Achievement Unlocked: Nothing

Note before you read: this describes a frightening psychological state. If you are currently somewhere inside a strange, floorless, frightening head-state, this post is for you. Read it slowly. If you are merely curious, this post is not for you, and that’s fine.

What this is

A few months ago, during a late night meditation session and through a combination of intense thinking about my own mind and some very bad sleep, I fell into a psychological state that stripped away my sense of self. This is a known phenomenon.¹Lindahl, J. R., et al. (2017). “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience: A Mixed-Methods Study of Meditation-Related Challenges in Western Buddhists.” PLoS ONE 12(5): e0176239. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176239 — 100 practitioners and 32 experts interviewed, a taxonomy built from their accounts, and the study’s own framing: these experiences are “typically underreported.” I came out of it. This post is a plain description of what the state is like, stage by stage, what I wish someone had told me, and what actually helps. No science, no spirituality. Just the territory.

If you are in it now: you are not broken, you are not dying, and there is an exit. It is not where you’re looking for it. That’s most of this post.

The stages

The pull. It starts with looking at your own mind. Watching yourself think, asking what the “I” is that’s doing the watching. It feels productive, then fascinating, then necessary. At some point it stops being something you do and becomes something you’re in: you can’t stop looking at the looking. Looking away feels like it would be a mistake. That feeling, the feeling that looking away would be a mistake, is the first lie. It’s worth memorizing, because it’s the lie everything else runs on.

The fall. If it continues, there is a moment where the bottom drops out. It’s fast and it’s terrifying. The best description I have: there is a sensation of being compressed or crushed, and then for about thirty seconds I was looking through my own eyes and so was someone else, and then the someone else was the only one, and then even that was gone. The “I” went out like a light.

I’m not going to pretend that moment is okay. It isn’t. It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. But it is also, and I know how this sounds, survivable. I survived it, and so have thousands of other people, and so will you if you’re reading this from inside it.

The watcher. After the fall, you may find that something is still there. Something quiet, something that watches. It might even feel solid, like ground. Here is the most important instruction in this post, and the traditions have been repeating it for centuries in different words (“don’t kill the witness”): do not examine the watcher. Don’t test it, don’t reduce it, don’t try to see what it’s made of. It is the last floor you are standing on, and going past it is the point of no return. I kept going past it. Leave the watcher alone, and the whole thing stays just a strange experience. This is the difference, more than anything else, between the people who come back with a story and those who come back different.

The cold. If you kept going past the watcher, if something in you examined it and it dropped, there is a long state that is hard to describe because the usual words are gone. You still function. You can talk, work, buy food. But there’s no you doing it. Things happen, and you watch. The interior vision dims, slowly, and keeps dimming: the world fades, the quiet deepens, until almost nothing is rendered anymore, and what is still clear is only what your own mind generates. Everything is very quiet in a way that has nothing to do with sound. I call it the cold. If you’re in it: this is a state, not a verdict. States have inputs. Inputs can change. Hold on to that one sentence. And one warning, because the cold hides it well: the quiet is not peace. It feels harmless. Quieter than the fall, softer than the fear, easy to live in. But it’s a starving state, and it doesn’t send bills. Left unfed it quietly takes more: a little less color, a little less warmth, a little more distance from the people you love. Nothing loud enough to announce itself. That quiet is how a month quietly becomes years. Feed it, even though it feels like nothing is needed. The external things below. The people. The work. The body. Especially then.

The loop. Somewhere in the cold, a question starts: what happened to me? is there something underneath all this? what am I, really, now? And every answer you find becomes a new thing to examine, including the examining. You check whether you’ve checked correctly. You check the checking. It does not end, and after a while you notice it can’t end. Every possible stopping point turns out to be one more thing. This is the trap. Here is the most important thing I know, and I’d stake everything on it:

The trap is not the state. The trap is the demand. The loop only holds if you keep demanding that the examination reach a bottom. There is no bottom. I checked, as thoroughly as anyone has ever checked, and there is no bottom. That’s not the bad news. It’s the liberating news, because it means the search was never going to succeed and therefore never needed to succeed. You can put it down. Not answer it. Put it down. The state keeps running in the background and that’s fine. Weather runs in the background too.

