Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, built his entire system on a single destabilizing observation: nothing has svabhāva — inherent, self-sufficient existence. Every thing we call 'real' only exists in relation to other things, through conditions, never from itself alone. Most people read this as a metaphysical claim about tables and rivers. It's also a claim about the voice in your head that says 'this is who I am.' Michael Singer's core move — watching thoughts rather than being them — works precisely because Nagarjuna's logic is correct: the 'self' that narrates your life isn't a fixed entity, it's a process that runs on borrowed conditions. When you stop feeding it — stop defending it, elaborating it, protecting it from contradiction — it doesn't disappear into chaos. It reveals itself as what it always was: a pattern, not a substance. The practical consequence isn't about meditation. It's about leadership and decision-making. Most organizational dysfunction, most creative stagnation, most interpersonal friction has svabhāva-thinking at its root: someone treating their model of the situation as self-evidently, inherently true, rather than as one relational pattern among many. The innovation that breaks through is almost always the one that spotted what everyone else was treating as fixed.

What assumption about yourself or your organization are you treating as load-bearing — when it might only be standing because nothing has tested it yet?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna