Thursday, September 03, 2026

John Tan on Emptiness, Dependent Arising, Right View, and Non-Meditation

By Soh

John Tan · Emptiness · Dependent Arising

John Tan on Emptiness, Dependent Arising, Right View, and Non-Meditation

A comprehensive synopsis of the 27 June 2026 Zoom meeting

Edited, source-faithful synopsis · Research references verify named texts and concepts, not John Tan’s realization claims

YouTube Videos and Audios by John Tan: Union of Dependent Arising and Emptiness

Editorial and attribution note

This synopsis was reconciled from multiple supplied transcript witnesses. No single machine transcript is treated as controlling. Wording is resolved by convergence across witnesses, contextual and grammatical fit, Buddhist/technical-term coherence, and speaker continuity; the fine-grained diarized version is especially useful for turn boundaries and attribution, but is not assumed to be more accurate word-for-word.

The high-confidence John Tan mapping is: Parts 1–13, Speaker A; Part 14, Speaker B; Part 15, Speaker A; Parts 16–17, Speaker B; Part 18, Speaker A; Part 19, Speaker B; and Part 20, Speaker A. The strongest internal checks include “John Tan’s mosquito” being addressed to Part 15 Speaker A, and Part 16 Speaker A referring to “John” immediately before Speaker B answers in the first person about choosing the five core logics.

This synopsis distinguishes John’s statements from other participants’ remarks, personal interpretations, traditional anecdotes, speculative comparisons, and independently verifiable textual context. At the author’s request, other participants are not named except in the dedicated translation-prompts section.

Where the user directly re-listened to a disputed phrase, that audio check is treated as stronger phonetic evidence than conflicting ASR for that phrase. This applies especially to John’s colloquial “half-boiled-egg / half-egged” wording and to “mine” rather than “mind” in the MMK chapter-18 discussion. Speaker identity itself is established separately through diarization, direct address, autobiographical/topic continuity, and cross-Part handoffs.

Later authorial context — John Tan’s new, as-yet-unreleased book manuscript:

A methodological note from John’s new manuscript explains that the larger project is organized in five parts: Part One develops the sustained argument from the collapse of the observer through dependent designation and causality; Part Two, Three Formations, applies the logic contemplatively through the mountain, flower, and space; Part Three, Nothing to Find, Nothing Missing, is a shorter introductory companion; Part Four, Science and the Dharma, places the argument beside modern physics and cognitive science while distinguishing resonance from proof; and an Appendix develops the formal and linguistic scaffolding, including how ordinary grammar can reconstruct substance.

The same note explicitly describes the book as a personal philosophical synthesis developed in continuity with Madhyamaka and Dzogchen—not a translation, commentary, or scholarly exposition of Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti, Tsongkhapa, Mipham, Dōgen, or Dzogchen as a whole. The local notes below therefore matter: they identify which recurring distinctions are John’s own pedagogical or organizing devices rather than classical categories he is claiming to reproduce verbatim.

The central argument

John is not presenting luminous nonduality or anatta as the endpoint. A practitioner can have radiance, seamlessness, anatta, and total-exertion experiences while the framework used to analyse those experiences still treats objects, space, time, consciousness, or even fluid process in an inherent way.

The later work is to bring experience and right view into alignment while understanding why empty phenomena remain conventionally valid, appearing, and functional. Emptiness is not blank absence: John argues that essence or a core would make arising, interaction, communication, and appearance impossible.

Detailed contents

The universality of emptiness and genuine non-meditation
Signs of maturation and the distinction between phases five and six
The desynchronization between experience and view
Spiritual bypassing: saying “empty” without understanding why
What John actually says about Longchenpa and judging masters
John’s own gap after anatta and total exertion
Conceptual designation and dependent designation
The apple as a multidimensional designation
Designation without naming and labelling
AI as a research interlocutor, not an authority
Relation without independently existing relata
Why phase six is analytical
Why anatta and noun-to-verb fluidity are not the endpoint
Why essence would make arising and interaction impossible
The “half-boiled-egg” / “half-egged” view
Arising, ceasing, and the analysis of time
Three criteria for investigating a phenomenon
Why John insists on the two truths
Hidden inherent views concerning space and time
Deconstructing “I” and “mine”: possessive mineness and possession
How John uses the MMK tetralemma to expose inherent thinking
The danger of relentless negation and attachment to groundlessness
Causal efficacy without inherent causal power
Conventionality becomes crucial when no substrate remains
Conceptuality, pure perception, and non-meditation
What continues to drive John’s practice
His reaction to Soh’s translation prompts
Refining right view so that experience can open further
Mipham, Tsongkhapa, translation, and traditional anecdotes
John’s qualified suggestion for using AI with difficult books
John’s selection of five core logics
Infinite regress, scientific “stuff,” and designation upon characteristics
Niels Bohr and Karen Barad: corrected names, comparison, and conjecture
The organization of John’s video material and its AI-oriented component
His reservations about public circulation of the videos

Supplemental source: Full unreleased-book excerpt — “A Note on Method”

Part I · From Nondual Experience to the Need for Emptiness

1. The universality of emptiness and genuine non-meditation

John begins from the universality of emptiness. He says emptiness is not restricted to one domain: all phenomena are empty. When that is seen universally, there is “no entry” and “no exit,” no distance to be crossed, and no special effort by which one moves into a separate meditative state.

John explicitly includes appearances divided as inside and outside and gives the examples of wind and a blower: all are empty and dependently originated.

He explicitly qualifies this as his own perspective: it may not be the perspective of Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, or other practices. His concern is that, without realizing emptiness, it is very difficult to go beyond construing luminosity as consciousness or luminous clarity.

Seeing every appearance as empty is therefore, in his view, what allows one to speak of genuine non-meditation. Even so, John says he still meditates although he considers himself to be in a state of non-meditation.

2. Signs of maturation and the distinction between phases five and six

Asked how someone recognizes deepening insight, John says there may be signs, although the practitioner ultimately knows through growing confidence and an opening of insight. One sign he gives is simply that “everything” is seen as “very light.” He does not define that phrase further at that point, so it is best left as his experiential description rather than turned into a more technical criterion.

He then distinguishes phase-five and phase-six insight. Phase five is characterized by radiance, nonduality, direct clarity, and recurring moments of what he calls “mini total exertion.” His example is ordinary: when a door opens or an MRT train moves, the vibration, the train, and “everything” can be experienced as one presentation.

This can be a profound opening, but the experiential taste may be far stronger than the practitioner’s view. Phase six addresses precisely that imbalance by investigating the framework through which experience is understood.

3. The desynchronization between experience and view

John describes a fundamental desynchronization among direct experience, insight, and the framework used to analyse and articulate that experience. Someone may experience seamlessness and anatta while ordinary analysis continues to treat the computer, phone, and other appearances as isolated external objects. Later in the meeting he exposes additional inherited assumptions concerning space, time, relation, and substrate.

Nondual experience does not automatically remove those assumptions. John’s point is that the analysis itself can continue to operate through the old framework even when the experiential taste of seamlessness or anatta is present. The framework therefore has to be examined and retrained rather than assumed to disappear through experience alone.

He does not dogmatically claim that explicit analysis is the only conceivable route. Vajrayāna and other approaches may operate in ways he does not claim to assess completely. His narrower point is autobiographical and practical: in his own experience, it is extremely difficult to move beyond the residual framework without investigating it directly.

Later unreleased-book clarification — “desynchronization” is John’s own diagnostic framework:

John’s manuscript says that the underlying phenomenon—realization and conceptual view developing at different rates—is recognized in various forms across contemplative traditions, but the specific framing as a “desynchronization of view, experience, and insight” is his own construction.

He uses it as the organizing engine of the book: direct contemplative experience such as anatta or total exertion can be complete while the conceptual framework interpreting it remains, unnoticed, substantialist. He offers this formulation because he finds it clarifying and accurate to how the process unfolds, not because “desynchronization” is a classical technical term.

4. Spiritual bypassing: saying “empty” without understanding why

John repeatedly criticizes spiritual bypassing. Here the problem is claiming to understand because one can repeat that “everything is empty,” while the underlying analysis and framework have never been penetrated. His recurring challenge is concrete: if one says everything or all conditions are empty, can one actually explain why?

His immediate test is simple: if one says that everything is empty, why is it empty? Why are conditions empty? If one cannot investigate that and the analysis, logic, interpretation, and understanding are not integrated, John says the claim may amount to something memorized rather than penetrated.

The recurring practical standard is sincerity: recognize where experience is present but understanding is not, and investigate rather than bypassing the unresolved point.

5. What John actually says about Longchenpa and judging masters

John first singles Malcolm out as someone who has tried very hard to articulate these matters clearly. He then reports that Malcolm had quoted or interpreted Longchenpa as treating external reality as true. Another participant reacts by saying they would not dare conclude from this that Longchenpa did not understand emptiness. John agrees that it is extremely difficult to comment on masters such as Longchenpa, Tsongkhapa, and Mipham without deep practice and a clear understanding of deconstruction.

John does not resolve the textual dispute or accuse Longchenpa of substantialism. He redirects the discussion to the practitioner’s own understanding: even if one can repeat that Longchenpa or another master said something, does one actually see why phenomena and conditions are empty? Merely citing an authority is not a substitute for integrating experience, reasoning, and view.

Later, John gives his personal assessment that Candrakīrti, Mipham, and Tsongkhapa express Nāgārjuna’s meaning with exceptional clarity. This is his evaluation, not a neutral ranking across Buddhist traditions.

Part II · Dependent Designation and the Reconstruction of View

6. John’s own gap after anatta and total exertion

John uses his own development as the central example. For several years after anatta, he experienced repeated moments of mini-total-exertion. Later, total exertion itself became very clear. He had the taste and the direct insight, but knew that his view had not caught up.

When he encountered the chariot exchange between Nāgasena and King Milinda, he immediately recognized a connection with total exertion. Yet he could not initially explain the view underlying it. His response was not to pretend that intuitive recognition amounted to understanding. He knew the teaching was pointing toward something correct, that it corresponded to his experience, and that it supplied a missing element—but he also knew he did not yet understand why.

The question that seized him was not merely whether the chariot had a referent. It was more specific: why must the designation be said to depend upon the parts? That question became a doorway into his later investigation.

John says he kept pursuing the discrepancy rather than treating the chariot passage as understood. He recalls asking Andre and others on Facebook why the label is not simply referring to the object itself and why, instead, the label must be said to be designated upon parts.

Textual verification: In the Milindapañha, “chariot” is explained as a conventional designation used in dependence upon the pole, axle, wheels, body, and other constituents, rather than as an additional entity separate from them. See SuttaCentral, Mil 3.1.1.

Later unreleased-book clarification — the “logic of the single stroke” is an organizing device of John’s own:

In the manuscript John says that reading Nāgasena’s chariot as containing the later argument in miniature—no residue, exhaustive conditionality, mutual dependence, full function without essence, and no independent core—is his own way of organizing the material.

