First there is the understanding. First there is the realization of emptiness or dependent origination, and then there is nibbāna.

- The Buddha (SN 12:70)

Bratwurst, Lederhosen, Oktoberfest, Munich, Berlin, Holocaust, Hitler, and Merkel all clearly point to a thing we call "Germany." In a way, Germany is a real thing: you physically cannot cross the border into Germany without a valid travel permit, and countless people have gone to war and died for (or against) this thing we call Germany.

At the same time, there's another deep sense in which Germany does not really exist. Sure—over the centuries, billions of people have uttered words that express their belief in the existence of Germany ("I'm going to Germany this summer," "My son will fight for Germany," "Germany is totally a thing"); and there exist countless documents (especially in German government buildings) saying something to the effect of "We hereby confirm the existence of Germany" or "These are the rules by which German citizens should abide;" and most people agree where the German border is, as documented by modern maps.

But a Buddhist trained in emptiness (suññatā in Pali) recognizes that all of those are just stories, ideas, and perceptions that reinforce the seeming existence of each other:

• When someone says "I am from Germany," the Buddhist thinks "ah yes, those are sounds that many people like her have uttered and continue to utter. Is Germany in those sounds?"
• When someone takes out their copy of the German Constitution, the Buddhist thinks "ah, some ink patterns on some paper—popular ink patterns indeed. Is Germany in that ink? On that paper?"
• When someone points to where the German border is supposed to be, the Buddhist thinks "that's some nice piece of land. Looking closely, however, I see nothing but dirt. Is Germany in this handful of dirt? Behind it? Underneath?"

Having looked everywhere and failing to find where Germany actually is, the Buddhist concludes that Germany doesn't inherently exist. Its apparent existence is only a fabrication of the minds of many people: it depends on people uttering certain phrases, certain documents containing certain ink patterns, certain maps containing certain borders, etc. Germany, being dependent on such conditions, does not exist inherently.

The Buddhist rejoices. "Why go to war over something that doesn't really exist? Why get angry when the neighboring country makes an unwholesome remark about Germany? If "Germany" is nothing but a story, why not choose to tell ourselves a nicer story than what we have?"

Putin, too, rejoices. "Listen to the monk! Since borders are arbitrary, let us redraw them more beautifully so that this "thing" "Germans" call "Bavaria" gets renamed as "New Petersburg", with slightly larger, rounder borders. Namaste, suchki!"

I don't know if the Buddha thought about the implications of emptiness for world politics—the Pali Canon doesn't have a section on game theory, as far as I know. But he was convinced that insight into emptiness was key to liberation. This is how meditation teacher Rob Burbea starts his magnum opus Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising:

Revered in the tradition as the "crown jewels" of the Dharma, the Buddha's teachings on emptiness and dependent arising point and pave the way to the most beautiful possibilities for us as human beings. Their realization brings a truly radical revolution in our whole sense of existence in a way that opens up a profound and extraordinary freedom.

I read Seeing That Frees a couple of years ago and so many of the ideas have stayed with me since then, though it could take me a lifetime to really digest and incorporate all of the material in the book. There's so much gold in there.

Last week, two friends and I spent one week in the Swiss mountains listening to Rob's recordings on emptiness from 2010 and practicing different meditation techniques to deepen our understanding of these teachings. This post is a collection of assorted thoughts and notes from the retreat, including various techniques I tried, what worked, what didn't work, and a few open questions. The unpolished notes are mostly for future me, but I thought I'd share them nonetheless.

But before I start, I want to share some context on my personal motivation, which goes back to an evening in late 2023 that really opened my eyes to the power of emptiness, in what I consider to be my most intense meditation-related moment yet.¹

My moment of insight into emptiness

It was the early evening of a regular workday and I was working hard to finish a grant application that was due that night. It was a pretty high-stakes task, with a lot of money involved and little time to polish the proposal. A colleague of mine was giving feedback on my Google Doc in real time, and he was also palpably stressed, judging from the tone of his comments. The whole situation was making me really stressed, and it was becoming increasingly harder for me to focus, which was very inconvenient given that I still had quite some work to do and not much time left.

At the time, I had recently finished reading Seeing That Frees and had been thinking about emptiness a lot. I was also reading Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom by Andrew Holocek, which suggests, uh, well, using moments of pain and difficult emotions to practice meditation and make faster progress on the meditative path.

