I’ve been gradually developing an obsession with Buddhism — and specifically with the vision of what’s genuinely possible on the path, far beyond a mere calming of the mind. Through study of the suttas and the GOAT Rob Burbea, my sense of what’s actually available to a human being has generated more energy for practice than I know what to do with.
This post is as much my own attempt to put my finger on what the “fantasy” or the “goal” of the path actually is. I hope it cracks something open for you about what’s possible.
Here’s my honest read: Buddhism in the West often gets so watered down that we’re not even clear why we’re practicing. We’re left with vague gestures toward “no-self,” or “calming the mind,” or “being happier.” And I think that fuzziness quietly costs us — because when you get precise about why you practice and what you’re actually shooting for, your energy goes up, you avoid the classic pitfalls, and your happiness deepens faster.
So let me try to be precise. And I’m going to make one claim the whole piece hangs on:
Almost everything you experience is subtly oppressing you — and emptiness is what lifts the pressure off existence itself.
The goal is not what you think it is
If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have said the goal of Buddhism is to suffer less. That’s how nearly everyone frames it. It’s not wrong — but it’s the floor, not the ceiling. Here’s Rob saying it straight:
“What if the path and the goal of the path… is not less suffering, but actually the goal, the aim of the path is an increase, a deepening, an opening, an enriching of the sense of the beauty, beauties (plural), and the sacrednesses, the sense of sacredness, of existence — self, other, world, events, facts, cosmos, all of that?… That would be quite a radical position.” — Rob Burbea, Beyond the Search for Freedom (2016)
Read that twice. The end of the path isn’t a flatline of “meh, I don’t suffer anymore.” It’s a fearless, unbounded love and a world soaked in beauty and the sense of the sacred. Less-suffering just clears the road. The thing the road leads to is so much bigger — and I’ll come back to it, because it’s the part nobody tells you.
The water we swim in
Start with the most obvious fact of your existence, the one you’ve never once questioned: right now, you perceive a world of solid things that exist out there, independent of you. The chair is just there. Your problems are just there. You didn’t decide this. It’s not a belief you hold and could argue about — it’s the default mode of perception itself. It’s the water you swim in.
And if you think you’re somehow exempt from this — that you, personally, already know it’s all interconnected or whatever — you’re not. This is how all of us perceive, all the time, below the level of philosophy. It’s the operating system.
That’s the thing the path is actually after. Not your bad moods. The water.
The most radical thing I’ve ever encountered
Here’s the claim that reorganized everything for me, and Rob doesn’t soften it:
“We build our world, we build our perceptions, we build our reality. That’s what’s, in a way, so radical to realize — that that’s what’s going on.” — Rob Burbea, The Unfabricated, The Deathless (2009)
Not “we interpret a pre-existing reality.” We build it. Self and world arise together, fabricated in the same instant by how we’re looking — and the wild part is anyone can verify this:
“All phenomena are fabricated… ‘Any and all perception is like a mirage,’ he said. All and anything you experience is like a mirage… The process of making a thing, constructing some thing which then we feel, we perceive… Anyone can see this. Even a non-meditator can see this.” — Rob Burbea, Approaching the Dharma — Unbinding the World (2012)
So there is no objective world underneath the perceiving to get back to. The “solid world out there” is itself a fabrication, arising with the self that perceives it. There is no ground even though culture tells us that there is a ground. That what’s ultimately real is: Matter, God, Soul, Source, etc.
This is exactly where the Western mind balks, because it cuts against the entire metaphysics we were raised in — what Rob calls modernism: the unspoken assumption that matter is what’s primary and real, that there’s a solid world out there, and meditation is just a coping tool for dealing with it. That assumption is what Buddhism is deconstructing. And it’s claim is that: until you deconstruct the sense that reality exists out there independently of you, then you won’t find ultimate happiness and you will suffer unecessarily. It’s not that lovingkindness is hard. It’s that real freedom asks you to put down the realist picture of a solid self in a solid world.
