Unbuilding the Self: From Models to Meditation

A yearlong study of emptiness, perception, and freedom

“I used to think clarity was a narrowing. Now I think it’s a widening.”
— from my journal

I’ve spent most of my life chasing reality through equations. If you’re someone who leans on logic, skepticism, or scientific rigor—and you’re not sure where meditation fits in—I get it. I was that person too. That’s why I wrote a separate piece called Letters to a Skeptic: it’s the letter I wish I’d had when I started this journey. You don’t need it to follow the rest of the series, but if you’re on the fence, it’s there.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been trained to look for reality by reducing things—galaxies into star populations, stars into particles, particles into quantum fields. My background is in astrophysics. I spent years building mathematical models of the universe, trying to get as close as I could to how things really work. And in that world, you learn that truth is always downstream of complexity, always hidden somewhere deeper.

But a funny thing happened when I started meditating seriously.

I stopped looking “down” and started looking “in.”

And what I found wasn’t a bedrock layer of reality waiting to be discovered—it was a slow unraveling of the assumption that such a bedrock even existed. Not in the way I thought.

This blog series, Unbuilding the Self, is a set of reflections from a yearlong study of Rob Burbea’s Seeing That Frees, a profound and often mind-bending book on emptiness, perception, and the ways we suffer unnecessarily.

What is “emptiness”? In short: it’s a set of practices for revealing how perception constructs what we take to be reality—and how loosening those constructions can reveal spaciousness, compassion, and unexpected freedom.

It’s also a kind of rekindling: I’ve had a meditation practice since 2014, but by the time I found this work, things had gone flat. The lights were on, but not much was happening inside. This study brought things back to life.

The Series

The journey unfolds in four parts:

Part I: From Reductionism to Raw Experience

I explore how my scientific mindset ran straight into the teachings on emptiness—and started to crack. I talk about Borges, chairs, quarks, the stubborn sense that something must be real at the bottom, and the first glimpses that even this belief is just another view.

Part II: The Vanishing Self

This part is about identity—how we subtly construct and defend our self-image, and what starts to happen when that image becomes permeable. I reflect on contradictions in how I define myself, and share a strange and beautiful experience where the “little guy in my head” disappeared and awareness became everything.

Part III: Living in the Middle

This is where things get both weirder and more ordinary. I investigate dualities, wonder about “visual silence,” experience emptiness while hearing a space heater, and start to see how perception, love, and even the urge to be seen are all facets of the same turning jewel.

Part IV: Coming Soon

The final three months of the program move toward unbinding, the taste of release, and what it might mean to live all of this in daily life. I don’t know what it will look like yet. But if the previous parts are any indication, it won’t be what I expect.

These posts aren’t trying to teach dharma. They’re not polished insights or “how-to meditate” guides. They’re field notes. Inner experiments. Some are clean, some messy, all honest.

If you’ve ever tried to reconcile a rational worldview with spiritual intuition—or wondered what happens when your sense of self starts to blur—I hope something in here resonates.

To begin reading the series, start with Part I: From Reductionism to Raw Experience.

Thanks for reading.

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