The timing was great—I noticed that I was suffering and took up Andrew's advice to do some meditation right then and there. I closed my eyes and started contemplating the emptiness of my whole situation: the "grant application" was, like Germany, just some story that my colleagues, our donors, and I kept telling each other; our "organization" was also not really real—just some document filed with the IRS or something, plus some website, etc.; "money" too is empty anyway.

I just kept going, peeling layer by layer of this seemingly solid, heavy "grant application" and everything it depended on. And just a few minutes in (I don't remember how long, but probably not even 10 minutes), something clicked. Not only did I intellectually believe in the emptiness of these things, but I really felt it and believed it in my body. I felt a little explosion in my head—literally a wave of energy that started somewhere deep inside my brain, expanding upwards and outwards to the edge of my brain, and then traveling back down, following a sort of toroidal path.

Immediately, the stress and anxiety dissipated completely. I was smiling ear to ear. I then got back to work, finished that grant proposal in a state of cool contentment, went back home, and slept like a baby.

"Holy smokes," I thought. "What if this thing that just happened means I'm now immune to work-related anxiety? Did I just rewire my brain into a state of constant cool contentment?"

Yeah, I didn't. But I do think that something shifted. If anything, I became more convinced than ever of the promise of the Dharma, and that deep transformation is within my reach.

Needless to say, I was very excited to spend a week diving deeper into emptiness. With such limited time, though, I only caught some glimpses of the power of the practice, but I already look forward to the next retreat.

Finally: I think it is an insanely beautiful coincidence that seeing the world more clearly also happens to bring bliss and liberation. What a good deal! On various occasions during the retreat, I thought to myself: "how incredibly privileged am I to get to practice seeing things more clearly; to be among the very, very few in the history of humanity who actually take the time to contemplate the nature of reality firsthand; to try to make this tiny corner of the universal field of consciousness see itself more clearly and be freer! And it literally only requires me to sit with my own mind!" Can recommend.

Notes

Samadhi and metta

Rob spends a lot of time emphasizing the importance of practicing techniques that enhance samadhi to complement one's emptiness practice. In particular, he suggests doing some metta meditation every day because, among others, it provides a "warm, cozy environment to do emptiness practice." Also, as he puts it, more samadhi means "less fabrication, less self, less world." So we incorporated a metta meditation every morning, also guided by Rob (from some of his other retreats, e.g. this one or this one).

Generally, I loved how much he emphasizes approaching insight practice with love, joy, excitement, and wonder. Emptiness practice can sometimes feel effortful, so one useful prompt he suggests is asking "Where is the love, now?" I used this prompt as often as I could during emptiness meditations. Initially, I'd do some metta in the morning and then completely switch gears to emptiness practice, and while I was probably still experiencing some metta after-effects, they had largely gone away. So instead I tried to suffuse my emptiness meditations with metta simultaneously, meaning that every now and then, I'd take a moment to kindle feelings of loving-kindness. This helped a lot.

I also found it useful to imagine metta waves ironing the web of my (dependently originated) field of awareness, from a spider web-like structure with a central region that feels like the self, to a square lattice without a central locus.

Required reading: mettannealing.

Objectifying and deobjectifying thing

I have been practicing Roger Thisdell's meditations on (de)objectifying thing (this one and this one in particular), which are based on his Very Streamlined Enlightenment Protocol. Rob's talks and guided meditations are very synergistic with Roger's framework. Both emphasize the importance of noting that every sensation is ultimately made of the same stuff. From Rob's talk on the three characteristics:

As the sense of collectedness and steadiness settles, it's actually possible to open up to the totality of our experience: body, mind, all six senses (mind is a sixth sense in the Dharma) at once. But because there's a steadiness, the consciousness is able to open out and feel like it's steady taking in everything. Does that make sense, totality? [yogi in background: At the same time?] Yes, everything -- it's almost like not really differentiating between listening, sounds, and body sensations. It's just all happening, all bubbling away, and it's all impermanent, or it's all stuff in relation to which to let go in our relationship, etc., or it's all just not-self, etc.

And from his talk on emptiness and the vastness of awareness:

And then -- again, this is just review of the guided meditation -- getting this sense that all phenomena are kind of held within that space of awareness. All phenomena are kind of effortlessly embraced and held in that. And, even more, all phenomena, all experience, seem to or can be seen to appear out of that space of awareness and disappear back into it.