He explicitly does not present this as a claim about how the chariot dialogue was originally intended or how it has traditionally been read. It is a reading he has found illuminating and uses to structure the subsequent argument.

7. Conceptual designation and dependent designation

In ordinary life, people do not consciously think that they designate things upon parts and conditions. When someone says “apple,” the ordinary assumption is that a complete apple already exists, the mind sees it, and the word is then attached to that object. The same model is applied to a mouse, controller, train, or body.

John calls the ordinary model conceptual designation: the object is taken to be there as a whole and the label is then “slapped onto” it. What he is trying to understand under dependent designation is different: designation is spoken of in dependence upon bases such as parts, causes and conditions, rather than upon a self-established whole that is already there.

John emphasizes how radical this shift would be. He says that ordinarily “we never think this way”; if one truly saw phenomena in terms of parts, causes, and conditions in the way he is describing, one would already be seeing dependent arising. He rhetorically adds that one would be “already enlightened,” provided one truly understood it.

John initially recognized dependent designation through total exertion—the entirety of conditions presenting as this particular event—but he knew that this experiential recognition did not yet explain the mechanism completely.

Context: Nāgārjuna’s analysis is widely interpreted as rejecting an ontological foundation beneath dependently arisen phenomena. MMK 24.18 famously links dependent arising, emptiness, and dependent designation, although its precise interpretation is debated. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Nāgārjuna and a recent Journal of Indian Philosophy study.

Later unreleased-book clarification — “conceptual designation versus dependent designation” is a pedagogical distinction, not a classical Madhyamaka division:

John’s manuscript states this very plainly: classical Madhyamaka does not separate “conceptual designation” and “dependent designation” into two rival categories. Its position is that all designation is dependent designation.

The contrast used throughout John’s book—“thing first, label second” versus a structure in which the thing and its designation arise dependently—is therefore his own pedagogical separation, designed to help a reader approach the insight. He does not claim that Nāgārjuna or Candrakīrti formulated this two-category scheme themselves.

What he regards as continuous with the classical conclusion is the endpoint toward which the distinction is meant to lead: there is no self-established thing to which a label is subsequently attached; designation is dependent.

8. The apple as a multidimensional designation

John develops the distinction through an apple. Ordinary cognition treats the apple as a single whole object standing outside the observer. In his account, however, what is called “apple” presents through multiple experiential dimensions: colour and visual consciousness, bodily sensation, taste, and the other streams of sensory consciousness involved in the encounter.

John says these sensory dimensions form bases of designation. His contrast is with the ordinary way of taking the apple as a complete object that is already there and then attaching the label to that whole object.

The example therefore returns to his central question: why does Madhyamaka speak of designation upon bases, parts, causes, and conditions when ordinary cognition feels as though it simply encounters a whole object and names it? Merely moving the analysis down to atoms would not by itself answer that question.

9. Designation without naming and labelling

A further trigger came when John was reading Tsongkhapa and encountered Tibetan Buddhist language about conceptuality and freedom from conceptual elaboration in connection with emptiness. He says this came as a shock because he had been understanding designation in the ordinary sense of conceptual labelling. It forced a more basic question: what does “designation” mean in Tibetan Buddhism, and if there is no naming or labelling, is there still designation?

John’s next question was whether designation can operate without verbal naming or deliberate labelling. He imagines a world in which everything is blue. Without contrast, blue is not distinguished as a particular feature. When green appears, the contrast becomes manifest immediately, even before anyone invents or applies the words “blue” and “green.”

The important point for John is simply that difference and structure are already manifest before verbal naming. He calls this “designation without naming and labelling.” In this article the phrase is treated as John’s own analytical formulation in the meeting, not as a standardized technical translation.

Designation therefore cannot simply mean consciously attaching a word. This is why he challenged the idea that removing conceptual labelling by itself would amount to enlightenment.

John treats this as foundational rather than peripheral: “without understanding all these, you cannot understand dependent origination.”

Later unreleased-book clarification — “designation by relation” is also John’s personal synthesis:

The manuscript distinguishes designation-by-thought from designation-by-relation and proposes that structural, non-conceptual individuation can operate prior to explicit conceptual labelling. John explicitly says that this does not appear as a formal division in classical Madhyamaka sources.

He presents it as a personal synthesis in continuity with the tradition, not as orthodox doctrine. The unreleased manuscript describes this with a blue-and-yellow contrast; in the 27 June meeting summarized above, his spoken example uses blue and green. The difference is retained rather than silently harmonized.

10. AI as a research interlocutor, not an authority

John says he kept these questions largely within his own investigation and contemplation. He says they were not things he could simply find settled in books or go to teachers and ask to have resolved for him; they were part of his personal investigation. Much of the inquiry remained in contemplation and notes without being fully put into words because he found verification difficult.

When more capable AI systems appeared, he began questioning them repeatedly: telling them to search as widely as they could, challenging the answers, and checking again and again what “designation” meant in Tibetan Buddhist usage. He says the distinction gradually became clearer, including the point that designation need not mean verbal naming.

In this part of the meeting AI functions as a tool for searching and checking an inquiry that John had already been contemplating; he does not present the AI’s first answer as authoritative.

11. Relation without independently existing relata

A further problem then arose: if independently existing things cannot be found, how are dependence and relation possible? The ordinary model assumes that entity A exists, entity B exists, and a relation subsequently connects them. John challenges the assumption that A and B are already fully constituted before the relation.

John’s formulation is that “you,” “I,” “this,” and “that” come about in the meeting or relation itself rather than first standing there as fully established things and only later entering interaction. He compares this with Karen Barad’s language of intra-action, where the relata are not assumed to pre-exist the relation.

He explicitly limits this discussion to the conventional level. He is not proposing relation as a new ultimate ground; at the ultimate level, he says, it is emptiness.

Comparison verified: Barad’s “intra-action” is explicitly contrasted with interaction because interaction presumes independently existing relata. A concise scholarly explanation is available from Cultural Anthropology.

12. Why phase six is analytical

John calls phase six analytical because, after anatta and total exertion, one has to challenge the existing framework of understanding and find out more exactly what dependent arising and emptiness mean.

The surrounding examples that feed this phase-six inquiry include dependent designation, designation without naming and labelling, relation without independently established relata, and later causal efficacy without intrinsic causal power. John’s emphasis is that these are not merely new concepts to collect; they expose something fundamentally wrong in the way the old framework analyses experience.

For him, this is why Madhyamaka goes deeper than the initial anatta insight. The experience may already be nondual, but the framework can still visualize reality inherently unless it too is penetrated.

Part III · Beyond Anatta, Fluidity, and Hidden Substrates

13. Why anatta and noun-to-verb fluidity are not the endpoint

John illustrates the comparatively direct anatta point with examples such as: there is no wind apart from blowing—the blowing is the wind; there is no lightning apart from flashing—the flashing is the lightning; and there is no separate listener behind sound.

His warning is that even after anatta and total exertion, a practitioner without clear view can still imagine reality as something fluid—like water, or like wind flowing. John says this is still an inherent view.

So the move from noun to verb is not yet enough. The flowing or fluid process must not become the new substrate. John’s “ninety-nine percent” remark is rhetorical emphasis, not a measured statistic.

14. Why essence would make arising and interaction impossible

John says the practitioner has to become clear that if there were essence or a core, it would be impossible for something to arise, interact, communicate, or even appear.

His argument is deliberately functional: an independently fixed essence would be incompatible with the dependent arising and interaction that are actually being discussed. He repeatedly asks how anything could arise at all if it had such a core.

This is why he treats the absence of essence not as the destruction of functioning, but as inseparable from the possibility of dependent arising and interaction. He wants this to become a clear conviction rather than a slogan.

Later, John restates the issue in terms of appearance itself. He says it is “very difficult to understand the nature of what appears”: when sound appears, its nature is a lack of essence, yet this is difficult to see as long as the inherent framework and its logic continue to govern the analysis.

Later unreleased-book extension — spontaneous presence and dependent arising:

John’s later manuscript goes beyond the specific argument made in this Zoom section. It argues that Dzogchen’s spontaneous presence (lhun grub) and Madhyamaka’s dependent arising are the same nature under two descriptions, and that Dzogchen direct introduction can be understood as the experiential actualization of what Madhyamaka analysis points toward.

Crucially, John himself labels this a confident personal synthesis rather than settled cross-tradition doctrine. He notes that other lineages and commentators regard Dzogchen as its own resultant vehicle and do not reduce it to, or regard it as guaranteed by, Madhyamaka analysis alone.

15. The “half-boiled-egg” / “half-egged” view

John uses a colloquial metaphor for a mixed, only partly worked-out view. After the user’s direct re-listening of the recording, the preferred reading is “half-boiled-egg view,” also shortened in John’s speech to “half-egged.” The automatic transcripts disagree sharply, producing forms such as “half boy,” “half-egot,” and the earlier editorial normalization “half-void, half-ego.”

John immediately explains what he means: partly we take things as inherent, and partly as non-inherent. The metaphor therefore describes a view that is only half-formed or “half-cooked”: the practitioner has some insight into emptiness while the old inherent framework continues operating.

His point is not a contrast between “void” and “ego.” It is the inconsistency of simultaneously relying on inherent assumptions and non-inherent insight. Until ultimate analysis is applied clearly, he says, we do not really understand how reality differs from the way we habitually imagine it.

Transcription note: Because the ASR witnesses conflict, this wording is retained as an audio-relisten correction rather than claimed from the machine transcripts themselves. John’s immediately following explanation—partly inherent, partly non-inherent—fits the “half-cooked” metaphor.

16. Arising, ceasing, and the analysis of time

John uses the question: “A moment ceases as it arises. Does it arise, or does it cease?” The question exposes the instability of ordinary categories. He connects it with Nāgārjuna’s examination of time: the past is gone, the future has not arrived, and the present appears to remain.

But if the present has duration, it can be divided into earlier and later portions. If it has no duration, in what sense can a present moment be established? Likewise, if a moment ceases in the very act of arising, should it be classified as arising or as ceasing?

John explicitly says Nāgārjuna is not saying that nothing exists. His point is that there is a fundamental problem with the way ordinary language and analysis frame time and phenomena. He then moves directly from this problem into the three criteria for understanding a phenomenon in the next section.

John also gives this question an autobiographical history: he says he had posed it to a participant roughly twenty years earlier and had asked it repeatedly over the years. He uses the long-running exchange to emphasize his practical point that hearing a Madhyamaka question is not the same as actually investigating it.

17. Three criteria for investigating a phenomenon

John offers three connected criteria for penetrating a phenomenon:

Do not begin by demanding “What is it?” John says that in a completely substrateless world, the very demand for a final “what” is already conditioned by the framework.
It is unfindable. His wording here is that it cannot be found in conception or perception; nevertheless, there is appearance.
It does not originate without conditions. Whatever appears is not independent of conditions.

