1. The universality of emptiness and genuine non-meditation

John begins from the universality of emptiness. Emptiness is not confined to meditation, thought, consciousness, economics, material objects, or any other selected domain. Every phenomenon must be penetrated in the same way. When this universality becomes clear, the division between meditation and non-meditation loses its foundation: there is no independently existing meditator who enters a special state, no fixed point of entry or exit, and no real distance that effort must cross.

Everything ordinarily divided into inside and outside is equally dependently originated and empty: body, environment, thought, matter, wind, a mechanical blower, perception, luminous clarity, and the apparent distinction between practice and ordinary activity. John therefore considers genuine non-meditation extremely difficult without a clear realization of emptiness. Presence or luminous clarity can otherwise be interpreted as a subtle consciousness, background field, or pervasive substance.

Emptiness is what prevents luminosity from becoming another metaphysical foundation. Only when every appearance is seen as empty can there truly be no entry and no exit. Nevertheless, John says that he continues to meditate even though he considers himself to be in non-meditation. Non-meditation is not permission to abandon formal practice; it means that formal meditation is no longer understood as an inherently separate realm entered by an inherently existing practitioner.

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 is that everything appears very light: the felt solidity, heaviness, and self-established nature ordinarily attributed to phenomena has loosened.

He then distinguishes what he calls phase-five and phase-six insight. Phase five is associated with radiance, nonduality, direct clarity, manifestation as appearance, anatta, and recurring moments of “mini-total-exertion.” His example is deliberately ordinary: a door opens, or an MRT train moves, and the vibrations, movement, train, body, and environment are experienced as one undivided presentation. No internal observer stands apart to receive an external event.

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 repeatedly experience seamlessness and anatta while continuing to assume isolated objects, an external world confronting an internal subject, things that exist before entering relations, space as a container, time as a stream, or consciousness as an underlying field.

Nondual experience does not automatically remove these assumptions. When the experience subsides, the analytical mind may resume using the old framework. John considers it very difficult to overcome this simply by collecting more experiences. The framework itself must be exposed, questioned, re-educated, and retrained.

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.

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

John repeatedly criticizes spiritual bypassing. Here the phrase means using spiritual language, experiences, or doctrines to avoid examining unresolved assumptions. A person may say “everything is empty,” “there is no self,” “everything is just awareness,” or “there is no view,” yet be unable to explain why conditions, objects, relations, and cognition are empty.

His test is not whether someone can recite the accepted conclusion. It is whether that person can investigate why an object cannot possess inherent existence, why essence would obstruct change and interaction, how dependent designation functions, and how empty phenomena nevertheless remain causally effective. When reasoning, experience, and interpretation are not integrated, the statement “everything is empty” may be memorized doctrine rather than assimilated insight.

Sincerity therefore includes the ability to say, “I experience this, but I do not understand it.” John treats that admission as more valuable than turning an experience into a premature claim of completion.

5. Caution when judging Longchenpa, Tsongkhapa, Mipham, and other masters

John applies the same demand for sincerity to doctrinal judgments. It is easy to isolate a passage and claim that a master believed in external reality, substantial mind, or another metaphysical foundation. It is much harder to understand why the master used that formulation, how it functions within the complete system, and what experiential realization stands behind it.

He mentions Malcolm as someone who has made a serious effort to articulate difficult issues clearly, while still warning against moving too quickly from quotations to sweeping conclusions. Masters are not placed beyond analysis, but someone who has not deeply practised and understood deconstruction should be very cautious about declaring that Longchenpa, Tsongkhapa, Mipham, or another major figure did not understand emptiness.

John’s own assessment is that Candrakīrti, Tsongkhapa, and Mipham understood Nāgārjuna with exceptional clarity. He presents this as his personal evaluation, not as a neutral ranking accepted across Buddhist traditions.

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.

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 this ordinary model conceptual designation: an object is believed to stand there independently and a concept is placed upon it. Dependent designation operates differently. It does not begin with an independently established whole. The whole is intelligible only in dependence upon parts, causes, conditions, functions, relations, perceptual manifestations, and conventional practices.

