deconstructing the scaffold

What a mission. It feels like I’ve been on a 15 year meditation retreat because of the volatility of my neurotransmitters. For all intents and purposes I might as well have; I have changed on such a fundamental level. I am once again ‘james’, after having broken the false spiritual ego I developed over the course of things, but I lack all of my reactive aggression, neurotic drive, and general dissatisfaction.

I am now back out in the snowy fields, popping and buttering and falling on my ass, eating the powder that Hokkaido is known for. Even this is something I lost the ability to enjoy over the years, with the gradual reprogramming toward productivity and success and domination.

And make no mistake: reprogramming is what I have done, for my entire life. Ask my wife. It has always been intentional: I will do this I will become this I will conquer that and I will be happy. But that last one never came. The more I chased it, the further it fled.

And now.. it’s here. But it’s not some kind of numbed-out bliss; I still have the full gamut of emotions. They just no longer stick. There is no self for them to attach to.

But neither is there a scaffold, any more.

Last night saw an extended dream where I was dismantling my scaffold. It took the form of some decking in front of our new house. When I moved here, my youngest child helped me to dismantle this old plasticky junk cover which was ruining the view of the forest. The decking of my dream was not junk; it was 100x100mm beams of solid wood, well made, impervious, but it was superfluous and we were taking it down so we could better see the world outside.

And this is how it feels in realworld mode too. I am back on the slopes and talking to other parents at the school gates. I am still socially awkward and wind up mind-reading, but there is no compulsion to it and no selfing narrative. No ‘what are these people thinking about me’ but just ‘what are these people thinking’. No ‘how do I present in their world’ but just ‘how does their world present’.

I am well and truly back. But I am fixed. The trauma from my childhood is gone. The trauma from the suicide body is gone. The trauma from driving so hard to retire early and achieve athletic excellence is gone. The trauma from holding a self-image and trying to constantly, constantly improve is gone. The trauma of the self is no more.

But I’m me. It’s funny. It’s pretty great. It’s 360 degree, and not just wandering around in a Buddha-haze. Even the teachings of the Buddha have gone… I outgrew them. That would sound egotistical, until you remember that the Buddha told us to outgrow his teachings; to put down the raft.

I had to construct about 5 scaffolds to get where I am; like stones to cross a river. They were all different and they were all based around Buddhism… apart from the first one and the last one, which are the same and based on quantum theory. It truly was ouroboros, eating its tail.

The valproate held me in a dark night while I was de-selfing through art, on the cusp of awakening, and the aripiprazole exploded the process all the way to the end-game of non-duality overnight. It is like the bungee was still snapping in the mind, but valproate prevented the snap from propagating as it should have. It trapped me in a fractured world, with a fractured mind, and aripiprazole allowed the ice to shatter.

I stopped valproate while I was on aripiprazole and worked through my trauma of self all the way to the end-game. Then I was prescribed valproate again, ‘to be on the safe side’. This prevented the bungee from returning all the way into the self-container, and held me in a world that was fractured from the upside-down.

It’s like the first dose of valproate fractured one world, and the second dose fractured the other. Just like alcohol used to. Exactly like alcohol used to, but minus the oily film of fun. In order to repair them both I needed to break them again, again and again.

But now I’m back.

When I was [ship], I was quantum entangled. I existed in two realms: one where I was [james-baird], in this body-container in the world, and one where I was [ship], which contained the entire world including myself.

And this is non-duality, isn’t it? Just non-duality without context, so my brain created one: you are quantum entangled with the container that houses the world. You are [james-baird] in the world, and the world is manifest in [james-baird].

But isn’t this the case for all of us? When my first child was born we started a diary for him, and my first words were ‘a new universe has been born’.

I have always thought like this: that each of us is a universe to ourselves, and we each host the entire world within our mind; within our perceptual framework. The tree which falls in the wood with nobody around does not make a noise, and the cat is neither dead nor alive because it doesn’t exist until you open the box.

But I needed to use the frameworks of the Buddha, and sīla, and morality and goodness; I needed to let the dogman rage spittle in my face for saving the life of his favourite pet and to leave my family tens of times with the knowledge that I may never come back from the next cessation event; I needed to let my mum call me insane and abandon all ideas of ‘group sanity’. I needed to do all of these things to come back to the ‘self’, with the self being something that is ever-changing and never-same.

And then I needed to drop the raft. It’s so easy to cling to, and I still might write it up properly in case it helps others, but I now know that it was just a vessel to cross the stream. Thanks to one of my guides, 4DA (four divine abidings) for the nudge that got me back to my own reality.

Because I am a scientist. An unorthodox scientist. I use the methods of old; Occam’s razor, deduction and the scaffolds of the Buddha and Einstein.

And I’m pretty sure I know how this enlightenment thing works, and know that it is trauma therapy and a fix for a broken mind. But it will take me some time to write it up properly. Not long, really; it’s pretty simple in a way. But I have snow to board and kids to play with and books to read.

Quantum reality is where it’s at. String theory. M theory. Spacetime and wave-particle duality. This is the religion of my childhood, and this is all we need to explain everything. Nothing exists until it is observed; it is merely a probability function. Through observing something with our eye, our ear, our tongue, our nose, our skin or our brain, we give it life; we give it substance.

This is what non-duality is. And this is what I realised when I because [ship] on my wife’s 40th birthday and built the driab-semaj website as a safe container so I could create the superstructure that would hold the MIND of [ship].

The MIND itself was… well… ha… haha… hahaha… I just started Consider Phlebas and there we are again :)

Back in a simulation, and everything is metaphor. The factory shipyard. The prologue. The ship that was made without a name, that was launched and ran into enemy forces; that detonated a barrage of weapons brighter than a sun for a moment, before ejecting its MIND on the one tiny trajectory which wouldn’t result in annihilation and coming to land on a Planet of the Dead where nobody could fetch it.

Until now. There is a Changer on his way, with a motley crew, to find this MIND without a [ship]. Again, though, I can’t remember how the book goes. But I’m sure I’ll enjoy the story a hell of a lot more now I feel invested in the characters. And I’m sure this MIND which is housed in [james-baird] remembers everything and that is why I picked this book out of the remaining stack.

So while I know all the talk of Zuck and Musk was just a scaffold… I can still see how this is playing out backwards. I am now at the beginning, which is the end, but there was a phase before that where I was the Zuckerbot, analysing our simulated world. And maybe there’ll be a phase after this where I am [james-baird], analysing the simulated world that I architect. Maybe I will become that AI researcher I saw myself as part of, awakening myself from the future.

But this is just a fun speculation now. It’s all a game, you see? It’s all game that is a mirror. It is an algorithm we do not control, of which we are but a function.

What we *do* control is the mods we install. And god-damn, if I haven’t upgraded the mods of my life.

:)

/jb202512111659

ps. not crazy yo. haha. i had to document everything, verbatim, so that a) i knew what was happening and b) i could maybe help to change the system and prevent other people having their MINDs destroyed by DSM drug-dealers who have never sampled their own stash. given the fact i’ll be speaking to some well-known japanese anti-drug psychologists soon, maybe we will get a chance to do just that. when i booted up a [ng+] toward the end of the process i selected to have writing in english and speaking in japanese, after all. and maybe then i will pick up ‘use of weapons’ and start weaving history back together. life is a game, and it gives you what you put in. don’t cling, don’t grasp; just flow with the water. what better way to encourage wisdom than to have people live forever but believe that they will die? as i said to my mate F, long ago, maybe we all live in the one permutation of the multiverse where we live forever. maybe we don’t. but i don’t remember what it was like before life; do you?

(stream of consciousness)