John says these three points must be penetrated together; from there, one can understand the phenomenon through the two truths.

John then gives a revealing example of how a question can already carry the framework it is supposed to investigate: when one asks “Who am I?”, the question is already conditioned by the assumption of a “who.” He uses this to illustrate his broader point that analysis is often shaped in advance by the framework through which the question is asked.

18. Why John insists on the two truths

John says that penetrating those three criteria leads into the two truths, and he states that he is “very against one truth.” His own emphasis is functional: ultimately phenomena are empty, while conventionally they appear, are valid, and function.

For John, emptiness therefore cannot be separated from dependent arising. If everything is empty, one must also see how conventional appearances arise and function rather than stopping at negation.

Doctrinal context: Scholarly treatments of Madhyamaka distinguish conventional truth—dependently arisen, transactionally effective phenomena—from ultimate analysis, which finds them empty of intrinsic nature. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the two truths in India.

19. Hidden inherent views concerning space and time

John insists that people do think inherently even when they say they do not. His concrete examples are space and time: we imagine space as an absolute container holding objects, and time as a large stream in which we are situated and which flows in one direction.

Because these assumptions feel obvious, simply denying that we hold inherent views prevents learning. John says they have to be exposed and worked through.

John then groups several of his own formulations together—“relation without relata,” “designation without naming,” and “causal efficacy without causal power”—and explicitly calls them important understandings of dependent arising. They are his explanatory formulations rather than standard translations of fixed classical expressions.

John also returns to hearer and sound. He says there is hearer and sound and that they “dependently originate”; one cannot have sound without hearer. He notes that the MMK analysis and the language of anatta may initially sound different, but says they are pointing to the same thing or the same experience. He then adds that the initial experience of anatta is not yet total.

Later manuscript perspective on these formulations:

The unreleased manuscript reinforces the caution already used in this synopsis: expressions such as “designation without naming,” “designation by relation,” and the wider architecture connecting these analyses are John’s own explanatory constructions. Their purpose is to articulate dependent arising without smuggling an independently existing entity back into the relation; they should not be mistaken for standardized classical category labels.

20. Deconstructing “I” and “mine”: possessive mineness and possession

John recalls an earlier exchange in which his intended statement was: “I don’t have an ‘I,’ but I have ‘mine.’” Some automatic transcripts render the last word as mind, but the surrounding discussion repeatedly returns to “I and mine” and “the possession.” The coherent reading—and the user’s audio correction—is mine, not mind.

The issue is therefore possessive mineness or possession, not a residual entity called mind. John then connects this with MMK chapter 18, where he understands freedom or deconstruction of “I” and “mine” as connected with freedom from grasping and conceptual elaboration.

What struck John was precisely that further connection. He says, “That part I still don’t quite understand,” and takes the discrepancy as evidence that his own taste and insight of anatta were not complete. The point should therefore not be reduced to a claim that one specific remaining possession had simply been identified and solved; the unresolved relation between “I/mine,” grasping, and conceptual elaboration is what drove the inquiry.

Textual verification: Niisaku’s study of MMK 18.2 renders the relevant expression as freedom from the sense of “mine” and the sense of “I” through the calming of the self and what belongs to the self. See Yoshiaki Niisaku, “Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Chapter 18, Verse 2 and the Prasannapadā’s Commentary Thereon”.

Part IV · Reading Nāgārjuna Without Falling into Negation

21. How John uses the MMK tetralemma to expose inherent thinking

John says the MMK is difficult and that its logic has to be understood as a challenge to inherent thinking. In this part of the meeting, another participant supplies the specific comparison with being accustomed to textbooks; John’s own contribution is the explanation of what the fourfold analysis is doing.

John says that if inherent production is pushed to its logical extreme, the possibilities are exhausted by a fourfold analysis. In his own audible list he mentions production from self, from other, neither self nor other, and random/uncaused production; elsewhere in the exchange another participant gives the familiar self/other/both/neither formulation. John’s key example is self-production: if something were produced from itself, production would be unnecessary.

He stresses that Nāgārjuna is not negating causal efficacy. The analysis is meant to show that something is wrong with the way inherent thinking understands production. If none of the four inherent alternatives works, John says one has to question how functioning actually occurs rather than simply invent another hidden kind of 'stuff'.

John later summarizes the scope of the MMK challenge in his own words: it challenges “self, element, condition, noble truth, all sorts of things… identity.” His point is that the inherent framework is not being questioned only in one philosophical corner; the same style of analysis is applied across many kinds of phenomena.

John separately says that studying the MMK is not easy and depends on each person’s affinity (各自的缘分). He says this understanding can take many years because it is gradual rather than like an insight that suddenly lands all at once; once one has gone through it, however, many things become clearer and smoother.

22. The danger of relentless negation and attachment to groundlessness

John explicitly calls this a problem with modern non-implicative negation. It is easy, he says, to see that relation is empty, self is empty, entities are empty, and objects are empty; then whenever something is formulated, one simply says not to attach to it because that too is empty.

He calls treating relentless negation as the way “incurable,” linking the warning to what he calls the emptiness of emptiness.

Repeated this way, one can wrongly treat groundlessness as emptiness. John says people can turn emptiness into an “ultimate solvent” for dissolving every attachment. After another participant asks whether this is nihilistic, John answers that it is nihilistic and “very, very dangerous.” For him, this is only half the story: attachment to mere negation means one is not seeing dependent arising.

The difficult part, he says, is seeing the formation itself and knowing that the formation is empty—not merely negating each thing that appears.

23. Causal efficacy without inherent causal power

John connects causal efficacy with the objection in MMK chapter 24 that emptiness would make the Noble Truths and functioning impossible. His response is the reverse: because things are empty, they can function and interact.

He illustrates this with two phantom-like figures fighting, where one phantom can apparently hurt the other even though both phenomena lack essence. This is what he means by causal efficacy without an intrinsic causal power.

Text-title caution: John’s spoken title for the phantom example is garbled in the transcripts (one witness hears something like “dispelling of the truth”). The source list therefore includes Jan Westerhoff’s Oxford University Press edition of Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartanī (The Dispeller of Disputes) only as a plausible textual comparison/identification, not as a certain reconstruction of the audio title.

24. Conventionality becomes crucial when no substrate remains

John asks what becomes most important if there is no ultimate reality, substrate, thing, or essence. His answer is conventionality, and he immediately links this with the importance of the two truths.

He explicitly rejects the dismissive response, “Oh, it is just conventional.” Because everything is empty, he says, conventionality becomes very important; in that discussion he also uses the phrase “of equal status.” The point is that conventional validity is not a disposable remainder after emptiness has been established.

He describes conventions as valid, appearing, and functioning. The shift in view is from taking something as concretely true to seeing something that appears and is unfindable: empty ultimately, while valid, functional, and appearing conventionally.

John describes the work as emptying conventional appearance—whether perception or conception—of inherence. Ignorance, in his formulation, projects onto the conventional something that is not there: inherentness.

Because there is no ultimate reality, he says, “the basis of the conventional reality is still conventionality” and “there’s no ending to it.” He says Tsongkhapa puts this emphasis on conventionality very clearly, while also stressing the depth of both Tsongkhapa and Mipham.

25. Conceptuality, pure perception, and non-meditation

John says that once conventionality is understood this way, one is no longer worried about either conceptual conventionalities or pure perception—the luminous clarity free from conceptual or symbolic layering. His wording is that “it doesn’t matter anymore.”

He connects this directly with non-meditation: once conceptual conventionalities and pure perception no longer pose this problem, he says one can be in a state of non-meditation.

Part V · Practice, Study, AI, and Publication Responsibility

26. What continues to drive John’s practice

Asked what he is trying to better or maintain, John answers directly: “I’m not trying to better or maintain anything.” He says his phases of insight are driven by what he does not understand.

He says a practitioner must be sincere, avoid spiritual bypassing, and open oneself. Asked what “open up” means, he answers: open the body-mind, thoughts, and attachments. He calls opening oneself “the toughest thing in the world” and “the greatest art.”

Going deeply into what remains unresolved leads him to say that “there’s no ending” and “life has no ending.” He contrasts this with a modern tendency to treat some practice or realization in this life as though everything were finished. As his view became clearer and his experience opened, he says he practised even harder.

The same deepening produces greater respect rather than greater license to pronounce on Buddhism. John says his confidence in the Buddha, Nāgārjuna, Tsongkhapa, Mipham, and other masters becomes very high because he is struck by how deeply they saw and how they were able to express it. He warns against speaking arrogantly or irresponsibly about what Buddhism is.

27. His reaction to Soh’s translation prompts

Near the end, John says that he likes Soh’s translation prompt and thinks it must have been developed over years.

Across the exchange, John variously describes the prompt as ten or twenty pages, “like a whole book,” more than or almost one hundred pages, and says he has never seen a prompt of that length. He also speculates about or asks whether it is auto-self-generating, rather than asserting that point as a settled fact. See the translation-prompt page.

Comment by Soh: My automated AI workflow is doing work for me 24/7 even when I am away from the computer.

John’s substantive assessment is positive toward the translation work: he says the blog should focus on translation, notes that the developed prompt can do good translations, and contrasts this with publicly circulating his unfinished video material.

Other participants supply most of the jokes about whether an AI can tolerate such an instruction, being treated like a feelingless robot, and the water and energy consumed by extensive AI use. The final encouragement to meditate and rest is also spoken by another participant after John says that he has to leave; it should not be attributed to John.

28. Refining right view so that experience can open further

In the later discussion, John tells a participant to refine the view and let the view open. He says that once one is able to see more clearly, experience itself changes.

He explains why he considers this important: the ordinary view is dualistic and inherent, and because that view is harboured, experience appears through it and is easily misinterpreted. As understanding and confidence in right view grow, the mind opens and one sees more clearly.

John therefore warns against jumping prematurely to “no view”: first understand right view and develop confidence in it. He tells the participant that experiences and dreams of clarity are already present, but the view is weak; refining and opening the view is what he says will allow the experience to go further.

He recommends beginning with Mipham, while emphasizing that Mipham is not easy to understand and that the Madhyamaka polemics themselves had given him many insights.

29. Mipham, Tsongkhapa, translation, and traditional anecdotes

John recommends serious engagement with Mipham and says that Mipham’s writings and the Madhyamaka polemics gave him many insights. During the exchange, the participants identify Karma Phuntsho’s Mipham’s Dialectics and the Debates on Emptiness and Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty; the full book title is supplied by another participant while John recognizes and discusses the works.

John describes his own engagement with these polemics as long-running rather than casual: he says he underlined the passages and kept thinking through what the disputants were talking about over many years, roughly the past decade, because the texts are very difficult to understand without discussion.

John warns against casually calling Mipham a substantialist and says that how a passage sounds can depend heavily on the translator. He says Mipham knows the MMK “inside out.” Later he contrasts the Nyingma emphasis, which integrates luminous clarity, with Tsongkhapa’s presentation, while stressing the profundity of both.

