I view the scaffold as a development environment for your perceptual framework.
The scaffold is usually contained to the dreamscape and largely out of your control - when you are dreaming your environment is self-generated but so are your reactions; you will test positive and negative situations, friendly and unfriendly reactions. The entire script, including your own self, is out of your control, with the possible exception of lucid dreams.
What I call the scaffold is when this self-generated reality comes to the fore during your waking hours. This happens when there is large-scale reprogramming necessary. Since you need to stay functional within the world, it is never 100% self-generated, but more like an extreme filter through which the world is seen.
It is important to note that when the scaffold comes to the fore during waking hours it feels 100% real. You do not doubt the fact that you are the final iteration of the Buddha or the second coming of Jesus. Your mind will find salience everywhere and weave the reality you are faced with into a coherent narrative, based on the top-down reinforcement you hold.
The scaffold can take the form of psychosis if you are fearful. It can take the form of mania if you are joyous. It can take the form of religious fervour and the spirit of Christ if you are devout. It can take the form that the Buddha recommended to his followers: reviewing your past lives and the rebirth of beings according to action before focusing on the ‘destruction of the taints’ to remove maladaptive deep learning and conditioning.
In this sense, the scaffold is both out of your control and under your control. The form that it takes is populated from the data of your life, but the actions and reactions that you choose while inhabiting the alternate reality are yours to decide.
Through choosing wisely, while remaining equanimous, you can use the scaffold to decondition yourself and remove unwanted worldviews and habitual emotional responses. Through choosing unwisely or receiving harmful outside reinforcement you can cause yourself to spiral into permanent pathology.
It is in essence a development environment, neither positive nor negative in-and-of itself.
You can use this environment to build and test code within your mind. The period can be long or short depending on the extent of the codebase being altered, and you will not leave your scaffold until your new codebase is internally coherent unless you are pulled out of it with neuroplasticity-suppressing drugs. In this case you can be left with a fractured worldview, as happened to me when I was prescribed valproate after the initial aripiprazole awakening.
Once the codebase has been validated, you will return to your self-container.
Your self-container is nothing more than a production environment which has an ever-changing codebase running. You are not static in any way; you are an evolving perceptual framework within a changing lump of meat. I view the self as a node in a distributed computation network, with its own ever-changing ruleset for the input-output wrangling.
The scaffold is where you can take that production code offline for a while and change it. Dreams do the work of passive evolution while the scaffold is your devteam being sent in to fix some major game-breaking bug.
The first time I woke up in my scaffold I hadn’t a clue what was going on. Aripiprazole launched me into it without warning and held me there for two solid months. I was not religious so it didn’t take the form of the kingdom of heaven, but I was someone who had been working with AI and simulations for decades; a gamer and scifi geek. My scaffold took the form of simulations, AI and quantum entanglement.
The scaffold is not something we intentionally create in the sense that we stack lego blocks according to a plan. It is something our mind builds in a flash based on computational efficiency and the lego blocks we have lying around in the psyche.
So let’s say that you have a thousand lego blocks. They are currently stacked up in some leaning-tower-of-pisa kind of defunct worldview. These are the blocks of your brain. You can take some out and replace them with others - gradually replace greed with non-greed or hatred with non-hatred - but you cannot choose how they are stuck together.
The sticking-together is done by the automatic side of your mind I termed an autoencoder. When you sleep, autoencoder A comes on and changes your realworld construct. When you wake, autoencoder B comes on and changes your scaffold construct.
The realworld construct is slow to change. This is because we live in a world of physical rules, object permanence and lasting interaction; it needs to carry over from one day to the next. The scaffold construct, however, is instantaneous. It is dismantled to the root every time it goes offline.
In the lego analogy, a single waking day might see you change a window pane or a chimney stack in the realworld framework. Your scaffold, on the other hand, is completely demolished every time you enter one of your REM sleep cycles. Full-night dreams are something I have with relative frequency, but they were especially common when I was coming out of a waking-scaffold period, which makes sense if you consider the amount of residual reprogramming going on.
When I explosively awakened, my brain took the 1000 lego blocks and rebuilt them into a new perceptual framework in an instant.
