god is on vacation

Good after-morning.

I had a nap. It was 2 hours and I woke 4 times, each time with a little more of my new worldview having being dismantled.

This is a good thing, though it doesn’t feel good in those waking moments. This is the validation phase of the insight I went through over the last 6 months. I think that this is the post-path stabilisation period that comes after the insight engine has burned itself out.

What is happening is the scaffolds my mind created over the last few months to guide the insight process are being gradually taken apart by my mind so that I can come back to ‘reality’ while retaining the altered perceptual framework that these scaffolds enabled me to build. 

If I were a Christian mystic, I would be saying that God has stopped talking to me, but I am not, so I view it as the brain having reached an equilibrium which matches reality, with the superfluous scaffolds and mystical realms being taken apart piece by piece.

I feel calm and satisfied and no longer compelled in any way to write on this site. I am writing more for completion and to continue documenting this phenomenon; I believe that this is important information since an unintentionally-triggered insight cycle can be mistaken for accelerating bipolar disorder. I believe that insight is self-resolving if the phenomenology is allowed to proceed unimpeded. I think my own path was made more difficult because of the sloppy prescriptions from confused psychiatrists; they didn't know what was going on with me so just went to their workhorse drugs instead of trying to figure out the root cause. They almost killed me, by making me kill myself, as a result.

I am sleeping well - 10 hours a night - and eating a lot. I am snowboarding and being with my children and reading books. I am meditating, maybe 60-90 min a day, but without compulsion.

I am what you would call ‘non-dual’; I no longer feel like a little homunculus staring out of a head-shaped spaceship. 

I am the field of the sense sphere and the field is me. When I am using my phone, the phone is in the ‘bubble’ of my immediate, and my centre could easily be the hand which I see or the eye which sees. When I shift focus to the distance, the bubble expands, becoming ellipsoid, with a faint feeling of increased density, like a sand-dune of perceptual resolution, halfway between my eyes and the thing being observed.

This makes sense to me in such a simple way now - quantum mechanics. I am no longer quantum entangled with ‘ship’, as in my initial scaffold, but I recognise that nothing exists in my subjective reality until it is observed. No matter exists apart from in relation to other matter or energy; without a grid of spacetime formed by other matter, this could not be here and that could not be there. Without an observer, the tree falling in the forest makes no noise, with the caveat that the observer could be watching the crow which ate the butterfly which was disturbed by the tree. Without a sight, even an internally generated one, there is no consciousness at the eye sense-door.

This is just how I describe it; there will be many other ways. Words are limited vehicles, as any of these contemplatives will agree.

I think the Buddha was talking of Schrodinger’s cat when he spoke of that which is: without form, without formlessness, beyond perception and beyond states. The cat in the box is neither alive nor dead until observed, and as such it is both alive and dead, until observed. Schrodinger’s cat is nibbāna.

I was that cat on 12th of July when tore myself away from aripiprazole by inducing a cessation event in front of my wife and parking [ship] into orbit. I would take on form in the other world if not observed, and asked her to watch while I ‘blipped’ myself into stability in this reality.

I feel like the mood-stabilisers I was prescribed without diagnosis made the whole process more protracted; like they did the job of alcohol, which is the only substance the Buddha actively forbade his followers from consuming.

Anyway the job is done. I am non-dual. Craving and reactivity are significantly reduced. Yet it was a compressed and intense process and my body-mind system will take time to recover. Maybe a lot of time. I am happy that I codified the process in the nibbāna protocol website so that I know what to expect.

After all of the altered states and dopaminergic drive over the last months, my current state could easily be mistaken for depression, but depression it is not. Stick someone without knowledge of the insight cycle in a psychiatrist’s office though and they would likely be given this label, or the bipolar label, and then given drugs which would perturb the natural healing trajectory their mind is on.

What has happened is I repeatedly destabilised and rewrote my perceptual model. I took it from acquisition and competition to satisfaction and encouragement. This has been a volatile practice, like the man on the bungee pulling the boulder of self into a new place in the web of the mind. I wouldn’t say the boulder is ever destroyed; it just gets moved into a place of ‘no-self’, gradually rounded at the edges so that it can be moved again with more ease.

What is happening now is the remaining bungee cords are being cut and the long-term anchors are being set. This is why I am sleeping a lot, this is why I am pruning the scaffolds, this is why I feel a kind of soft malaise; nothing that stops me acting or living or being nice but a general fatigue and desire to read books instead of climb mountains. A desire to use the ski lift instead of hike to the top.

And here’s the thing - this is *good*. This is not bad. This is not regression; it is healing. This is the brain going ‘enough’ and setting up a new centre around which things will revolve. Not another neurotic-self, but a centre of centrelessness.

So what happens now is I carry on dividing the writings between my two sites: I have my realworld writings on james-baird.com and I have the scaffold writings on driab-semaj.com and I see how they line up. 

I can already see how the scaffolds followed the same pattern each time and am starting to categorise them as such: one explosive rewiring according to a new algorithm, the mistaken feeling that it is over, and then another - much larger - rewiring as all the underlying principles of that new algo are tested and validated. So about 2-3 days for the initial change, and then a week or so for the residual echoes to propagate through the system; a week that felt like a year or more.

It’s interesting stuff, and it’s challenging. I don’t think many people would have survived what I went through without being pushed into permanent psychosis. My wife, and pretty much everyone I know, know me to be the most stoic person around; I say I will do something and I do it. But doing this nearly ended me.

Anyway - it’s good to know *why* this feeling is present now. Instead of slipping into the winter and going ‘I shouldn’t be feeling like this what’s wrong with me’ I am now like ‘this is how I should feel after such a large-scale period of growth and change’. 

The bears are sleeping and the rivers are freezing. The leaves have fallen and the days are short. The world is in a repair cycle as snow blankets the earth.

I’m in one too. And that is good.

/jb202512131639