streamentryemail

Update: I received one reply from a secular buddhist which was encouraging and one from the theravada school which was like 'the only way it so follow the path blah blah' which definitely sounded like attachment to rites and rituals to me... but hey. I'll just start calling it kenshō because the zen school is more open about these things.

I have sent this to two people who claim to be familiar with stream entry to see how the buddhist community interpret it. All hypotheses are open to me and none of them seem to preclude each other. It can be both.

Hello

I think I may have achieved spontaneous self-guided stream entry approximately one month ago and am looking for someone who understands the phenomenon. I had never heard of stream entry until this week, but the descriptions fit my experience perfectly.

I have a layperson’s background in buddhism and only moderate meditation experience (SN Goenka retreat), but a lifetime of undiagnosed audhd and trauma, which I believe I managed through my own instinctual meditations.

Recently I was held in a state of high tonic dopamine and low phasic dopamine (the state seen in highly-experienced vipassana practitioners) for a subjective 3 years (2 external months) by a medication prescribed for autism. 

My ego disintegrated and I guided the process toward identifying the root cause of all the suffering in my life and removing it. Once this was curated I felt a jolt of electricity in my mid-brain which propagated through my entire nervous system and left me on the floor in tears of joy.

Since that moment I have felt no craving or attachment to anything. I have preferences but they are soft. My world is quiet. It is the same, but different, in every way, and I am a completely changed man. The change is ongoing and I am no buddha, not yet. But I was for a while.

I spent the next 4 days in a state of total flow, without any sense of self; merely a feeling that this was all fated and pure compassion for all members of our species, even the most fettered and powerful. After that I returned to some semblance of james, but he is not the same and he no longer needs defining.

My experience took the form of my life, in that it played out in terms of science. I documented everything on my website in real-time and with time-stamps because I knew from the outset that this would be the most important thing I ever do. It is likely near 400,000 words now and I continue to coalesce, with remaining fetters like anger and ignorance just… falling away.

Thoughts appear, but I do not pursue them. It is effortless. I have been away from that medicine for 5 weeks now and the suffering and craving which defined my life as someone with undiagnosed dopamine dysregulation is… gone. I get hit with one dart, but not the other.

Anyway.

This is not a monastic setting. But the meditation and chemically-altered brain state were real, and I have managed to achieve some kind of alignment between my front and mid brain, so that emotion and cognition are aligned. 

It is all very strange. But I think I have intuited the neurological underpinnings of the Buddha’s teachings, and am wondering how to go about instigating research so that we can replicate this experience for everybody.

Please could you review my website with an open mind and let me know your thoughts. Remember that the Buddha did not have buddhism but still arrived at the dhamma. I believe I have arrived at the same truth, through drastically different methods, and I want to start talking to people about how they have experienced this awakening before.

The website is a mess; apologies. I am still in the consolidation phase and things are making more sense by the day.

www.james-baird.com

is the top page

and 

https://www.james-baird.com/notscience/dopamine/202507/20250710

is where I experienced the ‘global cascade’, as I termed it; where all the synapses in my brain aligned and formed into a new neural network.

Please note I have spent the last 12 years working in artificial intelligence and simulations, so my realisation has taken this form. I am not sure if this is real or metaphor, but I do not think that matters.

If the message is correct and it can be replicated for the world as a way of alleviating the suffering and hatred we are afflicted with then we use the language of the day. The language of the day is science.

Thank you,

james