One thing I have to catch right here, or the whole essay goes wrong: “no ground” does not mean “nothing exists.” That’s nihilism, and it’s a trap. Nāgārjuna — the most radical of the Buddhist philosophers — cuts between both extremes: things neither inherently exist (the materialist’s solid world) nor are nothing. Emptiness is empty of inherent existence; it is not empty of appearance, function, or mattering. The cup still holds water. Your friend still needs your kindness. They’re just not findable as solid, independent things. Hold this carefully — because this “neither/nor” is the exact hinge on which the whole thing turns from bleak to beautiful. If “no ground” meant “it’s all meaningless,” you’d get despair. Because it means “neither fixed-and-real nor nothing,” you get something light, fluid, workable, and somehow more precious — dreamlike rather than dead.
This also goes further than most Buddhism. You can watch impermanence — “things arise and pass, arise and pass” — all day and still quietly assume there are real little things doing the arising and passing. Mere change-watching can leave the deepest assumption, that things exist, completely intact. Nāgārjuna goes underneath it: there was never an inherent thing there to be impermanent in the first place.
Everything is subtly oppressive
We talk about suffering like it’s the big stuff — the breakup, the money fear, the diagnosis. But there’s something running underneath all of that, all the time, that we barely notice: a low-grade hum of being faintly oppressed by everything.
Your tiredness oppresses you a little. Your mood does. The weather. The to-do list. The slight wrongness of the room. And the most invisible one of all — the fact that you are the way you are. You feel subtly oppressed by your own personality, your tendencies, your history, as though you’re stuck being some solid, fixed thing called “me.”
Notice the structure, because it’s identical every time. To feel oppressed by anything, three things have to be in place:
- The thing is real and solid.
- The thing is other than you, and against you.
- You are a fixed thing that it’s happening to.
Every one of those is fabricated. And the reason this matters so much is that all of it — not just your crises, but the entire faint background pressure of existence — runs on the same engine: each thing is held as solid and inherent, so each presses on a solid, inherent “you.” This is the Buddha’s most refined sense of dukkha: not just pain, not just things-changing, but the pervasive, subtle unsatisfactoriness that suffuses all reified experience, even the pleasant and the neutral.
To see the emptiness of the thing is to be freed from the subtle oppression you feel in relation to it. Not “the tiredness disappears” — the tiredness stops being a solid adversary you’re a victim to, and becomes a light, workable texture of experience. Same with the sadness. Same with the emotion. Same with “the way I am.”
Realization here isn’t something you achieve; it’s just seeing clearly that the cage is something being constructed and choosing to stop constructing it.
And to be clear, this isn’t spiritual bypass. Emptiness doesn’t say your bank account isn’t draining. It’s the second arrow (the Buddha’s image, SN 36.6): the first arrow is the actual event; the second arrow is the suffering self being oppressed by it — and that one is optional, fabricated, removable. The genuinely radical possibility of the path is this: a freedom so deep that nothing in the world can install you as a victim.
The emptiness of time
Here’s how deep and radical this can get. Even the sense of time is something being built by your relationship to it.
Watch how much of your suffering is actually a relationship to time. Regret and grievance — a solid past, sitting there, that happened. Anxiety and dread — a solid future, bearing down. The claustrophobia of “I’m stuck in this” — a solid now. You experience yourself as a victim to a “relentless, inescapable flow of time” and you never think to ask whether the flow is even real.
“Dharma practice and inquiry can puncture and shatter our belief in the real independent existence of time — both the past/future and the present/the ‘Now’ — and, in so doing, open awareness up to a truly inconceivable and immeasurable liberation.” — Rob Burbea, Time and the Emptiness of Time (2007)
To realization that time doesn’t objectively exist, but rather is constructed by the mind is to open up to a profoundly beautiful, sacred and awe-inspiring sense of existence.
So why does seeing this open love — and even bliss?
