This is Part II of a series exploring meditation and emptiness. For context, you may want to read the series introduction first.
“Are you good with bad habits, or are you bad with good habits?”
— Shel Silverstein
When I started this study of emptiness, I didn’t expect to run directly into myself.
Not the poetic, capital-S Self. I mean the messy, cobbled-together identity I wear every day without really noticing: smart, competent, kind (mostly), quietly judgmental, a little anxious, ambitious-but-humble, grounded-but-dreamy. The whole contradictory kit.
At some point during this process, I was invited to simply write down the ways I define myself. I did. It was uncomfortable almost immediately.
Here were the contradictions, side by side:
- I am kind and I am jealous.
- I perceive and accept rather than judge, but sometimes I’m judgy as hell.
- I am ambitious and try to win, but my preferred role is to support and take a back seat.
All of these are true. And none of them are consistent. What struck me wasn’t just the contradictions themselves, but how invisible they’d become. I operate within these stories every day, often clinging to one side while denying the other exists.
What I started to see—slowly, reluctantly—was that the problem wasn’t the content of the stories. It was the fact that they were stories at all.
The Stories That Shrink Us
I wouldn’t have told you that my self-concept was a source of suffering. But after sitting with these definitions, I began to feel how much tension they hold.
When I’m being judgmental, it’s like the part of me that believes I’m accepting disappears completely. When I’m chasing a win, the quiet supporter vanishes. There’s no space for both to coexist. And yet, they do.
My intellectual mind can easily hold this complexity. But in any given moment, I tend to collapse into a single, narrow identity—and then suffer when reality doesn’t match it.
And then, one evening, I remembered a poem.
I asked the zebra / Are you black with white stripes? / Or white with black stripes?
And the zebra asked me…
If you know it, you know where it goes.
Zebra Questions, by Shel Silverstein. Silly, sharp, unexpectedly profound. And suddenly, it felt like the dharma in a children’s book.
Are you good with bad habits? Are you noisy with quiet times? Are you neat with some sloppy ways?
That zebra had seen through the game. I was just beginning to.
Spaciousness by Way of Inconsistency
Around the same time, I started paying attention to how my sense of self changed throughout the day.
It was surprisingly variable.
When I was emotional or distracted, my body felt tight, contracted. The sense of “I” became small and central. When I was relaxed, or in flow, the opposite happened—the sense of self faded, and awareness felt large and diffuse.
I started tracking these shifts. Morning to evening. Calm to tense. Spacious to collapsed.
Every day held a thousand selves. And not one of them stuck around for long.
This was more than just noticing impermanence. It was the beginning of understanding anattā—that none of these self-states could rightly be called me or mine. They were arising and passing with conditions. And if that was true… who, exactly, was watching all this happen?
The Little Guy in My Head
One afternoon in meditation, while doing a practice from the Emptiness and Awareness chapter of Seeing That Frees, something strange happened.
I was tracking my experience of awareness—not the content, but the background. The thing that seemed to be aware.
And then I saw it: the little guy in my head. The one I unconsciously imagine lives behind my eyes, watching the movie of my life on an internal screen. He’s got monitors and speakers and probably a swivel chair.
Except… he wasn’t there.
Or rather, the space between the watcher and the screen collapsed. There was no distance. No gap. No separation between the one who sees and what is seen.
Just perception, just sound, just sensation.
And in that moment, awareness stopped being inside anything. It had no center. No edges. It didn’t belong to anyone. It just was.
This wasn’t some dramatic enlightenment moment. More like a perceptual shift. But it was enough to shake something loose.
Because I realized: the little guy had always been assumed. I’d never even thought to question him. And now that he was gone, things were… quieter. Lighter. Less lonely.
John Peacock once said in a talk: “It is lonely being an I.”
He was right. And for a few moments, I wasn’t one.
Letting It Be
One technique that helped open this up was deceptively simple: let it be.
When I noticed contraction or aversion in meditation, instead of analyzing it or trying to make it go away, I just allowed it. Stayed with it. Let it be part of the landscape.
This opened into deeper states of samādhi than I’d experienced before. And more interestingly, it gave me a way to feel into the characteristic of dukkha.
Dukkha started to show up not just as pain or dissatisfaction, but as contraction. As narrowing. As collapse around an identity or a view. And letting it be—not fixing it, not transcending it, just making space for it—gave it room to breathe. Sometimes that was all it needed to release.
This isn’t a glamorous insight. It’s not something to write down in a notebook and underline. But it’s practice. And it works.
A Self Made of Reactions
One last realization from this phase:
So much of what I had thought of as “me” was actually just the aggregates doing their thing.
In one sit, I watched an itch appear.
First came the sensation (viññāṇa). Then the recognition of “itch” (saññā). Then the unpleasant tone (vedanā). Then the impulse to act (saṅkhāra), which arrived as a little mental image of me scratching it.
It was all so fast. But none of it was “me.” It was just a process. A loop. An impersonal chain.
And yet, outside of meditation, I would have said: “I had an itch, so I scratched it.”
But who is this “I”, exactly?
And what happens when we stop assuming it’s in charge?
There were no final answers in this phase. Just cracks. Just questions.
But through those cracks, light started to filter in.
What had felt stable began to flicker. And in that flickering, space.
Not a void. Not a loss.
A freedom I hadn’t known I was missing.
This is Part II of the “Unbuilding the Self” series. View the series overview, read Part I: From Reductionism to Raw Experience, or continue to Part III: Living in the Middle.
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