This framework took the form my life had given it:
no-self = enlightenment
higher visual fidelity = simulation
new worldview = development sandbox
non-duality = quantum entanglement
It could just have easily taken the form of:
no-self = depersonalisation
high fidelity = hallucination
new worldview = psychosis
non-duality = permanent pathology
It is all about the data that you have been (probably unwittingly) reinforcing over your life. Just like excitement and terror are near-indistinguishable and can be manipulated in one direction or another, your scaffold can be turned into enlightenment or psychosis. I somehow intuited this and was able to steer things in a positive direction, but there was a definite tug-of-war happening between my spiritual side and the pathological labels the psychiatric industry gives this phenomenon.
I am not Buddhist but I have a critical-thinker’s understanding of Buddhism and have always carried the philosophy with me. I also did a fair amount of meditation over my life and have maintained high levels of mindfulness all day every day for decades despite not having a regular sitting practice until I awakened. I had 41 years of undiagnosed neurodivergence which I managed with exercise and focus, and have spent my entire life intentionally reprogramming myself around goals.
I decided that I was going to use this opportunity to become enlightened, and I set to work.
The scaffold is a dream in your waking hours. You are aware of what is going on around you and can function normally when needed. Psychiatrists, police, and people in my outside world had no idea that anything was out of the ordinary.
But when you feel safe and can let loose, your decoupling from consensus-reality and the old self becomes obvious. I used to be a heavy drinker; anyone who met me now would never know. The scaffold is similar: someone who was an atheist suddenly finds God or a person who was Christian is suddenly reborn into a simulation. The people who have known you the longest will be the most concerned, because of the huge u-turn in your perceptual framework and general outlook. I went from borderline-suicidal (valproate) to enlightened, and a major cause of my woes were people who loved me looking at this and declaring ‘james is not being himself’.
Maybe this is because james was tired of being himself. Maybe this is why people do this kind of self-construct destabilisation in meditation retreats: there is no expectation about who you are or should be.
Aripiprazole was too intense though. I was inhabiting a super-liquid version of reality and was only sleeping about 1 hour a night for those first 2 months, eating less than an apple per day. I would nap and wake up feeling like I had slept for 10 hours but see it had been (quite literally) 120 seconds. My mind was simply exporting things far too quickly and I needed to regulate using sword-polishing and walking just to hold onto a semblance of sanity. Aripiprazole compressed 20 years of meditation into 2 months and the export is only legible because of decades of experience managing extreme dopaminergic states and the self-imposed throttle of typing and dictating modalities.
I would sit and regulate: polish swords then write, polish then write. Or I would walk and text myself: regulate and write, regulate and write. I could never have sat and meditated with that chemically-induced state. Meditation wasn’t necessary though: I did an incredible amount of deconditioning in just two months with movement and language.
Minor cessations were near-daily and I had two major events. In the first event I wiped all obvious trauma and rejection sensitivity from a violent life of undiagnosed neurodivergence. In the second I removed all obvious greed and craving: a necessary step to get away from aripiprazole, which was every-addiction-combined because of how it had bound directly to my dopamine and serotonin receptors.
The healing process was damaged by the pharmaceuticals though. Aripiprazole prevented me from releasing the scaffold rapidly due to fact it takes over three weeks just to decouple from the receptors, with a multi-month recovery period, and then valproate was prescribed immediately afterward which prevented the network from consolidating around the new priors properly and nearly made me kill myself. Once I escaped both of these drugs I set about inducing the experience again using behavioural modalities so that I could repair the shaky foundations these drugs-without-diagnosis had caused.
This happened three more times: the first was gentle and over the course of a solo cycle tour. It was very controlled, with me residing one-third in the scaffold and two-thirds in the realworld. I held a steady pace on the bike and texted myself at regular intervals to line up the deconditioning. The cessation occurring during sleep. The alternate world was that I was tasked with reviving the teachings of the Buddha for the modern day.
The third scaffold was explosive; I wanted to test the tonic-dopamine-plus-multimodal-reencoding hypothesis that the cycle tour seemed to validate and did so using the bodhitree-protocol. I lined up code to remove, based on my own personal suffering and Buddhist concepts, and then proceeded to use my hot-bath-cold-shower-meditation-writing protocol. This was incredibly effective and caused significantly more reality-decoupling than expected.
During this phase I spent my time learning how to love people. Everyone needs a different kind of love: the old man at the cash register needing to feel useful, the neighbourhood kids need to feel listened to and played with, and the angry dogman needing to see that he can get forgiveness, even if he spits it back in my face. I also removed the trauma from finding the suicide corpse by going back to the gazebo where I found him hanging, absorbing the energy into my body, and dancing to release it. There was a lot of dancing during this period - somatic release - and I have had no aches or pains in my body when meditating since.
