subtler. Instead of “I am this limited body-mind,” there is “I am the one reality appearing as everything.” The identity has expanded enormously, but the assumption of something ultimately established has not necessarily been penetrated.
Anatta and the further penetration of emptiness
Anatta does not require replacing a little self with a vast Self. There is no knower behind appearances, and no need to consolidate their vividness into one eternal substance. In seeing, just the seen; in hearing, just the heard.
Yet even after the separate subject is seen through, there can remain subtle reification of phenomena, presence, or the appearing itself. The empty nature of all phenomena has to become clear as well. A nondual experience, anatta realization, and the thorough realization of twofold emptiness should therefore not be treated as interchangeable labels.
The point is not to diminish genuine openings. It is to understand what each opening has disclosed and what assumptions may still remain. Otherwise, the force of a realization can make its accompanying interpretation seem beyond question.
10. When luminosity becomes another knot
Luminous presence can be profoundly blissful. Coarse mental agitation may quieten, and one may feel released from many ordinary concerns. But bliss does not, by itself, establish that the roots of grasping have ended.
If presence is taken as the final ground of identity, there can be a powerful impulse to remain established in it. At first this may be deliberate: returning again and again to the witness, sustaining the sense of awareness, trying not to lose it.
Eventually, the habit may no longer feel deliberate. The momentum of abiding can become so strong that it seems impossible to stop. One is not constantly thinking, “I must maintain awareness,” yet the body-mind remains organized around preserving a subtle center.
This is why it is insufficient to say that a practice is effortless simply because conscious effort is no longer obvious. Habits can operate automatically. A pattern of grasping can be deeply ingrained without announcing itself as an intention.
In practice, this can be experienced as a knot: a subtle fixation on the intensity of presence, sometimes accompanied by bodily tightness, pressure, headaches, agitation, or difficulty settling into sleep. Practitioners may describe such experiences as “energy imbalance.” Clinging to awareness can itself become a source of strain.
Trying to sustain witnessing through the night illustrates the problem. If the witness has become what one believes oneself ultimately to be, relaxing that stance may feel like losing something indispensable. A realization that initially brought freedom from ordinary identification can become a new form of vigilance.
The same possibility applies to nondual presence. Even when there is no felt separation between awareness and appearances, the intensity of the experience can be grasped as the ultimate reality. The contraction is no longer necessarily around a tiny observer; it can be around the certainty of an all-encompassing essence.
Intensity is not the measure of liberation. An experience can be vast, blissful, and seemingly more real than anything else, while still being appropriated as an identity or a ground of abiding.
Fixation itself should not be mistaken for the natural state merely because its object is awareness.
Nor does the answer lie in suppressing luminosity. The issue is not that presence is too vivid. The issue is the ignorance that turns its vividness into something inherently real that must be possessed, protected, or maintained.
11. Luminosity is blissful; emptiness liberates
This is why I keep returning to the distinction: luminosity can be blissful, but emptiness is what liberates grasping. The phrase needs to be understood carefully. It does not set up two separate realities, one luminous and the other empty. It identifies what is missing when the recognition of luminosity is still accompanied by reification.
No matter how immense or certain an experience of presence may be, does it possess an intrinsic nature? Is there an independently established awareness to be found? Does the appearance exist from its own side, or is its vividness being mistaken for substantiality?
When its empty nature is seen, luminosity no longer has to become a place to stand. There is no need to turn it into the final answer to “Who am I?” or into a reality that survives beneath every changing appearance.
This does not make experience dull. An empty appearance can be exquisitely vivid. What is absent is the imagined essence that grasping tries to secure.
However, an intellectual understanding of emptiness is also insufficient. We may become less dogmatic, less attached to fixed descriptions, or more able to question our assumptions. These are useful changes, but they are not the same as the direct realization of empty luminosity.
If emptiness remains a conclusion held at a distance from immediate experience, the structure of a knower confronting a world may continue almost untouched. We can speak fluently about the absence of inherent existence while still living from an unquestioned center.
The point is therefore neither luminosity alone nor an abstract doctrine of emptiness. There must be direct realization, with the luminous character of experience and its absence of intrinsic nature evident together.
This is what I mean by authentically realizing our nature. The very vividness that previously became a ground of identification is now ungraspable. There is nothing behind it to possess, and nothing in its appearing that can be established as an independent essence.
