Buddhist insight practice makes a promise: see through the way things appear to exist, and the suffering and dissatisfaction we add to what is present fall away. The fear that distorts your decisions; the verdict about yourself you have carried for decades; the elation you hold on to though you know it cannot last. Teachers agree that the practice is for freedom, and on that they stake the whole path.
Then ask them what to practise.
One teacher says: attend to your experience more steadily, in higher resolution, with more equanimity. Watch sensory events as they arise, change, and pass. You practise to increase how many events you can detect in a second. Insight maps will tell you roughly which stage you are in. You know you are getting somewhere because what stands out starts to change. The thought still says what it says and the ache is still in your chest, but your interest has moved off content. You catch yourself registering that the thought arrived from nowhere, that it is thinner than it looked, that it is already leaving—and whatever it was about has stopped being the point. Progress is real. It also takes thousands of hours.
A second teacher tells you to look. Identify the thing precisely: what you are calling frustration, the owner of the emotion, the observer behind your eyes, the picture of yourself you have been defending all week. Say where it would have to be if it were there in its own right. Then look, and fail to find it. It takes seconds. Then the next move: with the frustrated self not found, what is here? Presence. The teacher invites you to let it recognise itself. Appearances have not changed. Unpleasant feelings have not gone away. But presence does not need to be tangled up in frustration or claim it as its own. The teacher guides you through a series of recognitions. The task now is to get these recognitions to hold when you are tired, or in an argument, or days into a bad stretch.
A third teacher says neither of those has established anything about how things are. Failing to find something never showed that it could not have been there. Take the thing as it appears—the self, this moment, a chair—and lay out every way it could exist: as identical with its parts, as something other than them, as possessing them. Then refute each. Nothing in the visual field changes. The chair still looks exactly like a chair. What you have is a reasoned certainty that it cannot exist in the way it appears to, and from here you return to the analysis until that certainty stops being something you merely understand and starts altering how things show up. That can take years.
In the Mahāyāna traditions, and in the contemporary insight world that has absorbed their vocabulary, seeing through the way things appear has a precise meaning: realising emptiness (śūnyatā). Whatever practices take you there, the arrival is seeing that nothing exists from its own side. Rob Burbea called this a seeing that frees.
Imagine you have practised vipassanā for years, an hour a day, with long retreats. Emptiness as a doctrine has never meant much to you, but the practice has. In some respects it worked. You are less reactive and more fulfilled. But the fear that distorts your decisions and the verdict about yourself you have carried for decades are mostly where they were. The breakthrough the insight maps point to feels out of reach. Then you come across a teacher like Loch Kelly, who holds that glimpses of awakening are available in minutes, through short practices you can run between one appointment and the next. It sounds too good to be true. You ask your vipassanā teacher, who is clear that the real thing takes extensive retreat practice.
Sam Harris tells a version of this in Waking Up. At least a year of silent vipassanā retreats across his twenties. Then a meeting in Nepal with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a Dzogchen master and one of Loch Kelly’s own teachers. Tulku Urgyen gave Harris the pointing-out instruction, in which a teacher shows the student the nature of mind directly. Harris had come wanting the experience of self-transcendence. In a few minutes, he writes, Tulku Urgyen “showed me that I had no self to transcend” (p. 135). He took from it that a practice of attending to objects leaves the subject in place (p. 126), so you can practise diligently for years and still be a meditator, watching.
It is tempting to ask which of the teachers is right. They use the same word for where practice leads. What they disagree about is what has to come undone.
What emptiness says
Traditions do not all define emptiness the same way. This essay follows one of the most precise definitions, from late medieval Tibet. Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) had mastered the Indian and Tibetan literature he inherited, above all the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy that began with the Indian philosopher Nāgārjuna. He founded the Geluk order, the one the Dalai Lamas belong to, and in 1402 he set out his synthesis in The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path.
Guy Newland’s Introduction to Emptiness explains Tsongkhapa’s arguments in accessible terms. The glossary provides two core definitions:
Emptiness: the sheer nonexistence of intrinsic nature.
Intrinsic nature: an essential nature whereby something comes to have an independent way of existing without being posited through the force of consciousness.
Guy Newland, Introduction to Emptiness (2009), pp. 126–27
In the tradition’s terms, a thing would have intrinsic nature if it existed from its own side, being what it is without a mind having to impute it. Recognising anything requires a mind; that much is trivial. The point is that what a thing is depends on a mind taking it as this or that. Emptiness is the absence of intrinsic nature. Tsongkhapa concludes that nothing exists from its own side.
Newland admits that the definition is hard to take in (p. 70). He draws a large A on the board and asks where its A-ness comes from. Not the chalk dust. Not the left slanted line, the right one, or the crossbar. Nor is being an A a fact about the shape alone. Someone who has never learned the Roman alphabet sees strokes and no letter. In another writing system, the same shape might mean something else or nothing. Being an A is something readers impute, by a convention they share. It works all the same. It spells words and grades tests.
A common response here is that of course a letter is a convention. Nobody thought otherwise. It does its job, and that is what matters. Who cares if the letter A lacks intrinsic nature? Hold on to this question.
At first, many people hear “nothing exists from its own side” as saying that things do not exist. The A shows otherwise. The letter lacks intrinsic nature and is there on the board all the same, doing its job. Emptiness denies a way of existing, not existence. The English word invites the mistake, because in conventional language “the bottle is empty” means “there is nothing in it”. Here a thing is empty of intrinsic nature, and the thing remains.