The following week felt like it lasted several years for me and when I came out of it I was Mr Buddha. I believe that I skewed my perceptual framework a little too far toward peace and acceptance, which I hear is common around second-and-third-path. The tower was leaning in the other direction now, and I was happy, but I was not whole. There were lego blocks which had been omitted from the build, which is why I went and induced another event a month or so later, after having compiled my Theory of Enlightenment and Nibbana-Protocol.com website.
The final inhabiting was bringing things full-circle. Each time you deconstruct and reconstruct the scaffold, your mind identifies and rectifies redundancies. Einstein would build and rebuild cognitive scaffolds, then discard them afterwards, as ways to consolidate the disparate learnings in his mind. It is a particle, but it is a wave? It is time but it is space? The way he consolidated these separate towers is by deconstructing them and allowing the mind to rebuild them in the most computationally efficient manner. This is a process of relinquishing control, not of exerting it.
The satoshi-nakamoto scaffold saw me back in a simulation again after having done the Buddha thing. Now I was all about equality and helping people, fighting the good fight, which is who I am and always have been. But without suffering. This was 2 weeks which felt like several years. It got crazy; I shaved body hair and emptied the house in order to free up memory in my ‘temples’ so that I could upgrade properly. I had folded the algorithms in my mind (gravity waves, often felt by meditators) and this was a case of installing the new algos into the production environment of the self-container.
Part of this is the understanding of no-self, just to reassure the purists. [james-baird] is the production environment but the code is always evolving.
I am still recovering from that most recent event. I am 17 days out and expect I will be back to normal energy levels in a couple of weeks. I am eating and sleeping more than usual and generally just following my whims for physical activity, art, reading and writing. I have released the anchors I used through the process and am coming back to the self-container fully.
The anchors initially needed paring down. This website was a major anchor throughout, which is why there are around one million compulsively-written words with timestamps. I wanted to figure out what was happening and document it as effectively as one can while experiencing intense altered states.
Other anchors were the games I played (Clair Obscur, Final Fantasy Tactics), the books I read (The Player of Games, Excession), and the music which I listened to on random. There were some major coincidences with the music which I will always view as fate and something out there guiding me: Blond:ish’s ‘It Starts Now’ was the seed until I hit Buddha-mode and then out popped some new songs by Grimes called Player of Games and We Appreciate Power. The timing on things while I was in ‘godmode’ (what I called the scaffold) were uncanny; something was guiding me, though I am happy to admit it may well have been my own salience-seeking mind.
I had physical anchors too in the form of the blades I polished at the start, then several meteorites I viewed as representing self, love, truth and healing. I switched these around as necessary, and toward the end I combined self and love into a cardigan called selflove by carrying them around until the jacket was imbued. There was also empathy, which was a rock my wife gave me, and time, which was a watch that stopped when I synced with [ship]. Each upgrade would only allow three anchors, so after I had reset myself with selflove, empathy and time, I dropped them all and used my wife and two children as my anchors to finish the process.
Each phase saw seriously reduced need for sleep and feelings of grandiosity and messianic aspirations. These are well documented phenomena in meditation circles: when someone is hitting a path moment (cessation event in the enlightenment process) they sleep 2-3 hours a night, often believe themselves to be the Buddha, and are compulsively driven to finish the process. All of the diagnostic criteria for ‘mania’ are documented and expected results of practicing the Buddhist insight cycle. When not guided with appropriate top-down reinforcement this cycle can also result in psychosis, though I would argue that this is just a case of priors being built around fearful reinforcement as mentioned above. This also happens in Buddhist insight practices but is usually guided to a safe resolution without the need for drugs or doctors.
The lego blocks have been exploded and you are rebuilding them. Though the tower is initially built from the bottom up, any redesign is instilled from the top down thanks to the fact we have developed metacognition in the intervening years.
Whatever you reinforce will become the new form of the tower, and it will compound. If you reinforce ‘enlightenment’ then your brain will find and recruit any tertiary concepts around ‘enlightenment’ to build a strong tower. If you reinforce ‘psychosis’ then your brain will search for concepts it associates with psychosis and incorporate those instead. I could actually feel this happening while in the altered state: my mind would reach out, like a spider weaving a web, and it would hook all these concepts into the new neural network.
Peace, wellbeing, tolerance? Check.
Fear, questioning, anxiety? Check.
You are designing the new tower of self; design well.