Here’s the part that isn’t obvious.
Rob asks a beautiful question: is love something we create?
“Is it maybe the case that love and compassion may be the natural state and a natural expression when the heart, when the consciousness is not entangled or obscured or clouded by clinging and by delusion? It’s much more as if one is uncovering love and uncovering compassion.” — Rob Burbea, Using Insight to Deepen Love and Compassion (2008)
So here’s the chain. Perceiving inherent existence makes a solid, separate self and a solid, separate other. Separation breeds clinging and aversion. Clinging is contraction. Contraction closes the heart. So as long as the world is held as solid, the heart stays subtly clenched. Emptiness doesn’t add love — it dissolves the walls (the solid self that must be defended, the solid other who’s a threat or an object) and the love that was always the natural condition flows back in. Less inherent existence → less separation → less clinging → the heart uncovers what it already was. That’s why “emptiness is love.”
And it goes past love, into something I’d call re-enchantment. There’s a writer, Vacha (Garden of Light), who put the tantric version of this better than I’ve seen anywhere. Bring to mind the person you find most magically, sexually fascinating in the world. Feel the beauty and magic you see in them. Now — what if everything held that same fascination? That, Vacha says, is what a truly tantric practice is unlocking: not making sex more fascinating, but making everything that is not sex as fascinating and magical as sex is. And here’s the emptiness turn, exactly:
“Specialness and desirability are seen as empty in that they are revealed as a mode of awareness rather than a property of the desired or special object… Because everything is special, nothing is special… Liberated from dependence on specific objects, experiences or people, bliss shines everywhere in all things.” — Vacha, Garden of Light
This is enormous. The magic you’ve been chasing in special experiences was never in the experiences. It was a mode of your awareness that you only ever turned on for a few special objects. See that it’s empty — not a property of the thing — and you’re freed from depending on the thing. The beauty stops being rationed out to a handful of special people and objects and starts shining in all of it. This is why the Tibetans say emptiness is inseparable from bliss. The same emptiness that lifts the subtle oppression off existence lets the bliss flood into existence. Two sides of one coin.
A few counterintuitive truths that fall out:
- The more you open your heart to the suffering of others, the less you suffer.
- The more you’re afraid of the suffering of the world, the more overwhelming it becomes.
- The thing you found magical in one person was always available in everything — you just never knew the magic was yours to turn on.
And now the infamous sutta lands with full weight. Hate is always rooted in perceiving wrongly, and is never helpful, no matter the provocation:
“Bhikkhus, even if bandits were to sever you savagely limb by limb with a two-handled saw, he who gave rise to a mind of hate towards them would not be carrying out my teaching… We shall abide pervading that person with a mind imbued with loving-kindness… abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility and without ill will.” — MN 21, trans. Ñāṇamoli & Bodhi
People read this as a superhuman moral demand. Through emptiness it isn’t a demand at all — it’s a description. Hate requires a solid “them” doing real harm to a solid “me.” Remove the solidity and there’s nothing for hate to grip. Even under the saw.
How this is actually changing how I relate to people
When I’m with someone and I notice the contraction — the subtle defending, the managing of how they see me, the scanning of their face for threat — that’s the attention getting sucked into the difficulty, and the other person solidifying into a fixed thing: “the one who might reject me,” “the one I need something from.” The more solid they get, the more closed I get.
The practice is right there in the moment: can I sense space around this? Can I notice that this “them” I’m bracing against is partly something I’m building? When the solidity loosens even a little, something relaxes, and I can actually be with the person instead of with my fabricated version of them. The love that was blocked by the bracing comes back online — not because I forced lovingkindness, but because I stopped building the wall. And the other person gets more mysterious, not less. As Rob says, we sometimes love people more when we recognize their autonomy — “beauty, mystery, unfathomability.” A fixed label does the opposite; it shrinks them to something known and finished.
Sex, romance, and the desire we got wrong
Romance is where I’ve found the most fabrication and the most suffering — and so, per Rob, the best place to look.
