This is Part I of a series exploring meditation and emptiness. For context, you may want to read the series introduction first.
“Everything, all the way down, is models.” — a sentence I wrote in my journal that I’m still unpacking
I didn’t come to meditation looking for emptiness.
I’ve actually been meditating since 2014. It’s been a part of my life for over a decade now—but in the time leading up to this journey, my practice had gone a little stagnant. What had once been intimate and curious had become mechanical. Full of dead inertia. Sit, breathe, hope something shifts. Nothing really did.
Then I found Rob Burbea.
Or more accurately, a friend shared a link to one of Rob’s jhāna retreats. I clicked play while folding laundry. And within minutes, I was completely taken.
There was something in the way he spoke—unhurried, lyrical, precise—that bypassed the usual filters. He didn’t talk like a man trying to explain something. He talked like someone inviting me to look again. I trusted him immediately.
So I started practicing again. First samādhi, then some gentle jhāna work. His talks became part of my days—guiding walks, anchoring mornings, accompanying moments of friction. Titles like Selflessness and a Life of Love, Unbinding the World, Attitude, Effort, Attainment, and View became familiar companions.
Eventually, I picked up Seeing That Frees, the one book Rob wrote before he died. I wanted more of this—more of that.
But when I started reading, I hit a wall.
The Book That Bounced Off Me
I made it a few chapters in and stalled out.
The writing felt dense. The arguments abstract. Nothing landed. I found myself re-reading the same paragraph five times, then putting the book down and staring out the window. It wasn’t making contact.
My first thought was: maybe this book is beyond me. Maybe I wasn’t practiced enough to receive what it was pointing to.
But something in me knew this wasn’t a book to give up on.
So when I came across a yearlong study program based around Seeing That Frees—complete with monthly lectures, guided readings, sutta study, and group journaling—I signed up almost immediately.
The idea was simple: sit with the teachings over twelve months, and reflect. Slowly, deliberately. Let the thing sink in.
A Spark on the Body, a Grain in the Eye
There’s a line from Düdjom Lingpa’s The Foolish Dharma of an Idiot Clothed in Mud and Feathers that struck me like lightning:
“Without procrastinating until tomorrow and the next day, arouse a sense of urgency, as if a spark landed on your body or a grain of sand fell in your eye.”
It stopped me cold.
Because the truth is: it’s a miracle I’m even here. That I have a mind capable of reflection, a life that supports practice, teachings I can access, and a sangha I can learn with.
This doesn’t happen by accident.
And it won’t last forever.
This moment—this exact moment—might be the only chance I get. That realization didn’t make me panic. It made me still.
A kind of quiet resolve settled in: Don’t wait. Don’t squander this. Practice like something matters.
Armed with this urgency, I began the program. This post is the first of those reflections—the beginning of a process I could already feel was going to change me in ways I didn’t understand yet.
Everything is Models (Even That Statement)
I have a PhD in astrophysics. I spent years building mathematical models of galaxies—trying to simulate how they form, how they change, how they behave across incomprehensible spans of time.
And that meant I lived and breathed reductionism. It was in my bones.
You break a system down into parts. You isolate variables. You simplify the real so you can do the math. You make models.
And somewhere in the back of your mind, you still believe—however humbly—that if you go deep enough, if you keep zooming in, you’ll hit something solid. The bottom layer. The real real.
I used to say, only half-jokingly: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
And then I started practicing with emptiness.
I still remember the moment from Seeing That Frees—a line that casually pointed out that even reductionist materialism is just another view. Not truth. Not the world. Just a lens.
It broke something open.
“Everything, all the way down, is models.”
I remember writing that line in my journal and then staring at it for a long time.
“There is no magical level below which the models are any more real than what I was building. Protons? Models. Quarks? Models. Gravity? A model.”
The thought didn’t frighten me. It didn’t even really surprise me. But it unhooked something. Something I hadn’t realized was binding me.
It wasn’t a rejection of science. It was a deeper application of its humility. A kind of full-circle realization: that even the frameworks I used to decode reality were just more helpful fictions. Useful—but still fictions.
There was no ground. Just view layered on view.
The Described, Not the Description
One of the first things I started to notice in practice, once I began this study in earnest, was how quickly my mind would leap from experience to narration.
If something interesting happened in meditation—a curious sensation, a spacious moment, a flicker of stillness—my thinking mind would immediately begin describing it. Usually in the voice I imagined using to explain it to my group.
It was subtle, but it pulled me out of the experience every time.
Eventually, a phrase arose that became a kind of touchstone:
The described, not the description.
Every time I noticed myself analyzing, packaging, preparing a narrative, I came back. To the sensation itself. To the breath. To the unfiltered moment.
This simple phrase started to shift how I meditated. I stopped trying to turn experience into insight and just let the experience unfold. Sometimes it was ordinary. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes painful. But it was finally mine, not my commentary on it.
And that, as it turns out, made all the difference.
The First Crack in the Mirror
That was the beginning.
Not just of a course, or a reading plan, but of something much harder to name. A shift in orientation. A soft unraveling of assumptions I didn’t know I had.
What came next surprised me.
I started looking at the idea of a “self.” At how I define myself, contradict myself, cling to certain traits and hide from others. And slowly, that sense of identity—so central, so stable—started to flicker.
There was even a moment when the “little guy in my head”—the one I thought was me—just disappeared.
But that’s a story for another time.
This is Part I of the “Unbuilding the Self” series. View the series overview, or continue to Part II: The Vanishing Self.
Leave a comment