Reflections on Seeing That Frees

I.

On a meditation retreat last year I lay on my bed to meditate, and quickly settled into an especially deep and pleasant state, full of beautiful memories and gratitude for loved ones. These feelings fed on each other and became a spiral of happiness and peace and relaxation.

This was wonderful, and went on for a while, but at some point I realized that my body had disappeared.

My head was still around, but where my body had been there was instead a deep dark nothingness. Not a bad kind of nothingness. Quite the opposite. It was a vast peaceful expanse. Perfectly tranquil and pure.

I was curious about this, and especially intrigued by my head now floating on its own. I imagined the barrier between my head and what used to be my body dissolving, and the darkness flowed in like water and consumed my head too.

I had no physical form at all. There were just my thoughts in the nothingness. My thoughts felt different though, or had a different quality to them than usual. Most notably, they all felt perfectly and deeply okay, all exactly as they needed to be.

I usually spend a fair amount of time in meditation trying to collect myself around certain desired thoughts and feelings, and managing distractions accordingly, but these concepts ceased to make any sense at all. Everything was just flowing through me exactly as it needed to. Every moment perfectly and naturally followed from the previous without any resistance or uncertainty. Nothing was out of place, nothing was unwanted, nothing even could be out of place or unwanted, even as my thoughts and feelings touched things that ordinarily might have felt like obstacles.

Even though my body was “gone”, I was still aware of it in a very distant sense. I had a terrible sore throat at the time, and if I tried I could pick up the faintest sensation whenever I swallowed. I was also ever-so-subtly aware of a sensation corresponding to a shoulder injury that usually hurt a lot. There was no pain though. All of these sensations were just…there. Ever so distantly, as the smallest glimmers above the complete and beautiful nothingness. I could tell that anything I could possibly feel, anything I could sense, would have exactly this same quality.

I knew that even though on some level I could experience the sensations and feelings that might ordinarily be associated with suffering, there was nothing negative, aversive, or unwanted about them. They were, like everything else, just subtle flickers of experience amidst infinite peace.

I flung my thoughts around for a while, experimenting to see if I could find the edges of this expanse. I couldn’t. It occurred to me to try to relax even further, which made me laugh as I realized there was none of me there to relax. So, I just let my mind settle and sank into the deepest rest I have ever known.

Slowly, eventually, I started to feel my eyelids again, and then the rest of my face, and my body. As I emerged from the meditation, I felt completely refreshed and overflowing with love. So much love. It was as if this visit to the dark nothingness had cleared the normal noise out of my head, and all that was left was pure love and wellbeing.

Over the next couple of hours my mind settled back to close to its default state, but the experience left me stunned. The new awareness that such a state was possible felt like profound knowledge that could potentially transform how I experience life.

But, how to find my way back? Or, perhaps even better, how to bring the qualities that made it so beautiful into my everyday existence?

It’s that question that eventually brought me to Seeing That Frees.

II.

Before directly encountering any of Rob Burbea’s work, I’d occasionally hear people talk about him and feel struck by the reverence I’d hear in their voices. Having now read and listened to much of his work, I’m sure this is how I often sound to others. He’s a meditation teacher of rare wisdom and warmth.

His book, Seeing That Frees, is a guide to emptiness meditation practices and related philosophies. It could be less pithily titled Looking at the World and Experience in Ways that Alleviate Suffering and Bring Ease, Peace, and Wellbeing.

A central claim in Seeing That Frees (and the traditions it draws from) is that all suffering and distress result from clinging, craving, or aversion to things and experiences. Importantly, clinging, craving, and aversion are all relationships to other experiences, not intrinsic features of them. It follows that suffering isn’t caused by an experience itself, but by how we relate to it.

Clinging, craving, and aversion also all depend on a view of things and experiences as real/solid/static/heavy/intrinsically existent, at least enough so to react to. The central insight of emptiness is that this is not how things actually are, that in fact they aren’t intrinsically real. They are instead entirely dependent on myriad causes and conditions, both inner and outer, past and present. And, relatedly, they are far lighter and more porous, flexible, and spacious than we intuitively perceive them. Recognizing this makes them much harder to cling to.

The promise of emptiness practice (that is, the exploration of ways of looking at the world, the self, others, and experiences that allow one to appreciate their lack of inherent existence) is that the resulting insights release clinging, craving, and aversion, and alleviate suffering. With this release can come unprecedented freedom, love, and wellbeing.