That leaves the question of how things do exist, if not from their own side. The tradition’s answer is dependent arising: things exist only through their relations with other things. What arises depends on causes and conditions; whatever exists depends on its parts; and, most fundamentally for Tsongkhapa, everything depends on the minds that impute it (p. 69). This does not mean that everything is mind. Tsongkhapa affirms that external objects exist conventionally, and the mind that imputes them is as empty as anything it imputes.
The tradition has two reasons for putting dependence on the mind first. The first concerns what binds us. Seeing that something depends on causes and parts need not loosen our grasping at it. Burbea notes, in Seeing That Frees, that knowing the rare conditions that produced a valuable vase can deepen your attachment to it. For Tsongkhapa, the belief that things are uncaused, partless, or permanent is acquired from philosophical views, while the grasping at the root of suffering is innate. Refuting that belief and stopping there is negating too little (Newland, pp. 67–69).
The second is logical. To say that X depends on causes Y, you must already have taken X and Y as two items in a causal relation. To say that a whole depends on its parts, you must already have taken something as a whole and other things as its parts. Each of these is an imputation that depends on the mind. So the other two dependences hold between items the mind has already imputed, and dependence on the mind comes first. Newland gives two examples. Fire arises from fuel, but something counts as fuel because a mind identifies it in relation to burning. A car is built from parts, but a piece of metal counts as a car part because a mind recognises it in relation to a car (pp. 69–70).
But the tradition goes further than the logical argument can reach. It teaches that nothing whatsoever has a determinate identity unless a mind imputes one. Is it asking us to believe something about the nature of reality?
Settled from its own side
Reading three chalk strokes as an A settles several things at once: that there is a letter on the board, which letter it is, and how it sounds. This happens faster than any conscious choice could.
Determination: settling that something is, what it is, how it is, or how it must be. Conditions do the settling: what is there, the senses, language, what we have learned, other people, and the mind’s own contribution. Experience arrives full of determinations, and most are sound.
With determinations in view, the denial of intrinsic nature separates into three denials:
It denies that anything we meet is independent of causes and parts: uncaused, partless, or permanent. Few readers will think anything they meet exists in this way, and denying it may not change much.
It denies that anything we meet is settled by the thing alone, through no determination. Whatever we encounter comes to us through a determination, with the mind’s contribution among its conditions. This one concerns how anything is available to us.
It denies that anything whatsoever is settled that way: there is no fact about what a thing is apart from some mind’s determination. This is a metaphysical thesis, and so is rejecting it. Asserting it commits you to a kind of anti-realism, and rejecting it to a kind of realism. Observation alone cannot decide it.
The second denial concerns how anything we meet comes to be what it is for us; the third, whether anything is what it is apart from every mind. The tradition asserts the third because of its view of what binds us. According to Tsongkhapa, what binds us is that things appear to exist from their own side, and we grasp them as existing that way (p. 76). We uproot grasping only by seeing that things depend on the mind, and we grasp at everything we meet, so the denial has to reach everything.
I will take the second, which is a departure from Tsongkhapa. Whatever we grasp at is something we have met, so the second already reaches all of it. Practice works only on how things show up, never on a fact beyond every determination, so the case I make here does not depend on the third denial. Whether anything lies beyond every determination, I leave open. What this gives up is Tsongkhapa’s account of conventional existence, in which to exist is to be imputed by the mind and nothing more. What it keeps is everything practice can use. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch take Madhyamaka in a similar way in The Embodied Mind, as a middle path between treating the world as given in advance and treating it as a projection of the mind.
From its own side: settled by the thing alone, through no determination: that it is, what it is, how it is, or how it must be.
Emptiness: nothing we meet is settled from its own side. Whatever we meet as something, we meet through a determination.
Emptiness leaves determinations standing. The A is still an A, and the same strokes misread as an N are not an N. It denies only that the A is an A on its own.
As a statement, this asks little. A realist about what lies beyond experience can accept it. Nobody believes a letter spells words by itself. Yet the A does not look like strokes you are reading. It looks like an A, already settled. What emptiness contradicts is not what we believe but how things show up.
When it matters
Who cares if the letter A lacks intrinsic nature? Nobody needs to. Taking an A as simply there costs nothing; it is how reading works. The stakes lie elsewhere.
Notice how the self shows up. There is someone here, looking out: solid, continuous, the one to whom things happen, owning a body, a history, and a stream of thoughts. Newland points to how we say “my mind”, “my body”, or “my feelings” as though there were a thing called a self standing somewhere apart from them (p. 92). Noticing how a sense of self arises proves nothing, but it suggests a place to look.
Imagine that someone criticises your work. Perhaps the criticism is fair, and the work needs fixing. What arrives, though, is more than information. It is a verdict: “I am a failure”. You defend yourself, to the critic or in your head, and you replay the exchange all evening.
The tradition locates suffering in moments like this one. Newland opens his book with it, writing that we suffer needlessly because we cannot let go of the sense that we are solid and independent (p. 5). Fear, anger, and pride, he goes on, act on behalf of that self, and answer foes who seem evil by their own nature (pp. 5, 12). The verdict shows both at once. The self it lands on feels solid enough to be wounded.
Here many people object again. “I never believed that the self exists independently of causes, parts, or relationships. I know I am made of a body, a mind, a history. I am a social being. Selves are constructed; I learned that long ago, so emptiness is refuting a position I never held.”
