# Corpus notes — Agrawal & Laukkonen, "Nothingness in Meditation: Making Sense of Emptiness and Cessation"

**Work:** Agrawal, V., & Laukkonen, R. E. (2024). *Nothingness in Meditation: Making Sense of Emptiness and Cessation*. In D. Rickles & L. Stein (Eds.), *Varieties of Nothingness*. Chiron Publications. Preprint: PsyArXiv, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tygdf (posted 2024-03-18; accepted version, 34 pp.).
**Read:** full 34-page preprint, all pages, 2026-07-16.
**Provenance note:** the originally staged input at `specs/waypoint-research/inputs/agrawal-laukkonen-nothingness-emptiness-cessation.pdf` was a **truncated 5-page copy** (ended mid-sentence on p. 5). A complete 34-page copy was found locally in Zotero (`~/Zotero/storage/TNYFFBYQ/`) and has **replaced the truncated staged file**. OSF downloads were returning 502 at read time; the reference list below was cross-checked against OpenAlex (70 machine-matched referenced works) and against the PDF's own References section (pp. 24–33), which is authoritative here.
**Relevance to spec:** primary discriminator source for the constructs the Wheel places at 50–60 (Unbinding: proto-cessation / "small death", non-dual loop navigation) and for the confusion pairs in spec §3; also feeds lanes 4 (adverse events), 5 (false insight / contamination), and 6 (predictive processing).

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## 1. USABLE FOR STAGE ASSESSMENT

### 1.1 The core two-construct discrimination (the paper's central claim)

The chapter separates two "nothingness" phenomena that practitioner reports routinely conflate (§§1–2):

| | **Emptiness (no-thingness, śūnyatā/suññatā)** | **Cessation (nothingness, nirodha)** |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Insight attainment / cognitive shift (**de-reification**) | Discrete state event with entry/exit (**de-fabrication**) |
| Content | Experiential understanding that self + objects are mental fabrications, interdependent, lacking intrinsic existence | Complete absence: all perceptions and feelings cease, *including space, time, and awareness* |
| Duration | Enduring shift in how experience is related to | Milliseconds to seconds (nirodha); up to ~7 days trained (nirodha samāpatti) |
| Aftermath | Non-attachment, equanimity, reduced "ontological addiction" | "Reboot" of consciousness; clarity/openness on emergence; recognized retrospectively |

**Waypoint use:** these are *different marker families*. Emptiness markers are trait-like and pervade language over weeks; cessation markers are event reports with crisp temporal boundaries. The marker bank should never collapse them into one "advanced" bucket.

**Transcript signatures:**
- Emptiness (genuine): epistemic, process-level descriptions — "I saw how the mind was constructing the problem", "the boundary between me and the sound wasn't there because it was never there", "even the emptiness isn't a thing". Post-hoc language of *relating differently* to unchanged content.
- Cessation (genuine): "there was a gap — I only knew it afterwards", "something switched off and on; time didn't pass", "when I came back everything was extremely clear/light". Retrospective recognition is itself part of the canonical phenomenology (Laukkonen, Sacchet, et al., 2023, as cited pp. 2, 5): a practitioner who claims *rich experience during* the cut is describing something else.
- 7th-jhāna "nothingness" (near-neighbor, NOT cessation): still has phenomenal content — "awareness dwells on the absence of any object"; "perception of no-thing-ness is still perception" (Gunaratana, 2009, as quoted p. 2). Probe discriminator: "was there anything it was like to be there?" — yes → formless absorption, not nirodha.

### 1.2 The confusion table (§2.4, pp. 6–8) — direct input to the spec §3 confusion-pair bank

The paper explicitly lists states that get mislabeled as emptiness or cessation:

1. **Non-dual awareness** — a background "ground of being" state. Key discriminator (p. 7, citing Attwood, 2022): non-dual awareness reports tend to **assert awareness as an ontological entity** ("awareness is what everything is"), whereas emptiness/cessation direct the mind to an **epistemic observation of how the mind operates, undermining any 'ground'**. In transcript terms: *ontological claims about awareness-as-substrate score toward ND-awareness experience; process observations that dissolve even the ground score toward emptiness insight.* This single sentence is one of the most operationalizable discriminators in the whole corpus.
2. **Pure consciousness / void experiences** (e.g., 5-MeO-DMT; Ermakova et al., 2022; Millière et al., 2018) — "emptying of all experiential content" described as pure consciousness, emptiness, nothingness, or void. Contentless-sounding ≠ cessation and ≠ emptiness insight.
3. **Objectless awareness in sleep** — yoga nidrā / luminosity yoga "clear light", Advaita *sushupti* "witnessing-sleep" (Alcaraz-Sánchez et al., 2022; Nikhilananda, 2006). Lacks object-directed awareness but is not nirodha.
4. **Transcendental oneness / mystical union** (subject–object dissolution) — can be mislabeled as nirodha (their example: Smith, 2011).
5. **'Blanking out', 'presence', 'light', 'silence', 'stillness', 'thoughtless awareness'** (Berkovich-Ohana et al., 2013; Hinterberger et al., 2014) — the authors suggest these may be *transitional states between emptiness insight and subsequent cessation* (p. 8), i.e., staging-informative but not the milestones themselves.
6. **Drug-induced ego dissolution** (Letheby & Gerrans, 2017; Lebedev et al., 2015) — self/world boundary loss with oneness; distinct provenance and (per the paper) risk of *reifying* the "woken-up reality" — "replacing one dream for another" (p. 11).
7. **Pathological voids** (§3.3, pp. 12–13): dissociation/derealization/depersonalization (Ciaunica et al., 2021; Apter, 1992), schizophrenic fragmentation ("nowhere to be found", Ellonen-Jéquier, 2009), narcissistic emptiness (Epstein, 1989), athymhormia (self-activation loss after brain injury; Verstichel & Larrouy, 2005). Discriminator offered (p. 13): genuine Buddhist attainments *reduce subjective suffering while fostering a compassionate and functional human being*; pathology does not. For Waypoint this is exactly the spec's "equanimity vs dissociation" pair: check function + warmth + agency alongside the void report.

### 1.3 A depth ladder for emptiness insight (gross → subtle, p. 4)

Scoreable gradations, roughly monotone in depth:
1. Intellectual/psychological: conceptions are constructs (countries/borders example; Van Gordon et al., 2017; Burbea, 2014).
2. Self as dynamic, ever-evolving construct (not fixed).
3. All five aggregates (form, valence, perception, mental activity, consciousness) arise co-dependently; the *entire experience* is fabricated.
4. **Emptiness of emptiness**: no-thingness itself is not a self-existent void or ultimate truth (Garfield, 1994; Anālayo, 2015).

**Transcript use:** placement within 1–4 discriminates map-talk (level 1 is cheap and reading-contaminable) from lived depth (levels 3–4 rarely survive paraphrase probing by someone who only read about it). A practitioner asserting "the void is the ultimate reality behind illusion" is *failing* level 4 — reification of emptiness is itself a placement signal (too shallow, or ND-awareness frame).

### 1.4 The 16-stage progress of insight as a staging scheme (§4, pp. 15–16; Sayadaw, 2016)

The paper reproduces the Mahasi map: (1) discernment of mental vs physical; (2) cause–effect between them ("initial taste of no-thingness"); (3) the three characteristics; (4) arising & passing away; (5) dissolution; (6) fear; (7) misery; (8) disgust; (9) desire for deliverance ("get me out of here"); (10) re-observation (decision to practice on); (11) equanimity toward all formations; (12) knowledge of the Four Noble Truths; (13) change-of-lineage (mind "abandons arising and rushes into cessation"); (14) path (magga) — defilements break, consciousness ceases; (15) fruition (phala); (16) reviewing.

- **Dukkha ñanas = stages 5–10**, beginning at dissolution: "no solid ground", no-thingness in everything, "severely disruptive to existing belief structures", conflict with sense of meaning/purpose (pp. 13, 16). This is the paper's anchor for the Wheel's dark-night-adjacent phase and the spec's dark-night-vs-depression pair: the disruption is *insight-triggered, stage-located, and expected*, and matures into equanimity (stage 11) rather than anhedonia.
- **Stages 13–15 last only moments and "are usually not recognized as distinct by the meditator"** (Thera, 1965, as cited p. 16). Consequence for Waypoint: do not expect practitioners to self-report magga/phala by name; expect a *reviewing-stage narrative* (stage 16) — retrospective reconstruction of a gap plus changed baseline. Corroboration should lean on before/after trait deltas, not on the event description alone.

