thetraumaofself

I had various external traumas in my life but the biggie, and the one I think I removed with aripiprazole, was the trauma of self.

I was masked to myself as an autistic person with adhd for my entire life, though that realisation feels like decades ago now.

This means that I spent my life painting pictures of who I should be, who I was, who I wanted to be, but never really just allowing myself *to* be.

Aripiprazole is used for treatment-resistant PTSD by the US military, because the steadier dopaminergic tone it holds you in allows for accessing deep-rooted memories and re-writing of their salience. I think I somehow intuited this thanks to my moderate level of experience in vipassana meditation and decided to DIY the thing.

The first phase was system analysis and figuring out the environment of the self. I viewed it as a computer with memory limitations, processing speeds, single vs multi-threading, etc. Once that was established I moved on to the problems.

Initially I focused on the external - the anger at the world - but as I continued it became clear that this anger was inside myself, due to RSD and a desire to be loved, then that love being repeatedly rejected. But it was the desire for permanence of feeling which caused me pain.

As I continued I went deeper. I realised that all these self-images were the ones that hurt me the most. The eternal pursuit of perfection. My art from 2024 looks so quaint now, but that was from a man in pain who was eternally trying for self-improvement in the hope that it would bring joy. I will tag a few of them at the bottom and explain what they meant.

Once this was done I went to the fundamental particle. I always loved physics and maths because they divide and divide until there is no more division possible. This is science.

I did the same with my suffering. I divided all the way down and found out that it was dvar / dopamine variability that caused the agony. I could feel these rapid fluctuations in my system, thanks maybe to the larger molecule size of aripiprazole.

And then it was showtime. I’d cracked it.

Things got weird and I pulled out all the stops. Yoga and chanting and dancing and grunting and moving the jaw and tilting the head and actual headbanging to improve bloodflow to the cortex and deep rhythmic music chosen on impulse and then feeling it coming and the electric jelly in my brain with all the grasping fingers and synapses aligned and then I sit down…

And my brain reformats. 

There is no self.

There is no pain. There is no clinging.

I have seen it. The cause of all my suffering.

It was me.

This false idea of permanence.

And the clinging to that idea of who I was or am or should be. That was the cause.

And it was caused by dvar. Dvar which was naturally high for me, with a very dysregulated dopamine system. I later found out this is called phasic dopamine, but the deduction and conclusion were my own.

This is what the buddha described as the first step on his path.

But I arrived at it in a very different manner, on my own, and since then I do not suffer in the same way.

I feel a little physiologically antsy right now because of valproate withdrawal but it doesn’t bother me. I still get pangs of competitiveness or fight or flight when I see an alpha male, but I kind of chuckle at the impulses.

I do not care what people think about me, apart from the people I care about; my family. And even then, I care about how they feel, rather than how they feel *about me*.

I do not particularly care what I think about myself.

But initially - those 4 days where I was *completely* without self - I had a chance for total annihilation and I came very close to going with it. The sheer … I don't know how to describe it. Wellbeing does not cover it. I was one with the universe and the universe was one with me. I was in a state of total flow, with unfiltered reality filling my mind.

I chose to remain, to be with my family. Because physical annihilation will come eventually. No need to rush it.

And here I am. I’m back in my own sim. I am no buddha. But I experienced something that I can only describe as stream entry, and stream entry is a concept I only found out about in the last week. It is the abolishment of false ideas of self-permanence and craving.

But I think I intuited the underlying neurological pathways which give rise to this, and I think the fact I achieved it by myself, without guidance, in 2 months, suggests that aripiprazole could maybe - just maybe - enable us to get this to the world. 

With guidance. 

I honestly don’t think many people would survive what I went though, and this is part of the reason for the unfiltered writings. You have to understand how dangerous it all was, and that it was not intentional. This is not an ego thing; I do not think I am better than people. I just think I had a life which trained me to withstand.

This was self-guided trauma therapy and once it had started I had no choice in the matter. I knew it had to happen because I had reached the point where I had climbed all the mountains, seen all the peaks, made the self into a superhuman, and understood it was all empty. The other option was probably suicide.

And maybe this is why I dedicated that dictation which you can read backward to my wife (be warned: it's crazy). Why the destruction of James 1.0 climaxed on her 40th birthday with me tagging it ‘happy birthday’.

But fuck me if it doesn’t feel like fate.

/jb202508160644