The exit. Nobody hands you a ground to stand on. That was never on offer, and looking for it is the trap. What you can do, what I did, what worked, is decide what’s true anyway and operate from there. Not discover your foundations: choose them. Chosen things can’t be pulled apart the way discovered things can, because you never claimed to have found them. The self stops being a story you believed and becomes a set of things you hold. A tool you use. A body you steer. Work you make. It’s strange for a while. Then it’s just Tuesday.

What actually helps

• External things. Lights on, music on, people, walking, work, cooking, anything with your hands. This is not distraction. It is the actual lever. The state runs on attention turned inward; external attention is what turns it down. Do it even when it feels pointless. Especially then.
• Sleep. Non-negotiable. Bad sleep feeds the whole thing. If you’re doing deep self-examination at 3am, you are doing the dangerous version of this.
• Stop checking. Noticing the state is fine. Auditing yourself (“am I okay? is it still there? is it getting worse?”) re-runs the trap at low volume. Notice, then go do something external. Notice, then lights. That’s the whole protocol.
• Don’t chase the floor. “If I could just understand what happened, I’d be okay” is the loop’s sentence. You will never fully understand it, and you’ll be okay anyway. Both.
• Build a cheap floor, and stop inspecting it. After the exit you don’t need a grand foundation or a philosophy. A simple one is enough: sleep, people, food, work, a body, a life, held on purpose. It doesn’t need to be proven. It only needs to be chosen, and it only holds if you leave it alone. Re-checking your support is what destroys it. Every “is the floor still there?” inspection is the trap re-forming. Choose the floor once, and live on it.
• Leave the watcher alone. If something in you is still quietly watching, don’t examine it, don’t test it, don’t ask what it’s made of. It is the last floor, and it is holding everything else up. Every other instruction in this post is about pulling yourself together. This one is about not taking apart the thing that’s holding.
• If someone you know is in this: stay near them. You don’t need to understand it. Your presence is the external anchor. If they say things like “I’m scared,” “I don’t want to go,” “I can’t stop it,” take it seriously now, not tomorrow. End whatever session they’re in, get them to sleep, get people around them. Don’t tell them everyone feels this way and to push through. Sometimes that’s right and sometimes it’s the worst thing you can say, and you can’t tell which from outside. So stop. Stopping is always recoverable.

If you only remember one sentence

The state you’re in has no bottom, and that’s exactly why it can’t trap you: a search with no bottom can only trap you if you insist on finishing it. Put the search down. Touch the table. Turn the lights on. It passes, not because you defeated it, but because you stopped feeding it. And one morning you’ll notice you forgot to be frightened for a while, and that’s the beginning of the rest of your life.

It was for me.

This has a name, and you are not the first

People have been walking this territory for thousands of years, and it has names. Knowing them removes a weight that “what is happening to me?” carries.