The extraordinary anecdotes are jointly produced and must not be assigned wholesale to John. Another participant makes the strong claim that Mipham could fly and leave footprints in stone. John explicitly qualifies this—“I don’t know whether he can fly or not”—and then relates a traditional story about Mipham’s master travelling to another realm and returning with an unfamiliar flower. John also recalls Mipham producing or translating many important works in remarkably short periods, speaking of days or weeks. The Natural History Museum joke and most of the ensuing Tsongkhapa retreat narrative come from the other participant.

Because these are conversational recollections without documentary support in the meeting, they should be presented as traditional anecdotes, not as verified historical findings.

Book verification: Karma Phuntsho’s official title is Mipham’s Dialectics and the Debates on Emptiness: To Be, Not to Be or Neither. The other work is singular, Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty.

30. John’s qualified suggestion for using AI with difficult books

John—not another participant—suggests using Gemini or ChatGPT with a difficult book: upload the whole work and ask for a summary of a chapter or its main points. When asked whether the AI will do it properly, he immediately qualifies the suggestion: it cannot do the work very well, but it may provide enough initial understanding for the reader to proceed slowly into the text.

Another participant immediately raises the concern that an AI might downplay something important and says it is better to read the text directly. John’s own suggestion is therefore best understood as a preliminary aid, not a replacement for the book.

The surrounding jokes about ADHD, medication, dating, and reading one chapter a day are divided between John and another participant. They should not be converted into a single polished instructional method or attributed entirely to either speaker.

31. John’s selection of five core logics

John explains that his “five core logics” are a pedagogical selection from patterns running through the twenty-seven chapters of the MMK. He refers to a common grouping involving chapters 1, 2, 15, 18, and 24, then says he changed two selections in order to emphasize identity and infinite regress.

He clearly mentions chapter 10 and says the other changed selection concerns infinite regress, but that second chapter number is not recoverable with confidence from the meeting transcripts. A later garbled line mentions “chapter five” in connection with svabhāva, but the audio is not available here to resolve that machine reading.

John’s pedagogical reason is clearer than the exact list. Earlier phases of his framework already address presence and anatta, including the issues associated with chapter 18. He therefore wants the later analytical material to bring out additional problems of inherent identity and infinite regress rather than merely repeat the earlier emphasis.

External corroboration: The current companion video index independently identifies John’s published five core-logic sequence as MMK chapters 1, 10, 2, 7, and 24, with Infinite Regress assigned to chapter 7. This helps identify his later formalized scheme, but it is not used to pretend that the meeting audio itself was unambiguous. See the current John Tan video/audio index.

32. Infinite regress, scientific “stuff,” and designation upon characteristics

Before developing the regress example, John criticizes what he sees as a continuing “stuff” framework in modern scientific explanation: even when the proposed fundamental level becomes subtler, one still imagines some fundamental stuff—sometimes spoken of as having consciousness-like as well as matter-like characteristics. His objection is to the assumption that explanation ultimately requires such stuff.

John says infinite regress is a problem for substantialists, not for a non-substantialist view that is already groundless. He explains the regress through the movement from atoms to electrons, protons and neutrons, then to quarks and further levels: if the explanation is always pushed one level down, it has not actually explained anything.

He then asks what these particle names are actually talking about and answers: different behaviours and characteristics. The name can designate those characteristics; one does not need a separate thing that 'houses' them.

In the exchange, measurement is also emphasized: what is encountered are characteristics through interaction with the measuring device and observer. John treats those characteristics as dependently arisen and uses the example to illustrate why another underlying 'stuff' is unnecessary. This remains a philosophical illustration, not a complete technical theory of physics.

33. Niels Bohr and Karen Barad: corrected names, comparison, and conjecture

John speculates that Niels Bohr may have studied emptiness because he associates Bohr’s account of indeterminacy with the denial of intrinsic characteristics. Nothing in the transcript witnesses or the sources reviewed establishes that historical claim, so it must remain explicitly John’s conjecture.

He then connects the discussion with Karen Barad. The automatic transcripts garble the names, but the surrounding references to Einstein, the Copenhagen interpretation, agential realism, and intra-action make Niels Bohr and Karen Barad the strongest contextual resolutions.

Barad’s concept is a useful comparison because intra-action rejects the assumption that fully constituted relata must exist before their relation. The analogy should not be expanded into an assertion that agential realism and Madhyamaka are identical, or that Barad supplies the full meaning of Nāgārjuna.

Comparison verified: Scholarly descriptions of Barad’s intra-action explicitly state that relata do not pre-exist relations but emerge within specific intra-actions. See Jaksland, “Decoherence, appearance, and reality in agential realism”.

34. The organization of John’s video material and its AI-oriented component

When asked whether he had recently read or learned anything especially insightful, John says, “I stopped reading already.” A participant then says “Soto”; John replies “Zen. The Korean, is it? Ah, Dōgen. I actually picked up…” before the exchange fragments into several participants showing or discussing books. Because the remainder is incomplete and speaker-shared, the synopsis does not infer a substantive teaching point from it.

John then says the videos are being reclassified into five main parts. The recording clearly mentions “decoding of view” and “understanding of dependent origination,” then describes axioms and mathematics as material aimed more at AI and standardization across LLMs. The meeting does not give five cleanly recoverable titles, so the synopsis does not invent them.

John imagines loading an axiomatic representation of his framework into an LLM as a persona or analytical system. When he asks a question, the system would check it against those axioms and tell him whether it is right or wrong. He then asks, in a phrase whose intended technical meaning is unclear, “Is that reverse? Does it contradict?”, and says the system could report that something does not contradict. The synopsis therefore preserves “reverse” as spoken without inventing a separate formal operation for it. He presents this as an AI-oriented standardization/checking project rather than as part of the meditative realization itself.

35. His reservations about public circulation of the videos

John is firm that his experimental videos should not be treated as finished public Buddhist teaching. He first says he had expected about twenty people; later in the same discussion he restates the intended audience as roughly ten to twenty close people. When the count rose to about 220 and then 228, he became concerned and considered making the material private or otherwise restricting access.

He describes the material as personal opinion, a personal journey, storage for ideas that may later become chapters, and experiments with AI-assisted presentation. He says some AI-produced material may be inaccurate, and that his non-orthodox phrases—such as “relation without relata” and “designation without naming and labelling”—require substantial explanation and can mislead when detached from context.

John explicitly says that he is not a teacher. A little later he becomes even more direct: “don’t talk about teaching,” adding that this is very serious because “in Buddhism, we cannot anyhow teach.” He ties that caution to his preference that people study the texts and to his concern that the videos can mislead without the extensive explanation their non-orthodox formulations require.

He says his videos might be used only “probably 10%, 5, 10%,” describes them as personal opinion and a personal journey, and says close friends may take them as reference. The phrase “five or ten percent of someone’s study” is therefore a synopsis of those adjacent remarks, not a verbatim quotation.

He would rather keep the material within a small circle or restricted sharing context. He emphasizes that it is his work and that the decision about wider release is his. John says he had already left Facebook and then created YouTube mainly as a place to save his material and to test some AI. Some of that AI-produced material, he adds, was not fully correct because he had not yet mastered the tools. Wider reposting therefore conflicted with the private/reference purpose for which he was keeping the channel.

Supplemental source — full excerpt from John Tan’s new, as-yet-unreleased book manuscript

The following is reproduced verbatim from the manuscript excerpt supplied for this article. It is later authorial material, not part of the 27 June 2026 Zoom meeting. The wording is intentionally preserved exactly as supplied, including “Three terms and distinctions,” even though five methodological items are subsequently discussed.

A Note on Method
This work is divided into five parts. Part One, this volume, is the main text: the sustained argument running from the collapse of the observer through dependent designation, causality, and the resonances and open questions gathered near its close. Part Two, Three Formations, carries that same logic through three coherent contemplative exercises — the mountain, the flower, and space — applying it directly rather than continuing to argue for it. Part Three, Nothing to Find, Nothing Missing, is a shorter, more accessible companion, walking a newer reader through the central argument from the beginning. Part Four, Science and the Dharma, sets this argument alongside developments in modern physics and cognitive science, carefully distinguishing resonance from proof throughout. The Appendix lays out the formal and linguistic scaffolding underlying the whole project — why ordinary grammar keeps reconstructing substance, and one proposed notation for avoiding it.
This book draws extensively on Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti, Tsongkhapa, Mipham, Dōgen, and the Dzogchen tradition. It is not a translation, a commentary, or a scholarly exposition of any one of them. It is a personal philosophical synthesis, developed in continuity with Madhyamaka and Dzogchen, offered for its own coherence and usefulness rather than as a claim to represent orthodox doctrine.
Three terms and distinctions used throughout this book are my own, not classical divisions found in the source texts, and it matters that this is stated plainly rather than left for the reader to assume otherwise: Conceptual designation versus dependent designation. Classical Madhyamaka does not separate these into two distinct categories. Madhyamaka's own position is that all designation is dependent designation — there is no legitimate "conceptual designation" standing apart from it as a rival account of how labels attach to things. The distinction drawn throughout this book, between a "thing first, label second" sequence and a "thing and label arising together" structure, is a pedagogical separation of my own, built to make the core insight easier to approach for a reader encountering it for the first time. It is not a division Nāgārjuna or Candrakīrti would recognize as their own, even though the conclusion it leads toward — that all designation is dependent — is entirely theirs.
Designation by relation. The distinction between designation-by-thought and designation-by-relation, and the claim that structural, non-conceptual individuation (illustrated by the blue-and-yellow contrast) operates even prior to explicit conceptual labeling, does not appear as a formal division in classical Madhyamaka sources. It is a personal synthesis in continuity with the tradition, not orthodox doctrine.
The logic of the single stroke. The framing of Nāgasena's chariot as containing every subsequent insight of this book in miniature — no residue, exhaustive conditionality, no hierarchy or sequence, mutual dependence, full function without essence — is my own organizing device. It is a way of reading the chariot dialogue that I have found genuinely illuminating, not a claim about how the dialogue was originally intended or has traditionally been read.
Spontaneous presence equals dependent arising. This book argues, in its later chapters, that Dzogchen's spontaneous presence (lhun grub) and Madhyamaka's dependent arising are the same nature under two descriptions, and that Dzogchen's direct introduction can be understood as the experiential actualization of what Madhyamaka's analysis was always pointing toward. This reading has real support within the tradition — Longchenpa's insistence that the ground is empty, not a subtle existent thing, points in the same direction — but it is not a settled cross-tradition consensus. Other lineages and commentators hold that Dzogchen constitutes its own resultant vehicle, not reducible to or guaranteed by Madhyamaka analysis alone. The equivalence of nature is a position I hold with real confidence, built carefully across this book. That it follows Madhyamaka analysis in a way that makes the two traditions simply two descriptions of one path is my own synthesis of a live and unresolved question, not a report of settled doctrine.
The desynchronization of view, experience, and insight. A central organizing claim of this book is that direct contemplative experience — the taste of anatta, of total exertion — can arrive complete while the conceptual view used to understand it remains, unnoticed, substantialist, and that this mismatch, rather than any deficiency in the experience itself, is what keeps a mind from opening fully. The underlying phenomenon this points to — that realization and view can run at different paces — is recognized in various forms across contemplative traditions. The specific framing of it as a "desynchronization," and the use of that framing as the engine organizing this entire book from the collapse of the observer through to the final chapters, is my own construction. It is offered because I have found it clarifying and, I believe, accurate to how this process actually unfolds — not because it is a term or a diagnostic framework drawn from any classical source.
None of this diminishes what the book is trying to do. It simply means the book should be read as what it is: one practitioner's attempt to synchronize direct contemplative experience with a rigorously non-substantialist view, built using the tools Madhyamaka and Dzogchen provide, and organized with distinctions of my own devising where the tradition itself does not supply one ready-made. Where a claim is demonstrated by the classical arguments themselves, I have tried to say so. Where a claim is my own extension, reading, or synthesis, I have tried to say that too, both here and at each point in the text where it becomes relevant again.

