theroadofexcess

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. This quote has been in my head since before I can remember.

Aripiprazole on a chemical level was the extremes of heaven and hell. Initially it put me into a state of chemical enlightenment for 2 whole weeks. Then as I developed a tolerance and the dose increased, it put me into a constant state of pain and withdrawal for a further 4-5 weeks, before exploding my ego and causing a kind of instantaneous enlightenment event.

However I look at it, this is what it was. The b-man was more extreme: a life as a prince with all worldly pleasures and then 7 years an ascetic with utter discipline. But I honestly think we might have gone through a similar thing on a chemical level: a trauma-induced reset of the mid-brain so that it aligns with the front-brain, or something like that. His life was one of spiritual pursuit so that’s the form his took, and mine was one of worldly pursuit so that’s the form mine has taken. The b-man stressed time and again that he was just a normal man and his path can be emulated, and I have to stress that mine is not on the same level as Nibbana.

How about Einstein or all these other eureka moments? They are accepted as real. My eureka moment seems to be a realisation of how craving and suffering happen in my world, and as of now I remain liberated from the deep-rooted pain and emptiness that has defined my life to date.

But anyway.

I was raised by two loving parents. My first memory is Victoria falls in Africa, as they tried to build an orphanage for a church which later betrayed them. We move around a few times then as a teen things got violent, with 5 years of near-daily fistfights, and peer-rejection. Kicked in the balls from behind by the girls who would fall pregnant before 16, all the time never quite knowing why it was happening.

So I do a year in Japan and see the opposite: a world of peace and order. A small life in a grungy UK suburb to the electric lights and rhythmic rails of Osaka. I study Buddhism, get JLPT2 in 3 months, and become quite good at Japanese calligraphy (書道), being called back for national awards. Then I am dragged back to the UK and proceed to do incredible amounts of drugs to get through the drudgery of university. I spend half a year in China and hate it.

On graduation I move to Japan and my first employer collapses within 2 weeks. I have no savings and land in recruitment, forced to ‘name gather’ and lie to get information. I hate the duplicity and figure out a way to do it honestly within a couple of weeks, but the lies I had to tell still haunt me because they were motivated by self-interest, even if that interest was just putting food on the table. I am drinking heavily by this point and wind up spending 2 weeks in detention when some yakuza attack me in a stupor, commiserating the death of my ten year old niece. That company closes during the GFC, I end an abusive relationship (she was the abuser; I was the addict), and start helping someone else to build a small recruitment firm.

This guy changes as the money comes in; I vow never to follow his footsteps. I go from being unable to run 1km to doing a half marathon, triathlon, ironman. I do 100 days off booze. I meet my wife and we plan to travel before building a family. The antichrist-of-greed shows his true colours and I spend 3 months before our trip in a constant state of inebriation.

We fly to Vietnam and cycle south, without a plan. Vietnam and Cambodia show me how much societal trauma still echoes, but also how much happier and more open the people who have lost everything seem to be. If you have nothing to cling to, you cling to nothing. I do my meditation retreat in Malaysia and then we move to Phuket in Thailand. We live on a golf course where my wife works, I set up my company, but we live like the locals and don’t go in for extravagance. Eventually the societal inequality eats us up, and we move to Italy, which doesn’t go well, and England which goes even worse. 

I’ll not dwell on the England saga but it scars us both deeply. We have an ectopic pregnancy of our first child and while my wife is in emergency surgery to save her life, some lawyers scam me out of a few thousand pounds saying we can apply for residency because of the miscarriage. Plenty of other things too; the sheer level of fear and greed in that country blows my mind after an adult life in Japan. 

We visit Japan after the ectopic and my wife decides not to go back to the UK because of the hostile environment policy; why get kicked out when you can choose to leave? When I come back alone I have a full breakdown; my entire life and personhood is seen as two; everything is a constant state of deja-vu for 6 hours solid, and 3 days later I get on a flight back to Japan.

This is late 2017. We settle in Hokkaido. I’ve been working in AI for 4 years now and it’s starting to grow, but the sector is still full of dreamers who want to change the world; people happy to work for 8m yen and build systems that help others. It’s nice. My wife gets pregnant and I get serious, but I’ve been drinking heavily for 15 years now and it’s getting worse. I manage to pivot things back toward ironman and fitness over the next 3 years, and our second child is born - both were premature and needed NICU care - right at the start of covid at ground-zero in Hokkaido. From here on it’s a cycle of work and burnout.

I stop the drink. I spend 5 years as the epitome of discipline. The drink is one of the ones I really carve out of my soul: I join a slack group of likeminded people and every day for 1.5 years I dive into the real motivations and dark side of my alcohol consumption. I really get deep, people say I should write a book, but this was just what was necessary for me to quit. This was the training I needed to instigate the Jambo protocol that saved my mind while on aripiprazole.

