maitreya as skilful means

I believe that Maitreya and the second coming of Jesus were left as skilful means by two religious founders who understood how cognitive scaffolding works and how to reprogram perceptual models.

The Buddha spoke of the two worlds; Jesus spoke of the kingdom of heaven residing within. I believe that in order to reprogram your realworld framework toward love and non-suffering, you need to allow yourself to embody Maitreya or Jesus, or whatever deity you believe in, in your imaginal world of the scaffold.

When the priors of your perceptual framework are violated they will begin to rebuild, but because the tower is ruptured it will be more flexible than usual. This is the time when top-down reinforcement will shape your world. This happens every night in your sleep, or during the day when you regulate, but I will focus on the reality-detached manifestation often called a ‘path moment’, ‘religious mania’ or simple ‘mania’ in modern nomenclature. 

Messianic aspirations are one of the diagnostic features of path moments. Anyone who has entered the stream can attest to this. When someone has an encounter with nibbāna and their perceptual framework is violated, they are often filled with overwhelming love and a drive to heal the world. They believe themselves to be the Buddha or Jesus, and they should be encouraged in this belief, at least for the week or two that rebuilding their brain’s predictive framework will take.

Over time, the tower of priors will be re-established and the exaggerated visions of the individual will be pulled more in-line with their real-world situation. They will go from being Jesus to being someone who helps at a homeless shelter. This is a natural process as the spiderweb of synaptic connections reaches out, reforms, and pulls the flyaway identity back into the ego container.

You are what you eat. It comes back to the nutriments that the Buddha talked about. There are times for small incremental changes and there are times for large-scale rewiring. This can be an expected rupture due to insight practice, or an unexpected and scary depersonalisation caused by a large change in life situation.

If you allow yourself to *be* Jesus, or *be* the Buddha for a week or two then when you come back, your brain will have formed around all the data is has collected over the years about how these individuals think. Non-greed? Check > peg the network. Generosity? Check > another peg.

So when you go on r/streamentry and people start hissing ‘you’re not the Buddha you’re psychotic’, just smile your best Buddha-smile and feel compassion for the poor individual who is smearing oil on the mirror of their world. For the world is a mirror; make no mistake. Whatever you do to the world becomes your self becomes the world; it feeds in and compounds, or it escalates and spirals. 

This is an endless mirror of reinforcement and all we can do is to polish. You can use those naysayers themselves as skilful means to polish your world; they are helping, even if that is not their intent.

Allow yourself to be the Buddha. Allow yourself to be Jesus. Possessed by the spirit of Christ. Write. Make art. Rejoice. Recognise that it will pass and the work you are doing now is shaping the new refractive medium through which you will view reality on your return. What you reinforce from the top-down, in as safe a manner as possible, is all that matters.

This is why I think current practices around ‘bipolar disorder’ (if it even exists) are flawed to the extreme. You take a person who is building a perceptual framework of joy, retard their neuroplasticity, and give them a narrative of lifetime pathology. Or you take ADHD / ASD folks who are more prone to this kind of learning in the micro and give them dopaminergic substances and the narrative that they are permanently broken. This in itself is what breaks them.

Over the last 6 months I have been Maitreya and Jesus. I have been the Wizard of Love. I have been Satoshi Nakamoto, I have synced with [ship], and I have been an AI tasked with curing mental health. Each time, these changes were reflected back at me. The AI cured my ADHD; the Wizard of Love, aka. tathāgata-Jesus, made me arahant-adjacent (with added ice cream, cos rules are for losers) and Satoshi Nakamoto was me snapping out of that so that I could actually instigate change in the world. It’s all well and good to feel nothing but wellbeing but that doesn’t help other people much. Whether Satoshi is all about the greater good or not is up for debate, but this is the ‘god’ that my mind created when I decided I want to take the commons back from the wealthy and give them to the people.

And each time, I detached from consensus-reality for a week or longer. Each time my family were worried because of this ‘manic’ narrative. But each time I have come back and been better for it; more aligned with the person I want to be and distinctly lacking in suffering.

What people need, when they go into one of these reprogram-and-repair cycles, is support and a safe-container. This is what a teacher and a monastery provides if you happen to be religious, but most of us are not religious and can’t get behind all of the mumbo jumbo. Most of us want scientific explanations for why we feel the way we do.

And the reality is, there currently are none, apart from what I’m brain-farting in this latest fruition. There’s just sloppy subjective-reporting, pharmacology and labels. This is why meditation without faith does not bring enlightenment. Meditation is just the crowbar that opens the mind, and the important thing is the nutriments you use to rebuild it once the rigid structures of old have been torn down.

This is what I hope to change. I want to instigate real research into this. Maybe we can take all those people who are held in ‘bipolar’ depression, treading on eggshells to avoid ‘feeding the mania’, and help them to become enlightened instead? Maybe we can take the ADHD crowd who are popping stimulants while reading about their ‘lifetime condition’ and help them become joyous individuals who accept their god-given gifts?

I am not religious. I followed the teachings of the Buddha to get here and then I went a step further. I followed the teachings of my life more than anything. I spent 42 years as undiagnosed divergent-as-fuck, excelling at everything. The way I did this was by intentionally reprogramming myself, all of the time.

Building a recruitment company? ‘I will be the best AI recruiter in the world’ > on the bike and regulate and bang - there is the pīti and the reprogramming and who was I before this? 

Starting athletic training? ‘I will reach ironman world championship fitness in 3 years’ > on the bike and regulate and bang - there’s the pīti and the slob is forgotten.

Quitting alcohol? ‘I will completely cut this craving off at the root through multimodal re-encoding’ > on the bike and regulate and bang - there’s the pīti. That one took a bit longer because alcohol is a neuroplasticity-suppressant and the Buddha specifically warned against those now, didn’t he? He didn’t warn against other drugs though and I’m sure as hell he will have eaten a dodgy mushroom or two in his time :)

Maybe we can take this approach into the mental health industy and help guide people who find themselves depersonalised and ma

Peace y’all.

/jb202512081337

(stream of consciousness)