The Three Windows Model

~ the TLDR summary ~

I. The Nature of the problem

I wrote this shorter version of the Three Windows Model because not everyone needs (or wants) to move through a 4,000-word essay to understand the heart of what the model offers. The long form—now divided into two parts—traces the lived problems that led me to create the model in the first place, and how its structure gradually revealed itself through years of practice, confusion, friction, and clarity. But I also wanted a more direct tool: a clean, high-signal reference that orients the reader immediately, and pairs well with the side-by-side chart below. That’s the purpose of this summary— something brief enough to read in a few minutes, yet substantial enough to stand on its own.

At its core, the Three Windows Model is a way to see clearly in a world where meaning, metaphor, and metaphysics routinely collapse into one another. In the worlds I move through—yangsheng (nourishing life) practices, bodywork, taijiquan, qigong, meditation, rehabilitation arts, wellness culture, and all the modern mythologies that surround them—I saw the same problem over and over again: people were mixing together different kinds of knowing as if they belonged to a single category. A bodily sensation was treated as proof of a cosmic theory; a symbolic practice was described as literal anatomy; a mythic story was taken to be a mechanism; a philosophical insight was inflated into revelation. The windows were blurred. And when the windows blur, confusion becomes inevitable.

The model is simple: the human mind makes sense of reality through three distinct modes of knowing, each with its own strengths, limits, and risks.

II. The Three Windows

The first is the physical–natural window: the grounded, observable world of sensation, anatomy, physiology, ecology, movement, pressure, and the body’s direct intelligence. This is the reality that shows itself without requiring belief. It’s the bedrock of practice, the starting point for anything we can test, feel, measure, repeat, or participate in with our whole body-mind. When I speak of beginning with what is present, this is the window I mean. It keeps practice honest. It prevents meaning from floating away into abstraction. It anchors the whole model.

The second window is the philosophical–metaphysical one: not supernatural, not cosmological, but conceptual. This is the realm of pattern, interpretation, meaning, ethics, and perspective ~ how we understand what experience means once it appears. It’s where reflection, phenomenological inquiry, ethical cultivation, and contemplative reasoning live. Metaphysics, in its original sense, is simply “what comes after the physical”— the grammar we use to make sense of life, not the architecture of unseen realms. Through this window, we name coherence, relationship, complementarity, emergence, and the interior shape of experience. It deepens meaning without pretending to offer evidence. It guards against two extremes: reducing everything to mechanics, or inflating everything into mysticism. This window is the bridge between embodiment and story.

The third window is the supernatural–mythic: the imaginal, symbolic, and narrative dimension of human life. Every culture creates mythic architectures—gods, heavens, hells, immortals, ancestors, rituals, inner alchemical landscapes, tantric cosmologies—not because these are literal accounts of the universe, but because humans need story to speak about the ungraspable. This window gives shape to mystery: loss, awe, fate, change, death, aspiration, longing, and the emotional currents that cannot be reduced to measurement or logic. When held properly, myth is one of our great inheritances. The danger arises only when the symbolic is mistaken for the structural, when story becomes mechanism, when imagination is wielded as ontology.

And as fourth window, some people see most clearly through the lens of mathematics ~ a window of pattern, precision, and elegant structure. I respect that view, but it isn’t a language my own mind moves through naturally, and it doesn’t meet the needs this model was built to address. For those who find orientation there, it offers real clarity; for me, it remains a valuable side-pane rather than a primary window.

Underlying all “four” windows is the ground of Naturalism ~ the quiet axis of the model. Naturalism is not reductive materialism, nor a dismissal of mystery; it is a discipline of clarity. It insists that we begin where we stand: in the felt, observable world. It prevents metaphysics from drifting into supernatural claims, and prevents myth from impersonating mechanism. It allows meaning to deepen without distortion, and wonder to remain luminous without being mistaken for fact. Naturalism keeps the windows from collapsing into one another. It protects the integrity of each.

III. Closing: keeping the windows clean

The Three Windows Model is not an ideology, nor a hierarchy, nor a new belief system. It doesn’t tell anyone what they “should” believe. I built it to keep my own metaphysics honest, so as to make sure that the meanings I draw from practice are grounded in the natural world rather than drifting into the supernatural. Your phenomenology doesn’t justify your ontology became a compass for me, and so did the simple question: Is your metaphysics grounded in the natural or the supernatural? This model offers a clean way to keep the modes of knowing from smudging together, and to see that each window serves a different purpose, reveals different insights, and conceals different things. Most of the confusion I’ve seen in body-mind arts comes from forgetting this: treating a sensation as evidence, a metaphor as mechanism, a myth as physics, or a philosophical insight as divine revelation. When the windows stay clear, experience stays honest, meaning stays grounded, and mystery stays spacious. That’s the old school dao.

This summary is only a doorway into the full picture. The longer essay—the two-part version—explores the stories, struggles, confusions, and lived encounters that shaped the model’s development. It shows why I needed this framework, and how it transformed the way I navigate practice, tradition, and interpretation. That longer arc gives the model its deeper utility. But if all you need is a clear reference, a clean orientation, or a map of the terrain, this short-form version & the side-by-side chart below will give you exactly that.

And when you’re ready to understand not just what the model says, but why it emerged and how it can reshape your own practice, the long form will be waiting.