Source status: unpublished manuscript excerpt supplied by the user. It is included here as later authorial clarification and is not used to rewrite the meeting transcript itself.

Integrated account of John’s position

Direct realization of anatta can bring vivid nondual experience and total exertion, but John’s central warning is that the practitioner’s framework may still remain inherent. Experience and view can be out of sync.

That residual framework may still treat consciousness, fluid process, space, time, conditions, or other explanatory bases as inherently established. Madhyamaka analysis is used to see why phenomena with essence could not arise, interact, communicate, or appear dependently.

Dependent designation, relation without relata, and causal efficacy without causal power are John’s ways of pressing the same point from different angles: function does not require an independently existing substrate.

Yet emptiness does not eliminate appearance. Phenomena remain conventionally valid and functional. The absence of ultimate foundation makes conventionality more important, not less. Ultimately phenomena are empty and unfindable; conventionally they appear, function, and arise dependently.

Mere negation, however, is only half the story. John repeatedly insists that the difficult part is seeing formation and seeing that formation as empty. When conventionality is understood in this way, he says one is no longer worried about conceptual conventionalities or pure perception, and connects that directly with non-meditation.

His practical standard is sincerity: allow what is not understood to drive further investigation rather than bypassing it. He describes this as opening the body-mind, thoughts, and attachments, and says that deeper understanding leads him to practise more seriously and to respect the great Buddhist masters more deeply.

Sources and verification scope

Unreleased-manuscript source:

The later methodological clarifications marked above come from a new, as-yet-unreleased John Tan book manuscript excerpt supplied for this article. Because the manuscript is not publicly available, these passages are used only as later authorial clarification of how John himself classifies his terminology, pedagogical distinctions, and cross-tradition synthesis. They are not used as independent verification of what was said in the 27 June meeting, and they are kept visually and verbally distinct from the meeting synopsis.

The meeting transcript witnesses control the spoken content, while speaker attribution is reconstructed from diarization, direct address, continuity, and cross-Part identification. Where the user directly re-listened to a disputed word or phrase, that check controls the phonetic reading actually checked; it is not treated as a blanket source for speaker identity. Public sources are used only to verify names, titles, textual references, or the limits of historical/comparative claims. They do not certify John Tan’s interpretations, realization claims, traditional anecdotes, or unresolved audio.

Watch and listen: John Tan on dependent arising and emptiness

The companion collection gathers John Tan’s videos and audios on right view, phase six, dependent designation, relations without relata, causal efficacy, the five MMK deconstruction logics, and why mere negation is inadequate.

YouTube Videos and Audios by John Tan: Union of Dependent Arising and Emptiness

Prepared from the supplied 27 June 2026 Zoom transcript witnesses. This is a comprehensive synopsis, not a verbatim transcript.

Sunday, November 02, 2025

Experience, Realization, View, Practice, and Fruition (Revised)

By Soh

Experience, Realization, View, Practice & Fruition

By Soh
中文翻译：体验/觉受、证悟、见地、修行与果位

(Note: This article was originally written in 2011 when I was 21. It has been lightly edited for English flow in 2025.)

Here's something I just added to my e-book.

I was trained in these three aspects and John Tan (Thusness) asked me to write something clearer about 'experience, realization and view', and synchronistically I actually had the same thought on that day. I think I'm going to add this as one of those preface chapters before I start with the journal section in my e-book.

So the three aspects I'm talking about are:

The Experience
The Realization
The Implications of View

However, for the sake of this article and benefit for readers, I will add two more:

The Practice
The Result/Fruition

I put Practice after the first three instead of dealing with practice in the first part because I want people to know what they are doing their practice for, the reason why they are doing those practices, how those practices result in realization, and their effects on View. You will understand as you read further.

This article documents my insight, experience, and journey. Even though whatever I said is authentic, spoken from experience, and accurate, it is not meant to be an authoritative map for everyone. Not everyone goes through these insights in the same linear fashion (for instance, the Buddha only taught people to realize Anatta and Shunyata in the traditional Pali texts and did not talk about Self-Inquiry or I AM/Self-Realization, even though the luminous mind is spoken of). However, it is true that all traditions of Buddhism (provided that there is right guidance and training) will eventually result in these various kinds of insights and experience, despite going through a different path or practice.

It should also be understood that when people talk about "no-self", it could imply a number of things... from impersonality, to non-dual, to Anatta. In the worst case, it is being misunderstood as dissociation (I, the observer, dissociate from phenomena as not myself). Therefore, we should always understand the context of 'no self' that is being said by the practitioner or person and not always assume that the 'no self' must be the same as the 'no self' you have in mind. Due to lack of clarity, very often 'Anatta' is confused with 'impersonality', or 'Anatta' with 'non-duality'. They are not the same even if there may be overlaps or aspects of each in one's experience. One must be careful to distinguish them and not confuse one with another.

I would also like to quote from a forum post Thusness made in 2010 which I feel is quite important to understand:

"...there exist a predictable relationship between the 'mental object to be de-constructed' and 'the experiences and realizations'... As a general guideline:

1. If you de-construct the subjective pole, you will be led to the experience of No-Mind.
2. If you de-construct the objective pole, you will be led to the experience of One-Mind.
3. If you go through a process of de-constructing prepositional phrases like 'in/out', 'inside/outside', 'into/onto', 'within/without', 'here/there', you will dissolve the illusionary nature of locality and time.
4. If you simply go through the process of self-enquiry by disassociation and elimination without clearly understanding the non-inherent and dependent originated nature of phenomena, you will be led to the experience of 'I AMness'.

Lastly, not to talk too much about self-liberation or the natural state, it can sound extremely misleading... we have to understand that to even come to this realization of the “Simplicity of What Is”, a practitioner will need to undergo a painstaking process of de-constructing the mental constructs. We must be deeply aware of the ‘blinding spell’ in order to understand consciousness…"

1. The Experience

I will now start explaining 'experience'. There are a number of important experiences related to our true nature:

1. Pure Presence/Witness

This is the case when practitioners have experienced a pure radiance of presence and awareness in the gap between two thoughts. Having recognised this pure presence-awareness, one tries to sustain this recognition in daily life. In daily life, one may sense this as a background witnessing presence, a space-like awareness in the background of things. It is felt to be something stable and unchanging, though we often lose sight of it due to fixation on the contents of experience or thoughts (like focusing on the drawing and losing sight of the canvas). This is related to the 'I AM', but still, this is the experience, not the realization.

Impersonality

This is the case when practitioners experience that everything is an expression of a universal cosmic intelligence. There is therefore no sense of a personal doer... rather, it feels like "I" and everything is being lived by a higher power, being expressed by a higher cosmic intelligence. But this is still dualistic – there is still this sense of separation between a 'cosmic intelligence' and the 'world of experience', so it is still dualistic.

I experienced impersonality after the I AM realization, however, some people experience it before I AM realization. Theistic Christians may not have I AM realization (it depends), however through their surrendering to Christ, they can drop their sense of personal doership and experience the sense of 'being lived by Christ', as in Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." This is an experience of impersonality that may or may not come with the realization of I AM. And as Sailor Bob Adamson said, "That separate entity, the belief in that entity or person, has never done a damn thing! It never can and never will. You must realize that you have been lived. That body-mind that you call 'you' is being lived, and it is being lived quite effortlessly. As Christ said, 'Which of you, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature?' That separate entity can’t do a bloody thing."

It should be noted that impersonality is not just an experience of non-doership. It is the dissolving of the construct of 'personal self' that leads to a purging of ego effect to a state of clean, pure, not-mine sort of "perception shift", accompanied with a sense that everything and everyone is being an expression of the same aliveness/intelligence/consciousness. This can then be easily extrapolated into a sense of a 'universal source' (but this is merely an extrapolation and at a later phase is deconstructed) and one will also experience 'being lived' by this greater Life and Intelligence.

Impersonality will help dissolve the sense of self but it has the danger of making one attached to a metaphysical essence or to personify, reify and extrapolate a universal consciousness. It makes a practitioner feel "God". At this phase, it is good to focus on this impersonal and universal aspect of consciousness, but beware of the tendency to extrapolate.

2. Non-dual into One Mind

Where subject and object division collapsed into a single seamless experience of one Naked Awareness. There is a difference between a temporary non-dual experience and non-dual insight. Explained later.

3. No-Mind

Where even the naked Awareness is totally forgotten and dissolved into simply scenery, sound, arising thoughts and passing scent. This is the experience of Anatta, but not the realization of Anatta. Explained later.

4. Sunyata (Emptiness)

It is when the 'self' is completely transcended into dependently originated activity. The play of dharma. There is a difference between this as a peak experience and the realization of emptiness/dependent origination. Explained later.

2. The Realization

Next is the 'Realization':

1. The Realization of I AM

Having an experience of witnessing, or a state of pure presence, is not the same as having attained the doubtless self-realization - in that case, the practitioner can be said to have an experience, but not insight/realization. I have had experiences of Presence and Witnessing consciousness since 2007, but not the realization until February 2010 after almost two years of self-inquiry practice.

Also just to be clear: the 'I AM' that Nisargadatta mentions is not the same as the 'I AM' as defined by me and Thusness. For me and Thusness, 'I AM' refers to the doubtless apprehension of Awareness, doubtless Self-Realization. Just so you know... many people use terms differently. Nisargadatta's 'I AM' is more related to Ramana Maharshi's I-thought, the root thought or the Aham Vritti. When you have seen that Aham Vritti, continue inquiring into the Source of that – Who is it that Witnesses the sense of self? And continuing to ask "Who am I?", "Who is the source of that?", eventually the 'I thought' will vanish and the Source will be realized. This Source that I call “Realization of I AM” is not to be confused with Nisargadatta’s “I AM” or Ramana’s “Aham Vritti”.