The tradition’s answer is that the belief is not the main target. The Tibetan teacher Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, in Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness, is explicit about it. The person, the personality, and the ego are not the problem, and they can be analysed rationally without difficulty. The question is why we behave as though there were a permanent, single, independent self. His instruction is to examine the reaction, not the concept: when you are hurt or offended, ask what exactly is hurt.
In How to See Yourself As You Really Are, the Dalai Lama gives a test. Recall a time when you were filled with hatred or desire. The person or thing you hated or wanted seemed “extremely substantial, very concrete”. While that is so, he says, you cannot maintain that you already see things as dependent on thought; you see them as existing in their own right (p. 195).
His book begins its analysis of the self in the scene this section began with. Imagine being criticised for something you have not done, or remember a time you thought “I really made a mess of things”, and notice how the “I” seems to stand by itself (pp. 131–35).
Newland states the point in the tradition’s own vocabulary: “We are suffering because of a deeply rooted, pernicious, and pervasively influential misconception, the misconception that we exist by way of our own intrinsic natures” (p. 69). To most people, the word misconception evokes an intellectual mistake, a false belief that a better argument could correct. The Dalai Lama’s test suggests otherwise. Philosophy becomes a practice that makes a difference when we see that the misconception is enacted.
Concealment: the conditions of a determination do not appear with what it settles, the mind’s own contribution least of all. We look through that contribution, as through a clean window, and see only what lies beyond. What the mind supplied is experienced as received, as part of the thing.
Thomas Metzinger calls this transparency. The models the mind builds are not experienced as models, so we look through them at the world.
Look at an A now and tell yourself that its being an A is only a convention. For most readers, the A stays simply there on the board, received rather than imputed. Knowing that it is only a convention does not change how it looks, and nothing hangs on it. The verdict is a determination too, and it can carry the same sense of being just how things are. The Dalai Lama’s phrase for this is that “we accept the appearance as given” (p. 179). Telling yourself that you are not a failure, and believing it, does not by itself release the reaction.
The obvious aim of practice is to see the verdict’s emptiness, not merely to agree with it. How to do this brings us back to the teachers, and the many ways they describe emptiness.
Reification
Most teachers state the traditional definition of emptiness, then say what it means in practice. The word itself may be the first point of departure. Michael Taft, a contemporary meditation teacher, prefers words like “openness” and “spaciousness” to “emptiness”, as phenomenological pointers that avoid incorrect associations with nothingness.
Listen to teachers long enough, and a whole vocabulary appears. Things are impermanent: they arise and pass. Things are constructed: what they are depends on how a mind takes them. They are insubstantial: looked at closely, their solidity thins. Nothing is a thing, Taft says, and things are verbs rather than nouns; nothing has properties in itself, since properties arise only in relation to other things. Nothing is separate: things arise together with what they depend on. And when the grip of solidity and separation loosens, teachers describe experience as open, spacious, undefined.
Since the traditions call the fundamental insight emptiness, we might think all these different words point to the same realisation. They do not. Two of Taft’s pointers bring out the difference. “Nothing is a thing” says that what looks like a bounded, stable unit is a process. “Nothing has properties in itself” says that what looks like a feature of the object belongs to its relations. The two come apart. A physicist can accept that every property is relational and still see a world of bounded, stable things.
Each word points to a recognition that loosens a different way of taking something as simply there. The general shape has a name:
Reification: what a determination settles, showing up as settled from its own side because the determination’s conditions are concealed. It comes in degrees, with how far those conditions are concealed. And we enact it: it shows in how things appear and in how we respond, whatever we would say if asked.
Grip: how far a reification settles what we perceive, feel, and do, and stays closed to revision by what is there.
Reification is what happens when something appears to be just how things are. You do not look at the board, see three strokes, and decide they make an A. You see an A, as if the letter announced itself, though it is an A only by a convention you learned. The verdict is no different. When the criticism comes, “I am a failure” does not feel like a conclusion your history and fears helped reach. It feels like a plain fact about you.
Reading the A is still a sound determination. The strokes do spell an A. The Dalai Lama says our minds are mistaken about what appears to them “even when they are right about certain observations” (p. 159). Emptiness does not say which determinations are sound, and neither does reification.
Much reification is harmless; it becomes a problem when it grips. The A’s conditions are about as concealed as conditions get. Try as you might, you cannot see three strokes instead of a letter. But the A rarely shuts out what is there. When a letter is smudged, you look again. You hold the verdict just as firmly, and it shuts out almost everything. When the criticism lands, it has already settled what you notice, what you feel, and what you do next. Concealment makes grip possible. Stake keeps it in place. Nothing hangs on the A, but your sense of who you are hangs on the verdict, and a reification with something at stake does not yield to what is there.
I learned to notice reification from Taft. He calls it making something into a thing. That is the word’s traditional sense, exact to its Latin root, res, and it gives a practitioner something to do. The difficulty is the word “thing”. In its strict sense, it misses reifications that solidify no object: “this dread means something terrible is coming” grants a feeling the authority of fact. You can attend to anxiety until it is spacious and boundaryless, with no object anywhere in it, and it can still be “mine”. Applied loosely, “thing” covers these cases, since we can call anything we take as fixed a thing, but then the word no longer says what we have fixed. Has the anxiety stopped seeming solid, or lasting? Has it stopped being yours? Has the verdict stopped being the truth about you? Asking whether you stopped making anxiety or the verdict into a thing does not distinguish them.
