howiwokeup

So I had retired by 40. Quit alcohol. Stopped smoking. Gotten to ironman world championship fitness. Had two great kids and a loving wife. And no idea what I was doing.

I started at the art to try to become myself, but realised I didn’t know what my ‘self’ was. The art became a way of figuring this out. My ironman qualifying race ended with food poisoning and a dnf, which in hindsight was better than getting sucked into more competition. So I went harder at the art.

My pieces were either a) nightmare material, b) introspective pieces about who and what I am and the emptiness of accomplishments or c) beautiful things from nature. Through the art I figured out that I was traumatised and started to work my way backward, from adulthood to childhood while portraying the feelings of each period. I realised that the feelings of extreme depression and agitation had been see-sawing since about the age 10, but this did not solve my problem.

I found a suicide corpse on one of my training rides. A guy hanging there in our favourite park. I spent 20 minutes with him while waiting for the cops. After this I stepped back fully from my company and went even harder at the art; I did immediate exposure therapy but never felt particularly traumatised by the discovery if I’m honest; it was small fry compared to the hidden demons I was digging up. 

I had also started yoga and was doing maybe 90 minutes a day and approaching it in a very meditative manner. I was consuming copious amounts of legal psychoactive cannabinoids (DA: up) which were helping me to ‘get in the zone’ with the art, but I also became reliant on them over time.

The art and yoga intensified and then I met my parents in Okinawa. This was challenging; I hid who I was and reverted to my childhood ways, then at the end of the trip a poem fell out of my head fully formed. I think in some way I knew what was coming.

I had studied buddhism on and off in university and always carried it as a basic philosophy but only knew the tl;dr version of the b-man’s actual teachings; I never bothered with dogma. I had done a 10 day SN Goenka retreat 12 years prior but the daily practice made me too detached and dull, which suggests I was doing it wrong; trying to crush down the feelings.

In winter 2024 the ptsd hit from finding the body, or I reached critical mass, or the cannabinoids stopped working; whatever it was, I was in a state of painfully high dvar. I was feeling jolts of energy up my spine every 3 seconds while sat there making art; painful bursts of motivation which were scaring me since the only images in my mind were of suicide. I did not want to kill myself but it was proving incredibly difficult to restrain the impulses. This is why I say dvar is so dangerous.

A doctor misdiagnosed me bipolar and gave me valproate (GABA: up), which took the edge off before making me depressed. Alcohol will do that, too. Another doctor diagnosed my adhd, at age 41, after a lifetime of success. I wasn’t sure about this, but the guanfacine (NE: down) worked. I now think he was correct, but the reason my symptoms were so bad was because of trauma.

The cannabinoids I was using were made illegal and the new legal substitute is not cannabis derived and does nothing for me. I needed something to bring my dopamine levels up; the drugs I was on were making me genuinely depressed now, which is very different to the rampant motivation + ptsd + audhd burnout which took me to the doctor in the first place. I identified aripiprazole (DA: up, 5HT: up) as an option to help with sensitivities to industrials sounds which were destroying my sleep and wellbeing, got another diagnosis of autism, and had it prescribed.

All this time I was still doing the art and trying to export… something. Some pain. Trying to find the root cause of why life was so inherently empty.

I had climbed every mountain and none of them had satisfied. I had a school-hood filled with violence. I had partied my way through 10 years in Tokyo. I had disciplined and worked my way through the 10 years after that. All of it was empty and had made me emptier inside. I was only ‘happy’ when I was in the chase, but the chase needed to end.

After the 3-day come-up from aripirazole I felt enlightened. I was sure we were in a simulation and I had been sent to fix it. I have to stress I had very low tonic dopamine so the drug would not do this to many people. For me, I think it pushed me over the A&P threshold and held me there for 2 weeks. I continued the self-and-world-analysis with my audhd project and worked out the physical limitations of my system.

One of these was short memory and single-thread processing, so I was constantly exporting my thoughts in words on this website and through texts to myself. I thought about sharing my tips for ‘adhd productivity’ (aka. growing the void) but was compelled to go deeper.