Self-realization is attained when there is a complete certainty of Being - an unshakeable and doubtless realization of Pure Presence-Existence or Consciousness or Beingness or Existence as being one's true identity. You clearly see that you are not a machine, you are nothing inert, you are not just an inert or dead corpse but you are pure Existence, Consciousness Itself. There is nothing clearer or undoubtable or irrefutable than You! Eureka. Without this quality of 'unshakeable certainty', whatever experiences one has cannot be considered as a realization.

One realizes the luminous essence of mind but is unable to see it as all manifestations under differing conditions (that would be non-dual realization and beyond). Yes, this luminous essence is experienced as a non-dual, non-conceptual, direct, immediate mode of perception (NDNCDIMOP) and is a Self-Knowing Consciousness (the Presence is itself its Knowing, there is no separate knower of its presence). Yes, in this moment of Beingness, there is no thought, and not even any sense of self. It is all-pervasive and limitless, and is often described as being like a raindrop (sense of individuality) dissolving into the ocean - one identifies oneself AS this infinite Presence, and in this infinite oceanic Presence there can be no sense of individuality (especially when this phase of experience and realization has matured in terms of intensity and impersonality). However, as Thusness puts it:

"The sense of 'Self' must dissolve in all entry and exit points. In the first stage of dissolving, the dissolving of 'Self' relates only to the thought realm. The entry is at the mind level. The experience is the 'AMness'. Having such experience, a practitioner might be overwhelmed by the transcendental experience, attached to it and mistaken it as the purest stage of consciousness, not realizing that it is only a state of 'no-self' relating to the thought realm."

The sense of 'Self' dissolves in all sense doors and experiences (in seeing just the seen without seer, in hearing just sound no hearer, in thinking just thought but no thinker, etc) when Anatta is realized as 'nature', as a dharma seal. This is discussed later.

In this phase of insight (I AMness) one sees all thoughts and experiences as coming from and subsiding within this Ground of Being, but the Beingness as a noumenon is unaffected by the comings and goings of phenomena, like the movie images passing through the screen, or the waves coming and going within an unchanging ocean. Seeing a subtle distinction between the Noumenal and Phenomenal, one clings to the pure thoughtless beingness (which is non-conceptual thought) as one's purest identity, as if it is the true unchanging self or ground Behind all things - one clings to a formless background source or witness of phenomena.

Since the view of duality and inherency is strong, Awareness is seen as an eternal witnessing presence, a pure formless perceiving subject. Therefore even though the I AM experience is itself non-dual, one still clings to a dualistic view which therefore affects the way we perceive reality and the world. This dualistic framework distorts a non-dual experience by clinging or reifying that experience into an ultimate Background which is merely an image of a previous non-dual experience made into a Self, ultimate and unchanging. So it is being perceived/conceived that "I am here," as an eternal unchanging Witness/Watcher of passing thoughts and feelings. The “I” simply witnesses but is not affected by, nor judges the thoughts/perceptions that are experienced - nonetheless there is a separation between the Observer and the Observed. A true experience is being distorted by the mind's tendency at projecting duality and inherency (to things, self, awareness, etc).

Also, in my experience, the I AM experience after the initial realization is tainted with a slight sense of personality and locality. That is, even though the mind knows how to experience Presence beyond all concepts, the mind still cannot separate Presence from that slight and subtle sense of personality. It wasn't until about two months after the realization, that the sense of a localized witness completely dissolved into a non-localized, impersonal space of witnessing-awareness-presence (but still dualistic and 'background'). At this level, the I AM is separated from Personality, and it is seen as if everything and everyone in the world share the same source or same space, like if a vase breaks, the air inside the vase completely merges with the air of the entire environment such that there is no sense of a division between an 'inside space' or an 'outside space', such that everything shares the same space, as an analogy of all-pervading presence. Because of the dissolving of the personal construct, it seems that myself and the chair and the dog equally 'share' the same space, the same source, the same substance of consciousness. Actually it is not that one "merges", but one Realizes that one IS the infinite self and not a small enclosed self.

2. The Realization of Non-Dual, into One Mind

Having an experience of non-duality is not the same as having a realization... for example, you may have a temporary experience where the sense of separation between experiencer and experience suddenly and temporarily dissolves or there is the sense that subject and object has merged... temporarily. I had such experiences since 2006 (I had a number of similar experiences in the years following, differing in intensity and length). The first time I had it was when looking at a tree - at that point the sense of an observer suddenly disappeared into oblivion and there is just the amazing greenery, the colours, shapes, and movement of the tree swaying with the wind with an amazingly intense clarity and aliveness as if every leaf on the tree is crystal-like. This had a lot of 'Wow' factor to it because of the huge contrast between the Self-mode of experience and the No-Self mode of experience (imagine dropping a one-ton load off your shoulders, the huge contrast makes you go "Wow!"). This is not yet the realization of non-duality... the realization that separation has been false right from the beginning... there never was separation.

When non-dual realization (that there never was subject-object duality) arises, non-dual experience becomes effortless and has a more ordinary, mundane quality to it (even though not any less rich or intense or alive). Everywhere I go, it is just this sensate world presenting itself in an intimate, non-dual, clean, perfect, wonderful way, something that 'I' cannot 'get out of' even if I wanted to because there is simply no illusion and sense of self/Self that could get out of this mode of perceiving, and there is nothing I needed to do to experience that (i.e. effortless), something that has no entry and exit. In the absence of the 'huge contrast' effected in a short glimpse of non-dual experience prior to insight, there is less of the 'Wow' factor, more of being ordinary, mundane, and yet no less magnificent and wonderful.

At this stage, you also become doubtless that the taste of luminosity experienced in I AM is exactly the same taste in all six entries - sights, sounds, smell, taste, touch, thought. So now you realize the "one taste of luminosity" and effortlessly experience pure luminosity and presence-awareness in and as the transience (a note however: the ‘one taste’ spoken in Mahamudra tradition is not just one taste of luminosity but the one taste of the union of luminosity and emptiness). You realize that the I AM (non-conceptual thought) that you realized and experienced is simply luminosity and NDNCDIMOP (non-dual, non-conceptual, direct, immediate mode of perception) in one particular state or manifestation or realm, by no means the totality. By not realizing this you reified one state into the purest and most ultimate identity, and thus you no longer "choose" or have "preference" on a purer state of presence to abide, since you see that I AM is no more I AM than a transient sound or sight or thought; everything shares the same taste of luminosity/awareness, and of non-duality. Here the tendency to refer back to a background is reduced as a result of this seeing.

Hence merely having temporary non-dual samadhis are not enlightenment... why? The realization that there never was separation to begin with hasn't arisen. Therefore you can only have temporary glimpses and experiences of non-dual... where the latent dualistic tendencies continue to surface... and not have seamless, effortless seeing.

And even after seeing through this separation, you may have the realization of non-dual but still fall into substantial non-duality, or One Mind. Why? This is because though we have overcome the bond of duality, our view of reality is still seeing it as 'inherent'. Our view or framework has it that reality must have an inherent essence or substance to it, something permanent, independent, ultimate. So though everything is experienced without separation, the mind still can't overcome the idea of a source.

Certain contemplations like "Where does Awareness end and manifestation begin?" are helpful for challenging and breaking through the dualistic view of Awareness as a watcher of manifestation, until we see clearly there is no real demarcation of 'inside' and 'outside', 'subject' and 'object', 'perceiver' and 'perceived'. Without an artificial dualistic boundary yet with an inherent view of Awareness, Awareness and manifestation become seen as an indistinguishable and inseparable oneness like the surface of a bright mirror and its reflections – can’t say the mirror is this and the reflection another. In One Mind, seer and seen are one inseparable seeing, one naked awareness – it is the inseparability of seer and seen instead of realizing no subject, no agent, no observer.

There is no overcoming the idea of an ultimate metaphysical essence, something unchanging and ultimate, even with insight into the non-duality of subject and object. With this view of inherency, Awareness is seen as inherent, even though previously it was as if things were happening 'In' Awareness but now all manifestations ARE Awareness, or rather, Awareness is manifesting 'AS' everything (rather than things happening 'IN' Awareness which would be dualistic). Awareness is not apart from manifestation. Here it is seen that "All is Mind" - everything is You! The trees, the mountains, the rivers, all You and yet not You - no duality or division of subject and object.

At this phase, subject and object are seen to be indivisible by collapsing all manifestations into the One Subject/One Awareness/One Mind. Therefore the mind keeps coming back to a 'source', a 'One Naked Awareness', a 'One Mind' which manifests as the many, and is unable to breakthrough but finds the constant need to rest in an ultimate reality in which everything is a part of... a Mind, an Awareness, a Self.... Or one tries to be non-dual by attempts to reconfirm the non-dual or one mind (thinking the sound and sights is You, trying to subsume everything into Mind, trying to be nondual with or intimate with sights and sounds) which is another form of effort arising due to ignorance – the ignorance of the fact of anatta that always already, seeing is just the seen, no seer, and therefore no effort or attempts to reconfirm are necessary. All effort is due to the illusion of ‘self’.

What this results in is a subtle tendency to cling, to sink back to a ground, a source, or attempt to reconfirm, and so transience cannot be fully and effortlessly appreciated for what it is. It is an important phase however, as for the first time phenomena are no longer seen as 'happening IN Awareness' but 'happening AS Awareness' – Awareness is its object of perception (or rather, all objects of perceptions are subsumed to be Awareness itself), Awareness is expressing itself as every moment of manifest perception.

It should be understood that even in this phase, at the peak of One Mind, one will have glimpses of No Mind as temporary peak experiences where the source/Awareness is temporarily forgotten into 'just the scenery, the taste, the sound, etc'. Very often, people try to master the state of No Mind without realizing Anatta, thus no fundamental transformation of view can occur.

Since no fundamental change in view has taken place (the view is still of 'inherent Source/Self'), one can still fall back from that peak experience and reference back to the One Awareness. That is, until you see that the idea itself is merely a thought, and everything is merely thoughts, sights, sounds, disjoint, disperse, insubstantial, ephemeral, bubble-like. There, a change of view takes place... the result of:

3. The Realization of Anatta

Here, experience remains non-dual but without the view of 'everything is inside me/everything is an expression of ME/everything is ME' but 'there is just thoughts, sight, sound, taste' – just manifestation.

More precisely (as it is realized for me in October 2010 when I was doing Basic Military Training): in that moment of seeing, you realize that the seeing is JUST the experience of scenery! There is no 'seer is seeing the scenery' - the view of 'seer seeing the seen' is completely eradicated by the realization that 'in seeing ALWAYS just the seen, Seeing is just the seen'. In seeing, always just the shapes, colours, forms, textures, details of manifestation. The illusion of agency is seen through forever. This is not merely the subject-object, seer-seen, awareness-content inseparability of One Mind but seeing the emptiness of an inherent Self/Awareness, it is seeing through the need to posit a subjective essence as there isn’t any. It is no longer the ‘seamlessness, indistinguishability and inseparability between the bright mirror and its reflections’, it is seeing that there is no mirror, there is no observer, needless to speak about the inseparability of an observer and its display. Instead, there is simply the flow of observing/observed as a verb, as action, as manifestation, nothing about a source or agent – nothing unchanging, no background reality that is inseparable from the foreground.

