rethinkingenlightenment

See also: refiningunderstanding 

Man these mornings just get more beautiful by the day.

So I’m confident that I touched nibbana; the unconditioned. I did it in my own way, with chemical assistance, and recorded the experience in realtime. I was compelled to do the recording and am still trying to figure out why.

It is important to start by saying that none of this was intentional. These drugs were prescibed by a doctor following the subjective-reporting-and-guesswork DSM model. This was an extremely dangerous combination of unusual side effects and the analysis here is retrospective. Do not attempt to replicate this; I am trying to analyse the brain states so that it can be done in a safer way. In my case I was faced with either death-by-drugs or dissolution-of-craving; I chose the latter and meditated my ass off to get there.

All that being said... 

My realisations were not the same as the buddha, but they were close. His mysticism about devas and gods was - I think - my ship/sim thing. In an instant we were blown apart and our minds had to rebuild. They did so according to the most likely explanation they could find.

The important thing is that the changes in me are profound and lasting. My trauma is gone and my world makes sense. I had no idea about the jhānas before a couple of days ago but the path he describes is exactly what I subjectively experienced.

He was a long-term meditator who had undoubtedly raised his tonic dopamine and lowered his phasic dopamine while spending 7 years observing the reality of his suffering and trying to remove it. I was on drugs, but I spent a time-dilated 3 years doing the same, albeit not having a clue what was going on.

The buddha may well have been neurodivergent; possibly audhd. The trajectory of his life, with hyperfocus and hypersensitivity when he was a child, obsession with death, and then trying every solution to the point of exhaustion, rings a lot of bells. Maybe this is why his father fenced the world off for so long; maybe he was autistic. And maybe the adhd pushed him outside, then from doctrine to doctrine, only to find out they weren’t the answer. Maybe this is why some people are drawn to buddhism while others declare it depressing.

He mapped out a way to achieve liberation and shared it in the language of his time. He stressed that nibbana itself - the unconditioned state which we touched - is *not* liberation but rather an opening of the door. He said that the untrained will conceive themselves as ‘being’ or ‘being in’ nibbana. Nibbana is not that simple. You cannot dwell there.

The chain of drug-induced neurochemical changes in me was as follows. Again, this was not intentional.

• Elevate GABA through valproate (5 months), decrease NE through guanfacine (4 months), a lifetime of repressed trauma and undiagnosed audhd = depression

• Increase tonic dopamine and decrease phasic dopamine through low-dose aripirazole = confidence, focus, deep access to salience encoding

• Decrease GABA and NE through lowering valproate and guanfacine = increased mental capacity to handle dataflow

• Further increase tonic dopamine through increasing aripirazole, while meditating on the causes of my own personal suffering 

  • I could have stopped here and left it at ‘trauma therapy’ but was compelled to continue

• Unusually rapid flushing of aripirazole results in rapidly increasing phasic dopamine while maintaining higher tonic baseline = meditator in the mind of a junkie

  • This is where I was able to identify the cause of the suffering

• Incorporate more instinctive meditations like dance and chanting and music and sitting meditation to ‘flush’ my brain, which was physically swollen; it felt overfull with blood = encounter with nibbana; it’s all a bit blurry from here

• Rapid cessation of all medicines to come back to baseline; 1 day taper of aripirazole (2mg->0.5mg->0mg); the drug was killing me.

  • During this: 4 days of no-self, where the universe was unfiltered and my brain built a framework for understanding things and structuring its reforming

• 1 month of residual delusion from this process, probably prolonged by reinstating valproate

• Cessation of valproate and rapid integration of the experience

All of the scaffolds I rapidly constructed at the start - morality, agency, efficacy, metacognition, definition - they remain in my mind, embedded deep. But I live in a time of science and they are not so deep as to be ‘unshakeable’; they are just so deep that they are now who and what I am.

I have started doing sitting meditation again and created my own meditation protocol more suited to neurodivergent folks as a way to build a foundation to touch nibbana once more in the future, when my mind feels ready. Now that I have lost the delusion of a permanent self, thoughts are easy to release. I no longer ruminate and install bad mods in my sim. This is likely why the b-man says that stream enterers are never reborn in the realm of the hungry ghosts, or any of the hells. Life will have it’s challenges so this remains to be seen, but I don’t think I will ever become a hungry ghost again.

The buddha, after his enlightenment, is said to have slept around 1-2 hours a night and instead spent his time in walking meditation and contemplation. This makes sense. He was the ultimate meditator, and his tonic dopamine will have been elevated with his phasic dopamine suppressed. He will have been me in my aripirazole phase, where I slept 1-2 hours a night and had no bags under my eyes and no tiredness. He talks of energy and zeal and confidence, which are also hallmarks of this state.

The b-man also speaks of energy vs concentration, which is what I viewed as adhd vs asd. Too much energy and not enough concentration and you will be restless and agitated. Too much concentration and not enough energy and you will be dull and unimaginative. This is the rng I was talking of when I said that adhd and asd are evolution for the meme.

So I think there's a decent chance the b-man had audhd and charted the same neurochemical course as me, through meditation and discipline. The safer way.