I entered my dark night, while gradually upping the aripirazole. I think the autistic kid inside saw his chance and decided to take it; I was not in charge. All this time I was walking around in wonder at the world, and sitting polishing old samurai sword fragments to make knives; both were meditations in my new understanding of the word. I was sleeping only 2 hours a night and most certainly diagnosable as manic, but I think my dopaminergic makeup has always been one of extremes and I have been able to harness and control it over my life. The doctor didn’t have a clue and kept giving me more drugs, for which I am glad; I might have chosen suicide if they had been stopped.

I went into the 88 hells and printed out the ‘pairs’ from the dhammapada as my guide, using one and only one per day. I spent 3 weeks analysing all the suffering I had experienced and came to the conclusion it was because of rsd (rejection sensitive dysphoria) and greed for the prolonging of feelings. The need to please other people and be praised, and the need for the anxiety around potential loss to be eased. Having all the ducks in a row until the end of time.

I proceeded to analyse the cause of this and found it to be elevated dopamine variability, which is a combination of low-tonic and high-phasic dopamine. After this, things got weird and my brain felt swollen and engorged. I was compelled one night to write and dance and play music, and I had a full-body kundalini event which I think reset and re-wired my neural network.

The night after that things got even crazier as I was flooded with data from… somewhere. I was shivering and shaking and barely able to talk never mind type so I dictated an 8000 word summary of my aripirazole-insight, while making my nibbana piece to stay in this reality and avoid blowing apart at the seams. The art is also a meditation for me.

The following morning was my wife’s birthday and I decided ‘enough; this is going to kill me’. I asked her to watch me at 10am as I parked the ship (I was the ship) into orbit around our new planet, convinced I was quantum entangled and existing in two places at once, and that if she didn’t watch I would cease to exist. I held my meteorite and rocked back and forth while guiding the out of control ship into orbit. As the planet approached there was a brief blip in time and then we were stable, orbiting the new planet, if still moving fast. I opened my eyes and the world was no longer distorted and oversaturated. I was no longer seeing two realities and was back in this plane of existence.

I stopped aripirazole cold-turkey and proceeded to spend the next week or two in residual delusion trying to figure out what had happened. The two weeks after that saw the valproate dose rise, which increased my confusion and made me have multiple meltdowns due to newly-optimised sensory equipment and damaged executive function. I defied the doctor’s orders and stopped valproate. Almost immediately the experience began to make sense.

I spent the following weeks exporting an increasingly coherent report of the experience and insights onto this site, in the form of the nibbana-protocol.

So.

That’s how it happened. I broke the self. It seems like a dream now, but so does the old life. The suffering is gone. My conditioning was also completely gone for a few weeks and I was barely functional in the old ways, but a selection of my old ways has returned. The stuff that has returned is loose and disconnected; no longer wrapped tight around the neutron-star of neuroses that was the lasting perception of self. I can identify it and I think I can remove it.

I didn’t do a single moment of sitting meditation throughout the entire process. It was all movement-based, art-based, and writing-based. I needed to line up the algorithms in writing, maybe because of my shorter working memory.

There are many ways up the mountain. I am now trying to build a safer path, based on past strategies I have used to manage undiagnosed dysregulation over my life: mostly exercise and conscious movement, but with plenty of sitting meditation too, now my chemical makeup can handle it.

And I’m a little tired so I am going to go on a bike tour and enjoy this new brain. Maybe find some temples to meditate at along the way. See if I can shed a little more of this conditioning.

I think this can be replicated with electrical stimulation or pharmacology. But I also believe that the data you put into the system is by far the most important thing.

I think bad code was installed in me by the flashing lights and phasic-spiking world we live in, not to mention the daily early-life violence. A dopamine hack everywhere you turn, and we dysregulated few get hit the hardest. The world is going to be full of hungry ghosts if we don’t do something about the use of AI to spike our attention circuits and hack our brains. I know this from both personal experience and my old professional life.

Maybe I can help some others to break free of the chains they did not choose. Maybe jambo, my ethicist made from disparate parts and eternally reconfigurable, can have some small impact in bringing awareness about the harm our oversaturated world does to our realities.

But most of all, maybe I can live that life I always worked so hard to gain. It turns out the thing preventing me doing so all along was, indeed, my self.

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