The designation does not disclose a hidden essence behind this network. John initially recognized the point through total exertion—the entirety of conditions presenting as this particular event—but knew that experiential recognition did not yet explain the mechanism completely.

8. The apple as a multidimensional designation

John develops the distinction through the example of an apple. Ordinary cognition treats the apple as one whole object standing outside the observer. What is actually available, however, includes colour appearing through visual consciousness, shape, tactile sensation, smell, taste, weight, texture, memory, expectation, biological growth conditions, relations to the senses, and practical conventions governing what counts as an apple.

Each is a dimension of what is conventionally called “the apple.” There is no need to posit an additional apple-entity standing behind these manifestations and possessing them. “Apple” designates the dependently organized presentation.

This is not merely a reduction of the whole to smaller physical particles. If the apple is reduced to atoms while the atoms are treated as intrinsically existing things, the supposed essence has merely been moved to a smaller scale. John’s inquiry concerns the entire perceptual, causal, relational, and conventional framework through which the object is constituted and identified.

9. Designation without naming and labelling

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.”

There is already difference, contrast, structure, distinguishability, and organization of the perceptual field. John calls this designation without naming and labelling. The phrase is his own analytical formulation, not a standard definition accepted by every Tibetan Buddhist school.

The point is that designation cannot simply mean consciously attaching a word. A prelinguistic or nonverbal differentiation may already structure how something appears as this rather than that. Otherwise “freedom from conceptual elaboration” could be reduced to the absence of internal speech, making any wordless moment equivalent to enlightenment—an interpretation John considers clearly inadequate.

10. AI as a research interlocutor, not an authority

For a long period, these questions remained in John’s private notes and contemplation. He found it difficult to locate clear explanations online, difficult to verify his intuitions, and difficult simply to ask a teacher to settle what had become his own investigation.

When more capable AI systems appeared, he began using them as research interlocutors. He did not accept the first answer. He repeatedly asked, challenged, requested broader searches, checked terminology, rejected simplistic explanations, and reframed the question. Through this process, he became increasingly convinced that designation in Tibetan Buddhist contexts cannot be reduced to ordinary naming.

AI’s role here is investigative and preparatory. It helps search, compare, and orient; it does not become an infallible teacher or replace direct reading and contemplation.

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.

In the encounter itself, what conventionally counts as “this,” “that,” “subject,” “object,” “you,” and “I” becomes determinate. The relata are not necessarily pre-packaged entities waiting to interact. John compares this with Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action, which rejects the assumption that independent relata must precede their relation.

He does not claim that agential realism and Madhyamaka are identical. The comparison helps illustrate a relational structure at the conventional level. Relation itself is not elevated into an ultimate substance: relata, relation, and event are all empty.

12. Why phase six is analytical

John calls phase six analytical because its task is to transform the framework through which all earlier experience has been interpreted. Phase five may contain anatta, radiance, and total exertion; phase six investigates what dependent arising actually means, why phenomena cannot possess essence, how designation functions, whether relations require independent relata, and how causality works without intrinsic causal power.

It also investigates how appearance and unfindability coexist and why conventional function is not destroyed by emptiness. This is not abstract philosophy detached from practice. The analysis exposes assumptions that continue shaping perception and interpretation.

Once the framework is seen to be defective, the meaning of earlier nondual experiences changes. They are no longer interpreted through a hidden subject, consciousness, process, or substrate.

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

John illustrates anatta with formulations such as: there is no wind apart from blowing; the blowing is the wind. There is no lightning apart from flashing; the flashing is lightning. There is no separate listener standing behind hearing, and no agent apart from the activity.

These can bring a powerful shift from noun to verb, entity to activity, and observer to manifestation. Yet John calls this the comparatively easy part. Even after anatta and total exertion, a practitioner commonly imagines reality as fluid, wave-like, wind-like, a continuous dynamic field, a luminous stream, or a process underlying individual forms.

The static substance has disappeared, but a process-substance remains. A noun has been replaced by a reified verb. Nāgārjuna’s analysis, as John understands it, negates this fluid substrate as well. The flowing itself cannot be established as an independent ground. John’s “ninety-nine percent” remark in the meeting is rhetorical emphasis, not a measured statistic.

