This is Part III of a series exploring meditation and emptiness. For context, you may want to read the series introduction first.
“When I look for the place that awareness comes from, I can’t find a center. When I stop looking, it’s everywhere.”
— from my journal
When the self started to flicker, something else stepped forward: the ordinary.
Not the dull or the boring, but the background hum of daily life. The fan in the room. The shape of my shadow in the corner of my eye. The way my daughter says “just a little bit” when she wants something very much. These things had always been there, but now they glowed. Not because they were more meaningful—but because they weren’t trying to be anything at all.
In the months that followed, I found myself drawn to what I now think of as the grace of ordinary emptiness. Not grand insights, not fireworks, but the way things soften when you stop needing them to stand for something.
Everything Fades (Even the Toaster)
Another insight that arrived around this time was one of the most ordinary, and one of the most strange.
I was sitting in meditation, noticing sound. There was a low hum from a space heater across the room. Normally, I would have called it background noise. Not worth attention.
But something shifted. I started to notice the sound not as a “thing,” but as a flickering. A presence that came and went with each pulse of attention.
Then a thought: The heater doesn’t make a continuous sound. I just keep re-noticing it.
That simple realization cracked open a whole layer of view. Because if the heater only exists when I notice it—what else is like that? How many things in my experience are present but not central?
This led to a phrase that became a kind of koan for me:
Even the toaster fades.
Not everything needs to disappear. Some things just need to be seen in the background.
And that’s enough for freedom.
The View Builds the World
Throughout this process, one thing kept ringing true: view is generative.
It doesn’t just interpret experience. It creates it.
When I sat with the view of impermanence, things flickered. When I sat with the view of not-self, identity collapsed. When I sat with the view of awareness, space opened up. Each view brought forward a different world. Not in theory—in direct perception.
This changed how I approached practice. I stopped looking for the “right” view and started asking: what view serves here? What loosens clinging? What reveals possibility?
It reminded me of something from my physics days: you use different equations for different scales. Newton for the baseball. Relativity for the planet. Quantum theory for the atom. Each model is incomplete, but useful. None are reality.
Maybe dharma views are the same.
The Tension of Being Seen
Around this time, a subtle desire emerged in practice: the wish to be seen.
It wasn’t about visibility in the social sense. It was subtler. The wish for my insights to be known. The hope that my practice would register somewhere. The quiet longing to be a “serious” student in the eyes of someone I respected.
And beneath that, a fear: that if no one saw this work, it wouldn’t count.
I sat with that for a while. What I began to notice was that this desire to be seen was actually a kind of contraction—a clinging to identity. An inner leaning forward. A need to locate myself somewhere, anywhere, in the field of view.
Of course, the irony here isn’t lost on me. I’m writing all this in a public blog post.
But there’s a difference between wanting to be seen and letting yourself be seen. The first is about performance. The second is about vulnerability.
It still feels edgy to name all this here. But part of my practice now is being willing to say the quiet parts out loud—not to be validated, but to be honest. To loosen the grip.
The deeper this goes, the less there is to hold up as progress. And the more grace there is in anonymity.
When Vision Goes Quiet
At one point, I became fascinated with visual silence. I wanted to know: what is the quietest thing I can see?
It turns out, vision doesn’t have a “zero.” Even with eyes closed, there’s a dance of light, color, afterimage. A stubborn refusal to be still.
But then I realized: the silence isn’t visual. It’s the moment I stop labeling what I see.
When I stopped looking for silence and just looked at seeing, a kind of peace emerged. Not from absence, but from simplicity. From not needing anything to resolve.
It made me wonder: how often do I confuse quiet with disappearance? How often do I miss stillness because I’m waiting for blankness?
Stillness, it turns out, can shimmer.
Letting the Jewel Turn
One of the metaphors that kept returning in this phase was that of a jewel: many facets, all interconnected.
Emptiness. Fading. Awareness. Not-self. None of these are separate. They’re different ways of looking into the same mystery. And each one illuminates the others.
When I held them gently, let the jewel turn, I saw new reflections. I stopped asking which was right, and started asking what was helpful.
There’s a kind of faith in that. A faith not in belief, but in the process. In the unfolding. In the middle way.
And that’s where I find myself now.
Not at an end. Not at a peak. But somewhere in the middle of a path that keeps dissolving just enough to walk on.
This is Part III of the “Unbuilding the Self” series. View the series overview, read Part I: From Reductionism to Raw Experience, or read Part II: The Vanishing Self.
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