He says something I can’t unsee:
“It’s almost as if romantic love has become the god of our present culture — in a secular culture, what has become god, what has become the most important thing… It overburdens it with too much expectation of too much fulfilment.” — Rob Burbea, Love / The Difficulties of Love (2008)
When the old gods left, we handed all that weight to one human being. We expect a partner to do what religion used to do — save us, complete us, make existence finally okay — and then we’re shocked when an ordinary person buckles under being someone’s entire meaning. Rob even notes the ideal itself is historically new (it traces to the Renaissance troubadours). We were born into it and assumed it was just how reality is. It isn’t. It’s a way of looking with a date stamp.
Underneath it is the need to feel loved, and the trap is exact: “one ends up feeling unhappy because one doesn’t have what one thinks one needs to be happy.” The unhappiness isn’t from not having the relationship. It’s from the belief that you need it to be okay. The belief manufactures the lack.
Now here’s where people get scared — they hear “the path matures you out of grasping desire” and assume it means a gray, sexless, desireless life. It’s the opposite, and Vacha’s tantric framing is the cleanest answer to that fear:
“We are not losing anything by maturing out of our grasping, consumptive desires. Rather, we are allowing the bliss that was once bound up in specific people, objects or experiences, to extend itself to all people, all objects and all experiences. We are allowing ourselves to fall into sexual union with all of reality.” — Vacha, Garden of Light
You don’t lose eros. You unbind it. The intensity you could only feel for one naked body the first time becomes available — in its own register — for everything. This is also the resolution of my own knot. I caught myself once thinking I can’t slow down, I’m not complete until I make money — and the thing I saw is that the problem was never the bank account. It was the desire being held through lack: “I want this, I don’t have it, I feel the not-having,” which solidifies me into someone broken racing to get fixed. The moment I felt the same wanting as just energy, a current, without the lack-story, there was no incompleteness — just the wanting, and a strange abundance. And I made more videos that way, not fewer. The suffering was pure fabrication, and optional.
So Buddhism is not “kill desire.” It splits taṇhā — lack-driven, consumptive craving, which is the cause of suffering — from clean desire, desire-as-current, even the Buddha’s “have few desires, but great ones.”
(This is the one place I’ll borrow from outside Buddhism. Marc Gafni’s CosmoErotic Humanism dignifies desire beautifully and nails the secular-god critique. But I’m not buying his metaphysics — he says Reality literally is Eros, value is intrinsic and objective, you are intended by the cosmos. From the emptiness ground this whole essay stands on, even “Reality is Eros” is one more thing held as solid — empty like everything else. I want the dignity of desire he’s pointing at. I take it the Burbea way: as something empty and sacred at once, not as a metaphysical fact.)
The reconstruction: deep beauty in all things
So what’s actually left after you’ve dissolved the solid world, the solid self, the solid time? Not a gray void. That’s the great misconception — that the path ends in some cold, detached emptiness.
It ends in re-enchantment. Once you really get that nothing is inherently, objectively anything — that beauty and magic and meaning were never properties of things but modes of awareness you can turn on — you’re not stuck in barren neutrality. You’re freed to fabricate beauty. Knowingly. Deliberately. As a practice.
This is the part of Rob’s later work — what he calls soulmaking — that took me the longest to get. Emptiness isn’t the destination; it’s the liberation of the eyes. Because everything is empty, you get to look in the ways that disclose the most beauty, the most eros, the most sacredness — and what gets disclosed is genuinely meaningful, genuinely “more,” even though it’s fabricated and empty. Not objectively real (that would make it fixed, finished, a little dead). Not a lie either. Something in between — Rob has a whole talk just called Neither Is Nor Is Not. The image, the sacredness, the beauty gives itself to you, has its own depth and demand, and is empty all the way down. And the emptiness is exactly what keeps it alive, because there’s always more — eros always wants more, and an empty image can keep opening forever in a way a fixed fact never could.