14. Why essence would make arising and interaction impossible

John treats the following as one of the indispensable conclusions of Madhyamaka analysis: if something possessed an intrinsic essence, it could not genuinely arise, change, interact, communicate, or appear through conditions.

An essence would establish the thing by itself. Conditions could not produce or alter it; relation could not constitute it; it could not become what it was not; it would have no need to arise; and it could not cease without losing the very nature said to define it inherently.

The absence of essence is therefore not a defect that prevents function. It is what permits conditional function. John wants the practitioner to investigate this until it becomes completely convincing, not merely intellectually agreeable. Only then does dependent origination cease to mean “real things interacting with other real things.”

15. The “half-void, half-ego” condition

John describes most practitioners as holding a mixed and inconsistent view. One part of the mind accepts no-self, emptiness, nonduality, and groundlessness. Another part continues assuming real objects, real consciousness, absolute space, flowing time, intrinsic causal powers, a subtle process, or an ultimate luminous foundation.

He calls this a half-void, half-ego view. Because both frameworks coexist, the practitioner may alternate between emptiness language and inherent interpretation without seeing the contradiction.

Ultimate analysis is needed to expose that what is experienced never existed in the manner in which it was assumed to exist.

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?

The purpose is not to announce that absolutely nothing exists. It is to reveal a defect in the language and framework through which existence and time are analysed. Nāgārjuna’s analysis therefore goes beyond replacing enduring entities with instantaneous events; the event, moment, arising, and ceasing are themselves unfindable as inherently established units.

17. Three criteria for investigating a phenomenon

John offers three connected criteria for penetrating a phenomenon:

1. Do not begin by demanding “What is it?” The question may already presuppose that an underlying thing must exist. In a completely substrateless understanding, there is no final independent “what” behind the appearance.
2. The phenomenon is unfindable. It cannot be established independently in perception, conception, its parts, apart from its parts, as the collection, or as an owner of the parts. Yet unfindability does not mean blank nonappearance; there is appearance.
3. It does not arise without conditions. Appearance is not random or causeless. Whatever appears depends upon causes and conditions.

The three must be held together: no final substrate, unfindability, and conditional appearance. Leaving out conditional appearance turns emptiness into mere negation. Leaving out unfindability turns dependent arising into interaction among inherently existing things.

18. Why John insists on the two truths

John strongly opposes collapsing the teaching into “one truth.” The two truths preserve two inseparable dimensions. Ultimately, no independently existing essence can be found. Conventionally, phenomena appear, function, depend upon conditions, produce consequences, and can be valid or invalid, accurately or inaccurately understood.

The ultimate does not abolish the conventional, and the conventional does not establish intrinsic existence. John’s criticism of “one truth” is directed against presentations that reify appearances, dissolve them into an undifferentiated absolute, dismiss conventionality as meaningless, or make emptiness into the one reality that truly exists.

19. Hidden inherent views concerning space, time, and boundaries

John insists that people think inherently even when they deny doing so philosophically. Space is imagined as an absolute container in which objects are placed. Time is imagined as a large stream moving in one direction, with people and events located inside it. Things are assumed to possess boundaries before entering relations, and subject and object are assumed to be separate before perception occurs.

These assumptions feel obvious because they are built into ordinary cognition and language. As long as practitioners deny holding them, they cannot learn. The assumptions must first become visible.

John’s phrases “relation without relata,” “designation without naming,” and “causal efficacy without intrinsic causal power” are meant to loosen this hidden framework. They are his explanatory formulations rather than standard translations of fixed classical expressions.

20. Deconstructing “I” and “mine”: the structure of possessive mineness

John recalls an earlier exchange in which his intended point was, in effect, “There is no ‘I,’ but there is still ‘mine.’” The transcript’s word “mind” is a transcription error for “mine.” He was not positing a residual metaphysical mind or consciousness. He was drawing attention to possessive mineness: the appropriation through which experience, views, realization, body, thought, or awareness can still be tacitly felt as “mine,” “for me,” or belonging to a self.

The contrast is therefore not between the disappearance of a personal “I” and the survival of an entity called mind. It concerns two mutually supporting structures of appropriation: I-making and mine-making. Even where overt self-reference has quieted, a subtler sense of ownership or belonging-to-self may continue to organize experience.

