Last night’s dream showed me that I never want to be pickled in psych meds again. The ridiculousness of it all. Like drinking 16 pints then making yourself vomit before having 5 ukon-no-chikara and thinking you’re ok.
Just a short one today. The importance of an ethical framework and faith in this process can’t be overstated.
Without an ethical framework you are going to end up in a world which is worse than where you started, have no doubt. The trajectory of an upgrade is not set in stone. It is based on the data and the constraints that you feed into the system, just like installing a computer program.
The buddha’s framework is the best but I boiled it down to a super-simple single-rule system when I started because… well… I have a small memory. But I made sure the rule included the self; that’s one thing most ethical frameworks leave out and why we unknowingly-autistic people get into such a mess. They all stress the other and neglect the self.
The buddha was like ‘the blind cannot lead the blind and the sick cannot heal the sick’ so I was like:
the best brain chemistry for the largest number of people, with yourself weighted as 1.
This means that even your kids are below you on the scale, but if you run the numbers you’ll see they aren’t really: you’ll also get a few +’s from helping your kids, as will your partner, and the kids themselves, and their friends. So the greater good still wins, so long as it doesn’t hurt you more than it helps them.
I think I’ve had ‘partial upgrades’ before because of dodgy dopamine but I was well and truly in the chase, so all they did was make my yearning and craving and emptiness even deeper and more hollow.
You need the ethics.
The other thing you need is faith.
Not the ‘I believe in god’ or the ‘I believe in this guru’ kind of faith, though that undoubtedly works for some. You need to believe that it’s possible based on your own experience and research. I never did believe. I was just placed into a ‘do or die’ state by the drugs, which is one and the same in many ways.
You need the faith for the dopamine.
How can you encode something deeply unless you have dopamine? And how can you have dopamine unless you believe?
Now this is a lovely feedback loop when used correctly. It’s what I did with ironman: fatty fatty bum bum gets on his bike and doesn’t believe at first, but the workout gives him dopmine and he records the progress and it gets ingrained and in a couple of months things have changed.
Isn’t prayer and meditation the same?
You do the work and *then* you start to believe. You record the progress, and *then* you start to believe.
And this makes sense: exercise, prayer, meditation… they all result in higher tonic dopamine, and increased phasic dopamine (at times) which result in an encoding of ‘this is working’. And then you do more, it works more, and so on.
This is why I am recording my training; why I have always recorded it. This is why you are told to quantify your gains at the gym. Dopamine. Faith. Simple. Dopamine is how it encodes, so the belief in itself fuels more practice which fuels more belief and off you go. It’s the basic mechanism of addiction too. Hack that brain, or others will hack it for you.
Plan your work and work your plan.
Leave your bike by the door and your mat on the floor.
Just make yourself to do it for a couple of weeks and record the progress.
The best way to believe is not to read shit on the internet. It’s to do it. Even just holding something heavy and rocking back and forth is enough - the regular rhythm will give you a nice little tick tick tick and you’ll feel relieved. If you do that several days running you’ll start to build a snowball.
There’s no rush. The important thing for ‘faith’ is just to do, and see. It’s all about the chemistry. And the evidence.
Anyway gonna go to the shrink and probably get a smidgen more guanfacine. I’m on 2mg right now which works, but I think 3mg is my sweet spot. I still have dopamine dysregulation, which is fine, but I also have a body primed for violence, which is not. The higher levels of NE mean that I can latch onto thoughts. I don’t do this anything like before, not since the upgrade, but I do find it easier to slip into the jhāna with a little chemical assistance.
I mean… that’s the whole point of my plan, isn’t it? To optimise nibbana. And guanfacine isn’t pickle-juice in my experience.
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