I’m gonna go ahead and say it: I think the buddha had audhd. Definitely asd and probably adhd too given how he talks about desire.
So before going any further I’d like to stress that I’m talking about the buddha. Gautama. He was a historical figure and a scientist of the mind. He sampled all the religions and philosophies of his time, then created his own because he found them lacking.
I cannot find any errors with the original teachings of the buddha. The dogma later, sure, it sucks, but the original teachings don’t wildly contradict modern science. The buddha was a scientist examining the mind and the human condition. He’s my senpai.
2024 was a mental breakdown and 2025 a spiritual awakening.
The cycle of rebirth is what I am trying to get a leg out of, so I am starting with addressing my ignorance. A ground survey. The first steps of any build are to see what you are building with. All of my previous personas were pre-fab neurotypical builds and didn’t last long. Not this time.
Anyway ignorance gives way to volitional formations - karma - a new persona - and then everything spirals from there. Eventually you optimise and ‘become’, the behaviour is regulated to the cerebellum, there’s no more gum for the PFC to chew, and you start to feel pain with this persona you funnelled so much love into.
Then - bang - your defence mechanism kicks in. A kind of trauma response. This is what I think is happening when adhd ‘flips’ to encode your love as a null. Initially it codes to bad, we push through like any other addict, and then it codes to null. Because if you can’t avoid the pain, at least the brain can make you not feel it.
So I think this is what the monks are doing when they go in for asceticism. I think they are focusing so hard on their self; so hard on the agony of sitting dead still for days on end… the physical and mental torture… 40 days in the desert.
Maybe Buddha and Jesus and all the other millions who have achieved nirvana over the years did so by turning their adhd on themselves. Encoding themselves to null, so that their dopamine levels are stable, regardless of subjective reality.
This is pure baseless speculation but the more I think about it the more it intuitively feels correct. So I’m going to run with it. The human condition pre-dates language. Science is great for the sciency bits, but subjective experience needs subjective language.