MMK 18.2 asks how “mine”—what belongs to self—could remain if self is absent. Its Sanskrit ātmanīya means what belongs to or is associated with the self, while nirmama indicates being free from the sense of “mine.” The verse links the calming of self and what belongs to self with freedom from the senses of “I” and “mine.” The issue here is possession and appropriation, not mind.

John was especially struck by chapter 18’s movement from “I” and “mine” to the cessation of appropriation or grasping, and then to the pacification of conceptual fabrication through emptiness. His point is that anatta involves deconstructing not only explicit self-reference but also the possessive structure of mineness. He openly says that he did not immediately understand the full relationship with freedom from conceptual elaboration, and that uncertainty became another reason for investigation.

21. The MMK as a transformative exercise rather than a textbook

John says the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is difficult and may take years to understand. Unlike a textbook that simply supplies propositions, Nāgārjuna’s arguments challenge the reader’s basic assumptions.

John discusses the four alternatives of production: from self, from other, from both, and without cause. If something were produced from itself, production would be unnecessary because it would already exist as what it is. The remaining alternatives also become incoherent when cause and effect are assumed to exist inherently.

The point is not to deny conventional causation. The analysis demonstrates that inherently conceived production cannot be established in any of the four alternatives. The practitioner is meant to ask how functioning occurs when causes, effects, and causal powers are not independent substances—not to invent a hidden fifth kind of fundamental stuff.

22. The danger of relentless negation and attachment to groundlessness

One of John’s strongest warnings concerns a modern misuse of non-implicative negation. A practitioner learns to say that self, object, relation, concept, and every new formulation are empty. The practice becomes an automatic solvent: whatever appears is immediately negated.

John says that treating relentless negation as the way is “incurable.” It can create attachment to groundlessness, mere absence, indeterminacy, refusal to formulate anything, or the belief that freedom consists in dissolving every distinction. He regards this as nihilistic because it sees only half of the teaching.

The easy part is to see a formation and deny that it exists inherently. The difficult part is to see how the formation arises, how its conditions operate, how it functions, how it remains unfindable, and how that very functioning formation is empty. Emptiness of emptiness means that emptiness itself cannot become the final ground or absolute solvent.

23. Causal efficacy without inherent causal power

John repeatedly distinguishes causal efficacy from an intrinsic causal power. Phenomena can affect one another without containing a self-established power inside themselves. He uses the image of two phantom-like figures fighting in a dream. Neither possesses independent essence, yet within the dream one can strike and apparently injure the other.

The analogy preserves appearance, consequence, conditional functioning, and lack of intrinsic substance. John invokes Nāgārjuna’s response to the objection that emptiness would eliminate the Noble Truths and Buddhist practice. His interpretation is the reverse: if phenomena possessed fixed natures, transformation would be impossible. Because phenomena are empty, suffering can arise, conditions can change, practice can operate, and liberation can occur.

This is why the fact that things are empty enables interaction. The target is not causality but the idea of a causal power existing independently within a cause.

24. Conventionality becomes crucial when no substrate remains

John asks what becomes most important if there is no ultimate reality, substrate, essence, or independently existing thing. His answer is conventionality. This must not be dismissed as “only conventional.”

Conventional phenomena appear, function, matter, produce effects, and can be valid or invalid. Because no ultimate substrate lies underneath them, analysis does not reach a final non-conventional layer. The basis of one conventional account is another network of conventional conditions. There is no endpoint at which an independently existing entity is finally uncovered.

Ignorance consists in projecting inherence onto this conventional presentation—adding a self-existing core that is not there. The task is not to destroy conventional appearance but to empty the appearance of the inherence projected upon it. John considers Tsongkhapa especially clear in emphasizing the importance and validity of conventionality when no ultimate foundation is admitted.

25. Conceptuality, pure perception, and non-meditation

Once conventionality and emptiness are integrated, John says one no longer needs to fear either conceptuality or pure perception. Conceptual appearances include names, thoughts, interpretations, categories, and symbolic layering. Pure perception may involve luminous clarity with little obvious conceptual overlay.