### 1.5 Trait milestones: the four-path fetter model (§3.1, pp. 9–10)

- **Stream-entry (sotāpatti) is attained "when consciousness ceases for the first time"** (Armstrong, 2021; Buddhaghosa, 1998; Upatissa, 1995) — i.e., *first cessation is a crisp, datable milestone event* that doubles as a band boundary. It eliminates three fetters: identity view, doubt in practice, belief in purification by external observance (Anālayo, 2021).
- Post-stream-entry signature (p. 9): even the view "I have no self" is abandoned — the mind does **not** slide into detached nihilism; self drops away as "real, unreal, both, or neither" (Burbea, 2014). Transcript discriminator: nihilistic flatness ("nothing matters, there's no one here") is a *negative* marker; middle-way ease without doctrinal assertion is positive.
- **Fetter removal is claimed to be permanent** — "not a temporary absence like … an altered state of consciousness" (pp. 9–10; Anālayo, 2018). Waypoint translation: trait markers must persist across sessions/months to corroborate a band claim; a week of equanimity followed by old reactivity is a state, not a stage. (The paper flags that irreversibility has zero contemporary scientific evidence — see Cautions.)
- Fetters as **latent tendencies (anusaya)** that fire automatically on valence and are "only realize[d] … in hindsight" (Anālayo, 2018, p. 9). Marker gradient: reports of *noticing reactivity only in hindsight* → *catching it live* → *reaction not arising* is a scoreable reactivity ladder, and it is observable passively in how practitioners narrate conflicts.

### 1.6 Pathways to cessation and what telemetry predicts (§4, pp. 14–17)

Three routes, each with different expected milestone sequences:
1. **Samatha-first:** access concentration (hindrances pacified) → jhānas 1–4 (pleasurable sensation → mental happiness → contentment → pure equanimity) → formless jhānas 5–8 (boundless space, boundless consciousness, nothingness, neither-perception-nor-non-perception) → possibly the **signless state** ("primarily characterized by emptiness") → nirodha samāpatti. Masters traverse at will for predetermined periods (p. 15).
2. **Dry/bare insight (Mahasi-style):** the 16 ñanas culminating in cessation, without jhāna mastery.
3. **Contemporary umbrella:** focused attention → open monitoring → non-dual practices as progressive reduction of "abstract, counterfactual, and temporally deep cognition" (Laukkonen & Slagter, 2021; Dahl et al., 2015) — each stage brings the meditator "closer to the true here and now," which logically terminates in either contentless awareness or cessation (p. 17).

**Waypoint use:** practice telemetry (which practice family, which sequence position) sets the *prior over which milestones should appear next* and which vocabulary is expected. A breathwork/absorption-track practitioner reporting ñana-style fear/disgust stages (or vice versa) is a consistency flag — either cross-training, contamination, or misreport.

### 1.7 Post-insight psychological profile (§3.1, p. 10)

Van Gordon et al. (2019), advanced practitioners meditating on emptiness vs mindfulness controls: significantly greater non-attachment, compassion, positive affect; lower negative affect. Participant phrasing: "letting go of any emotional or conceptual baggage", "recharging", "replenishing". Mechanism framing: emptiness removes the locus on which baggage accumulates; reduces "ontological addiction" (Van Gordon et al., 2017). **Marker-bank note:** these are natural-language exemplars for positive-polarity emptiness markers, and the *compassion co-occurrence* is a bypass/dissociation discriminator (dissociative detachment lacks the warmth component).

### 1.8 De-fabrication vs de-reification (§6, pp. 19–21) — the state/trait axis formalized

- **Fabrication** = creating experience; **reification** = treating fabrications as inherently real. **De-fabrication** occurs in ASCs (deep sleep, anesthesia, cessation); **de-reification** is "tied explicitly to insight attainments or cognitive shifts" (p. 20).
- Suffering model: dukkha = the intention/struggle to minimize the gap between actual and envisioned experience (craving pleasantness / resisting unpleasantness), formalized as motivation to reduce (perceived) prediction error (p. 19). Freedom via de-reification = seeing what-is, what-ought, and the gap as all mental projections, while *retaining an adaptive functional model* (Burbea, 2014; Yates et al., 2017).
- Computational sketch: emptiness insight ≈ **relaxing hyperpriors on precision** (beliefs about the reliability of one's own beliefs/uncertainty) (Friston et al., 2013; p. 20); nervous system becomes "resilient to uncertainty" — doesn't get 'shocked' into fight/flight under uncertain situations (p. 21).
- **Transcript signature of de-reification (vs mere calm):** descriptions where the *relationship to* experience changed while content remained ("the anxiety was there but it wasn't a problem / wasn't mine / wasn't solid"), equanimity under provocation *in the conversation itself*, and absence of craving-for-certainty language. The paper's binocular-rivalry analogy (Hohwy et al., 2008; p. 21) frames ordinary mind as perpetual viewpoint-switching under prediction error — de-reified practitioners should show less viewpoint-thrash in reasoning about their own dilemmas.