Emptiness is often presented as an endpoint, or one side of a binary (i.e. we typically see things the “normal” way, but we could see them the better, “empty” way). I don’t find this helpful, both because it can cause emptiness to come across as a distant (and perhaps unreachable) goal, and because it’s prone to activating fears that if things are seen to be empty then they will become meaningless and cold and conducive to apathy or nihilism. This is both a very understandable fear, and a mostly misplaced one. A thing I particularly appreciate about Burbea’s approach in Seeing That Frees is his emphasis on allowing the pursuit of emptiness-related insights to be guided by the degree to which they alleviate suffering and open up freedom, joy, compassion, and love.

I find it more helpful to think of emptiness as a spectrum from seeing things as maximally solid and heavy and real, to maximally porous and light and empty. One need not find or interrogate the ends of this spectrum to play around with small movements along it and see if it bears fruit. That said, by many trusted accounts, at the far reaches of the spectrum lie near-indescribable depths of peace and beauty.

In a retreat that he led on the practice of the jhanas (a series of eight advanced meditative states of profound bliss and altered consciousness), Burbea once claimed that if one can find and appreciate the slightest glimmer of embodied happiness in meditation, then the entire path of the jhanas is open to them. I imagine he would say something similar regarding emptiness: that if one can find even a small release of suffering in noticing that things might be less real and solid than they often intuitively seem, then the entire path to this extraordinary freedom and wellbeing is open to them.

III.

Seeing That Frees is primarily a walkthrough of many different “insights”, or ways of looking at the world and experience, and associated meditation practices for exploring and applying them. They build on each other, from simple and intuitive to quite complex, subtle, and surprising.

I’ve pulled out ten insight practices to give a sense of this path. They’re primarily drawn from the earlier, more intuitive sections of the book, in part because these are the practices that are most clear and accessible, and in part because I’m far less confident in my ability to do justice to the further reaches of the practice.

When playing with these views, Burbea emphasizes the importance of attending to how they shift the relationship to self, phenomena, and other people. And, in particular, the importance of noticing whether and in what ways they bring a measure of release from suffering. When they do, those are the threads to follow.

Different people will find different practices more intuitive or effective. My approach was to start with a fifteen-minute meditation reflecting on each of them as I worked my way through the book, and then return to the ones I liked. It worked pretty well.

1. Questioning values and beliefs. Notice how particular values and beliefs are contributing to suffering, and then notice if or how those values and beliefs were absorbed in part from a specific cultural and social environment.

2. The role of space. Notice how the space of the mind contracts when attention is pulled to something difficult. When this happens, intentionally pay attention to larger space (by e.g. opening awareness to all sounds, opening the field of vision, or opening awareness to a sense of vast physical space).

3. Staying at contact. Keep attention on the basic sense experience of each moment, rather than letting it expand and extrapolate into stories, fears, predictions, and the like.

4. Dot-to-dot. Notice how things that seem like persistent experiences are often isolated moments of experience with space in between them, that the mind constructs into an independent, persistent thing, like connecting dots.

5. Dependence on conditions. In cases of feeling trapped in regret or blame over some circumstance, reflect on the full and detailed confluence of conditions that gave rise to the situation, and see how the space for blame of self or others dissolves.

6. Impermanence. Reflect on the nature of things as constantly changing and evolving, on every timescale.

   1. Small: Notice changes in the senses and emotions moment-to-moment, and extend this awareness to all of experience.
   2. Medium: Notice how mood, energy levels, feelings in the body, etc. change over the course of a day, or week, or month. Use this to recognize that whatever is present in the current moment will also change.
   3. Large: Reflect on birth and death as your appearance and disappearance from the universe, and on the vastness of time and space before you arrived and after you leave.

7. Holy discontent. Consider that by nature of their impermanence, no phenomena can ever lead to lasting fulfilment, and all phenomena are thus inherently unsatisfactory. Look for a sense of “letting go” in this.

8. Relaxing clinging. Aim directly at relaxing the sense of clinging to an object or phenomenon, using strategies like:

   1. Simply intend to let go of clinging to the phenomenon.
   2. Find the tension in the body that corresponds to the clinging and relax that physical tension.
   3. Welcome and open to the phenomenon as fully as possible, rather than resisting it.

9. Not me, not mine. Let go of a sense of things as either being you, or belonging to you. Try this with the body, with sense experience, with other people, and anything else you might think of as you or yours.

10. Releasing preferences. Consider that all phenomena are the same, in some sense: just things arising and fading from awareness. Use this to try to release a sense of preference between them.

In the book, things continue building from here toward deeper, more counterintuitive insights, like perception as fundamentally dependent on clinging, the lack of inherent existence of a self, and even the emptiness of insight and emptiness itself. These land for me to different degrees on different days: sometimes they feel a bit absurd, sometimes profoundly liberating. Over time the balance has skewed toward the latter.