Before emptiness is understood, a practitioner may privilege pure perception as closer to reality and reject conceptuality as contamination. This can reify luminous non-conceptual awareness. When both conceptual and non-conceptual appearances are understood as empty conventional presentations, neither must be absolutized nor rejected.

At this point the distinction between meditation and non-meditation no longer governs experience in the same way. This returns the discussion to John’s opening claim: non-meditation becomes possible when emptiness penetrates every form of appearance, not merely a privileged state of luminous consciousness.

26. What continues to drive John’s practice

Asked what he is trying to improve or maintain, John says he is not trying to preserve a special state. His phases of insight have been driven by what he does not understand.

Sincerity requires admitting confusion, investigating unresolved questions, exposing attachment, opening the body-mind, opening habitual thought, and allowing the framework of understanding to change. John calls opening oneself “the toughest thing in the world” and “the greatest art.”

The path does not end with one dramatic realization. Each genuine opening reveals further depth. Realizing that anatta and fluidity are insufficient leads to a deeper investigation of Nāgārjuna. Clearer understanding produces not complacency but humility, greater confidence in dependent arising and emptiness, deeper respect for the Buddha and great masters, and a more serious commitment to practice.

27. His reaction to Soh’s translation prompts

Near the end, John expresses admiration and amusement at the size and sophistication of Soh’s prompts.

The prompts are described variously as ten or twenty pages, like an entire book, possibly approaching one hundred pages, and potentially auto-generating or self-expanding.

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

John says he has never seen such an enormous prompt and was shocked by it. The participants joke about whether an AI can tolerate being given a book-length instruction, whether the AI “hates” the user, and about the water and energy consumed by such extensive AI use.

Despite the humour, John’s substantive assessment is positive: he believes the translation prompts have been developed over a long period and can produce good translations. That is one reason he encourages the blog to focus on translation rather than unrestricted publication of his private video experiments.

The meeting concludes with John encouraging everyone to meditate, rest and go to sleep.

28. Refining right view so that experience can open further

In the later discussion, John advises a participant to refine the view and allow it to open. Right view is not an intellectual ornament added after experience. A dualistic and inherent framework conditions how reality appears; when the framework changes, experience also changes.

He warns against speaking prematurely of “no view.” One must first understand right view. Otherwise “no view” can serve as a slogan protecting assumptions that have never been examined.

He tells the participant that experiences and dreams of clarity are already present, but the view is weak. Greater confidence in the right view allows the mind and experience to open further and makes the practitioner less likely to misinterpret nondual or luminous experiences.

29. Mipham, Tsongkhapa, translation, and traditional anecdotes

John recommends serious engagement with Mipham, mentioning Mipham’s Dialectics and the Debates on Emptiness and Beacon of Certainty. He says Mipham’s writings are difficult but gave him many insights, especially through the debates surrounding Madhyamaka and the Gelug presentation.

He again warns against casually describing Mipham as a substantialist. How a passage sounds may depend heavily on the translator, the doctrinal topic, the surrounding text, and the way luminous clarity is integrated with Madhyamaka. He makes a similar broad point about Tsongkhapa: the analytical sophistication of the works reflects profound clarity, and the polemics between traditions should not be reduced to casual online judgments.

The surrounding conversation includes extraordinary traditional stories about masters, such as travel to other realms, an unfamiliar flower, unusually rapid translation, long retreats, and the composition of vast treatises. John qualifies at least some of these stories—for example, saying he does not know whether Mipham literally flew. They should be treated as religious anecdotes reported in conversation, not as historically verified facts.

30. Using AI to approach difficult books

John suggests uploading a difficult book to Gemini or ChatGPT and asking for chapter summaries. He immediately limits the recommendation: the AI will not necessarily summarize the work well. Its value is to give enough orientation for the reader to begin.

The responsible sequence is to obtain an initial overview, identify the chapter’s main question, read the original, compare the summary with the text, and personally investigate the reasoning. AI should not replace reading where exact distinctions matter.

The conversation includes joking references to ADHD, medication, dating, and reading one chapter a day. Beneath the humour is a practical recommendation: make difficult study manageable rather than avoiding it, and use AI as a temporary scaffold rather than a substitute.

