3. escaping pharmaceuticals

Aripiprazole has a metabolite half-life of 96 hours and take around 3 weeks to decouple from the dopamine receptors to which it binds. This meant I was held in my scaffold for far too long and spent weeks trying to make sense of what was real and what was not.

I was still decoupled from james-baird.com, with my personal website looking like this:

I anticipated a rough ride of the withdrawal, but the entire process was actually a significant step up from my life to that date. During the n1 encounter I had removed my attachment to dopamine itself so the dopaminergic changes brought about by withdrawal were easier to navigate than my prior natural dysregulation.

I was, however, very confused. I had no framework to understand what had happened outside of the scaffold my mind had created and the medical industry. During the daytime hours I was functional as a father, but the nighttime was devoted to hypothesising about what had happened to me.

I believed myself to be sandboxed and quantum entangled with a future version of myself who was working to develop the technology which would become [ship] in our reality. I was also the translation interface with the ship; a modern version of a messiah talking to God.

[REENTRY]

withdrawal // video // 20250716 // 20250717 // 20250718 // 20250719 // psychosis 

insight // chatGPTanalysis // ship/sim // alteredstatesummary // howaripirazolefelt // lastingchange  // chatgptdiagnosis

As the aripiprazole decoupled from system I came back to reality and tried to make sense of the situation through the lens of psychiatric definition. I had been diagnosed with BP2, ADHD and ASD, but I would have needed to also have a rare form of epilepsy (FLE) for the halos I was seeing and the messianic visions to make sense. Other historical figures thought to have had this form of epilepsy are Joan of Arc, St John of the Cross, and Mohammed the Prophet. 

My experience was too profound to chalk up to mere hallucination so I spent time exporting the raw understanding of my spiritual framework in the form of [technospirituality]. All of this was of my own discovery but mirrored the teachings of the Buddha.

[TECHNOSPIRITUALITY]

alsomeditation // reconfiguration // doityourself // genAI // contagion // cmem / karma // clearingcmem // compatibility // meditation // ship // freewill // alteredstate // annihilation // mindstates // yourjob //notenlightened 

I had an MRI and was assured my brain was perfectly healthy. My new psychiatrist prescribed valproate once more, declaring the aripiprazole phase to be mania while conveniently glossing over the fact it was drug-induced. The valproate held me in a confused state for a further two weeks and caused multiple intense meltdowns along with suicidality where I was almost walking into traffic to end my life. I later defied the doctor and my family to cease the medication, and within 3 days the meltdowns and suicidality faded and everything started to make sense.

Having been cleared for FLE and seen the disastrous impacts of the medicines prescribed by the psychiatric industry, I proceeded to forge my own path.

The religious figures listed as having FLE, along with messianic visions being a diagnostic criterium for bipolar mania, got me thinking that maybe this was a spiritual awakening. I went back to the Buddhist philosophy I have carried since my university days and started doing my own research.

I found the theravāda maps of Daniel Ingram and looked into the phenomenology of the arising & passing, dark night and stream entry process. These aligned with my own experience perfectly, so I dropped the psychiatric labels and decided to look into the millennia-old understanding of awakening.

My own path was not initiated within the Buddhist framework, so I knew I would have to extract the tools and adapt them for something new. 

The next step was to create a working hypothesis and reverse-engineering the process of enlightenment.