There comes a moment in any long enquiry into consciousness when scattered insights begin to arrange themselves into a single form. What once appeared as separate states — waking, dreaming, meditating, sleeping, dissolving, dying — start to reveal their hidden continuity. The mind, which for most of our lives feels like a shifting multitude of experiences, begins to show itself as one movement with different depths.
This model was born out of that recognition.
For centuries, meditation traditions described the descent inward, neuroscience charted the frequencies of the brain, physiology mapped the fascia and organ networks that sustain us, and contemplatives spoke of Sunyata and Thukdam as if they were states outside of ordinary comprehension. Each field held a fragment, but the fragments never sat on the same page. There was no integrated picture that showed how the entire system fits together.
Until now.
This diagram is the first attempt to place everything on one vertical continuum. At the top sits the familiar world of waking consciousness, carried by the brain’s operating frequencies. Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta — these are not random bands, but layers of the mind’s outward engagement. When the body signals upward through fascia, nerves and interoception, it rises into these frequencies. This is the everyday loop: body to brain, brain to experience, experience to self. Nothing unusual, nothing mystical, simply the dynamics of being alive.
Yet the same mind that rises outward also has the capacity to move inward. This is where the diagram changes direction. The downward arrow does not represent physiology; it represents the collapse of the self. In meditation, the frequencies slow, the mind withdraws, thinking quietens, and the familiar sense of identity begins to loosen. The field becomes pictorial, then silent, then still.
And then the 300-millisecond gap appears.
It is small, almost negligible in ordinary experience, yet it is the doorway through which the entire inward continuum begins. The mind disappears and returns with no memory of where it has been. The self flickers, the world goes thin, and awareness begins to stand without its usual content. Here, the descent deepens, and what traditions call Sunyata becomes the first true threshold. The mind-light extinguishes. There is no movement, no thought, no time, yet life remains. Sleep resembles it, but cannot enter it, for sleep is unconscious while Sunyata is a stillness held from within.
If the body remains alive, the mind can return. If the inward movement continues past the point of reassembling the self, the diagram enters its final region: the ending of time in the mind. This is the crossing from reversible to irreversible. Sunyata reached deliberately through meditation becomes Thukdam when held beyond the final breath. The body remains warm, coherent, and undecayed for days because the inward collapse has completed without re-emergence. The field that maintained the mind’s timing has dissolved.
Above all of this sits the recognition that gave the model its final form: the entire continuum is one inward movement. Waking, sleeping, dreaming, meditating, entering Sunyata, crossing into Thukdam — these are not separate events. They are simply different depths of disappearance. The mind rises outward to form the self; it falls inward to dissolve it. One movement with two directions. One architecture with different thresholds.
The fascia-body at the bottom does not participate in this inward collapse; its signals travel upward only into the waking layers. The inward continuum belongs to consciousness alone. By placing both flows — body upward, mind inward — on the same page, the model shows clearly what has been confused for centuries: the self is not required for the body to function, nor for life to continue, nor for stillness to occur. The self is simply what appears when the mind is moving outward.
This one-page diagram is not an explanation. It is an orientation.
It allows the reader to see the structure of their own mind laid out from beginning to end. It shows where meditation leads, where sleep points, where death opens, and why the deepest inward movements were always described as thresholds rather than experiences. It is a map of what we are built from, and what remains when the mind begins to fall silent.
If this model feels intuitive, it is because it describes the movement your mind has always known. You rise outward every morning, fall inward every night, touch the edge of the gap each time thought pauses, and approach Sunyata each time the self recedes. The diagram does not introduce something new; it reveals what has been happening in you for as long as you have been alive.
And this is why it belongs on a single page.
Because the mind itself is one field, one movement, one architecture — expressed differently at different depths, yet always belonging to the same continuum.