31. John’s selection of five core logics

John explains that his “five core logics” are selected from analytical patterns running through the twenty-seven chapters of the MMK. The transcript records a customary grouping involving chapters 1, 2, 15, 18, and 24, while John says that his own pedagogical selection substitutes material that brings out identity and infinite regress.

He specifically mentions chapter 10, but the second substituted chapter is unclear in the transcript. The safe point is not the exact list but the pedagogical reason for changing it. Earlier phases of his framework already deal extensively with presence and anatta; therefore, the later analytical presentation should emphasize forms of inherent production and identity not already covered.

The selected logics are meant to train the practitioner to see inherent production, identity, dependence, infinite regress, and the relation between emptiness and conventional function—not to reduce Nāgārjuna’s twenty-seven chapters to five isolated arguments.

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

John argues that infinite regress is particularly problematic for a substantialist framework. The explanation is continually deferred: an object is explained by atoms, atoms by smaller particles, those by quarks or deeper constituents, a creator by another creator, and a substrate by another substrate. The promised explanation never reaches a self-sufficient endpoint.

For a non-substantialist view, the absence of a final ground is not a defect. Names such as “atom,” “electron,” or “quark” can designate organized patterns of behaviour, measurement, interaction, characteristics, and predictive regularities. One need not posit a bare thing hidden behind and housing all these characteristics.

John notes that experimental inquiry does not simply see the imagined thing in itself. It measures characteristics through an interaction involving the phenomenon, apparatus, and observer. He uses this as a philosophical illustration of dependent designation; it should not be mistaken for a complete technical account of contemporary physics.

33. Niels Bohr and Karen Barad: comparison and conjecture

John speculates that Niels Bohr may have studied emptiness because aspects of Bohr’s thought seemed to resist the idea of intrinsic characteristics. The transcript provides no historical evidence for this suggestion, and the present synopsis therefore preserves it explicitly as John’s conjecture rather than presenting it as fact.

The comparison with Karen Barad is more direct because Barad’s concept of intra-action explicitly challenges the priority of independently constituted relata. Even here, the comparison has limits. John is not saying that agential realism supplies the complete Madhyamaka view, nor that Barad and Nāgārjuna are teaching the same doctrine.

His use of both figures serves one purpose: to illustrate how deeply the ordinary “stuff” framework structures modern thinking, even when that framework has already been made dynamic, relational, or quantum.

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

John says that the video material had been reorganized into five broad areas. The clearly identifiable categories are decoding the view, understanding dependent origination, axioms, mathematical or formal representation, and standardization across different large language models.

The axiomatic and mathematical portions are aimed especially at people with some AI knowledge. John imagines loading a structured representation of his framework as a persona or analytical system into an LLM. A proposition could then be tested for consistency, contradiction, reversal, or compatibility with the stated axioms.

This technical project is distinct from the experiential and philosophical account of anatta, emptiness, and dependent arising, although it is intended to formalize the same view sufficiently for cross-model evaluation.

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 originally expected a small circle of perhaps ten or twenty familiar people to see them. When the audience rose to roughly 220 or 228, apparently through wider sharing, he became concerned and considered making them private.

His concern is not simply whether the videos are “good.” He describes them as personal opinions, a record of his journey, notes for chapters he may later write, and experiments with AI-assisted presentation. Some details generated through AI may be inaccurate, and his formulations require extensive explanation.

Phrases such as “relation without relata” and “designation without naming and labelling” are not orthodox stock expressions. They isolate insights John considers important, but they can mislead when detached from context. He also says explicitly that he is not a teacher and that Buddhist teaching cannot be undertaken casually.

He prefers people to study Nāgārjuna, Mipham, Tsongkhapa, and the primary texts. His videos may serve as a limited reference or record of a personal journey—perhaps five or ten percent of someone’s study—not as a substitute for the sources. He would rather distribute them privately or through a restricted link to a small group able to ask questions.

John also emphasizes ownership and responsibility. The material is his work, and the decision about when it is ready for public release belongs to him. He had withdrawn from Facebook and was using YouTube partly as personal storage and an AI testbed; unrestricted reposting defeats that purpose.