The Layers of Insight

The following framework is adapted from Michael Taft’s Stack Model.

It describes increasingly subtle ways of experiencing or ways of seeing our present-moment experience. These become available through sustained cultivation of the three core skills—Stability, Clarity and Equanimity—through Vipassanā practice.

Often, Insight practice uses the Sixteen Stages of Insight (Ñāṇas) to describe this unfolding. While the map is valuable, particularly on intensive retreat, I’ve found the Stack Model to be a simpler and more practical framework for guiding everyday practice.

Like any map, it isn’t reality itself. It doesn’t perfectly describe every meditator or every possible experience. Rather, it is a framework that helps us understand where our practice is tending and which approach might be most helpful at a given time.

You can think of these as five increasing depths of presence, beginning with complete distraction and gradually revealing deeper and less constructed ways of experiencing reality.

You can also think of them as layers of conditioning. At the top, experience is heavily filtered through concepts, beliefs and mental stories. As practice deepens, experience becomes progressively less constructed and more directly known.

Finally, you can think of them as layers of insight. The deeper we go, the more clearly the fundamental characteristics of experience reveal themselves. The five layers are not discrete levels or stages but more like a continuous spectrum we constantly move within. Over time, deeper layers are present more of the time.

The five layers of Insight or five ways of seeing our phenomenological experience with increasing stability, clarity and equanimity.

Way of Seeing	Quality of Experience	Description
(1) Fully Distracted	No Presence	Completely caught in thoughts, stories or reactions without knowing that you’re caught.
(2) Conceptual / Cognitive	Thinking About Experience	Awareness is present, but mostly through concepts. Thinking about experience rather than directly experiencing it.
(3) Sensory Events	Distinct Phenomena	Experience is known as individual sensations, sounds, thoughts, emotions and mental images or self talk arising in awareness. The three characteristics are glimpsed.
(4) Flux / Flow	Movement & Energy	The apparent solidity of experiences begins dissolving into continuous movement, vibration and flow. Boundaries soften and experience becomes more field-like, alive and dynamic. The three characteristics become more obvious.
(5) Openness / Spaciousness	Emptiness & Awareness	Experience is recognised as open, spacious and awake. The apparent separation between awareness and experience, observer and observed is dissolving. The three characteristics mature towards insight into Shunyata.

The three characteristics are the hallmarks of Vipassana practice. They are the fundamental truths or nature of every experience arising in consciousness. They are what we discover when we see clearly in Vipassana practice.

Anicca

Impermanence / Instability / Inconstancy

Self and World are experienced as phenomena that are always moving shifting and are not the stable, solid things that the mind assumes them to be. Stability only exists at the concept level while experience is continuously changing.

Dukkha

Suffering / Dissatisfaction / Recurrent Struggle

When we tries to grasp, hold onto, remove or resist experiences there is a subjective experience that is painful, tense or separate. We usually do this when we hold an idea of how I or World should be different than it is. That tension also tends to lead to compulsive behaviour which is unhelpful to ourselves and others. 

Anatta

Non-Self / No separate, permanent Self

What we assume to be ourselves, our personality and our viewpoint is a flux of uncontrollable impermanent phenomena - a flow of mental and sensory activity. What we took to be separate and permanent is constructed of phenomena in the present moment and comes and goes.

Shunyata

Emptiness / Hollowness / Spaciousness / Openness / Awareness

Although not emphasised in the earliest forms of Vipassanā in the same way that it later came to be in Mahāyāna Buddhism, I have found the teaching of Śūnyatā to be an incredibly powerful lens for practice. Rather than replacing the three characteristics, it deepens them. As impermanence, suffering and non-self become clearer, experience begins to be recognised as empty of fixed, independent existence. Both Self and World are experienced as open, relational and continuously arising together.

This integration of Theravāda Vipassanā with contemporary non-dual approaches was introduced to me through my teacher, Michael Taft, and has gradually become part of the progression we explore in Vipassanā at Home.

Unfolding Practice

Our practice initially moves in the downward direction through these layers. This can take years of consistent practice.

Importantly, this doesn’t happen equally across all parts of our experience. We might already experience the body as movement and flow, while our emotions still feel dense and conceptual. Or we may glimpse spacious awareness during meditation but still become completely caught in our thinking during everyday life. Different parts of our experience unfold at different rates.

Vipassanā is fundamentally a deconstructive meditation practice.

Deconstruction simply means moving down through these layers and seeing through the constructed solidity of experience. We begin recognising that what we took to be one solid thing is actually made up of many changing phenomena. Experience becomes less conceptual and more directly experienced. 

Importantly, this doesn’t mean we stop using concepts.As practice deepens, these deeper layers become available more easily, with less formal meditation and in more areas of our life.

As this happens, we also begin bringing the insight gained in the deeper layers back into the higher ones. We continue thinking, speaking, planning and using concepts, but we do so while recognising their constructed nature. We can use concepts without becoming trapped inside them.

In this sense, practice first moves down through the layers and then begins moving back up again. Vipassanā gradually shifts from cultivation to view.

At first we intentionally cultivate Samādhi, Sati and Upekkhā and actively deconstruct experience. Later, it becomes less about doing something and more about recognising the nature of experience itself. Rather than continuously trying to deconstruct experience, we begin resting in the understanding that has already been revealed. The Buddha expressed this through the insight that:

“All conditioned phenomena are impermanent.”

This is the language of early Buddhism. It points us towards seeing through the conditioned nature of experience. Later Buddhist traditions, particularly Zen and Vajrayāna, often express the same insight from the other direction:

“Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.”

This points to the maturation of the final layer of the stack. Rather than trying to stay in that layer forever, we begin to recognise that all the other layers were already empty to begin with.

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