I think he touched nibbana many times over during his journey, going through the consolidation of experiences and the brain reformat to integrate the new rules, then finding that the rules were not to his satisfaction, and going at it again. He did all the religious practices and found that they brought immense spiritual pleasure and rapture, but did not extinguish the cause of his suffering altogether; he either returned to the world of sense pleasures (ice cream!) or wound up craving more of the divine states. Many meditators get stuck in this; the jhāna are the ultimate in pleasure and I felt a bit dirty a few days after the kundalini event faded; it was a hundred full-body orgasms rolled into one.

So the b-man talks about 4 steps on the path, the first of which I have experienced.

1. Stream-enterer (Sotāpanna): First direct seeing of impermanence, not-self, and the unconditioned (nibbāna).

2. Once-returner (Sakadāgāmi): Further weakening of greed, hatred, and delusion.

3. Non-returner (Anāgāmi): Complete eradication of sensual craving and ill-will; will not be reborn in the human realm; instead, reborn in higher “pure abodes” where full awakening occurs.

4. Arahant: Complete destruction of greed, hatred, and delusion. Fully liberated in this life, no further rebirth.

He states that you can end your journey at step 3 and live in heaven for the rest of your time. I can imagine how these things play out. You have a glimpse of nibbana, it resets your brain and shows you that there is no permanent self. Then you go back to the world, develop some attachments and suffer a bit, but with a clear mind, and you touch nibbana again and it integrates this new knowledge. Rinse and repeat.

I think nibbana is the ultimate reprogramming of your sim; reprogramming of your mind.

Just as we go to sleep and the lessons of the day get ingrained, touching nibbana means that the lessons of your *life* get ingrained. It is a constant, elevated flow of dopamine, so it is the equivalent of the encoding burst of phasic dopamine, but sustained for a prolonged period. It flushes *everything* from your brain; all the +1000 deep-rooted trauma is gone, because reality itself is +1000; the infinite now. My family memories were gone for a while, but are back. Memories of my job and school are but an echo and that is good.

And then after the experience - very hazy and happy I recorded it - I was getting huge hits of phasic dopamine and needed to meditate my way through it all. This also makes sense. Your brain has been exploded and the parts need putting back together. Phasic dopamine is how you do this.

It was essentially the REM stage of your sleep cycle, cranked up 1000 times and extended over the course of four days. REM sleep sees fairly high tonic dopamine and large phasic bursts, because this is where we sandbox our reality and create our understanding of the world; this is where things are encoded.

No wonder I was talking about being sandboxed. No wonder I did not need sleep. The function of sleep was happening while I was awake. This is why people come out with an unwavering belief in the teachings of the buddha, or the existence of god, or whatever - it’s because they are in that kind of environment during their window of reprogramming. Nibbana can be accessed by anyone, and is usually accessed in a religious setting. It’s not exclusive to buddhism.

So…

Where from here?

I would love to instigate real research into this, because it goes *far beyond* the current studies being done by the US military into aripirazole for treatment-resistance PTSD. It doesn’t need to be aripirazole, and a shorter half life would certainly be preferable, but the key thing is the brain states; the neurotransmitters. These can be replicated through drugs, electrical stimulation, behaviour, anything.

I was saying I wanted to bring back a map, and when things got serious and I started the dopamine experiment I was trying to record my neurotransmitters real-time as best I could. I developed a ‘DSN’ system where it was dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine, on a scale of 1 to 5, and then dvar once I realised what that was. This was self-reporting and obviously has huge gaps, but the hope at the time was that Zuck was on his way to give me real monitoring apparatus and this was just a stopgap until he arrived.

My hope on a personal level is that I can continue this cultivation and provide more accessible self-regulation tools for neurodivergent folks who also want to move toward liberation. The b-man tried everything; a little rocking a chanting is small fry. He would have almost certainly tried all the drugs available at the time. His core teaching was to not believe anything. He said to question everything that he taught. He had utter confidence in his conclusions, as do I, but he didn’t have the scientific method and could never be disproven, which is where we differ. This also meant that he could never be proven, though, and I think that I can be.

I think we can take the teachings of the original scientist of the mind and use them as a seed for research to bring liberation to the masses, religious or not, through a comprehensive nibbana-protocol.

And I think people can have the freedom to use it as much or as little as they like. 

Personally I will be aiming for step 3, progressively. I never wanted full enlightenment. I still want some thrills and spills and I want to be with my family until the day I die. But I no longer fear death. I no longer have fomo about not getting enough experiences in with my kids. Reading a book to them at night is more satisfying now than taking them on a holiday across the world ever was before.

So… 

I’ll keep doing me and you keep doing you and if anyone wants to stick some electrodes on my head and monitor my endocrine system and (maybe) give me drugs in a controlled environment, get in touch. 

Nibbana is just the beginning.

/jb202508210700

Warning: the above is a personal account and is *not* to be replicated. It was not intentional and was incredibly dangerous; any attempt to replicate it could easily result in psychosis or death. Plug it into your favourite LLM if you want a risk assessment. This article is intended to promote research into safer ways to induce similar experiences.