Roger suggests focusing on somatic sensations in particular (as opposed to, say, the visual field). I found the somatic sensations of the breath particularly great to (try to) (de)objectify. I also noticed some strong effects from asking myself things like "If it's all the same… is that sound of the wind the same as… my breath? Is my breath the same as… this thought?"

Good reminder by Rob: the three characteristics should not be considered the ultimate insight, but rather a stepping stone to realizing the emptiness of everything.

Noting gone

Students sometimes ask me "is there a quickest path to enlightenment?" My standard answer is "perhaps, but I don't think it's currently known by humanity. In our current stage of spiritual science (dhamma), different approaches seem to work for different people. That's why I like to give you folks a wide range of contrasting techniques to choose from." A few days ago, I decided to do a thought experiment. What if I were only allowed to teach one focus technique and no other? Which technique would I pick? Hard choice. But I think it would be the technique I call "Just Note Gone."

I've also been practicing "noting gone" during the last year, and I incorporated it into the retreat too. Something about its simplicity appeals to me. Some things I tried that had a strong effect include:

• Taking a step back from noting gone every now and then to be meta-aware of the craziness of gone-ness.
• Trying to note the gone-ness of the "gone" thought itself.
• Imagining carrying a cosmic eraser that erases every single experience I have (Shinzen uses this eraser metaphor in his book).
• Imagining a graveyard of all experiences I've ever had, right behind me. And that his graveyard will host all experiences I'll ever have.
• Noting the gone-ness of feelings of metta, and asking where this "metta" is.
• Asking myself: "Why are you still surprised and amazed about the gone-ness of reality? You've seen it over and over. Stop being surprised!"
• Using "gone mantras" such as "This is it." "This is the nature of the mind," "This is me," "This is my life," "All experiences are gone," "I am a sliver," or "My life has never not been this / My life will never not be this". I also tried to note the gone-ness of the mantras themselves, and sometimes the gone-ness of each word or syllable.
• Noticing how light I am: Nothing but a sliver of experience with barely any spatiotemporal extension.
• Noting the gone-ness of any sensation associated with the self, as well as that of any sensation of (dis)satisfaction.

The emptiness of consciousness

Rob talks about how we should also realize the emptiness of consciousness itself, an idea I struggle with since my working ontology is that only consciousness exists (and its substrate is nothing but the fundamental fields of physics). One of the key arguments he introduces goes something like this: 'knowing' needs a 'known,' and the 'known' needs a 'knowing'. They are therefore dependently arising and not inherently existent. 'Consciousness' and 'perception' are like the 'knowing' and the 'known'. And since we know that everything we perceive is empty, consciousness itself must also be empty, as it depends on empty objects of perception. (He talks about this in his talk "No Mind" and in chapter 25 of Seeing That Frees.)

In his book, he presents this guided meditation to practice the idea above:

I tried this meditation using the breath as my object of perception, trying to see its emptiness as clearly as possible. For example, I'd ask: Is this sensation the breath? Or this one? Did the breath already start, end? What if it's extremely short? Or long? What if I hold my breath? Is that a new breath? Where is this thing everyone keeps calling the breath?" Now, I could see how my consciousness was holding this empty construct, but I just couldn't shake the fact that this construct was appearing in some sort of substrate that feels like some-thing. I couldn't disentangle the fact that "consciousness" as an idea may well be empty while acknowledging that its thinginess is still, somehow, real. I'm confused.

More random notes and questions

Zero ontology: Emptiness seems consistent with zero ontology. But how does the fundamentality of consciousness come into the picture? Should we think of 'consciousness' and 'perception' as something akin to particle/antiparticle pairs? And what do we make of the fact that, according to the Standard Model, there seem to be some physical quantities that are not contingent on other physical facts (in particular, a field's spin as well as the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field)? Should we expect future versions of the Standard Model to find that these quantities are, in fact, also relational and not intrinsic? Or are we using words like "dependence" to mean different things? What does the emptiness of time tell us about the ontological status of time in physics, if anything?

Metta solidifying the self: Am I solidifying my sense of self whenever I send metta towards myself? Is there a more, uh… nondual (?) way to practice? ("May this corner of the universal field of consciousness live with kindness and with ease.") It probably doesn't matter—the benefits likely far outweigh any solidification effects.