Making something into a thing is one form of reification among several. Something can seem lasting until you recognise that it is impermanent, and solid until you see, under close attention, how insubstantial it is. To take it as a single bounded unit is to miss that it is a process, which is what “nothing is a thing” points to. Its features can seem to belong to it alone, until you see that they arise only in relation to other things. And it can seem separate, standing apart from everything around it, until you see that it arises together with what it depends on. It can also seem simply there, a thing in its own right, until you look for it where it would have to be. We reify the self of the last section in four of these forms at once: as there, solid, stable, and separate. Openness is a different kind of word. It refers to no particular form of reification. It describes what experience is like when the forms relax.
In Tsongkhapa’s terms, each of these recognitions is a corollary of dependent arising, a face of one of its three levels: dependence on causes and conditions, on parts, or on the mind.
In his terms, impermanence implies emptiness. But seeing impermanence does not imply seeing emptiness. This is the crux. It holds for any form of dependent arising. Picture a wave. Its impermanence is on full display: it rises, changes, and breaks. Its dependence on wind, water, and seabed is just as visible, and its height and its danger are relative too. It still shows up as a wave, a thing coming at you, there in its own right. You may experience anger in the same way. While it lasts, it feels like the truth about the situation. Attending to change may loosen that sense, but nothing guarantees it. Tsongkhapa says that stopping at impermanence is negating too little (Newland, p. 67).
The vocabulary differs because teachers emphasise different forms of reification, usually the forms their own practice is best at loosening. A teacher whose students spend years attending to arising and passing will speak of impermanence and no-thingness. A teacher whose students look for the self and fail to find it will speak of construction. A teacher whose students rest in awareness will speak of spaciousness and non-separateness.
A teacher’s vocabulary may reach what is gripping you only indirectly. The dread, the anxiety, and the verdict each fit the forms above, as fixity, as separation, as a boundary drawn around a self, but loosening those forms does not reliably release them. You can see the verdict as a passing event, and it can go on telling you what you are. Authority, ownership, and identity behave like further forms of reification, and some of the most direct approaches to them come from outside meditation. Byron Katie’s first question to a painful thought is “Is it true?” Internal Family Systems therapy turns “I am a failure” into “a part of me feels like a failure”.
Five families of practice
Emptiness is equally true of everything we meet. To gain more freedom, we should work on the reifications that grip us most. So a practice targets some form of reification: taking something as fixed, as solid, as separate, as the truth about you. A practice the teacher calls “emptiness of self” addresses one or more of the self’s reifications: its solidity, its continuity, its separateness, its ownership of what happens, its authorship of what it does, its self-judgements. Dismantling a particular reification will not automatically make others come along for the ride. You may experience your body as changing and spacious, while reifying it as yours and criticising yourself for not being fit enough.
Practices that loosen reification take many forms. Meditation is one. Contemplative inquiry is another: Zen’s koans, Gregory Kramer’s Insight Dialogue, and A. H. Almaas’ Diamond Approach. Psychotherapy has cognitive and acceptance-based therapies, Internal Family Systems, Focusing, and exposure. Philosophy has Socratic questioning, the ancient sceptics’ suspension of judgement, and phenomenology’s bracketing of the world’s taken-for-granted existence. Social critique traces how people made arrangements that seem natural. Art makes the familiar strange enough to be seen.
Staying within meditation traditions, I will look at five families of practice that teachers offer as ways of seeing through reifications. The boundaries between these families blur, and most traditions teach more than one. When I place a teacher in a family, it is because they give an unusually clear example, not because it is all they teach.
The first family is perceptual training. You build the capacity to attend steadily, without grasping at what is present or pushing it away. Practices in this family use this capacity in three broad ways. Made precise and high in resolution, attention notices, discriminates, and tracks sensory events as they arise, change, and pass. Made wide and relaxed, it can find space around and through whatever appears. Directed through a lens, such as impermanence, it picks out a feature of experience it may otherwise underweight.
Well-known modern forms came out of twentieth-century Burma: Mahasi Sayadaw’s noting, and the body-scanning taught in S. N. Goenka’s retreats. Shinzen Young has developed one of the most systematic contemporary methods for perceptual training. The pragmatic dharma movement, associated with teachers such as Daniel Ingram, has taken similar practices in a technical direction. Ingram turns attention on the three characteristics (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self), and holds that perceiving them directly is awakening.
In the second family, which I will call searching, the practitioner starts by identifying something that seems to be there: the owner of an emotion, the observer behind the eyes, the self a criticism wounded, the boundary between a subject over here and experience over there. They say where they would have to find it if it existed as it seems. Then they look, until they feel a shift towards the conviction that the target is unfindable in direct experience.1 The search is designed to fail: it looks where an enacted reification would have to be, and finds nothing there. The practitioner runs the search again in the moments that matter, when they are tired or have just been criticised, until they see the absence more quickly and it starts to hold. Over time, a verdict finds less of a self to land on.
This family’s home is in the Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen lineages of Tibet, which often ask the practitioner to look for the mind. B. Alan Wallace teaches a classic form from Düdjom Lingpa’s Vajra Essence: look for where the mind comes from, where it stays, and where it goes, and then ask the same of the “I”. Harris passes on Douglas Harding’s version: look for whatever you are calling “I”, and notice what happens “the moment you turn consciousness upon itself” (p. 145). Peter Fenner, trained in Madhyamaka philosophy, moved the search into conversation: find the concept at the core of a painful story, and look with someone for what it refers to. Scott Kiloby’s Unfindable Inquiry teaches a contemporary form.
