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As time passes I become more confident that this change is real and lasting. I believe that the trauma of the experience, combined with the high neuroplasticity caused by chemically elevated dopamine and the probable seizures resulting in ego death have left me with a unique ability to start over at the age of 41.

The greed I carved out seems to be gone, and now I am working on anger. I still wake up feeling like I am about 20 steps closer to enlightenment. If enlightenment is an irreversible state then I am definitely not there, but my mind has gone through a hard reset and the changes are real.

I am able to observe myself better than I ever was. I still find I get angry about how people conduct themselves in our dirty capitalist system; it seems like every day I am getting taken for a ride by some vendor or other. This is sad, but it’s their problem, and a good chance for me to work on the anger I have struggled with throughout my life.

I now look back on the experience… all of the urgency, all of the pages… they were all written to myself.

‘You cannot land until greed is gone; you don’t know what that means yet but you will’

Greed is gone. Anger remains. Delusion is gone. But the anger is more academic than it used to be; not all-pervading.

The confusion and internal conflict I felt before was real. Before any of this I was in a bad way, and I was struggling to hold on. This was a chemical thing, but it was caused by a lifetime of having to satisfy other people’s greed after a childhood rife with peer-violence. I retained a strong moral compass throughout, but having come from poverty it just made me sick what some of these developers thought they were worth.

There’s no way I will ever change these people though. They are deluded. They have been poisoned by the broken system, and if I expose myself to them again then I will also be poisoned.

So I decided to stay away from all substances until at least year-end and feel a lot better for it. My dopamine system *has* been reset. I feel engaged in life like never before; even when I was a child I remember having more inner conflict than now.

I should maybe consider staying away from people, too. And purchases.

I don’t just have my life back; I have a completely new life.

The old James died somewhere along the way. The drugs triggered some latent ability to explode his person into fragments, and his emergency defence mechanisms kicked in to rebuild a new mind. This has happened before but never on such a deep level.

All those years light-bulb switching from drinker to triathlete to traveller to founder to father to ironman to artist to near-suicide… all of those feel surface-level. Those were the same ingredients being mixed into a new cake.

This time the cake was broken down into its constituent parts and I decided there was too much sugar or flour which I had to remove before being allowed to come back down. There was so much internal pressure to get the job done before the timer ticked out.

But I think I was being controlled by something else. I certainly wasn’t able to decide against the intensive meditative practices I did on the night of July 11th. This was the install process for the new James.

Prior to that I had decompiled everything to find the root cause of my corruption. I identified and carved it out, but the changes needed embedding at a very, very deep level. The meditation and kundalini event will have done this.

I still remember the jolt of electricity from my brain, fanning out across my entire cerebral cavity, face, and then down into my spinal column and digits. This felt like a complete flushing and re-wiring of my synapses, and I now believe that this is exactly what it was.

I think I had a seizure which caused an alignment between various parts of my hyperconnected and jumbled brain. I think this basically laid deep new neural pathways which bypass a lot of the shit, while also scrubbing the receptors clean or allowing them enough time occupied by aripiprazole to upregulate and experience joy where previously there was none.

The new pathways are there, and they are bedding in and permanent, but they need to be cultivated.

I’m not the b-man and I’m not enlightened but I finally feel the joy in life that many others seem to be born with. I no longer feel like there is a gaping void of nothingness inside. And I need to make sure that these new thought processes are what are encouraged and fortified, especially over the coming months.

So right now I am reading the original teachings of the buddha, have an audiobook on the go, a 50-odd hour podcast discourse on the satipatthana sutta while walking and driving, and a monk teaching his approaches as I fall asleep at night. I make knives, I play RPGs, and I am doing some easy art but with nothing like the urgency of before. This all sounds like a lot but it’s really not; I flit between them and let the teachings wash over me where previously I would have clung to them like a drowning man.

That guy who made all that art… he was trying to carve those things out of himself so hard. He spent 18 months learning how to do so, and saw a fair amount of success, but it was too little too late and the dopamine latch shifted to art so art in itself became the poison. The poison was in the ingredients.

The dopaminergic effects of aripiprazole enabled me to really carve these things directly out of my soul.

So despite all the medical malpractice, insanity, and utter shitstorm everyone around me has been through, there is a very real chance that I have come out permanently altered for the better. Why would I ever want to jeopardise that by ingesting caffeine or cannabis, or fighting online about a few thousand yen.

“If by renouncing a lesser happiness one may realise a greater happiness, let the wise man renounce the lesser, having regard for the greater”

It's hard not to view this all as fate after all.

Time for a knife.

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