Insights and Tastes for Practice

What has to be seen, what has to be tasted, and how would I advise someone who practises?

A zoom-in of the exploration Practice and Realisation.

In brief

The experience is not what is missing. For me, presence was vivid from 1982. What changed over the seven phases was the logic through which I read it. So practice is not about collecting experiences. It is about undoing the habit of seeing things as existing from their own side, again and again, wherever it works.
Four insights carry the practice: vivid and unfindable at once; appearing whenever conditions meet; the habit of thinking inherently; and no given world beneath it all. Anatta is the first door into them.
Five tastes confirm them: the clarity of appearances themselves, the emptiness of that clarity, six streams rather than one lamp, the knot that ties them into things, and each moment complete.
View and taste correct each other. Without the view, an opening turns into a Witness or a Source. Without the taste, emptiness turns dry and negative.
It is a wisdom practice, not a practice of keeping a state. Nothing has to be maintained day and night. Effortlessness is the fruit of clear seeing, not a technique to start with.

Where the work really is

For years after the realisation of I AM, presence was vivid and unmistakable. The vividness was never what was missing. What was missing was seeing what that vividness is. I read it through the logic of substance: first a Witness, then a non-dual Presence, still something on its own side, behind everything.

Anatta dawned in 1997, and it was a genuine breakthrough. Yet for years afterwards my experience was free while my view was not. The self had dissolved; the universe had not. That is the desynchronisation I describe in Book 2.

So I put it plainly to anyone who practises. Experience and insight can go deep while the framework that reads them stays inherent. That is the wall. More experience does not take the wall down. Seeing the framework does.

The insights to see

Anatta: no doer behind the doing

In seeing, only the seen. There is thinking, no thinker; hearing, no hearer standing apart from sound. This is the first door. Nāgārjuna takes the same move through everything: the walker in chapter 2, the seer in chapter 3, the fire and the fuel in chapter 10, the cause in chapter 1. Anatta is a seal, not a stage. It was always so; it is not a state reached and then kept.

Vivid and unfindable, at the same time

The apple is fully red while the red is not found. Not vivid first and empty later, not empty underneath and vivid on the surface. If only the vividness is authenticated, presence turns into a new ground. If only the unfindability is, the world turns thin and void. Both have to be seen together, in the same appearing.

This is not a contradiction to be held together by effort. It is simply how things are. The confusion runs the other way: it is the habit of thinking that whatever appears vividly must be findable, as if vividness needed something there, standing by itself, in order to be vivid. That assumption is the inherent framework at work. Vividness never needed anything findable.

Appearing whenever conditions meet

Light, a surface, an eye, attention: when they come together, red appears; when one is missing, it does not. Nothing comes out of a hidden source, and nothing goes back into one. Nor are the conditions a solid web behind the appearing. The conditions are the appearing, cut into parts for explaining and for getting things done. They work, validly and reliably, and no power in them is ever found.

We think inherently, by default

This is the one most often agreed with and least often seen. Grammar wants a subject and a verb, so we say “the wind blows”, as if a wind stood apart from the blowing, and “I see the tree”, with a seer, a tree and an act of seeing between them. Experience is never like that. The blowing is the wind.

The habit does not feel like a view. It feels like how things are. It has to hit home in your own mind, in the middle of an ordinary day: a self that decides, a problem that sits there from its own side, a cause pushing out its effect. Until it is seen there, every opening is quietly read back into things, selves and grounds.

There is no given

No world is already there, with its own edges, waiting to be named. A thing and its designation arise together. This matters for practice more than it seems. If concepts are pictured as labels laid over a given reality, practice becomes peeling the labels off to reach what lies underneath. That picture is itself the logic of substance. Stripping the labels quietens the commentary, but the habit stays, now without words, and the clear wordless experience is read the old way. That is how luminous clarity became a Witness for me in the I AM years.

Where they meet

The first two are one fact seen from two sides: what arises dependently is what is called emptiness (MMK 24.18). The third is what hides that fact. The fourth takes away its last hiding place. When the habit stops and no given is left, the two are tasted together. With no doer anywhere, and nothing put in its place, nothing is making the appearing. The sound is complete exactly as its conditions meet. That is spontaneous presence. Dependent arising is spontaneous presence.

The tastes to authenticate

By authenticating I mean confirming in direct experience, again and again, until it is no longer an idea I agree with. Seeing once is not enough: if we stop, the old logic quietly comes back.

The clarity of appearances. Sounds, colours and sensations are clear as they appear; nothing lights them, not even themselves. Bare attention can taste this, and it is worth tasting. But clarity is never missing; the error is abstracting it into one Awareness behind the six. Nāgārjuna’s lamp does not light itself, and it is not lit by another (MMK 7.8–12): nothing lights an appearing.
The emptiness of the clarity. Look for the vividness and it is not found. Not a blank, not thin. Once dependent arising is seen, mind and matter lose their weight and become light, magical and plastic.
Six streams, not one lamp. Seeing has its own conditions, hearing its own. Their coordinated unity gives the impression of a self, or a Self. From seeing to hearing there is no gap and no bridge: neither carried nor cut. The substantialist mind looks for a carrier to link them; in real time none is ever there.
The knot. Holding an apple, the senses come one by one: red, weight, smooth, cool, the smell. Then the habit ties them into one apple “out there”. Feel the tying as a habit, not as a fact found.
Each moment complete. Complete is not sealed off. When eating, eat; when sleeping, sleep fully. The question of what carries the moment over arises only when moments are lined up in a row.