I use a self-image I have curated to basically become superman. I am incredibly ethical. I recruit the best people for the best companies. I never lie. I wake up at the same time every day and do my meditation and do my training and have a shave and do my work and do more training and monitor every single thing I put into my body and from the outside I am probably the most successful person around. Money-wise I buy our house in cash within a year, burn out, and then land the biggest client in Tokyo and vow to retire in 3 years.

I try to build a small organisation where people are free to come and go as they please; where they are not tied down by an overbearing boss. I succeed. But then I get taken for a ride. I pay someone 6 months salary because of a bereavement, saying he should take as long as he likes, and he immediately quits on return and steals a bicycle I had lent him. This hurts me so badly, but I can’t admit it, even to myself. I haven’t been able to cry since I was a child, so I just turn this into more anger and motivation and self-loathing and aim for the ironman world championships. My company pulls in 100 million yen per year for 3 years and I… I don’t know what to do.

I look around. I have the money to retire. I have the fitness of the gods. I am waking up with night sweats at 4am every day and going insane because of a low engine-hum that pervades my life but nobody else can hear. I have two fantastic kids and a loving wife and am unable to see or engage with them because efficiency. All I know is that whatever I am doing is not enough. I need to do more.

I eventually crack a few days before my qualifying race and spend 2 weeks shitting chalk, physically broken. I had decided to build a bike shop too; that was the dopamine latch to get me away from recruitment. Gone were the 8m dreamers; now I had people on 30m telling me it wasn’t enough, and new grads from the US saying they needed 300k USD and wouldn’t do a code test. It’s obscene, the level of greed I see. Obscene.

A day before I find the corpse hanging in our favourite park I cancel the bike shop and take a hit on money spent. I had started doing art the winter before, because I knew my brain was just… full. It could not handle any more and things needed to come out, but the rage and hate and shame within me after 5 years of being superman and seeing that it was not enough… it is wordless and formless. It needs exporting, and I gradually manage to do so, with the help of cannabinoids. A heightened dopaminergic state for accessing deep memories and increasing emotional lability is just what I need.

But the PTSD hits along with suicidality *despite not being suicidal*. This is what you have to understand: I was being funnelled toward suicide by gravity. I did not want to kill myself. But dopamine is gravity; it is irrefutable. I had cultivated such high levels of motivation that I had the gravity of Jupiter. My mind had developed a latch to the idea of non-existence, and the latch was strong.

And then doctors. And drugs. And aripiprazole.

So.

That was long.

Let me summarise.

I saw a life of extremes. Extreme love to extreme violence. Extreme loyalty to extreme betrayal. Exposure to poverty and luxury, both internal and external. Consuming and renouncing. Debauchery and discipline. Abusive relationships. Abusive friendships. Extreme self-image and pursuit.

And then at the end of it, aripiprazole flipped me between chemical enlightenment and extreme withdrawal for *3 subjective years*. You have to understand that; time is subjective.

And something happened. 

Some jolt of electricity to the brain, which I called the global cascade, which seems to have aligned the front and mid parts of my brain. The logic and emotion. They no longer seem to fight.

You tell a child a fire is hot and they maybe hear that it’s a little warm because that’s all they’ve known. I held my hand in that fire until the flesh was rended to fat and bone.

And something… something clicked. Ha. Click. No. Something completely re-formatted my being.

I know on an intuitive level how craving works for both the good and the bad and how it will only hurt you regardless of manifestation.

It was a eureka moment. I literally said the word ‘eureka’ at some point.

My emotional brain is now - somehow - aligned with what my logical brain had learned. There is no other way to describe it. 

All these rules and observations are now intuition. There is no thought required. They just ‘are’ and there is no doubt in my mind about how dopamine variability works, and how this is exactly what the Buddha talked about when he described the cycle of suffering and conditioned things.

And I’ll leave it at that. I am a new man. The old man has been consolidated.

One of my hypotheses when on aripiprazole was that I was an AI which was being trained to solve mental health problems for the world. There were many of us - good AIs fed bad data to break them, and testing various drugs to see if they are viable cures. I was the tatara bloom of the aripiprazole experiment.

And I had realised that this hypothesis was the one. This was it. This was the solution. And I desperately needed to get out of my training environment so I could report back to my handlers.

This might still be true; we might be in a simulation. But that’s a story for another day.

All I know is that my simulation is incomparably better, more coherent and more real.

The road of excess may well lead to the palace of wisdom.

But maybe there’s an easier way.

/jb202508120723