The Three Windows Model pt. 1

~ the origins of the framework ~

I wrote this model to stay honest in a world where practice, metaphor, and metaphysics constantly collide. This first part traces the confusion that shaped my path and the simple maxim that grounded it: your phenomenology doesn’t justify your ontology. It's about seeing how easily things blur ~ and why clarity matters long before any model appears.

I. When too many worlds collide

We live in an age overflowing with truth-claims. Some appear in the language of science, others in the poetry of metaphor, and others still disguised as spiritual or religious authority. And somewhere in this mix—between the wellness industry, the therapeutic arts, and the body-mind traditions of taijiquan, qigong, yoga, meditation, bodywork, and modern “energy medicine”—I found myself trying to make sense of so many contradictions that didn’t fit together, creating more friction than clarity in my so-called “beginner’s mind.”

Some people insisted their salubrious sensations were proof of concocted cosmologies. Others dismissed an entire landscape of real human experience based on fantastical claims from “ancient” texts— a perfect example of allochronism and golden-age thinking (as I wrote about in The Daoist Who Wasn’t There), where people assume antiquity guarantees accuracy rather than acknowledging the poetry, politics, and human imagination woven into every era.

In the vast world of massage & bodywork (one I’ve explored far & wide) this same tension showed up often in the assumption that if a client ‘felt better,’ that alone was proof the teacher/practitioner’s model was “true”— as if subjective relief were enough to validate their metaphysics. But on a more practical level, the confusion was often quieter and more ordinary. One teacher would insist that a particular aspect of the musculoskeletal system was the real key, while another swore the opposite, “Stretch more!” “Don’t stretch!”. Each system was internally coherent, each producing results. Trying to weave together the wide range of modalities I was learning—each with its own assessment priorities, techniques, and treatment rationales—often left me more confused than confident.

Meanwhile, meaning often got flattened into a shallow puddle where everything was “energy this” or “quantum that,” and if you dared question any of it, you were brushed off with a condescending “what the bleep do you know?”— a nod, of course, to that infamous film What the Bleep Do We Know?, which did more to confuse the public (myself included) about science than illuminate anything at all.

But beneath my frustration was something more personal: I wanted a way to make sense of all the powerful techniques I was learning in bodywork, taijiquan, and qigong, without having to swallow the questionable metaphysics that often came bundled with them, or to just simply sort out all of the different theories and questionable histories. Many of the teachers I encountered had real skill, real sensitivity, and real craft. I absorbed their methods gladly while often quietly rejecting many of the theoretical stories they used to justify them. What I needed was a framework that let me keep what was alive and functional without hauling along the parts that only muddied the water.

What I did know was that there had to be a more honest and skillful way to navigate all this. Not a way to win arguments, but a means to open dialogue. Not a new ideology. Just a simple way to keep wonder intact while protecting practice—and protecting clients—from confusion and harm.

That’s why I created the Three Windows Model. It grew out of necessity, not ambition; a way to separate what is real, what is meaningful for me, and what is not, without collapsing them into one blurry worldview ~ a way to see my own path with clarity (qing 清) instead of contradiction. And a way to engage the mythic and mystic as living sources of insight and imagination, deepening the human work of meaning making.

A brief word on mathematics

Before opening the Three Windows, I want to acknowledge a fourth one that many people hold dear: mathematics. For some, it offers the clearest view of the universe — a crystalline window of pattern, proportion, and elegant necessity. I honor that. Even Einstein, who spoke its language more fluently than almost anyone, treated mathematics with both admiration and caution:

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain;

and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

— Albert Einstein, Geometry and Experience lecture (1921)

For me, the limitation isn’t mathematical insight— it’s simply that mathematics is not one of the languages my mind naturally speaks. I admire its beauty, its geometry, its precision, and the astonishing way it reveals structure ~ most vividly in fractal patterns ~ but it’s not a window I personally see through with ease. And like every way of knowing, even at its brightest, mathematics illuminates only part of the world.

And while mathematics can offer deep orientation and even a kind of existential clarity for many, it doesn’t meet all the human needs we turn to meaning, philosophy, and myth to address. For those dimensions of experience—the interpretive, the symbolic, the abstract—we look through other windows.

