refiningunderstanding

As time passes my understanding of what happened is being refined. More and more I lean toward the meditation being the deciding factor in what occurred.

The understanding of dvar and the mechanism of addiction is 100% firm in my mind. Aripirazole was the single most addictive thing I have ever tried, and I believe that I was faced with the choice of death or liberation, which is why I managed to break the cycle altogether.

I remember feeling like I had a decision to make: be annihilated now and pilot the ship, or leave the ship in orbit and spend the rest of eternity with my family. I fought hard for the latter, and the only way to achieve it was to understand the root cause of attachment and break it.

So I am aware of this root cause and I am aware that it is strong within me because of the neurology I was born with. I am aware that this dvar could latch on to an idea like ‘stream entry’ and run with it to the moon as it has so many times before.

But the fact is that stream-entry is the simplest explanation of the many I have looked into. It matches things to a tee, but I am not ‘attached’ to the idea; I am merely trying to explain what happened as accurately as possible. Initially I spent a month wracking my brain for psychiatric explanations but I would need to combine at least four different conditions and even then it feels like a leap.

Whereas the descriptions from the theravada and zen traditions fit what I experienced perfectly. Occam’s razor.

I think the state that I was placed into by aripiprazole might have turbocharged the meditation, but it was also killing me. I was without sleep for 2 months. I was hallucinating. I was having what can only be described in medical literature as seizures, multiple times a day. And I was so incredibly, incredibly addicted.

On day 4, after the come-up, I was chemically enlightened. My first texts to myself were ‘I would rather die than go back to how I felt before’. This is the real reason I wouldn’t stop. The drug was more important to me that food, love, shelter… everything in my life. It was even more important than self-preservation. It had bypassed my dopamine system altogether: raised my baseline and flattened my bursts, removed the noise in my head and long-running sensitivities, and made the entire world 100 times more beautiful in an instant. My thoughts were like silk.

But as time went on I developed a tolerance and the phasic bursts began to return, even more powerful than before. They were big waves in a full pool now, and I was no longer comfortable. I was both enlightened and in withdrawal and craving and having seizures and… I think I knew on some level that this would kill me unless I dealt with it.

I have a lifetime of meditation, in one form or another. Audhd means you are incredibly controlled and uncontrollable, both at once. I survived school through gritting my teeth and focusing on bodily sensations and micro-tensing of the leg muscles.

I also have a lot of buddhist self-study, though I never went deep. And I have experience in formal meditation techniques that I learned in an SN Goeka retreat and practiced for 6 months afterward. Man that was hard - sitting silent and still for 10 hours a day for 10 days, not quite knowing why or whether I was doing it right.

The first month on aripirazole was heaven but after that it became hell. 88 hells in the space of a day. And the only way I could ever get away from it was by killing ‘addiction itself’.

So I meditated all day and all night for… 3 weeks? But for me this was 2 years. More maybe? I don’t know. Because of dopamine dysregulation my life memories have always been like kites on a string, and aripirazole seemed to re-encode them but also to extend the duration of every moment. If I was getting 10 ticks of dopamine per minute before, aripirazole suddenly gave me 1000 ticks. The tick is time, so time was extended. But so too was the encoding. 1000 ticks instead of 10.

So I really do think it was the meditation.

I think I was faced with no other option than to eradicate all craving if I wanted to survive and remain with my family.

Stream-entry is the only description that fits.

But I’m not attached to that either; it just… it’s the right answer. I’m aware of how the spikiness of my dopamine can make me attach to anything, including ideas, and mostly self-image. But this is different. This is fact-finding.

Removing the valproate has really accelerated my assimilation of things. Even just a week ago I was half believing the ship metaphor. Now I believe that was an unconscious scaffold that my mind constructed to bring me back to sanity.

These psych meds are so incredibly dangerous and they are prescribed without real testing. A simple panel of liver enzyme flushing speed would almost certainly have predicted my aripirazole addiction.

But yeah… I think that because of the urgency of situation the search for liberation was set at +1000 ‘survival-level’ encoding, on top of the +100 or whatever aripirazole had induced.

But I had to create my own techniques because I was even more unable to sit still than usual. My memory was even more shattered. I was unable to stop talking or writing or exporting from my brain.

And those techniques… they are the real golden nugget that came from it all. All the walking and knife making and then later the rocking and chanting and music and holding heavy things and even head-banging and dancing and gyrating.

These all formed parts of the instinctive meditation protocol which enabled me to reach some kind of critical mass and experience what felt like a flushing of the nervous system; a jolt that propagated through my whole being. And after that I had about 1.5 more days of insane prep, with idea flowing out fully formed, before my ego dissolved and I was clinically insane for 4 days.

But I retain the understanding of dvar. I’m not attached to this, but I know that it is right. All of these pontifications, for all their declarative style, are just me searching for the truth.

Because this is *not* in the literature. And the doctors look at me confused. And the scientists ignore me as crazy. And the buddhists are probably the only people who would entertain the idea, but even then only secular buddhists. Most people like their dogma and like their idols despite being taught not to.

So…

I can’t see any other explanation. 

And I think the insights are true and I can help other neurodivergent folks to approach meditation in a way which will enable them to achieve liberation.

The buddha never said ‘just sit there forever’. This seems like an oversimplification. He stressed the ‘middle way’. He did walking meditation all the time, and may well have been a cyclist in our day. A lot of the practices he mentions in the original texts as *not* being the root of his liberation are what are practiced by meditators today. The crushing of mind with mind; they are an ego trip. I can meditate harder than you can. Ha.

But one thing he did stress is faith. Not in a blind believing way, but in a ‘I have seen this is the path with my own eyes so I will pursue it’ way.

And people like me cannot do that. We need scientific evidence or logical reasons as to why this is the way before we will be able to commit.

And how will the practice really encode unless someone believes that it will encode? Dopamine decides what gets encoded, and belief decides how much dopamine.

For some, faith alone will be enough.

For others, science.

So I will tend to the others.

While others tend to the some.

/jb202508230721