The third family is analytical meditation, whose classic home is Tsongkhapa’s and the Dalai Lama’s Geluk school. In the Dalai Lama’s version, the practitioner brings the self to mind as it appears in a charged moment, sees that if it existed the way it seems to, it would have to be either one with mind and body or separate from them, and shows that it can be neither. The tradition alternates this analysis with stabilising meditation: resting in the conclusion and returning to the analysis whenever its felt force fades (How to See Yourself As You Really Are, pp. 168–72). Progress runs from understanding to conviction to perception. At first, the conclusion is an argument you accept. Returned to over years, it becomes a certainty that no longer needs the steps, and then begins to change how things appear. The “I” that seemed to stand by itself under criticism stands less firmly.
The fourth family I will call ways of looking, after Burbea. Here the practitioner deliberately adopts different ways of regarding experience and notices their effects. They regard a sensation they normally feel as theirs as not theirs; notice how experience changes as grasping relaxes; attend to a present sensation against the vastness of time and space. The practices go beyond interpretation. The experience itself may become less solid, less painful, or even fade from awareness. Through repeated experiments, the practitioner begins to recognise how much of what seemed simply there depends on the looking. Of the five families, this one tests concealment most directly, because it varies the mind’s contribution and lets the practitioner watch the appearance change with it. In Seeing That Frees, Burbea concludes more broadly that every way of looking, including those of the other families, takes part in fabricating what appears, and that none reveals things as they are independently of the looking.
The fifth family I will call non-doing. Instead of directing attention or investigating experience, the practitioner releases the effort to control what happens. Shinzen Young’s Do Nothing practice gives a simple instruction: let whatever happens happen, and whenever you notice an intention to direct your attention, drop it. His meditation system carries the same release into action, letting thought, speech, and movement happen without the sense that someone is directing them. Sōtō Zen’s shikantaza and Adyashanti’s true meditation also ask the practitioner to stop manipulating experience, though each places that within its own understanding of what sitting is for. What loosens is the sense of a doer standing apart from experience, directing and managing it. Burbea warns of the limit. Even awareness that seems effortless and non-interfering takes part in fabricating what appears, so just resting with experience can leave untouched the assumptions built into perception itself.
The same instruction can belong to more than one family. Take the lens of impermanence. If impermanence is what you look for, you are in perceptual training; if it is one way of looking among others, compared with them, you are investigating how what appears depends on the looking. Ingram regards the three characteristics as the true nature of experience; Burbea treats them as ways of looking. The difference matters, because taking impermanence to be what is really there stops short of emptiness.
Each family contradicts a different claim that experience makes. Perceptual training meets the claim that something is solid, lasting, and one thing; searching, the claim that it is there in its own right. Analytical meditation tests whether it could exist as it seems, and ways of looking whether how it appears is so from its own side. Non-doing meets the claim that experience needs someone to run it; when the directing stops, experience goes on.
Two of these families get a closer look. Perceptual training is what most of the contemporary insight world practises, and searching is what the practitioner in the opening meets as too good to be true. Between them they also mark the widest contrast in how practice works.
Perceptual training
Perceptual training aims at lasting changes in perception. Ordinarily, experience has a felt substantiality: the sense that what we perceive consists of solid, separate, enduring things, including the self who perceives them. Through practice, this apparent solidity can begin to loosen. What seemed a distinct, solid thing resolves into sensations, and the sensations into changing patterns of activity. With finer attention, sensory experience may lose its substance and become more open and spacious. As this way of perceiving becomes more familiar, ordinary experience remains vivid and recognisable while feeling less solid, less divided into separate things, and less organised around a separate experiencer.
Take the verdict. At first it feels like a single condition that has taken hold of you. Attended closely, it becomes heat in the face, tension in the chest, images of what happened, and an inner voice rehearsing accusations, each arising, changing, and passing. Even these can thin, losing their density and their edges. The verdict need not disappear or become less intense, but its grip loosens, and it no longer shuts out the criticism itself.
Teachers explain perceptual training in two ways that fit together. Perception supplies much of what we experience as solid and stable. Roger Thisdell, a contemporary teacher, points out that you cannot see the back of your hand while holding it palm towards you, yet you are not surprised when it turns, because the mind has been filling it in. Experience is full of such filling-in, and it makes the world more concrete than the senses warrant. If the mind fills in this much, precise, steady attention catches experience before the filling-in is complete. Events arise and pass faster than the mind can assemble them into things.
Shinzen talks about sensory friction: the small tensions with which we grasp at or resist what arises, which interfere with how the mind processes sensory events and gives them weight. In his model, the mind adds solidity downstream of the senses, under that friction. The remedy is equanimity, letting sensations arise and pass without interference, and the more of it there is, the less there is to solidify. Sensory clarity lets experience come apart; equanimity stops the mind holding it together.
Perceptual training implicitly assumes that the most gripping reifications are rooted in how perception builds a solid and stable world, moment by moment. It is a bottom-up approach. Perception runs mostly outside voluntary control and changes gradually, under repeated evidence, gathered again in every sitting. That explains the demands of perceptual training. Shinzen puts the timescale in decades. The slowness has a compensation. Because the practice works on whatever arises, it can loosen reifications you are not aware of.
Where the assumption is right, perceptual training is hard to match. In pain, panic, and craving, perception builds the reifications that grip. Chronic pain hurts, and it also arrives as a dense block that feels like it will never end. Attended closely, the block comes apart into pressure, heat, and pulsing that shift from moment to moment, and the “never” goes with it. A surge of panic feels like a wall that will not stop rising, until you watch it rise, crest, and fall like any other wave of sensation. Craving presents itself as a demand that will only grow until you obey it, and an urge you watch without obeying swells and passes.