It is seen very clearly in Anatta that all views and notions of consciousness/super-consciousness having some independent or unchanging true existence is not true, awareness is simply the quality of the transient sensate world, it is intrinsically self-luminous or self-aware but does not exist as some independent unchanged substratum, background, source, etc. Of course, without awareness, there is nothing made manifest. But it is not "awareness, therefore sensation". It is "awareness-sensation", "awareness-world". Prior and after (false construct of time) doesn't apply so the source-emanation analogy does not apply. The three kayas are a single co-arising. Source/awareness goes with transience like wetness goes with water. They are not even inseparable, they are synonymous. In seeing there is only/just the seen. To speak of water is to speak of wetness, to speak of sensations is to speak of luminosity, just as to speak of wind is to speak of blowing. Both are words but just points to the single flow of empty-luminosity, as just this action, just this activity (but not some One Mind/source and substratum of phenomena).

BUT... this is not the end of story for Anatta and no-agency. The initial entry into Anatta for me was the aspect of Thusness's Second Stanza of Anatta, however the First Stanza was not as clear for me at the moment (for some people, they enter through the first stanza, but for me and those focusing on non-dual luminosity, insight comes through second stanza first).

A few months later, even though it has already been seen that ‘seeing is always the sights, sounds, colours and shapes, never a seer’, I began to notice this subtle remaining tendency to cling to a Here and Now. Somehow, I still want to return to a Here, a Now, like 'The actual world right here and now', which I can 'ground myself in', like I needed to ground in something truly existing, like I needed to return to being actual, here, now, whatever you want to call it. At that point when I detected this subtle movement I instantly recognised it to be illusory and dropped it, however I still could not find a natural resolution to that.

Until, shortly maybe two weeks later, a deeper insight arose and I saw how Here/Now or something I can ground myself in doesn't apply when the "brilliant, self-luminous, vivid, alive, wonderful textures and forms and shapes and colours and details of the universe", all sense perceptions and thoughts, are in reality insubstantial, groundless, ephemeral, disjoint, unsupported and spontaneous, there was a deeper freedom and effortlessness. It is this insight into all as insubstantial, ephemeral, bubble-like, disjoint manifestations that allows this overcoming of a subtle view of something inherent. There is no observer observing something changing: simply that the "sensate world" is simply these disjoint manifestations without anything linking each sensation to another, without some inherent ground that could link manifestations, so manifestations are 'scattered'.

Prior to this insight, there isn't the insight into phenomena as being 'scattered' without a linking basis (well there already was but it needs refinement)... the moment you say there is an ‘Actual World Here/Now’, or a Mind, or an Awareness, or a Presence that is constant throughout all experiences, that pervades and arise as all appearances, you have failed to see the 'no-linking', 'disjointed', 'unsupported' nature of manifestation – an insight which breaks a subtle clinging to an inherent ground, resulting in greater freedom.

This opens the way to the experience of the self-release of everything – spontaneous, disjoint, self-releasing without any linkage. One also begins to understand Zen Master Dogen’s doctrine – that firewood is a complete and whole dharma-position of firewood, ash is a complete and whole dharma-position of ash, it is not that firewood turns into ashes. Similarly awareness does not turn into world nor is there an awareness which emanates world. Each manifestation is a whole and complete awareness-world with no before and after, disjoint and self-liberating upon its inception.

Only one who realizes Anatta and thus becoming a stream winner (Sotappana) will start to understand the purpose of Buddhist practice.

4. The Realization of Emptiness (Shunyata)

Effectively with the realization of Anatta, the substantiality of any self/Self is totally seen through. There is no such thing as a 'self' or an ultimate 'Self' with the capital S at all - always, in seeing just sights, in hearing only sounds, in sensing - just tactile sensations. Manifesting and liberating upon inception... moment by moment. Once seen, there is no longer any more clinging to some ultimate Source or metaphysical essence/substance. Instead, one finds delight in the direct revelation of the sensate world moment by moment, seeing, hearing, tasting, all wonderful, all marvellous, how alive... words can never capture it, the practitioner is no longer concerned with concepts and contents, but instead 'grooves' in the minutest details of every sensation. Freedom from sense of self/Self is very freeing and blissful.

However, having said so much, there is a danger of reifying the sensate world into an actual, substantial, tangible, inherently existing objective universe. This is the phase after the realization of Anatta, and before the realization of Shunyata. At this phase, it is as Thusness has said:

"Before the insight anatta first arose, you still risked the danger of seeing the physical as inherent and truly existing. Therefore there is a period that you are lost, unsure and AF [Actualism/Actual Freedom - a teaching that aims to eradicate all sense of self/Self and emotions] seems appealing - a sign that you have not extended the insight of emptiness to phenomena though you kept saying twofold emptiness."

And after Shunyata it is more like:

"There is just aggregates that are like foams, bubbles, ethereal having all the same taste without substantiality and implicitly non-dual. No sense of body, mind and the world, nothing actual or truly there."

So what is the realization of Shunyata?

When observing a thought in the beginning of June 2011, observing where it came from, where it goes to, where it stays, it's discovered (again, a eureka moment) that the thought is utterly illusory (and likewise all forms and sense perception are the same)! Empty! No-arising, no-staying, no-cessation! Insubstantial! Coreless! Substanceless! Hollow! Unlocatable! Without an origin! Without a destination! Cannot be pinned down! Cannot be grasped! Cannot be found! And yet, as empty as it is, still, like a magician's trick, an apparition, an illusion, vividly manifesting due to interdependent origination out of nowhere, in nowhere! How amazing it is! A sense of wonder and bliss arose in light of this realization, a newfound freedom and liberation.

It should be understood that everything is dream-like, mind-only, in the sense of Emptiness is not the same as Substantial Non-duality of One Mind.

It is now seen that everything is really no different from a thought - as in as baseless and empty as a projected thought like a dream, though it doesn't literally mean everything (including sense perceptions) are mere figment of imagination or projection (if you stop thinking, illusory perceptions still manifest due to natural dependent origination). Since everything is dream-like and illusory, they are fundamentally no different from a thought or a dream, and it is in this sense we can say that everything is mind-only. So all is mind in terms of emptiness signifies this dreamlike nature, vastly different from all is mind from a substantialist perspective.

So in short, there is a very big difference between substantialist non-dual of One-Mind and what I said here. In this experience, there is no background reality. It is NOT 'The world is illusory, only Brahman is Real'. It is not about the background Awareness (there is no awareness apart from manifestation!) but rather the foreground aggregates that I am talking about - A thought. Everything is as insubstantial and illusory as a thought or a dream. There is just the aggregates that are like foams, bubbles, ethereal, having all the same taste (of luminosity and emptiness) without substantiality and implicitly non-dual. No sense of body, mind and the world, nothing actual or truly there or here.

Also, it is crucial to understand the transition from Anatta to Emptiness involves a deepening of insight regarding reification. As John Tan pointed out to me in a conversation from 2022:

John Tan: Still only anatta then pure appearances as one's radiance clarity. That will not lead you to the insight of emptiness. You need two more insights, what are those?

Soh Wei Yu: Whatever dependently originates are non arising... everything is like chariot... Anatta is before emptiness. But it sees through inherent view of awareness and background...

John Tan: If you stay at this... then you only know "oh, there is no self" and all your focus is on eliminating self, it will not lead to emptiness.

The insight of Anatta leads to seeing consciousness as a construct, similar to the "weather." When you understand Anatta, you realize awareness is like "weather" - it is a label to denote this luminous yet empty arising (rain, clouds, wind), which are pure aggregates. We feel the wind and the blowing, but when we look at language and mistake verbs for nouns, we reify "Weather" into an entity. Similarly, seeing through the background and inherent existence of awareness leads to the direct taste of manifestation, but one must extend this to seeing through the constructs of objects—seeing that "flower" and "redness" deconstruct into vivid, non-referential empty clarity-appearance. Like red is no longer mistaken to be "redness of a flower" as an object; the redness and flower deconstruct into mere vivid red.

3. The Implications of View

The implication of views wasn’t very clear to me until more recent months (some time after I realized Anatta and Shunyata), when I began to see that what was causing grasping, clinging, the wrong way of perception, sense of self and so on was actually the latent view of inherency and duality. Even though previously realizations had arisen which had clearly done damage to such views, the impact of views in our experience and living wasn’t fully clear until more recently.

What is view? View is a deeply held notion, belief, position, stance, with regards to the reality of self and objects. This view has direct implications on how we view things - how we form a mental conception of self and things which causes grasping and contraction. When you want to cut ignorance, you go for cutting its roots, not its leaves and branches. In this analogy, sense of self/Self is its manifest form (leaves and branches) in the form of a sense of contraction, alienation and self-grasping in the form of craving and emotions, while the latent view is its roots.

This is why we cannot successfully get rid of the sense of self/Self by will and effort without effectively cutting off self-view from its root through a paradigm shift via realization. There are times of peak experiences which everyone has been through some time in their lives (usually in childhood) where the sense of a self/Self goes into temporary abeyance and there is just the sensate world, magnificent and wonderful, untainted by any sense of self or emotional contents, just the pristine purity and clarity of the sensate world at large. Yet most of us tend to forget those moments, and continue our lives not transformed by such experiences at all. Why is that so? Our self-view is intact, and no amount of glimpses of PCE (Pure Consciousness Experience) or NDNCDIMOP (non-dual, non-conceptual, direct, immediate mode of perception) is fundamentally going to transform us unless we cut off the roots of ignorance.

Self and Phenomena as a Learnt, Reified Concept

Recently John Tan asked me to recall when did I realise that 'self' is a learnt and reified concept. Wanted to mention that this is an important point and even in initial anatta breakthrough it is usually unclear at first. It comes as a deepening of insight.

At the I AM level, the personal ego is seen to be “learnt” and dropped... but all self/Self is only seen through and dropped at Anatta.

However, John Tan corrected me: "I don't think this is true. Think deeper, recall. You must understand that you can enquiry "who am I" and search for "I", you can have experience of "I AM" or even experience no-mind, or even realized that "I" does not exist, but still not realized that "I" is a reified concept."

I replied: ““I” as reified concept probably becomes clearer as I contemplated more on emptiness. But even in the initial Bahiya Sutta realization, there was a recognition that the sense of a seer or a seeing or awareness behind or beside manifestation is a reified concept that is wrong. That it is imagined and abstracted out of manifestation due to false view and then Anatta is immediately authenticated as luminous manifestation and realised as always already so. Seeing is only ever the seen and no other seer beside, in the seen only the seen. Like putting on glasses and vision is corrected finally.”