### 1.9 A behavioral probe Waypoint can adapt: retention time / "stickiness" (§6, p. 22)

Proposed experiment: expose insight meditators vs controls to praise/criticism/neutral stimuli; prediction — de-reified minds "effortlessly 'let go' of emergent phenomena, resulting in less sticky abstract processing"; neural responses to charged stimuli appear but *decay faster* (temporal generalization method, King & Dehaene, 2014). Also proposed to distinguish pathological *indifference* from genuine *equanimity* (response appears then releases vs never appears).
**Conversational analogue for the probe bank:** measure how long a mild provocation/charged topic persists in a practitioner's subsequent turns (rumination half-life). Fast appear-then-release = equanimity marker; no response at all = flatness/dissociation candidate; long persistence = reactivity. This is passive, invisible, and structure-scored — exactly the spec's probe constraints.

### 1.10 Neural correlates (for future wearable/EEG telemetry, not v1 conversation scoring)

- Alpha-power reduction starting ~40 s before cessation, linear occipital/parietal decrease, lowest immediately after the event; modest theta increases; delta/beta flat (Chowdhury et al., 2023; pp. 11–12).
- Alpha-band-specific decline in large-scale functional connectivity around cessation, replicated across two labs on two adepts (Laukkonen, Sacchet, et al., 2023; p. 12).
- Competing finding: increased global long-range gamma (25–45 Hz) synchronization during cessations (Berkovich-Ohana, 2017; p. 12).
- Emptiness (as defined here) has essentially **no dedicated neurophysiology** yet (p. 10); psychedelic DMN/SLN downregulation used only as an analogy (Lebedev et al., 2015).

### 1.11 Wheel mapping (my synthesis, marked as interpretation)

- Emptiness-insight ladder (1.3) spans Awakening into Enlightenment territory (~41+); level-1 intellectual emptiness is common in the 22–45 app population and must not be scored as insight.
- Dukkha ñanas (1.4) are the *phase* annotation (dip), not a stage regression; their onset presupposes reaching dissolution-stage perception — itself evidence of substantial depth.
- First cessation / stream-entry (1.5) and jhāna-ladder position (1.6) are the crisp milestones for the 50–60 band ("small death" / proto-cessation in Surya's model); the confusion table (1.2) is the guard against over-crediting ND-awareness, void, or sleep-state reports as Unbinding evidence.

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## 2. METHODOLOGY WORTH COPYING

1. **Differentiate constructs before measuring them.** The chapter's whole contribution is refusing to let "nothingness/emptiness/void/oneness/pure consciousness" function as one variable, then giving pairwise discriminators. Waypoint's marker bank should be built the same way: for every high-band marker, an explicit near-neighbor table with the feature that separates them (their best example: ontological assertion vs epistemic observation, §2.4).
2. **Epistemology/phenomenology over ontology (p. 2).** They deliberately score *how experience is described and what it did to the mind*, not whether the metaphysics is true. Identical stance to the spec's "how experience is described (not just what is claimed)".
3. **State vs trait separation** (de-fabrication vs de-reification; permanent fetter removal vs temporary ASC absence). Waypoint's fast-state vs slow-stage hierarchy is the same cut; the paper supplies the contemplative-theory justification and vocabulary.
4. **Use crisp events as temporal anchors.** "Cessation (nothingness), with its well-defined entry and exit points, can mark a significant moment in the meditative journey. In this section, we use cessation as a reference point to examine the temporal sequence…" (p. 14). Milestone events with boundaries beat diffuse quality ratings for longitudinal inference — supports the spec's milestone objects (`first_glimpse`, `small_death`).
5. **Triangulate retrospective questionnaires + subjective reports + micro-phenomenological interviews** (Schmidt & Berkemeyer, 2018, cited p. 7), and note that phenomenological analysis of "contentless" peaks shows they are neither contentless nor identical (Alcaraz-Sánchez et al., 2022; Woods et al., 2022). Directly supports the Surya-interview + dossier + battery triangulation design.
6. **Intensive-sampling adept case studies** (Chowdhury et al., 2023 — one meditator, ~37 cessations; Yang et al., 2023 — single adept, 7T) as the field's accepted way to study rare, advanced phenomena. Legitimizes Waypoint's tiny-N, per-individual longitudinal design; depth per subject over breadth.
7. **Treat felt insight as untrustworthy signal by default.** The Laukkonen-lab false-insight program (Grimmer et al., 2022a, 2022b, 2023; Laukkonen et al., 2020, 2022; McGovern et al., 2023) shows Aha-feelings can be induced, misattributed, and can make false content feel true — and detailed warnings only reduce, not prevent, false insights. Waypoint consequence: *conviction intensity is not evidence*; corroborate insight claims against behavior and structure, never against enthusiasm. This is the strongest scientific footing in the corpus for the spec's structure-scoring-over-content-scoring rule.
8. **Discriminate pathology by function, not phenomenology alone** (§3.3): the same "void" wording can come from attainment or from depersonalization; the differential is functioning + compassion + suffering-reduction. Waypoint markers for 50–60 territory should always be scored jointly with function markers.