I’ve presented these practices (and the underlying views) above as simply and succinctly as I could manage, but even these basic practices are each incredibly rich and deserving of far more exposition. Relatedly, while at least some of them might bear initial fruit with a brief reflection, fully internalizing and seeing the value of each insight likely requires repeated practice. For me at least, even when I feel like I’ve really gotten one of them and reaped the benefits, it’s rarely long before it fades and needs some kind of refreshing.

It can be tempting to apply these insights only in relating to difficult or aversive circumstances. To seek freedom from those, while continuing to cling to what feels good. But in fact, there’s also tremendous value in applying them to loosen and lighten the relationship to the good as well, both for appreciating the full breadth and significance of the insights, and for amplifying the goodness of already positive experiences. The same insight that might bring relief from a stressor can bring far deeper and more spacious beauty and freedom in relating to things that already feel good. Some of my most beautiful experiences in meditation have been of this sort, of finding peace and wonder in applying these practices to pleasant phenomena.

Perhaps most importantly, these insights and practices are just tools, to be picked up and applied when and as they are useful to alleviating suffering. It’s easy to underestimate the degree of freedom and goodness that they can open, so I do think there’s value in cultivating these practices even in moments where they don’t feel necessary per se. But it’s helpful to remember that the goal is not to adopt one or more of these views as the sole or “true” lens through which to see one’s life and experience, but rather to have the flexibility and agility to apply them at different times in service of freedom from suffering.

IV.

Exploring these practices has borne extraordinary fruit in my life.

Often, when I’m feeling stressed about whether I’m doing well at work, I remind myself that big parts of what “doing well at work” intuitively means are culturally imposed—from my particular company, my community, and Western society in general—and don’t reflect any absolute standards. This melts some of my angst and helps me find grace for myself.

When I get a message from someone that lands as short or frustrated, I can feel my mind start to spin stories about how upset they are at me, what I did wrong, etc. Instead of indulging this, I try to stay at contact and not jump to conclusions. Often, they aren’t actually upset. Even when I find out that indeed they are, I’ve spared myself some suffering in the meantime.

One of the most powerful practices for me is recognizing the dependence on causes and conditions. It’s easy to judge myself harshly when I make a mistake, especially one that hurts or inconveniences others, and to suffer a lot as a result. I find it so helpful to meditate on the full set of circumstances that gave rise to my behavior, both states of the world and facts of my own self and psychology. This often opens up a sense of empathy and compassion for myself, and a recognition that to wish I’d done things differently is to wish that I was a different person living in a different world. Same goes for others when I think they’ve made mistakes, or wronged me in some way.

Appreciating impermanence has helped lighten all kinds of distress for me. If I’m worried about a relationship, or a project at work, I remind myself of the myriad times in the past when I’ve felt similar stress, and the fact that none of them lasted: the stress always faded away. My present stress then transforms in my perception from a core feature of my being to a visitor who is just passing through, and will soon be on their way.

Holy discontent is one of my favorite insights to apply to positive experiences. I brought this view to a moment of beautiful connection with a partner: appreciating that for all its goodness, it was a fleeting moment that couldn’t offer any lasting satisfaction. The resulting sense of lightness and letting go caused me to sink far deeper into the goodness and delight of being together.

This is but a small taste of the many practices I’ve played with, the places I’ve applied them, and the impacts they’ve had on me. There are many more. Remembering “not me, not mine” is an incredible tool for easing the sting of jealousy. Trying to release preferences can imbue mundane experiences with wonder and magic, like by appreciating that nothing really separates a gloomy overcast sky from the most spectacular sunset.

Rather than hitting diminishing returns, these insights and the freedom they’ve brought seem to build on each other. When I practice consistently, the moment-to-moment relief they bring starts to bleed together into glimpses of a fundamentally different way of seeing the world and my own experience. A way of seeing that lessens the perceived solidity of all phenomena and leaves love and wellbeing in its place. Not a normal love, though. A more spacious, accepting love. Less conditional, more open. Less bounded, more free.

I have yet to return to the pseudo-psychedelic realm of perfect peace and nothingness that I first found on the meditation retreat. And I feel I have a long way still to go before I encounter the far reaches of these practices, as described by Rob Burbea and many others. I’m not even sure I’ll ever make it there. But each step has felt like an ever-more-beautiful gift, and I hope to keep taking them. I know of no better guides on this path than Rob Burbea and Seeing That Frees.