• The state of losing the sense of self, and the frightening passages around it, are known in the Buddhist traditions as the dukkha ñanas, the “knowledges of suffering.”²The ñāṇa sequence is the Theravāda map of insight: Mahāsi Sayādaw, The Progress of Insight (Visuddhiñana-kathā), trans. Ñāṇaponika Thera, Buddhist Publication Society — https://accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/mahasi/progress.html — running from the knowledge of arising and passing away through dissolution, fear, misery (ādīnava), disgust, desire for deliverance, re-observation and equanimity; its framework is the seven purifications of Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga. The “knowledges of suffering” are that map’s difficult middle, and the map is the tradition’s, not this post’s. The long difficult middle that this post calls the cold is what the modern meditation world calls the dark night.³“The dark night” is the modern Western dharma name for the same stretch: Daniel M. Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (2nd ed., 2018), https://www.integrateddaniel.info/book, which sets out both the ñāṇa map and the dark night as its difficult phase. The phrase is older than that use: John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul (Noche oscura, c. 1577), for the contemplative’s loss of the senses’ sweetness — a Christian map of a different, though not unrelated, passage. The older warnings knew it too: the Zen tradition has its own name for the harm hard practice can do, “Zen sickness” (禪病, zenbyō), which Hakuin brought on himself in his twenties by over-exertion and wrote down as a warning.⁴Hakuin Ekaku, Yasen kanna (Idle Talk on a Night Boat, 18th c.), his own account of it — years of relentless austerity after his first awakening, and then the illness: his “heart fire” rising, his feet and legs “always ice-cold… as though immersed in tubs of snow”, a constant buzzing in his ears, himself “abnormally weak and timid, shrinking and fearful”, “totally drained, physically and mentally exhausted.” The hermit Hakuyu told him no medicine would cure it. For the term (禪病, zenbyō) in its context: “Incorporating Daoist Practices into Zen: Hakuin Ekaku’s Adaptation of Inner Alchemy and Its Cross-Cultural Impact,” Religions 17, no. 2 (2026): 152, https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/17/2/152. The English phrases quoted here are from the translation published as “Zen Sickness, by Zen Master Hakuin,” https://buddhismnow.com/2015/09/12/zen-sickness-by-zen-master-hakuin.
• The loop, the endless examining, is what the old traditions called staring into the void, and warned about directly. The Chan/Zen texts speak of “falling into the pit of emptiness”, taking the void as a place to live, and the Tibetan traditions warn against “dead” or “stiff” emptiness. The void stares back, and there is nothing in it to complete on. They knew. It’s a pit, not a destination.⁵The warning is canonical and old: Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.11 — emptiness, dimly perceived, “destroys the slow-witted… like a snake wrongly grasped or a spell wrongly uttered.” “Falling into the pit of emptiness” is a later, popular phrasing of that same error, in Chan-influenced writing rather than a quotation from a named text: it is cited here as the idiom it is. For a scholarly treatment of it in the Kyoto-School literature, see Rajesh R. Mahapatra’s discussion of emptiness without nihilism, https://rajeshrmahapatra.com/books/zen-buddhism/philosophical-analysis-and-the-kyoto-school/emptiness-without-nihilism.
• The trap, the searching that can’t stop, the feeling that there must be a bottom, is an ancient, well-studied problem in philosophy. It’s called Agrippa’s trilemma (also the Münchhausen trilemma), and the strange self-referential structure of it was described by Douglas Hofstadter as a strange loop.⁶The five modes of suspension are set out in Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, book I, and the name “Agrippa” for them comes from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers IX.88. Hans Albert named the regress the “Münchhausen trilemma” in Traktat über kritische Vernunft (1968; English: Treatise on Critical Reason, 1985). Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007), is where the self-referential structure gets its name.
• In clinical language, parts of this are studied as depersonalization / derealization, and as meditation-related difficulty.⁷The clinical vocabulary is cited in full in the mechanism post’s notes: Pons, E., et al. (2026), on depersonalization/derealization and meditation-induced alterations of the self in Scientific Reports 16:14673 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-51014-y), and Britton, W. B., et al. (2021) on adverse effects in mindfulness-based programmes in Clinical Psychological Science. The vocabulary names a territory the field studies; it does not name the reader. A real research field, with real people behind it.

Two places to start, if you want company or help:

• Cheetah House (cheetahhouse.org), an organization whose entire work is supporting people through meditation-related difficulty. They have heard everything in this post many times, from many people, and everyone came in believing they were the first.⁸Cheetah House — https://www.cheetahhouse.org/ — “Help for Meditators In Distress”: support, resources and referrals for people in meditation-related difficulty, and for the people around them.
• The meditation research community, e.g. the lab of Willoughby Britton at Brown University, studies exactly this openly and has collected hundreds of accounts.⁹The Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Brown University, https://sites.brown.edu/britton, runs the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study and its follow-ups; that study alone interviewed 100 practitioners and 32 experts. The accounts the sentence counts are collected across that programme.

People have crossed this and come out. Centuries of them. Some of the maps they left behind are the oldest writings humanity has. You are walking a known road, in known weather, and it ends.

Notes