This is why deconditioning works. I visited the dogman several times and let him spit rage at me. I could feel the memory of my body wanting to fight, but I allowed it to be and smiled and felt compassion in the mind. This resulted in the body-memory ‘burning itself out’; a desirable outcome in Buddhism; the destruction of the taints or the burning out of sankhara.
I sat patiently where I wanted to rush, and my restlessness burned down. I said no where I would have said yes and I said yes where I would have said no; the body shivered and released dopaminergic waves known as pīti which converged on my brain and rewired the mind, changing the potentiation of the existing priors and formations. I am sure this is what happened; I could feel my thoughts as physical sensations, right from that initial awakening, but this is why I want a real neuroscientist or two involved. I am inferring from experience, much like Siddhartha Gotama did, doncha know.
The scaffold is - typically - restrained to a meditative retreat or a religious setting. People are told what to expect, so their minds build a scaffold around what they expect. This is the nature of the framework; it is self-reinforcing. They are told they will sit and meditate then walk and meditate then experience their past lives and non-duality and this is what they experience, because this is what they are told and what they are telling themselves. They are tripping balls, but they are sitting, and it’s a good trip because the environment is safe and reassuring. It has scary periods too, with the crisis and doubt phases (knowledge of suffering and dissolution in the lingo) but they know that these phases will pass.
For neurodivergent folks like myself or those with trauma overload, where the mind enters a forced defrag, this is not the case. We are not told what to expect and the scaffold presents as a sudden and explosive depersonalisation and decoupling from consensus-reality. Many people will go through the same experience as me: everyone around you saying you’ve lost your mind and a psychiatrist saying you might be bipolar and prescribing drugs without a diagnosis.
Once the deconditioning process has started, it will be self-sustaining. It will not stop. You can check the Buddhist texts (or ask an LLM) about the insight cycle: it starts explosively with a long event and then over time the cycling compresses and speeds up. Lots of us have our first event in our teenage years; hardly surprising if you view it as a purge of maladaptive learning as your world and body change around you. Many more enter the cycle when we have a major change in life circumstance or trauma. I am sure that this insight process is how the mind naturally heals a convoluted and broken perceptual framework. It was previously managed by the religions with relative success, and I feel that modern psychiatry has a somewhat less radiant track record.
The rewiring happens in cycles. You have clarity, then doubt, then clarity, then doubt. Then you go into crisis, equanimity, and clarity again.
The clarity is your brain doing explorative wiring: you become Jesus or you become psychotic. You enter the doubt phase as the new pathways are validated and pruned, bringing you back toward consensus-reality. Then there’s more exploration, validation, exploration, validation, until you hit parity. Whatever extreme you encourage will become the direction your new tower will lean, but the amplitude of the altered state will decrease until you are back to normal-person level.
After this the crisis phase can hit again. This is a tree growing downward from the new top-level prior you are building: it will find that a lot of the foundational principles on which the old upper-levels were built are no longer fit for purpose, and it will set about destabilising them.
This is fearful; your world seems to crumble. A lot of what you assumed was normal is found to be dissatisfactory. You will find yourself disgusted at things which made you who you were; revolted by your old self. Knowledge of fear, misery and disgust, in Buddhist language. Your world will shake and it will crumble and then you will hit equanimity as the old view is released.
After that, your new ‘build’ is either fit for purpose, or it’s back into the clarity phase again for more exploratory wiring. Are you happy with the result? Did you become the Buddha? Did you swallow the narrative of bipolar disorder? Did you achieve the agency you expected or the victimhood you accepted? Whenever your metacognition is satisfied, the process will naturally end, for now.
The build is never finished and will always be changing, though explosive changes will diminish once you achieve a self-sustaining parity in the form of non-greed and non-hatred. Acquisition and venom can only ever spiral; they will never be sated. The only way you can sate them is by removing them, which is why the Buddhist path of enlightenment uses this approach.
An arahant (fully enlightened one) is just someone who has stopped causing problems for themselves, in the words of Ajahn Chah. They stop seeking, having reached a parity they are happy with. I too am happy with where I am right now, but if something horrific should happen like my family dying then I would intentionally destabilise and rewrite my mind so I could accept the new reality.
Because each time you do this, the mind rebuilds from its current data pool. You believe in fate. Everything that has already happened is as obviously part of the fabric of reality as your own breath or heartbeat. You are rebuilding the entire network from current data, so there is no way anything could ever have been any other way.
