hungry ghost / cartography

That redlining on the dopamine is so bad. It doesn’t always hit but since the external life stressors got bad… something snapped and didn’t click back. Shouldn’t have done the dopamine hacking.

Anyway.

The 88 hells and the buddha

He mapped out 88 hells I think and several different mental states you could progress through when meditating. I’m not clued in on the dogma; only like the philosophy. But he said that to move to Z you have to pass through D and G and T for example. 

This tracks with what I want to do, and what I have experienced over my life.

The thing is that my endogenous chemicals are obviously wacky, so I have probably experienced all kinds of mental states which most people never would. Sorry. Brain chemistries. Let’s keep the two separate.

So in buddhism the mind is brain chemistry. It is the platform on which all else sits. This is your endogenous makeup at that point in time. Eg. DA0 5-HT0. To move to DA3 you will obviously need to pass through DA2 and I think this is what he was talking about.

So we have MRI and various other imaging tech comping along, and then deep reinforcement learning and sandbox simulations and whatnot.

I propose that we create a digital twin of the brain and then map out how the endocrine system impacts it. How to make the land more fertile. We have the tech to calculate (not yet) and then titrate meds to the microgram so that we can take someone, step by step, from being suicidal to being a happy person.

With the D dropouts I was literally (yes since it's a chemistry) going to hell every 3 seconds. For…ohh… about a month, if I’m not going to exaggerate. I’d had it before but it felt more motivating. Ha. This is motivation. This was my dopamine system getting even more fired up and even more broken.

It was because of the ‘more is better’ narrative around dopamine. More most certainly is not better if you are James Baird. More will kill you and is killing millions. But they all end up being recorded as car accidents or overdoses or violent crime. Or suicide.

Anyway when I took ari it raised my perceived D baseline from lets say -2 to +1 and 5-HT (serotonin) from -3 to +1.

This feels like going from a meaningless world where everyone will die and it will all be purposeless and you might as well just cut your wrists now because it’s all dust and that wave of action should I just…

It took me from that to.

Everything will be alright. The world is quiet and full of warmth and I am a real and whole person with a loving family who is having a good impact in the world.

But the real kicker is it’s not about the amount of dopamine but about the *rate of fluctuation* of dopamine.

Trust me, as someone who has experienced all 88 hells and most of the heavens: they do not last and they do not satisfy.

Most important:

If you push your dopamine too high then you will have a commensurate crash and for people with audhd that often means suicide. You are consigning yourself to hell when you pop that tryptophan. An illustrative exaggeration?

So when I say these supplements didn’t do anything for me, I might be wrong. They might have sent me into hell, and consigned me to suicide if I hand’t found aripiprazole.

This narrative needs to change.

I’m going to come back to the buddha because he was a real person 2500 years ago who achieved a real brain chemistry state which he labelled nirvana and characterised as the falling away of desire.

Nirvana is dopamine *regulation*.

We can map these states out and reproduce them. I decided long ago that nirvana wasn’t for me; I love my family too much. But until I made my family, nirvana was the only light I held onto.

Well good news. We now have language which can capture and (soon) reproduce nirvana. 1 and 0. You might not want it. I’m pretty sure the buddha had a bad case of audhd and this was his solution. I think nirvana is the gradual peaceful slowing down that most people experience naturally as they age. This is why it is so hard to attain; it is a cure for a sickness. 

And I think that cure happens to be turning all your attention on yourself and then causing an autistic processing overload migraine and just gunning into it until your encode your own self to null because of a trauma response.

But I go to the god hypothesis and this is because I have done this before. My old personas; the businessman, the athlete. They are in nirvana. They ‘fell away’ and the self dissolved.

This is why I decided to stop when I was in the inferno and I faced my old self and I had cut out these migraines I never knew about all my life and I was looking at him and he was tired and in pain but fuck me was he stoic.

He isn’t going to nirvana yet. He’s gonna hang around and be with his kids and enjoy the family life he built, now he has attained one of the lesser heavens or mere humanhood and has the capacity to do so.

There are few things worse than being a hungry ghost.

Dopamine hacking makes you a hungry ghost.

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