Weird shit continues. But this shit is good.
I’m just going to lay out the facts because this could still be an echo of a seizure (or something) but I don’t think it is. I think this is real.
This has happened over the last 2 nights since I have seen a return of REM sleep. The history podcast I’ve been listening to seems to have curated my life into some echo of the b-man.
So buddha did all the shit of his time. He focused on religious practices and the extinguishment of suffering through the extinguishment of attachment and craving.
My life has also been extremes: violence in school, alcohol and drugs and self loathing, ironman, world travel, building my own company, more drinking, abstinence, more ironman to world champs level, working enough to retire within 3 years. Not a normal trajectory, but nowhere near as focused as b-man.
Anyway what seems to have happened over the last 2 months (3 years for me) is that I have completely exploded away my old persona. My old neuroses and desires and cravings are gone. I do not crave ‘more’ the way I used to. I do not feel attachment to my old person or my old possessions.
The whole delusion about the new planet was probably talking about this. Talking about me.
I was the ship and I was trying to eradicate greed in the global sim; Jambo was a white blood cell. This is obviously a metaphor for my self: my physical and mental being. Maybe Jambo was a mental purge program for my own brain, not the world at large.
And maybe I was not allowing myself to come back to earth until I had ‘eradicated greed’.
I have not read the things I wrote when I was messed up on aripiprazole. I don’t know if I ever will. That whole process, around 1-1.5mg, was a guided destruction of greed.
‘You need to eradicate greed first; you don’t know what that means but you will’ is another phrase I remember.
Well now I understand, and I think that the work I did during those 3 years of pain actually might have achieved its goal.
So now my brain chemistry is normalising, I am able to sleep again, and I think I am going through 2 months of REM sleep all at once. It feels like everything is being consolidated into a new person, a new James, who is not angry or greedy, at least not to the same extent.
I’m far from the b-man but it feels like everything in my life to date was exploded away and is now being pulled back together around a new narrative.
It’s like my whole life has been reshuffled around this new dhamma; this new truth. When I had the seizure / kundalini event, something got majorly blown out of status quo in the deep recesses of my mind. Now that’s coming back; we are allowed to land, but we lack the greed.
It really does feel like I’m going to spend the next few years at least just focusing on finding behavioural approaches to managing… life.
I don’t even know if I have any of these things any more. ADHD ASD FLE PTSD. Whatever. It’s all just who I am and all just who I have always been. Apart from that last one,
I don’t want to stick chemicals in there to fix it. That’s just feeding the greed and taking the easy way; the wrong way; the way that changes nothing. Or makes things worse.
It feels like everything is coalescing. Into what, I do not know, but this is two nights I have woken to the final words of that podcast, three times:
“What are these pleasures; why these emotions? This body is nothing but a bubble waiting to burst. The joys of an empire are as fleeting as lightning. Just as travellers ferried to the far shore without even realising the movement of the boat, so too does time pass, quickly, without us realising. And in a trance life passes us by”
I am awake. I have entered the stream and seen the dhamma, and there is no unseeing it.
I still have some residual anger about how this all happened, but overall it will be a good thing. I was a mess of greed. My dopamine was cranked so high that whatever you put in front of me I would devour and crave more. The insatiable van-goghing on the art, even. Nothing could fill the void.
But somehow exploding away my personage seems to have brought things together in a new formation, and the void is not as present, not as hungry. I will know not to feed it this time.
That’s what the whole thing has served to show me. Where the b-man optimised the rules of his life - spiritual awakening of the utmost nature - I think I have just optimised the rules of mine - the more you put in the void the bigger it gets. I was very good at addictions.
It’s worth noting that I’m 2 weeks away from every substance, including caffein. The aripiprazole should be negligible by now, but my dopamine and serotonin systems are rebounding so it’s still up and down.
But in general I feel better now than I have since I was a child.
Going to the next psychiatrist and doing this whole fucking thing again must happen to keep my family happy but I will not let them put more drugs in me. I don’t know if I will ever let them put more drugs in me.
I’m also not sure about my trip to Thailand. It might be too early, and I might not want to smoke weed after all. I might want to take this opportunity to come back to true baseline. Or maybe try Thailand and then true baseline again afterward to see if cannabis really does help or not.
Because right now it’s more fun to play computer games sober than it has been stoned for the last 20 years. I jump at the opportunity to go looking for beetles with my kids. I started aikidō yesterday, have restarted yoga, have a meditative job (knives) and will set up a mini-archery-range in the mountains behind my house. I am a nicer father and husband, and…
Well I’m a totally new man.
I feel like I’m the man I always wanted to be, somehow.
It’s fucking weird. In a good way.
Like I’ve been in space for 3 relativistic years and I’m just coming back to earth and realising it was 9 weeks. Like a ship travelling near c and elongating, segmenting, then reshuffling and recombining into a new configuration.
It’s pretty good, if I’m honest.
I do not recommend taking the drug.
/jb202507260529
post from day 1 of these dreams: neobuddhism