Expanding my attention to attenuate thoughts: On various occasions, I started my meditation with 5–20 minutes of counting within the breath (which was the most useful of the various concentration practices suggested by Rob in his jhana retreat). On one occasion, I noticed that expanding my attention to include my whole body helped me stay more focused (by default, my attention was too concentrated around my head). This then reminded me of Daniel Ingram's "thoughts in the room" "hack," so I tried to include as much as I could of my surroundings into my field of attention. As expected, this caused the distracting thoughts to become even quieter and smaller. Try it! At some point, especially when I tried to include as much of my visual field as possible, I started having very mild psychedelic-like effects, such as drifting, a blurring of colors, and a general tendency of gestalts un-gestalting—things becoming stuff.

(Un)learning to name emotions: At one point, Rob talks about noticing the emptiness of emotions. For example, you can ask yourself "where exactly is this sadness? Is it this specific feeling of pressure behind my eyes?" Deconstructing sadness in such a way can make it feel much lighter. Which made me think: could one of the most unambiguously embraced pieces of parenting advice—namely, teaching children to recognize and name their emotions—actually be counterproductive? Are we teaching children to solidify body sensations into Real Emotions that may cause them to actually suffer more? What's the middle way here? (Probably: give them the vocabulary, yes, but also force them to listen to Rob Burbea's talks every night before going to bed. Yeah.)

Dependent arising of thoughts and stress: At one point, I remembered a work-related email that was causing me some annoyance. My initial reaction was to just try to set it aside, but then I decided to use it as an object of my emptiness meditation. I forced myself to think about the email, which felt a bit like stepping into a cold shower. I immediately noticed an unpleasant tension in my left leg, which I realized was the feeling of stress I had been trying to avoid. Now, instead of thinking of the email as being the cause of the tension in my leg, I tried to see them as dependently arising, more akin to an electron/positron pair than to a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball. In other words, there is no leg tension without the thought of the email, but also the leg tension keeps the thought of the email alive. I visualized both of them side by side in my mind's eye, trying to see them as dependently arising. Very quickly, both faded into mere whispers.

Healthy effort: Healthy effort in meditation requires four things: aspiration, confidence, joy, and rest. Remember to approach even the most hardcore insight practice with lightheartedness and joy. At the same time, occasionally ask yourself whether you should be taking any risks with your meditation practice.

Vocalization: Occasionally, saying some mantras out loud had a strong effect.

My favorite guided metta meditation: This one on gratitude and compassion, especially when I imagined all the people who have supported me in some way throughout my life by offering me a fraction of their time, attention, care, love, resources. So. Many. People.

Doing nothing and deeply letting go: Whenever I felt like I didn't have a lot of energy to meditate, I'd do some 'do nothing' meditation lying down on the floor. I also enjoyed this meditation on 'deeply letting go,' especially when followed by this track, which was very trance-inducing.

Attention is not all you need: Rob emphasizes the importance of concepts/theory/philosophy to inform one's practice. Bare attention is not enough. Which insights, ideas, frames could help me most? How do I navigate the state-space intelligently?

Muscle relaxation exercises: I tried the following exercises to release muscle tension once (found here; I don't know who Christopher Hyatt is but I thought it'd be fun to experiment with):

I did feel much more relaxed and my mind was more settled than usual, but it was also time-consuming (20–30 minutes).

Perfumes: I brought some Eau de Cologne Vide with me (can there be a more perfect scent for an emptiness retreat?) While I didn't quite enjoy the smell while meditating (I thought it had a bit of spikiness that didn't synergize well with the practice), it was great to have around and smell occasionally. The perfume will now forever remind me of the retreat. I also brought some Fearless with me, just in case I entered some fearful territory. Luckily, I didn't need it, but Rob made me realize that there's a place for fearlessness regardless, in a passage that moved me deeply:

And just reflecting, as I was lighting the candle, our capacity for love, our capacity to give has everything to do with our fearlessness, our ability to be fearless. And that fearlessness rests on our seeing emptiness. Or rather, our seeing of emptiness is something that profoundly enlarges our capacity for fearlessness. When there's fearlessness, there's more capacity to give.

May you be fearless!

Footnotes

1. For context: I started meditating in 2015, initially very intensely, then on and off in a very routine way for several years, and then again more intensely since 2023. ↩