Where the assumption is wrong, the practice meets its limit. Burbea pointed to it in a talk: mindfulness exposes seeming solidity as a fabrication, but on its own sees “only a certain extent of emptiness”. The question is which extent. The first difficulty is that much of what grips hardest is a persistent claim rather than an event: a judgement, an identity, a sense of what you must do. Perceptual training reaches such a claim only through the events in which it shows up, and it meets those events at their contour, how they move, not what they say. Pain and craving make claims about themselves—that the pain will never end and the craving must be obeyed—and watching them pass contradicts both. That is how the practice loosens their grip. Whether a judgement is true is not a property of how its sensations move. Watching a thought as an event can loosen its claim to be a fact, but the practice does not aim there. Take the verdict again. Its sensations, images, and inner voice can thin, and each loses much of its pull. But their passing is no evidence against what the judgement says, and it returns in the next sinking in the chest, the next way of hearing feedback. A practitioner can become skilled at watching each of these events and never examine the judgement’s apparent warrant.
The second difficulty, in my experience of practising and teaching it, is that the practice often regulates more reliably than it de-reifies. Regulation is a change in how strongly a reaction runs: less arousal, less reactivity, more ease. De-reification is a change in how far a determination’s conditions are concealed. A meditator can sit calmly with the verdict entirely intact, and someone can see plainly that the verdict is a construction while their heart pounds. The test is what the reification settles in advance once you are calm: whether you avoid the feedback, whether you take the next email as confirming that you are a failure. Regulation is essential; a calmer mind can turn towards what it could not bear to look at. But regulation can lower a reification’s volume without changing what it says or loosening its grip. This holds even when the practitioner brings the content in on purpose, as in Shinzen’s Response Challenge practice, which trains equanimity with the reaction. Regulation can also mute the signal that tells you which content needs attention.
The kind of feedback perceptual training gives compounds both difficulties. A skilled practitioner will experience pleasant and spacious states, a gentler response to what used to trigger, and markers on the maps of insight. The first two can come from regulation alone, so neither shows which reifications have loosened. Wallace writes that after enough concentration, perhaps 10,000 hours, everything can come to appear as empty appearances arising in the mind, without any realisation of emptiness (Fathoming the Mind, p. 117). The feedback is also slow. Over decades, with nothing to compare against, a practitioner cannot easily tell which changes the practice produced, or what it has left alone.
Searching
Search practices loosen two forms of reification. One takes something as simply there, a thing in its own right. Its clearest target is the self, which appears as obvious as “I’m here”: someone receiving what is seen. Look for that someone behind the eyes or in the chest, and what turns up is a tight jaw, a racing thought, a pressure under the ribs, and seeing going on. A verdict needs a self to be about, and that self is what the search cannot find.
The other form takes a feature as a thing’s own: a quality that seems to sit in an object as plainly as its colour. “I am a failure” takes failure as a property of a thing called you. Look for the self who is a failure, and you find none. Look for an essence of failure, and you find none.
Taking something as a thing bundles two determinations: that it is one stable unit, and that it is there at all. Perceptual training loosens the first by breaking the unit into events; search loosens the second by failing to find it where it would have to be. The two can diverge. A practitioner can see the watcher as a stream of events, and it can still seem to be an entity.
A search puts an appearance to its own test. For anything whose only evidence is that it seems to be there, like the watcher behind the eyes or the boundary between inner and outer experience, the result is decisive. But a reification claims more than that something is simply there. A verdict can lose the self it landed on and keep its authority over you, and dread can turn out to have no owner and still insist that something terrible is coming. You also have other evidence that you exist as a person: a body, a history, a name others call you by and promises they hold you to. Showing that this person could not exist the way it seems is the work of analysis.
A search is only as good as its target. Set up in a calm sitting as a general instruction to look for the self or the boundary, it finds nothing of interest, because at the time neither was presenting itself. The target is what you enact: the self that appears when criticism lands and you feel wounded, the owner of a fear while the fear is running. Precision comes from evoking it rather than defining it, as the Dalai Lama does when he asks you to imagine being criticised for something you have not done.
Loose targets produce loose results, most visibly with the self. Taught as the “emptiness of self”, search sets out to refute a substantial, unified owner and controller of experience, the self a criticism wounds. What it can refute is that this self is simply there, as it seems to be. Instead, practitioners often report the result as a finding about what exists—there is no self, the self is an illusion—which the search never tested. A phenomenologist such as Dan Zahavi, for whom the subject of experience is never one of its objects, predicts the same non-finding as someone who denies a self. Asked directly whether there is a self, the Buddha stayed silent, because either answer would have sided with a view (Saṃyutta Nikāya 44.10).
A non-finding is also easy to dismiss. Thoughts and feelings go on as before; what changes is how you hold them. A practitioner who expects a new state can miss the change and conclude that nothing happened. Stories like Harris’s set up an expectation of a dramatic shift. For most people, most of the time, the shift is ordinary enough to overlook.
When the search works, it works fast. But a glimpse is not arrival. In a dark bedroom, the outline by the door is a figure until you turn on the light and it is a coat. Turn the light off and the figure is back. You cannot keep a non-finding, and you cannot search more deeply, only again, with a sharper target. The longer task comes after the glimpse, in meeting each reification again as it reassembles. The main risk is a search that works. The practitioner takes the result for the destination and neglects the integration and the other practices that could finish the job.