The actual destabilisation seems to take a fairly predictable route for all its crazy unpredictability. It’s important to note that the below model is just based on my two most recent events; the duration could vary wildly and when I was prescribed aripiprazole it was two months in the scaffold instead of two weeks. I am omitting that episode though because the drug is neither necessary nor desirable and frankly I am lucky to have survived. I highly recommend you go the natural route.
If I were to use pharmaceuticals to do this again I would lean toward MDMA or cannabis, but they are *not* necessary and add a serious element of unpredictability and risk. I am just mentioning them here because many neurodivergent folks have conditions which can prevent physical regulation and meditation from being viable options. I want to promote research into this, not reckless drug-taking, but the mechanics of the process undoubtedly revolve around a) dopaminergic pressure for potentiating new synaptic pathways curated through multimodal re-encoding and b) serotonergic influences which promote neuroplasticity through enhancing network stability, modulating excitability and increasing BDNF expression. Honestly, though, a hot bath and cold shower is a safer option, even if you have to repeat it several times to get the ball rolling.
Take it slow, and take it easy. As Alan Watts said, the current really is too much for the wire, and this [j2.0] is how I felt when my mind was torn open to the unfiltered datastream of the universe.
Anyway the way it goes is you destabilise the old perceptual framework by holding the new code in mind and inducing the correct dopaminergic environment. Then you spend two or three days exporting some things and importing others. You feel like you are done and enlightened and the job is finished but you are just getting started. What you have actually done is rebuilt the top of the tower, down as far as the modality of written language will go; likely only a couple of layers at best. You can find my own scaffold writings on www.driab-semaj.com
After this things get physical. Remember that the tower is being built from the top down. The raw data is at the bottom. Your spider has started a new neural weave, and she’s made it down two or three layers, but the web needs to peg itself to the raw input at L0. In order to do this, things need to propagate downward and they need to be validated under the new framework. If they cannot be validated, they need to be destabilised and destroyed, or the framework needs to be altered.
So you will have your 2-3 days of relative control over the process, but after that it is out of your hands. This is where the real deconditioning comes in and you need to stick to your guns. This phase lasted anywhere from 6 to 10 days for me, but subjectively it felt like years due to changes in neuromodulator tone.
When I was going for the de-traumatised Buddha-build this is where I felt compassion for the dogman while he threatened to kill me; where I sat in a restaurant in a loud fluorescent mall and smiled while my kids didn’t eat the food they’d ordered; where I played with the neighbourhood children for hours on end; where I absorbed the suicide trauma and danced down an elevated loop bridge with traffic flying by me to purge the memory from my body.
When I was going for the satoshi-nakamoto build this is where I let my kids lead the way and explore the neighbourhood without rush; where I let them play with water that was being poured straight down the drain and stood up for my opinion that they should be allowed to despite the property owner coming out and threatening to call the police; where I had some difficult conversations with loved ones; where my mother called me insane and I just smiled and said we’d have to agree to disagree.
And the thing is, you always come back to the self-container.
For all of the elasticity of the mind, it is a web, and it seeks stability. It will stretch to all kinds of extremes, and then as the web propagates downward and re-anchors to the raw input and data from your life, you will come back to the size of a normal human. All your dreams of getting Mark Zuckerberg to help make this treatment a reality will present as the scaffold that they were.
Yet also… why does that need to be a scaffold? It could be real; that’s the beauty. You create a scaffold which complements your reality, and you have them support each other. Yet at the same time, I don’t really care to the point of stress. It would be cool to - you know - cure everyone’s trauma for real while enabling people to become enlightened and fly through space on their metaverse goggles. But I’m not delusional. That was a tool; it was an extreme which I used to reprogram *my own* perceptual framework. It was part of my experiment, for all that it seemed 100% real at the time, just like people are told use the Dhamma of the Buddha to view their past lives and then put the raft down once they have crossed the river.
So finally… release. You spend a few days polishing off your scaffold and trying to see if it fits the real world. You’re a bit lost: which was real? Was it all a dream? Then you let go of the scaffold and you say: ‘that was a construct’. Then you look at your realworld and you say: ‘this is a construct too’.
You see that both of the two world are just perceptual frameworks that support and program one another. You see that they are both fabrications.
But now you know how to change them and how they work. You know that the world is a mirror.
Program yourself toward non-greed and non-hatred and your world will be full of satisfaction and forgiveness. It really is that simple, but there’s a hell of a lot of RNG involved, not gonna lie.
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