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## 3. CAUTIONS

1. **Neural evidence is minuscule and inconsistent.** Cessation EEG rests on single-digit adepts; alpha-desynchronization (Chowdhury; Laukkonen-Sacchet) vs gamma-synchronization (Berkovich-Ohana) point in different directions. The authors say so ("research into cessation is still young", p. 12). Do not weight any neural marker in v1.
2. **No empirical support for permanence of path attainments**: "to the best of our knowledge, there is no contemporary scientific research on the irreversibility of path attainments" (p. 10). The fetter model is theory/doctrine; use it as prior structure, not established fact.
3. **Terminology drifts across traditions and commentaries.** They caution their jhāna introduction is "illustrative and simplified", translations differ, classical semantics differ from contemporary scientific usage, and the 16 stages "slightly differ across commentaries and Pāli canon" (pp. 15–16). Cross-tradition pointers (mu, Wu Wei, a-dvaita) "may not exactly align" with their emptiness definition (p. 4). A marker bank keyed to one commentarial map will misfire on practitioners trained in another.
4. **Cessation self-report is retrospective reconstruction**; stages 13–15 are usually not distinguished by the meditator (p. 16), and recognizing a cessation is itself a trained skill. Expect noisy, teacher-shaped narratives (path vs fruition attribution "depending on the teacher", p. 5).
5. **Insight experiences can entrench false beliefs** — ASC-adjacent states "may even strengthen one's belief in another reality, separate from their current experience" (McGovern et al., 2023, p. 8); psychedelic "waking up" can be reification, "replacing one dream for another" (p. 11). High-intensity mystical language should trigger the *reification check*, not band promotion.
6. **Adverse-effect attribution is murky**: many claimed adverse effects of emptiness/cessation "may be misattributions with no genuine connection to such practices" (p. 12), and challenging experiences may stem from unresolved psychological material rather than insight stages (p. 13). Cuts both ways for the teacher-flag design: neither over-attribute difficulties to stage, nor dismiss them as stage-normal.
7. **Sections 5–6 are explicitly speculative**: the active-inference account of jhāna-as-precision-release, suffering-as-error-minimization-motivation, hyperprior relaxation, the hibernation conjecture for nirodha samāpatti (p. 12), and the AI discussion are theory sketches — the authors themselves note "there seems to be no pre-existing computational theory about insights into no-thingness … Diving into all these is beyond the scope of this chapter" (p. 18). Treat as framing, not evidence.
8. **Publication status**: book chapter + PsyArXiv preprint (reviews_state "accepted" on OSF is a moderation status, not peer review). Author-lab overlap: many load-bearing citations are Laukkonen's own work — internally consistent network, but not independent corroboration.
9. **Small print for probe design**: the samatha-as-protection claim (relaxed concentration first reduces adverse effects; Epstein, 1989; Brasington, 2015; Yates et al., 2017) is flagged by the authors as untested ("empirical research on preventative features of practice has not been conducted", p. 14).
10. **One in-text citation is missing from the reference list**: Gunaratana (2009) (quoted on p. 2 re: 7th jhāna) has no References entry. Likely Gunaratana's 2009 book on the jhānas, but UNVERIFIED which work — resolve before citing onward.