The difference between a glimpse and keeping it resolves part of the quarrel the essay began with. Harris’s years of vipassanā and his minutes with Tulku Urgyen were not a slow road and a fast road to the same place. The minutes reached what the years had left standing: the sense of a thing called self to be transcended. Harris suggests the years also prepared the ground, since without time spent seeking self-transcendence the other way, a student is unlikely to recognise the glimpse as the answer (p. 148). The speed is not too good to be true. Whether something is there admits only yes or no, so a single look can contradict it; how solid and stable it appears is a perceptual habit that changes slowly.
One insight?
The traditions say more than this essay has. In the third century CE, Āryadeva wrote:
Whoever has a perfect vision of one thing,
Has the perfect vision of all things,
For the emptiness of one thing
Is the emptiness of all things.Āryadeva, Four Hundred Verses 8.16, trans. Lobsang P. Lhalungpa, in Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, Mahāmudrā: The Moonlight (2006)
It is easy to hear more in this than it says: that one deep enough insight would undo every reification, and the only question about practice is how to reach it. Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, the sixteenth-century Mahāmudrā teacher whose manual quotes the verse, draws the line more carefully. Directly realising the emptiness of one moment of mind is realising the emptiness of every moment, so there is no need to examine everything. But the realisation does not remove the habits that keep constructing things. As each event arises, the practitioner has to come to the same realisation about it.2 The insight’s scope is universal; its application is one construction at a time.
Every reification has the same shape: something shows up as settled from its own side. You can see that shape itself. In perceptual training, you catch it in the act, as the mind assembles experience. In ways of looking, you find it in how appearances change with the looking. What grows from these insights is general. Appearances lose some of their default authority, and one question becomes available anywhere: what am I fabricating here? In my experience, nothing changes the frame more.
What does not follow is that release generalises with insight into how the mind constructs experience. If one insight undid every reification, nothing would remain to be released after it, and the traditions themselves say a great deal does. For Tsongkhapa, the first direct realisation of emptiness removes the grasping acquired from philosophical views, while innate grasping wears away over a long path afterwards. The Pali canon draws the same line in its list of fetters: the view of a self as one’s identity falls at stream-entry, the first stage of awakening, while the conceit “I am” falls only at the last. Ingram, who holds that perceiving the three characteristics directly is awakening, also insists that such attainments leave much emotional and personal work undone.
Insight may transfer well within one form of reification. Once a practitioner sees a few sensations change, the rest readily look the same way. We cannot say the same of release from one form to another. Someone can see, almost anywhere, that a thought is arriving and already leaving, while a colleague’s comment on their work lands as a verdict on who they are.
Even if grasping has a single root, release rarely happens all at once. Nor is any insight the last word. Each can harden into a reification of its own. Loosen the sense of solid objects, and you may begin taking flow as what is really there. Dissolve the thing and you may come to rest on the process, or on the space in which everything appears, or on the awareness that knows it. Here metaphysics might enter, when a recognition that loosened one form becomes a picture of what reality ultimately is. Processes, space, and awareness lack intrinsic nature as surely as the verdict does. Burbea develops this at length in Seeing That Frees, and turns it into meditations on the emptiness of insight itself. Taft tells his students the same about awareness. Held as a view, even “it is all constructed” becomes one more thing taken as settled from its own side.
What to practise
Return to the practitioner from the start of this essay: years of practice, less reactive, more fulfilled, but sensing that something is missing, and still seeking. The usual diagnosis is insufficient depth of practice, with more practice as the cure. But reifications loosen unevenly, and each practice loosens the forms it can reach. Uneven results show where a practice has been able to go.
A reification hides its conditions, but it gives itself away: a reaction that flares at criticism, an unease that will not lift, a desire that tightens into grasping, moral certainty held against your political opponents. Some signals are pleasant: the elation you hold on to, the satisfaction of being proven right. Not every pain signals a grip that practice should eliminate. Grief at a death and sorrow at an injustice are often what caring about something feels like. Some persistent distress tracks something true, such as a hostile workplace or an unfair criticism. De-reification does not refute a sound determination, any more than the A stops being an A. What can loosen is its grip, and that can leave you freer to act on what is true. Life shows you where to look. The signals most worth following tend to repeat across diverse situations, outlast their occasion, or run out of proportion to it.
So life is what generates the material for de-reification. The verdict surfaces when the criticism comes, moral certainty when the opponent speaks. A life arranged around avoiding such moments produces few signals, which makes avoidance the first obstacle, in place before any practice begins. But some reifications give little signal, because nothing in your experience varies them: the worldview you look out from, the comparison you always make. What never varies is hard to see from inside. It comes into view through another person’s eyes, a change of context, or a disruption.
Within practice, the same obstacle returns in a different form. Meditation often turns attention from content to contour. Content carries the strongest signals, but turning towards it is not enough. Rumination stays with the verdict for hours and only rehearses it. When we meet a reification the way we usually live it, we enact it again, and it grips more firmly. Loosening the verdict means staying with it longer, and differently, until what it takes as settled becomes visible. Inquiry practices are built for this. In Focusing, Eugene Gendlin’s practice, you attend to the felt sense of a situation and wait for words that fit. With the verdict, the chest is tight, and “failure” is not quite right. “Exposed” is closer. Something in the chest eases, and the verdict no longer covers everything.3 Meditation teachers often treat inquiry of this kind as support for the real practice. It is de-reification proper, done where the reification lives.
