The Starting Point: The Journey Through Presence

Every contemplative journey begins with a question. For some, it begins with suffering. For others, with the search for meaning, liberation, or truth. My own journey began with something far simpler yet infinitely more mysterious: presence.

Long before I encountered Madhyamaka, dependent designation, or the dialectics of Nāgārjuna, contemplative practice had already begun transforming the very texture of ordinary experience. The changes did not initially feel philosophical; they felt experiential. The familiar sense of being an isolated observer began to soften. The mind became quieter. Experience became more immediate. Presence, once obscured by incessant thought, increasingly revealed itself as the very fabric of lived experience.

Like many practitioners, I naturally assumed that this maturation of presence was itself the path. Each stage felt deeper than the last. Presence became increasingly stable, increasingly luminous, increasingly intimate. The movement seemed unmistakable: from distraction to stillness, from fragmentation to unity, from duality to non-duality. Yet something eventually became apparent: every transformation, no matter how liberating, continued to revolve around the same unexamined assumption. Presence itself remained unquestioned.

At first, presence belonged to someone. There was 'my awareness', 'my consciousness', 'my experience'. As practice matured, this personal ownership dissolved. Presence no longer felt confined within an individual observer. Instead, it became expansive, seamless, and non-dual. The distinction between observer and observed weakened until it often disappeared altogether. Experience seemed to unfold within a single field of luminous immediacy.

For a long time, this felt like the culmination of contemplative practice. Indeed, many contemplative traditions understandably describe this as the realization itself. The language of pure awareness, luminous presence, mirror-like clarity, primordial knowing, or boundless consciousness all point towards this transformation. Such descriptions are neither mistaken nor fabricated. They faithfully describe real contemplative developments that fundamentally alter one’s relationship with experience.

Yet they also conceal a subtle danger. The observer may disappear, while Presence quietly becomes the new observer. The self may dissolve, while awareness itself becomes the new Self. Duality may collapse, while luminosity quietly assumes the role once occupied by substance. The centre has disappeared, yet the background remains.

This possibility is difficult to recognize because it feels so complete. Nothing appears missing. There is openness, clarity, intimacy, spontaneity, and freedom. The search itself feels like it has ended. For many years, I believed this was the destination. The turning point came not through another mystical experience, but through a simple question that became impossible to ignore: Does Presence itself inherently exist?

The question initially seemed almost absurd. Presence had become the very ground from which all experience appeared. To question it felt like questioning experience itself. Yet genuine investigation permits no exceptions. If the self can be examined, why not awareness? If the observer can be investigated, why not Presence? If inherent existence cannot be granted to the individual, on what basis should it be granted to consciousness itself?

That question quietly transformed everything. The investigation no longer sought deeper states of awareness. It no longer attempted to stabilize Presence or refine non-duality. Instead, it began examining whether anything within experience—awareness, presence, luminosity, space, time, causality, relation, or even dependent arising itself—could ultimately be established as inherently existing.

The answers did not arrive immediately. They unfolded over years through contemplative investigation, philosophical reflection, and repeated encounters with the insights of the Buddhist tradition. What initially looked like separate teachings eventually revealed themselves as successive resolutions of a single problem. The direct realization of anatta, Dōgen’s vision of total exertion, Nāgasena’s chariot, and Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way were no longer independent doctrines. They became different gateways leading towards the complete exhaustion of substantiality.

This book begins at that turning point. It does not recount the maturation of presence in detail, nor does it attempt to evaluate the many contemplative maps through which practitioners describe those developments. Instead, it begins at the moment when the investigation turns towards the final refuge of substantialism itself. The chapters that follow therefore do not ask how Presence may become clearer, deeper, or more stable. They ask a more fundamental question: What if Presence itself never required inherent existence?