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## 4. REFERENCES

Full reference list as printed (pp. 24–33), 78 entries. DOIs as given in the PDF.

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*(Numbering is mine for cross-reference; the PDF list is alphabetical and unnumbered. Cited in text but MISSING from the printed list: Gunaratana (2009) — see Cautions #10.)*

### LOAD-BEARING CITATIONS — shortlist for Waypoint

1. **Sayadaw, M. (2016). *Manual of Insight*.** The 16-stage progress-of-insight map the chapter treats as its canonical staging scheme; the direct source for ñana-based markers and dukkha-ñana phase annotations.
2. **Laukkonen, Sacchet, et al. (2023), nirodha samāpatti** (already in seed corpus). The chapter's backbone citation for cessation phenomenology, recognition-on-emergence, training pathway, and EEG evidence.
3. **Laukkonen & Slagter (2021), From many to (n)one** (already in seed corpus). FA→OM→ND deconstruction continuum and temporal-depth/abstraction model; the theoretical spine for practice-family priors.
4. **Chowdhury et al. (2023), cessation EEG case study.** Precedent for intensively sampled single-adept measurement of a discrete milestone event — the methodological template closest to Waypoint's small-N longitudinal design.
5. **Anālayo (2021), The Four Levels of Awakening.** The four-path fetter model as a trait-staging scheme with per-path observable consequences; the scholarly anchor for stream-entry-as-first-cessation milestone logic.
6. **Britton et al. (2021), meditation-related adverse effects.** How to define, elicit, and measure meditation difficulties rigorously — the anchor citation for lane 4 and the teacher-flag design.
7. **Lindahl & Britton (2019), "Not really being here".** Self-change phenomenology vs pathology in Buddhist practitioners; directly serves the equanimity/dissociation and dark-night/depression confusion pairs.
8. **Van Gordon et al. (2019), emptiness in advanced meditators.** The rare quantitative+qualitative psychometric study of emptiness effects; source of positive-marker language exemplars and convergent-validity candidates.
9. **Schmidt & Berkemeyer (2018), Altered States Database.** Repository of validated ASC questionnaires — the shopping catalog for the one-time calibration instrument battery.
10. **Woods, Windt & Carter (2022), contentless experiences synthesis.** Shows "contentless" reports are neither truly contentless nor one thing — the strongest methodological warning against scoring pure-consciousness claims as a single marker.
11. **Alcaraz-Sánchez et al. (2022), objectless awareness during sleep.** Defines the sleep-state near-neighbor that must not be credited as cessation.
12. **The false-insight cluster: Grimmer et al. (2022a, 2022b, 2023); Laukkonen et al. (2020, 2022); McGovern et al. (2023).** Lab evidence that Aha-feelings are inducible and make content feel true — the empirical footing for structure-scoring over conviction-scoring (lane 5 core).
13. **Yates, Immergut & Graves (2017), The Mind Illuminated.** Practitioner-facing samatha stage model repeatedly used by the chapter for mechanism claims; useful for stage-vocabulary contamination baselines (many app users will have read it).
14. **Buddhaghosa (1998 trans.), Visuddhimagga.** Root cartography behind the insight-stage tradition (lane 1's primary text for ñana interviews).
15. **Dahl, Lutz & Davidson (2015), practice taxonomy.** Empirically grounded grouping of practice families — the citation to anchor practice-telemetry categorization.
16. **Millière et al. (2018), psychedelics/meditation/self-consciousness.** Differential phenomenology of self-loss across induction routes; adjudicates several confusion pairs.
17. **Van Dam et al. (2018), Mind the Hype.** Field-level measurement-validity critique; guardrails for any claim Waypoint inherits from mindfulness psychometrics.
18. **Burbea (2014), Seeing That Frees.** Teacher-grade articulation of graded emptiness insight (the gross→subtle ladder) and of dukkha as clinging; source for probe wording that scores structure of understanding.
19. **Friston et al. (2013), hyperpriors/hypopriors** + **Friston et al. (2017), Active Inference, Curiosity and Insight.** The specific computational constructs (precision hyperpriors, fact-free learning) the chapter uses to model emptiness/de-reification — relevant to the estimator design memo's theoretical framing, not to v1 scoring.
20. **Berkovich-Ohana (2017), gamma case study.** The competing neural account of cessation — cite alongside #4 to keep the neural-marker disagreement visible.