Interesting! I asked Gemini about your comment, and after a few rounds of dialog we arrived at the following state. (Gemini wrote it from my first person perspective and I’m too lazy to swap out the pronouns now.) Does that make sense to you? Is it what you were referring to?
The Traditions: Different Flavors of No-Self
As you mentioned, the paths map out very differently:
The Deconstructive No-Self (Burmese Vipassana / Pragmatic Dharma): This is the tradition Daniel Ingram operates in. It relies on hyper-focused, microscopic analysis of sensory experience. The illusion of a continuous “self” drops away because reality is seen as a rapid-fire sequence of fleeting sensory fragments. Because it is highly analytical, the resulting state can sometimes feel very detached or dry.
The Luminous No-Self (Tibetan Dzogchen & Mahamudra): Instead of dissecting reality, these practices focus on resting in the natural, spacious awareness of the mind. When the rigid ego drops away, what is left is a vast, vibrant, intimately connected awareness. Here, you don’t lose your drive; the source of your drive simply shifts to spontaneous compassion (Bodhicitta).
The Original Mind No-Self (Thai Forest Tradition): Practitioners focus on letting go of “defilements” and everything we usually identify with. When you let go of all of that, you uncover the Citta—the purified heart/mind—which is a radiant, deeply grounded presence, avoiding the hyper-analytical traps of the deconstructive path.
The Psychological Framework: The PNSE Continuum
Modern research actually bridges the gap between these ancient maps and the varying experiences people have today. Jeffery Martin’s studies on Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience (PNSE) found that “enlightenment” or awakened states operate on a continuum with different “Locations.” This perfectly explains the gap between my experience and M.E. Thomas’s.
M.E. Thomas and Location 4:
Martin found that the symptoms M.E. Thomas describes—decision paralysis, lack of prospective/retrospective memory, and a loss of the sense of agency—are common among practitioners in what he calls “Location 4.” In this furthest extreme, emotion, agency, and memory hooks drop away completely. Her navigation of the world in that state is highly relatable if you view it through a different lens: it’s akin to how one feels about copyediting. You don’t feel emotional empathy for a misspelled word; you just correct it because there is a sort of aesthetic itch to do so. It is a functional, frictionless engagement with reality, stripped of emotional turbulence.
My Experience and Locations 2⁄3 (Stream Entry):
My experience, which happened spontaneously rather than through intensive concentration practices, maps beautifully onto Martin’s Locations 2 and 3. In these middle locations, practitioners experience an unshakable sense of well-being. The cognitive friction—the ego pushing away reality—is gone, meaning the bleakness of the world doesn’t penetrate the baseline mood. It is also characterized by a surge in positive emotion and profound present-moment compassion. (This aligns with my awakened friend’s suggestion that this was a spontaneous “Stream Entry”—a sudden dropping of the visceral belief in a separate, permanent self, which releases a massive amount of psychological energy and natural compassion).
Compassion, Hustle, and the Return to the A&P
This framework also explains the shift in motivation I experienced. During that year, 1:1 interactions felt highly motivating, and I helped a lot of people. But the hustle to build up societal status for wide-ranging, systemic changes was entirely absent.
This makes perfect psychological sense. 1:1 compassion is an immediate, spontaneous response to the present moment. It requires no complex timeline and is deeply compatible with a state of “no-self.” Conversely, leveraging societal status for systemic change requires a massive amount of “self-ing.” It requires maintaining a continuous mental narrative about who you are, what the future holds, and how to manipulate abstract variables years down the line. When the self-referential narrative quiets down, the cognitive machinery required to sustain a 10-year egoic “hustle” is no longer running the show.
Ultimately, my shift back toward A&P-like feelings wasn’t a blind urge. Rather, it arose out of compassion for a part of myself that sought deeper fulfillment. The A&P state provides the fuel, the narrative, and the future-orientation required to build status and engage with those larger, systemic goals. While the equanimous state is wonderful for immediate, frictionless living, I found that allowing some of that driven, narrative energy back in allowed for a richer sense of fulfillment in the long game.
My teacher from the thai forest tradition has a nice quote on this which I like. “Don’t poopoo the mind”
But a pointing out instruction here for you might be something like: “is it true that you are yourself when you’re self-ing?”
Who is it really who is having the experience?
There is in fact not a self nor a non-self to start with for that presumes that there is a self to relate to (emptiness of emptiness). There is no ground for reality to stand on, groundlessness...
Yada yada yada...
The tldr is that meditation can be a way for you to deeply anchor you to your emotions and that it can be a way of acting from a place that is more alive and agentic.
A deeper, rawer, and vibrant state of acting where there is so much more you can do and where the self that is effective in the world can know that peace is accessible at any point.
A confusing thing about my experience is that the truth of the no-self state is intellectually ineluctable to me and yet my perception is still filtered by selfhood. Sometimes I get a burst of spite-fueled energy that almost collapses into fatalism, and I remind myself that I chose this, that I can just go back if I don’t like it, but that I want to keep reading this chapter of my life, as it were, because it’s exciting! But even when I introspect, there’s a perspective there – someone has called it the watcher?
Interesting! I asked Gemini about your comment, and after a few rounds of dialog we arrived at the following state. (Gemini wrote it from my first person perspective and I’m too lazy to swap out the pronouns now.) Does that make sense to you? Is it what you were referring to?
Yeah, this makes sense to me.
My teacher from the thai forest tradition has a nice quote on this which I like. “Don’t poopoo the mind”
But a pointing out instruction here for you might be something like: “is it true that you are yourself when you’re self-ing?”
Who is it really who is having the experience?
There is in fact not a self nor a non-self to start with for that presumes that there is a self to relate to (emptiness of emptiness). There is no ground for reality to stand on, groundlessness...
Yada yada yada...
The tldr is that meditation can be a way for you to deeply anchor you to your emotions and that it can be a way of acting from a place that is more alive and agentic.
A deeper, rawer, and vibrant state of acting where there is so much more you can do and where the self that is effective in the world can know that peace is accessible at any point.
Hopefully that made some sense?
A confusing thing about my experience is that the truth of the no-self state is intellectually ineluctable to me and yet my perception is still filtered by selfhood. Sometimes I get a burst of spite-fueled energy that almost collapses into fatalism, and I remind myself that I chose this, that I can just go back if I don’t like it, but that I want to keep reading this chapter of my life, as it were, because it’s exciting! But even when I introspect, there’s a perspective there – someone has called it the watcher?