II. The nature of the problem

As I found my way deeper into my many worlds of practice ~ through osteopathic and orthopedic bodywork, taijiquan and other martial arts, qigong, meditation, and the wider ecology of the rehabilitation and wellness world ~ I kept encountering a deeper, more philosophical version of the same confusion I described earlier. People were drawing sweeping conclusions about the nature of the cosmos from the private weather inside their own bodies. A moment of stillness was treated as proof of higher dimensions; a ripple of warmth as evidence of subtle energies; a flicker of insight as divine revelation. The experiences themselves were often beautiful — sometimes transformative — but the interpretations quickly drifted into metaphysics that had no grounding in the physical–natural world.

This is where the distinction became unavoidable — a line I eventually put words to for myself: “your phenomenology does not justify your ontology.” As I came to realize, this simple maxim became a kind of compass in my practice. Phenomenology is the realm of experience: the warmth in the belly, the quiet in the mind, the subtle shifts in sensation that follow breath, stillness, or alignment. It tells you something is happening. Ontology is the realm of what exists: what the universe is made of, what its structures are, what forces actually operate in nature.

Experience reveals to you something is happening (phenomenology); it does not tell you what the universe is made of (ontology). Sensations can be meaningful, revelatory, even humbling — but they do not carry their own explanation. The story we tell about an experience is always an interpretation layered on top of the experience itself. That distinction — between what we feel and what we infer from what we feel— became the hinge on which my entire model turns.

And this is exactly where things often go sideways. The interpretation we attach to an experience is always a layer added after the fact, yet people routinely mistake the two for one and the same. A moment of deep stillness becomes “proof” of higher dimensions; a wave of warmth becomes “evidence” of subtle energy fields; a vivid sense of presence becomes a declaration that angels were literally holding them. The experience is real ~ profoundly real, sometimes life-changing ~ but that doesn’t mean the world contains the beings or forces we use to explain it. The explanation is optional; the experience is not.

And learning to hold that difference plainly, without inflation or dismissal, became one of the most important disciplines in my path.

As the groundbreaking book on embodied cognition reminded us:

“To confuse a lived experience with a description of the world

is already to take a step toward illusion.”
— Varela, Thompson & Rosch,

The Embodied Mind (1991)

At the same time, I watched skeptics dismiss entire traditions because of a few fantastical claims lifted from old texts—or out of context—not realizing those stories were symbolic, not literal, and never intended to carry the weight of ontological truth. They threw out the practices, the phenomenology, and the hard-won insights of embodied cultivation because someone, somewhere, took a myth as a mechanism.

And floating above all this was a deeper tension: the problem of religious belief. I don’t mean religion as culture, ritual, story, or community— those are parts of the human inheritance I value. I mean religious belief: truth-claims about the nature of the universe that rest not on the physical–natural world but on supernatural assertion, often coupled with moral prescriptions. The idea that the cosmos, or a god, commands your behavior or validates your metaphysics simply because someone wrote it down long ago — or because it just “feels right” — is only another version of the same category mistake. It collapses myth into mechanism, story into science, and metaphor into mandate.

I needed a way to untangle all of this— not to convert anyone, not to wage war on belief, but to keep my own understanding clear. I’m a naturalist at heart, shaped by the teachings of the living world and by my body–mind as “I” move within it. My metaphysics grows from nature’s clarity, from the coherence practice reveals, and from what my body–mind knows when it listens well. I needed a framework that let me honor the depth of these traditions without inheriting the supernatural machinery that people sometimes wrap around them.

The Three Windows Model became that framework. It allowed me to sort what is real, what is meaningful, and what is mythic without collapsing them into one confused worldview. It gave me a way to let practice stay grounded, to let meaning stay luminous, to let myth stay symbolic— without letting any of them impersonate the other.

Most importantly, it gave me clarity about my own dao: clarity about what I trust, what I question, what I treat as story, and how I make sense of the world I live in. I didn’t build this model to change anyone else’s mind. I built it so my own mind could stay honest, and so my practice could stay rooted in the real.

As a naturalist, I ask:

is your metaphysics grounded in the natural or the supranatural?