The release is deeper than repeatedly telling ourselves not to attach. A mistaken apprehension has been penetrated. What seemed to demand protection as the core of our being is no longer found in the manner we had imagined.
12. Dependent arising without inherent production
Emptiness also needs to be understood together with dependent arising. Otherwise, we can swing between two mistakes: treating appearances as self-existing things, or imagining that emptiness abolishes appearances and their functioning.
Dependent arising does not mean that there are solid entities already established in their own right, which then enter into relationships and produce one another. That would preserve the very assumption being questioned. Nor does replacing independent things with a fundamentally real web of relations resolve the problem. Conditions and relations are empty too.
AtR has discussed this distinction in The Correct View of Dependent Origination and Emptiness Is Not Relational Ontology: Relations Without Relata. Conditionality is not a substitute substance. Saying that something is dependently designated does not establish a “dependent existent” with an intrinsic core.
Nāgārjuna’s examination of production in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā challenges the establishment of arising from self, other, both, or without cause. His discussion of dependent arising, emptiness, and dependent designation is not an invitation to replace ordinary causality with a hidden metaphysical mechanism. [5]
Conventionally, conditions matter. Actions have consequences, and different conditions make different experiences possible. Ultimately, no independently existing producer, production, or product is found. These are not two competing accounts in which emptiness eventually cancels conditionality.
“Lawfully” means according to conditions, without an inherent lawgiver or controlling Mind. Intentional effort, including practice, also functions through conditions; no independent agent is required.
The imagery of a reflection or magical illusion helps here. An appearance can be unmistakably present without the thing it seems to establish being findable in the way it appears. A reflection is visible, yet no substantial person has entered the mirror.
Likewise, “non-arising” does not mean that nothing appears or that events never occur conventionally. It means that no phenomenon is established as arising through an intrinsic nature. We should not first imagine an inherently existing thing being born and then try to make that thing empty at a later moment.
Its very appearing is empty. Its very arising in dependence is without inherent arising. There is no need for an additional act that strips an essence away.
This applies equally to the most exalted experience of consciousness. However cosmic, oceanic, or undeniable it feels, its vividness does not exempt it from emptiness. It, too, is unfindable as an essence, like an evanescent display.
There is therefore no final ground of abiding to extract from experience. And there is no need to retreat from experience into blankness. Appearance and emptiness are inseparable; dependent arising and emptiness are inseparable. The two truths do not describe two self-existing worlds.
13. The Tathāgata is “Such”
The Kāḷaka Sutta gives another important pointer. It describes the Tathāgata as knowing what is seen, heard, sensed, and cognized without fastening onto it in the manner of conceiving a seer or cognizer, or establishing the corresponding objects. It calls the Tathāgata “Such.” [6]
That is not a description of unconsciousness. The discourse does not replace knowing with a blank absence. What is absent is the conceiving and fastening through which experience is made into a basis for self and fixed positions.
Suchness is vivid appearance free from the imputation of an inherent knower and an inherently existing known.
When a cloud appears, there need not be a separate “me” standing behind the seeing. Nor does the cloud have to be established as a self-existing object. There is the vividness of the scene, empty of both constructions.
To describe this as the simplicity of “existence” is tempting, but that word can suggest the very thing we are trying not to reify. I would rather speak of the utter simplicity of appearances: manifest, yet without an intrinsic core to seize upon.
We are not improving the cloud, perfecting the sound, or transforming the scene into something more spiritual. The release concerns the grasping that makes a self and a world stand apart as inherently established poles.
Even “suchness” must not become the name of a hidden substance. It does not supply a refined metaphysical object after the ordinary ones have been dissolved. The point is the ending of that very need to establish a final foothold.
14. View, experience, realization, and practice
If liberation is an undoing, does that mean we can dispense with practice? Certainly not. A conceptual appreciation of these points is not enough to dissolve deeply rooted habits.
Disciplined meditation matters. So do ethical conduct, careful reflection, and the willingness to examine assumptions we would prefer to protect. The path requires the conditions through which the teachings become directly evident, rather than remaining descriptions we admire.
But more intensity does not automatically mean more wisdom. A practitioner can meditate for long hours, enter sublime states, and deepen concentration while leaving the assumption of an inherent witness untouched. The practice may even strengthen identification with a refined state.
At this point, I am reminded of Master Sheng Yen’s discussion in Experiences of Awakening, and John Tan’s comment on it. Sheng Yen describes how absorption can bring a profound sense of unity, with the usual boundaries between body, mind, and world seeming to disappear. Yet even experiences of boundless consciousness and bliss can remain conditioned by subtle attachment to self. Their vastness may magnify that attachment to a cosmic scale rather than uproot it. Such absorption, while that attachment remains, is not liberating awakening.
John Tan / Thusness: “This is very good. Instead of self-view, you must learn to ‘plant’ the seeds of anatta, DO, and emptiness in that state of mind.” [7]
Here, DO means dependent origination. John’s emphasis is on bringing anatta, dependent origination, and emptiness into the very state that might otherwise reinforce self-view. The response is neither to dismiss the experience nor to take its intensity as proof of final realization.
For me, this returns us directly to the question of integration. A state of extraordinary clarity does not interpret itself correctly simply because it is extraordinary. If its vividness is taken as evidence of an inherently real Self, meditation can strengthen that conviction. Bringing right view into immediate experience means investigating precisely that assumption, so that clarity becomes an opportunity for insight instead of another basis for identification.
Right view provides orientation. It helps us recognize what is being mistaken and what needs investigation. Experience gives immediacy to what would otherwise remain conceptual. Realization is the actual seeing-through of a fundamental misapprehension. Continued practice allows that insight to be integrated and its implications to unfold.
These are related, but they are not interchangeable. A powerful experience can pass while the basic view remains unchanged. A genuine realization can occur while habitual reactions and subtler obscurations remain. Correct language can be present without either.
Even the realization of “I AM” shows why we need these distinctions. It can be a genuine, doubtless recognition of luminosity, yet the interpretation of that luminosity as an ultimate Self can become a new bondage. The fact that something has been realized does not mean every assumption attached to it is correct.
Conversely, the ability to explain why a Self cannot be established does not prove that the felt structure of a separate observer has been penetrated. We need to bring view and immediate experience together.
This is also why effort and non-effort must be understood in context. Effort that supports investigation, steadiness, and ethical responsiveness can be helpful. Effort that repeatedly reifies awareness as an ultimate background can reinforce the problem. We cannot decide between them by the quantity of effort alone.
The question is what is becoming clearer. Is practice exposing appropriation, or merely refining what we appropriate? Is emptiness increasingly evident in the immediacy of experience, or is it being kept as a philosophical belief alongside an unquestioned spiritual identity?
15. What I mean by the natural state
“Natural state” is a phrase that can be used too quickly. Someone has a glimpse of presence, or a profound nondual opening, and immediately concludes that nothing further remains. Yet the experience may still be grasped as an inherently real ground.
The natural state is natural spontaneous presence—the inseparable union of luminosity and emptiness, fully evident in the dependently arising display. All appearances are the radiance of pristine consciousness, and that radiance is itself empty of intrinsic nature. There is no separately established awareness, no inherently existing appearance, and no agent or self/Self directing the unfolding.
“Union” does not mean joining two independently existing things. The very appearances are luminous and empty; their spontaneous unfolding is the functioning of conditions, without an inherent source behind them. Realization releases the grasping that turns either knowingness or appearances into something substantial. Naturalness is therefore not a matter of maintaining pure presence, but of the release of contrivance through realizing this inseparability.
Recognizing the natural state requires the realization of twofold emptiness: the emptiness of self and the emptiness of phenomena.
Recognition must also be distinguished from complete actualization. A glimpse does not mean that every afflictive pattern and cognitive obscuration has ended. Nor does a significant realization justify treating all subsequent conditioning as irrelevant.
Afflictive obscurations concern the patterns that bind us in suffering, while cognitive obscurations include subtler habits of misapprehension that obstruct complete knowledge. Grasping at self and grasping at phenomena are closely involved, but they are not identical. One can be relinquished before the other: the separate self may be seen through while phenomena are still reified as inherently existent. The latter grasping requires further penetration.
It is therefore not enough that the coarse sense of a personal “I” has weakened. Subtle assumptions about inherently existing phenomena, truly established arising and ceasing, or a final reality called Awareness may remain. These, too, need to be penetrated.