De-reification practices draw on a few core capacities, in different proportions. Shinzen Young specifies three that mindfulness trains: concentration, the ability to stay with what you choose; sensory clarity, the ability to detect, untangle, and track experience; and equanimity, letting experience come and go without pushing or pulling at it. Beneath all three lies regulation: enough steadiness to meet what is here without being flooded.4 Clarity in Shinzen’s sense tracks sensory experience, and sets aside meaning. Inquiry tracks meaning. A reification lives at both levels, in a tightness in the chest and in what the tightness insists is true, so loosening it needs clarity in both senses.
Targeting reifications starts with reflection. A reification loosens where something contradicts what it takes as settled from its own side. The contradiction need not be an argument: seeing a thought as a thought rather than a fact, as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s defusion does, or finding a truer word, as in Focusing, can be enough. But we cannot contradict what we have not identified. That needs clarity about three things: what reification is, what this particular one takes as settled, and what we are asking the practice to refute. Tsongkhapa made it the hinge of his method: identify the object of negation before you try to negate it. Contemporary practice often skips this step, perhaps because its culture wants to treat experience as the authority, trusting what practitioners see on the cushion to speak for itself. It does not. Experience arrives full of determinations, and to treat it as speaking for itself is to take what it shows as settled from its own side, with the mind’s contribution concealed. Practice without a target then misfires twice: it aims at the wrong thing (loosening the solidity of dread while its claim to be a warning goes untouched) and misjudges its results (regulation mistaken for the insight that the dread is empty). The traditions built reflection into the order of training, between hearing the teaching and meditating on it.
Most people benefit from a base practice, and perceptual training is a good one, at a dose that fits your life. It builds the capacities above, and with practice it changes how things appear. If you are drawn to it, practise it at full strength, with retreats and support; the development is real. Judge it by what changes in your life rather than by stages on a map. When something changes, ask what changed. A gentler reaction, a verdict that feels less solid or less yours, and a verdict that no longer settles what is true about you are different results. Perceptual training can leave claims intact even after thousands of hours of practice. If years pass and criticism still turns into the same verdict, add a targeted practice rather than striving harder.
The other families, and inquiry outside them, target claims directly, and you may have a sense of which kinds grip you most. Inquiry tests what the content insists is true while it is live, and sometimes the content holds. Search and inquiry give feedback quickly. A week of brief searches will tell you whether you can find the one who seems to look out from behind the eyes.
For the practitioner at the start, what feels missing may lie in two places. One is what the practice is not reaching in the rest of their life: the criticism that still lands as a verdict. The other is the practice itself. The meditator on the path, the one who lacks something, and the awakening waiting at its end can be claims like any other, taken as settled. When the goal always seems one retreat away, that claim is the one to turn the practice on.
A practice with stages, hours, and attainments suits a mind that wants to fix itself, and that mind can recruit any of the five families. You can practise diligently, while the demand to become awakened organises the life around the practice. Some of what grips loosens only when you turn towards it.
What emptiness leaves
Emptiness is a negation: it denies that anything we meet is settled from its own side and affirms nothing in its place. Practice applies that negation to what grips. It loosens what you take as settled from its own side, and leaves what reaches you where it was. A path organised around de-reification would be one organised around correction, and correction by itself cannot build what it frees you for: love, connection, meaning, contribution, play, rest.
Love is empty too. If insight dissolves the verdict, why would it spare love? The traditions never said that seeing through dissolves all suffering. Physical pain survives it; the suttas show the Buddha resting an aching back. What falls away is the suffering that depended on reification, and love divides along the same line. Some of what we call love is reification: the other fixed into the image you fell for, love held as a possession, the promise that none of it will change. That love loosens, and losing it can hurt. What remains is simpler and harder: this matters, and we are here, with each other. Wishing another life to go well claims nothing emptiness denies. It needs the other person to exist, to be able to suffer and to flourish, and to matter. Dependence leaves all three standing.
As the self loosens, care can reach past the edge of “me”. Iris Murdoch wrote that love is “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”.5
Someone criticises your work again. This time it lands on the work, and you can see the person who gave it.
In Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen, the non-finding opens onto recognising awareness as both empty and cognisant, which this essay does not cover.
Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, Moonbeams of Mahāmudrā, trans. Elizabeth M. Callahan (2019), pp. 241–42 (“knowing one liberates all”); for the requirement to meet each arising again, see Daniel P. Brown, Pointing Out the Great Way (2006), ch. 6.
Eugene Gendlin, Focusing (1978). Focusing belongs to a wider set of practices that test what experience claims while it is live, among them Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s defusion, Bruce Ecker’s Coherence Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, Byron Katie’s The Work, Aletheia, the Diamond Approach’s inquiry, and, between people, Circling and Insight Dialogue. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change reaches assumptions that never vary. None of these describes itself as de-reification; that reading is mine.
Regulation is my addition. The idea of a range within which experience can be met without being flooded is Daniel Siegel’s window of tolerance (The Developing Mind, 1999), now standard in trauma-sensitive approaches to meditation. Jared Lindahl and colleagues documented a wide range of meditation-related difficulties among Western Buddhist practitioners, some severe and lasting (“The Varieties of Contemplative Experience”, PLOS ONE, 2017).
Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good” (1959), reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics (1997), p. 215. Her best-known case, in “The Idea of Perfection” (1964; same volume, pp. 312–13), is a mother who thinks her son has married badly. She finds his wife brusque, unpolished, and tiresomely juvenile, and treats her impeccably all the same. Then, suspecting her own snobbery and jealousy, she looks again, until the young woman appears “refreshingly simple” rather than vulgar, and youthful rather than juvenile. Murdoch lets the couple move away, or the daughter-in-law die, to make clear that the whole change happens in how the mother sees.