How I would advise a practitioner

Admit the problem first. Agreeing that we think inherently costs nothing. Seeing it, sincerely and honestly, in your own mind, is where practice starts.
Keep view and taste in step. View corrects the taste: a strong opening is easily read as an ultimate Awareness, and analysis catches that. Taste corrects the view: emptiness held only as an argument grows dry and negative, and the taste shows it is not a blank. If you have one without the other, you are desynchronised, as I was from 1997 until 2009.
Take the logic to each place the habit hides. The self, then objects, cause, time, space, death, the world, and at last presence itself. The logic of substance does not give way to a single argument. It has to be seen through wherever it works.
Authenticate; don’t collect. A clear moment is to be checked, not kept. When the urge comes to hold on to it, notice: that holding is the fixing coming back. Go back to plain looking.
Effortless is the fruit, not the method. Recognition is not an accomplishment, and it is not passivity either. “Nothing to do” without clarity is dullness. “A pure state to reach and keep” is eternalism. The moment effortlessness is held as an achievement, it has become one more fixed object.
A wisdom practice, not maintenance. There cannot be a case of maintenance, which is the split: a keeper beside what is kept. Recognition is complete when it unbinds the habit of seeing in an inherent pattern, not when awareness is kept lit through the day and the night.
A caution from experience. In my experience, many who forced energy practices, or tried to stay aware through sleep, suffered enormous sleeplessness and energy imbalances. Such practices have to be guided by a qualified master. To me they are not necessary for the insights of anatta and emptiness. If sleeplessness goes on, see a doctor as well.
Use conditions skilfully. Ethics, study, sitting, a teacher: all validly functioning, all ways of arranging conditions. With anger, do not try to lift it out like a stone. Change the posture, the story, where attention has gone, and watch it reconfigure. If states had a nature of their own, nothing could become other than it is (MMK 24.16–20).
Do not lean on the teaching itself. Emptiness was taught as the way out of all views; those for whom emptiness becomes a view are called incurable (MMK 13.8). The four insights are to be seen, not held as a new position.

The quiet fallbacks

These are the places where the old logic returns with new words. Each looks like progress.

The fallback	What it says	What it misses
Presence as Source	“Everything arises from pure Awareness.”	Clarity is the appearing’s own clearness, not a source behind it.
Emptiness as void	“Nothing is there at all.”	The appearing is vivid and validly functioning; only its own-nature is not found.
Conditions as a web	“Everything is relations.”	The relations are not found from their own side either (MMK 14.8).
Clear light as carrier	“A subtle mind carries on beneath it all.”	“Subtle” is fewer conditions, not a deeper floor; the stream is neither carried nor cut.
Sleep as a gap	“Awareness must not go out.”	Fearing a gap is the annihilation fear: something must have been there to be cut.
Beyond causes	“After awakening, causes no longer apply.”	Nothing is beyond conditions; what goes is the producer, not the working.
Labels off	“Drop concepts and reality shows itself.”	No undesignated layer waits underneath.

Try it

One sound. Listen to one sound until it ends. Notice how vivid it was. Then ask where it was. Don’t answer with a thought; just look.
Just marks. Look at a word on this page and try to see it only as marks. You cannot. The meaning is already in the seeing.
The cup. Hold a cup of tea. Notice sight, warmth, weight and the word “cup” coming one by one, and the tying into one cup out there. Is the cup found apart from them?
Seeing to hearing. Look at a colour, then hear a sound. Look for what carries you across. Notice that nothing is missing either.
Do not keep it. When a clear moment comes, notice the urge to hold it. Let that go, and keep looking.

Practice and Realisation: the whole picture this article zooms into.
Seeing Comes First: the four key insights after anatta.
What the Logic Is Looking At: Holding an apple, and the knot.
Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3: the doer behind the doing, and spontaneous presence.
The Illusion of the Given: no world beneath the appearing.
Neither Carried Nor Cut: six streams, no carrier.
Luminosity: the lamp that does not light itself, and why maintenance is the split.
Causal Efficacy Without Causal Power: conditions are the appearing.
Step 1: the two logics and the seven phases.
The Great Desynchronization: Book 2, when experience outruns the view.
Recognition, Not Effort: Book 4, Chapter 23.

Words to know

Authenticate: to confirm in direct experience, again and again, until it is no longer an idea agreed with.

Desynchronisation: experience free of substance while the view reading it is not.

Inherent framework: the habit of taking things as standing on their own, with their own properties, doing and being done to.

Taste: direct experience of how appearing is, as opposed to an argument about it.

Spontaneous presence (lhun grub): dependent arising met without the fixing: appearing complete as its conditions meet, with no producer behind it. Not uncaused, not a source.