John said: “Yes, you realized "self/Self" is learnt, there is no self. A reified mental construct, a named thing mistaken as real. Then you extend that insight to all phenomena. A thorough de-construction of inherentness on all aspects of named things in which “觉” (Awareness) is one of such phenomena/dharma only, although a very crucial one. All these deal directly with alaya in "uprooting" ignorance.”

The View of Existence ("There Is") and Non-Existence ("There Isn't")

I have just come to a new realisation in mid 2011 on the implications of views in daily life. I now see that every single attachment is an attachment to view, which, no matter what it is, comes to two basic clinging: the view 'there is' and the view 'there isn't'.

The view of There is.... Self, body, mind, awareness, world, whatever. Because of this clinging on to things as existent, they appear real to us and we cling to them. The only way to eradicate such clingings is to remove the root of clinging: the view of 'there is' and 'there isn't'.

The realization of Anatta removes the view of 'there is self', 'there is awareness' as an independent and permanent essence. Basically, any views about a subjective self is removed through the insight that "seeing is just the seen", the subject is always only its objective constituents. There is no more sense of self, body, awareness, or more precisely there is no clinging to a "there is" with regards to such labels. It is seen that these are entirely ungraspable processes. In short, the clinging and constant referencing to an awareness, a self dissolves, due to the notion "there is" such things are being eradicated.

The realization of dream-like reality removes the view of 'there are objects', the universe, the world of things... One realizes what the Heart Sutra meant by no five skandhas. This is basically the same realization as Anatta, except that it impacts the view "there is" and "there isn't" in terms of the objective pole, in contrast to the earlier insight that dissolves "there is" of a subjective self.

As Loppon Namdrol (Dzogchen teacher Acarya Malcolm Smith) states: "At base, the main fetter of self-grasping is predicated upon naive reification of existence and non-existence. Dependent origination is what allows us to see into the non-arising nature of dependently originated phenomena, i.e. the self-nature of our aggregates. Thus, right view is the direct seeing, in meditative equipoise, of this this non-arising nature of all phenomena."

Let me offer something for you to think about: every day we go into a state of deep sleep where all our beliefs, concepts, views, thoughts are temporarily suspended. But when we wake up, what happens? We are as ignorant as ever. Our framework of viewing self and reality is still the same. We still experience the same problems, the same sufferings, the same afflictions. This analogy should clearly show you that sustaining a state of non-conceptuality or mastering a state of 'forgetting the self' is not going to result in a fundamental change or transformation or effortless seeing, unless true wisdom and insight arises.

I shall offer two more analogies which are related: a person deluded as to see a rope as a snake, will live in fear, trying to tame the snake, trying to get rid of the snake, escape from the snake. Maybe he has managed a way to distance himself from the snake, yet the belief that the snake is still there is nevertheless going to haunt him. Even if he managed to master the state of forgetting the snake, he is nonetheless in a state of delusion. He has not seen as it truly is: the snake is simply a rope.

In another analogy, the child believes in the existence of Santa Claus and awaits eagerly for arrival of his presents on Christmas day. One day the parents decide that it's time the child be told the truth about Santa Claus. To do this, beating the hell out of the child is not going to work. You simply need to tell the child that Santa Claus doesn't truly exist. In these analogies, I try to showcase how trying to deal with the problem of false views through means of 'forgetting conceptuality, forgetting the self' is as useless or deluded as 'trying to forget the snake, trying to tame the snake, trying to beat the hell out of the child' when the simple, direct and only true solution is only to realize that there is only a rope, and that Santa Claus isn't real. Only Awakening liberates us from a bondage that is without basis. A ‘self’ was never truly there to begin with, so why are you trying so hard to get rid of it? Simply stop conceiving that there is one. But you cannot help but conceive a self until the doubtless realization of Anatta arises which erases our false view.

There are two kinds of views (with sub categories):

1. View of Subject-Object Duality

The view of subject-object duality is prevalent in everyone prior to nondual realization. If you have not realized I AM, this duality is felt as a sense of alienation, separation, distance, between I as a subjective perceiver inside my head looking at the world 'outside' from a distance.

2. View of Inherency

The view of inherency is twofold: the view that a subjective self [whether personal or universal], and the view that objects/phenomena have intrinsic, objective substantiality (whether gross such as 'a tree', or subtle, such as elemental existence of atoms).

All metaphysical views come down to 'is' or 'is not'. Either something exists, or something does not exist. The former is eternalism, the latter is nihilism. Both views are extremes and to be rejected according to Buddha.

4. The Practice

I think the topic of Practice is dealt with more in-depth in other sections of the e-book, therefore I am going to skim through this portion here.

There are many kinds of practices one can engage in in order to give rise to realization. There are neo-Advaita teachers who teach that "no practice is necessary, no realization is needed", I call bullshit to that. As long as ignorance, false view of reality is in effect, we are going to experience suffering, afflictive emotions, sense of self, self-contraction and all that. Even though there never was truly a self and all these are a result of pure delusion, nonetheless, unless we wake up, we can never be liberated from suffering. There are "pure now-ists" that say, all thoughts of awakening are a dream, your true self is fully evident Here and Now. Well that's ok as a pointer - but to take it as a suggestion that no practice or no realization is necessary? Bullshit again, and even though your true nature is fully evident in the present, unless you realize it, it is as useless as a diamond hidden under a beggar’s pillow unnoticed - the beggar is still going to be poor, perhaps for his entire life, which is tragic to say the least.

There are many neo-Advaita teachers who basically teach that "seeking after enlightenment is simply the delusion that there is a seeker and a thing apart from a seeker to be sought, therefore it is dualistic". But the problem is that seeking WILL continue as long as you have not realized that there is no you. In other words, it is not through force, will, or intention that seeking and the delusion of a seeker ends.

How does seeking end? Only by the realization that always already, there is no you, and no 'thing' apart from you that can be sought - reality never had a subject and object dichotomy. The 'self' is a mere delusion... there is just the spontaneous perfection of the inseparability of awareness-emptiness AS all appearances, all happenings. When this is seen, naturally the seeking falls away.

Direct path does not mean if you take up this practice, you will attain awakening today or tomorrow (it took me 1 year 10 months of self-inquiry to realize I AM and a couple of months more to realize the further stages of insights). It is direct, because the practice focuses on a form of very direct contemplation on the nature of self and reality that results in a direct realization of the nature of reality. It does not focus on cultivating experiences (such as merely experiencing awareness, presence, space-like awareness, or any other aspects of experience that becomes natural and implicit after realization). Rather, it goes right to the core of things, very quickly resulting in a direct realization of our true nature.

As for gradual practice: for example, practicing 'Awareness Watching Awareness', turning the light of awareness upon itself and so on is a gradual method that focuses on the experience of I AM but eventually can lead to realization after the experience has matured and stabilized.

But I should say, when I advise people on how to move from non-dual to Anatta, I always advise both direct path contemplation and also the practice of vipassana and mindfulness. So it is not always an 'either/or' case.

My practice and the practice I advise differs according to your aim at the moment, and where you are in your practice.

For I AM: Self-Inquiry ("Who am I?")
For Non-Dual: Focus on the four aspects (impersonality, etc) and challenging boundaries.
For Anatta: Investigate Bahiya Sutta ("In seeing just the seen").
For Shunyata: Investigate where thoughts arise from, where thoughts abide and where thoughts go to.

Apart from these direct path contemplations, daily practice of meditation (both in sitting and daily lives) is helpful. It is best to take meditation seriously and sit one hour a day. It could be split into two sessions. At least thirty minutes if you do not have time. (Update 2025: John Tan personally sits 3 to 4 hours a day for the past couple of years, and advises others and myself to sit 2 hours a day at least).

Thusness told me many years ago that it is important to "go beyond names and labels to touch our pristine awareness and experience reality as it is...". However, he said that one must be able to sustain "at least 30 minutes of thoughtlessness in meditation for the clarity and vitality to arise". Note that it does not mean "30 minutes of meditation" (which can be spent in distraction anyway) but rather "30 minutes to maintain the gap between two moments of thoughts".

He also criticized teachers who put down the importance of meditation by telling me “do not listen to people saying there is no need for meditation, these are people with only small attainment and realization”. That said, there is a time when everything becomes effortless and non-meditation takes over effortful meditation.

5. The Result/Fruition

You may be wondering, what is all this fuss about? Why should I bother with this stuff? Why get awakened? What are the results out of this? Is there any practical transformation in life?

But to me, in my experience, when you have sufficiently deep insight and experience, a far more profound and life-changing transformation takes place.

Here's what I know can be attained through deep awakening (at this moment these are the ones more apparent to me but as time progresses there could be more):

A permanent freedom from all delusions pertaining to the view of an existing self or object.
Freedom from any sense of self, separation, alienation from the world, self-contraction.
Freedom from attachment to a sense of a body-mind, drop off body-mind - no more inside and outside or any kind of boundaries and weight.
High degree of attenuation of craving, anger, fears, sorrow, attachments, or any afflictive emotions, thus by inference the complete eradication of all mental afflictions, defilements and clinging are definitely possible.
Pure bliss and wonder and delight in the intimate and intense aliveness of every moment's experience due to effortless and perpetual NDNCDIMOP: non-dual, non-conceptual, direct, immediate mode of perception of reality.
Deep sense of wakefulness, clarity and aliveness.
Sleep need reduced, wakefulness and alertness increased very much.
Discursive thoughts lessen, replaced by NDNCDIMOP.
Thoughts that do arise self-release without trace.

It should be understood that you should not focus on removing emotions head on, or removing thoughts head on, or removing sense of self head on. Why? If you do not go for the roots, but try to cut off the branches, then you leave the root intact. Your delusion is intact even if you managed to 'get rid of the sense of self' (just like your delusion is intact even if you managed to distance yourself from the illusory snake that actually is a rope). But once you cut off the root ignorance, the branches are dealt with, or they naturally fall away easily. So when realization occurs, you honour realization first, understanding that there is no liberation from afflictions without first liberation from ignorance via true knowledge and vision of things as they are.

Also, before realization, it is truly difficult to experience things like 'the luminosity of the textures and forms of manifestation', 'non-dual, non-conceptual, direct, immediate mode of perception' and things like that. But after Anatta, it seems that this brilliant non-dual luminosity is very effortless - I don't need to practice anything to be in NDNCDIMOP or the pure consciousness experience. Every ordinary and mundane experience even in daily life and non-meditation setting is already implicitly so.

Like Simpo said, "IMO, before the insight of no-self, it is quite hard to not get caught at the content level. This is because, before the non-dual, non-conceptual experience/insight, one does not know how 'not getting caught' in the content is like."

That is why insight is important. But don't worry if you don't experience all those qualities before awakening - it is very difficult to, but it becomes natural after insight, so just focus on insight.

Labels: Anatta Dependent Origination Emptiness I AMness Non Dual Stages of Enlightenment View and Path No comments