Everything that follows is an exploration of that question. For it was only when even Presence ceased to function as an independently existing foundation that a thoroughly non-substantialist understanding of reality finally became possible. Only then did it become apparent that the path was never leading towards a more refined state of consciousness. It was leading towards the recognition that nothing whatsoever had ever required inherent existence to appear, function, or be exactly what it is.

Before We Begin: The Cumulative Peak of Anatta

Before embarking upon the philosophical investigations presented in this book, it is important to acknowledge a realization of great depth. Everything that follows should never be mistaken as diminishing, correcting, or replacing the direct realization of anatta. Quite the opposite. The entire investigation presented in these pages rests upon it.

The direct realization of anatta, through the thorough deconstruction of the inherent self, naturally culminates in an experiential freedom. As the deeply rooted assumption of an internal observer collapses, the familiar architecture of seer-seeing-seen dissolves with it. What remains is often expressed as 'no seer, no seeing, and nothing seen'. Experience is no longer organized around a central reference point. There is simply the vivid immediacy of seeing, hearing, sensing, and thinking, unfolding effortlessly, centrelessly, and luminously.

This realization requires no prior understanding of dependent arising, dependent designation, the Two Truths, or Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. It is not the product of philosophical reasoning, nor does it depend upon any sophisticated conceptual framework. It is the natural culmination of insight into anatta itself. Through the sustained application of insight directed towards the illusion of an inherent subject, the entire subject–action–object structure quietly collapses. What emerges is what I shall call the non-conceptual register—the cumulative experiential peak of Phase Five realization. As an experiential breakthrough, it is complete in its own right.

Only afterwards came repeated episodes of a mode of experiencing reality that I would much later recognize, through Dōgen's writings, as what he called total exertion (zenki, literally 'total dynamic working'). During these moments, each event completely exhausted itself in being exactly what it was. Walking was simply walking. Hearing was simply hearing. The wind, the trees, the body, movement, sound, and space were no longer experienced as independently existing things interacting with one another, but as complete participatory happenings. There was an intimacy, immediacy, effortlessness, and seamlessness unlike anything previously imagined.

Yet these openings were often intermittent. They appeared with unmistakable clarity, only to quietly contract as ordinary cognition reasserted itself. Importantly, this intermittence did not reflect any deficiency in the realization itself. The direct experiential breakthrough remained complete whenever it manifested. Rather, what repeatedly reasserted itself were deeply conditioned conceptual habits inherited from a lifetime of substantialist thinking. Although the observer had disappeared, the world continued to be interpreted through the unconscious assumptions of independently existing space, time, causality, conditions, objects, and relations. The experience had become free; the view through which it was interpreted had not.

It gradually became clear that the realization of 'no seer, no seeing, and nothing seen' had not generated the philosophical investigations that follow because it was incomplete. Rather, it generated them because its very completeness continually exposed the inadequacy of the conceptual framework through which I still understood reality. The phenomenology and the worldview had fallen out of synchronization.

This book therefore does not seek to deepen the direct realization of anatta, nor to replace contemplative insight with philosophical speculation. Instead, it seeks to remove the remaining cognitive obscurations that continued to interpret an empty world through the grammar of inherent existence. It was this search that eventually led me to dependent designation, dependent arising, Nāgasena's chariot, Candrakīrti's sevenfold reasoning, and Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Rather than producing a new realization, these teachings gradually provided the conceptual precision necessary to understand what experience had already revealed.

Seen from this side, the questioning that began at the turning point described above did not end with the cumulative peak of anatta, and this book is the story of how the direct experiential freedom of Phase Five gradually became synchronized with a thoroughly non-substantialist understanding of conventional reality. It proposes that the analytical genius of Madhyamaka does not deepen the non-conceptual register, but liberates the conceptual register from the same reification that anatta removed from direct experience. When this synchronization is complete, nothing new is added to experience. Rather, the remaining cognitive obscurations quietly dissolve, allowing the freedom first discovered in 'no seer, no seeing, and nothing seen' to permeate language, meaning, causality, science, ethics, and the whole functioning of ordinary conventional life.