When I speak of the fully actualized natural state, free from both kinds of obscuration without remainder, I mean Buddhahood. I am not equating an initial anatta realization, an experience of effortless presence, or a period of nondual absorption with that complete fruition.
This distinction allows us to take spontaneous presence and self-liberation seriously. They are not slogans that make insight and maturation unnecessary. Nor do they mean that an existing self becomes exceptionally good at releasing each appearance.
The point is that what appears is not seized upon as an inherently existing thing requiring possession or rejection. Its empty nature leaves no substantial foothold for grasping. To speak of self-liberation while continuing to treat awareness as an eternal background, or phenomena as real in the sense of being inherently existent, is to use the language of fruition without having penetrated those reifications.
We cannot skip the necessary insight by adopting the vocabulary of the result. Calling an experience “the natural state” does not make its remaining reifications disappear.
The path need not follow a mechanically identical sequence for everyone. What cannot be bypassed is the actual undoing of ignorance. However the recognition unfolds, the luminosity being realized must also be known as empty.
16. From a hundred graspings to zero
We often imagine the spiritual journey as moving from one to a hundred: more knowledge, more experiences, more power, more certainty, more spiritual identity. But perhaps the more helpful image is moving from a hundred graspings towards zero.
Zero does not mean nothingness. It does not mean a blank mind, the erasure of appearances, or the destruction of the capacity to know and respond. It means that the additions of grasping, appropriation, and reification no longer have to organize experience.
What is revealed is not a diminished world. It is this very vivid unfolding, empty and luminous, without an independent agent or a self/Self established as its center or background.
The fist opens. The coal is released. The golden castle is no longer required. The naturalness suggested by the sleep analogy is no longer confused with a state to be forcibly manufactured—although, unlike sleep, liberation depends on wisdom rather than on temporarily losing track of our concerns.
That is the paradox I wanted to express. Liberation is utterly simple, but the ignorance that obscures this simplicity is deeply conditioned. We cannot think our way into it merely by repeating the correct words, and we cannot force our way into it merely by intensifying experience.
We need right view, direct realization, and the integration of that realization through practice. We need the vividness of luminosity without turning it into a Self, and the liberating insight of emptiness without reducing it to an abstraction or a void.
Then the path of undoing is not a gradual destruction of life. It is the release of the misapprehension through which life has been grasped.
From a hundred graspings to zero—and zero turns out to be the vivid, empty unfolding of experience, with no independent agent, no self/Self, and no inherently existing ground to grasp.
In the seen, just the seen. In the heard, just the heard. No separate knower behind the display, no inherent thing within it, and no hidden source beneath it. The utter simplicity was never something we needed to manufacture. What needed to be undone was the ignorance that kept us grasping.
References and further reading
- Dependent origination: SN 12.2, An Analysis of Dependent Co-arising, translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. This provides the twelve-link formula, the six classes of consciousness, and the cessation sequence. It defines ignorance as not knowing the four noble truths.
- The eighth bodhisattva ground: The Wheel-Like Path: Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna’s Commentary on The Way of the Bodhisattva, particularly “The Eighth Ground: The Immovable,” for the discussion of effortlessness and prior aspirations.
- Conditions affecting sleep: NHLBI: Insomnia—Causes and Risk Factors. An overview of the conditions that affect sleep.
- The instruction to Bāhiya: Udāna 1.10, Bāhiya Sutta, translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. The instruction joins the sensory formula to the absence of a “you” in connection with it and explicitly speaks of training.
- Emptiness and production: Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, selected chapters, translated by Geshe Kelsang Wangmo; see especially chapters 1 and 24, including 24.18. For the AtR discussion, see The Correct View of Dependent Origination and Emptiness Is Not Relational Ontology: Relations Without Relata.
- Knowing without conceiving a knower: AN 4.24, Kāḷaka Sutta, translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.
- Absorption, self-view, and liberating insight: Experiences of Awakening ~ Sheng Yen, posted at Awakening to Reality on 12 September 2022. Section 14 summarizes Sheng Yen’s teaching and includes John Tan’s full accompanying comment, lightly edited for English. “DO” means dependent origination.
Related AtR reading: On Anatta (No-Self), Emptiness, Maha and Ordinariness, and Spontaneous Perfection; Differentiating I AM, One Mind, No Mind and Anatta.
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