That is what I mean by the goal being “deep beauty in all things.” Not discovering that things are objectively beautiful. Becoming someone who can make beauty, make soul, make a sacred world — freely, because you’ve seen the freedom emptiness gives you. The desireless monk sitting perfectly still wanting nothing? That’s one image of the path, one archetype, and a beautiful one. But it is not the objectively-existing reality of what the path “looks like,” because there is no objectively-existing way the path looks. That’s the whole point. The path is empty too. You get to fabricate your own image of it — and the most alive ones aren’t about subtracting yourself down to nothing. They’re about falling, more and more, into union with all of reality.
Renunciation is not deprivation
Which finally makes sense of renunciation.
Done as white-knuckled self-control, it just tightens the self. Rob points at an example of why it fails: “dieting often comes from neurotic concern with one’s self-image… leading to a deepening of the constriction of self… the opposite of freedom.”
Forcing yourself away from the drink by sheer will is two parts of you at war, and it deepens the very contraction you’re trying to release.
Real renunciation runs the other way:
“Renunciation is… intimately connected with our heart’s capacity for deep joy, wonder, openness and freedom… renunciation is something that moves us towards freedom, towards joy, towards love.” — Rob Burbea, Renunciation and Joy (2006)
You don’t rip the cheap pleasure away. You build an internal well-being so genuine — the “close your eyes and be happy” skill, metta, the joy of samādhi — that the lesser refuge simply loses the competition. The craving for alcohol, nicotine, gambling releases not because you forbade it but because you no longer need it: you found the real thing it was a counterfeit of, and you saw that the thing was never as satisfying as it advertised. Renunciation stops being loss and becomes upgrade. It’s the same two moves as everything else here — see the emptiness of the craved thing, and cultivate the genuine well-being — and the grip falls open on its own.
The misconceptions that keep people away
A few things people are sure happen on this path, all of which I now think are wrong:
- Life becomes bleak as you go deeper.
- You become indifferent once you let go of attachment.
- Buddhism takes the zest out of life.
All untrue, for one reason: bleakness and indifference mean you haven’t seen through it yet. They’re a sign you’re still relating to the seeming solidity of things with aversion — which is just clinging wearing gray. If you actually perceived more clearly, the bleakness would dissolve into more aliveness, more warmth, more magic — bliss shining in all things, not drained out of them. Indifference is the opposite of the goal. If you’ve arrived there, you got off a stop early.
The inner critic, and why “we westerners” struggle here
The hardest part of this path, for me, is the endless inner critic measuring how far along I am. I should be practicing more. I should be more awakened. Rob traces it precisely: “something happened in the time of the Renaissance — a movement towards individualism… bringing with it… the kind of pain of excessive individualism that can manifest as the inner critic, and all the isolation that that brings.” That “should” injects itself into the practice itself, until even meditation becomes another arena to fail in.
And the subtle trap: to think of this as my path, my awakening, is to reify a solid self that’s racking up progress — the exact thing the path sees through. Realization isn’t something “I” do. It’s seeing clearly. In a strange way it’s something reality does when the self gets out of the way. Rob’s antidote flips the whole energy: when you hear someone else woke up, the critic says “see, you’re behind.” The Buddha says ask instead — “Why not me? Why not me?” Aspiration without the self-flagellation.
So here’s the fantasy I practice toward
Not a calmer version of the same life. A different relationship to existence entirely — where the world stops being a set of solid things subtly oppressing you, and becomes lighter, more workable, more shot through with love and beauty and even bliss than you knew was on the menu. Where the magic you used to ration out to a few special people and a few special nights turns out to have been yours all along, and starts shining everywhere. Where you’ve tasted enough of the timeless that the relentless flow can’t trap you anymore.
It’s available. That’s the most radical thing about it. Beyond anything you can imagine, and the most natural thing there is — the instant the fabricating relaxes its grip.
Why not me? Why not you?