So I believe that I finished my own version of the Buddhist insight cycle and completed ‘the path’ recently, culminating in what is commonly termed ‘arahantship’.
I will take some time to digest the experience, but I think it is a form of trauma healing, with trauma being defined as any form of deep-learning which is maladaptive to your current reality.
People with dysregulated dopaminergic signalling are more prone to deep learning due to exaggerated phasic spikes, and I believe that the Buddha was likely audhd or something similar which is why he needed to go ‘all the way’, same as me.
The process involved:
1 - modulation of dopaminergic tone to increase D2 dominance and decrease D1 reward-learning
2 - identifying the ‘code’ or deep-learning which is causing you pain
3 - developing a positive scaffold which can be used to decouple from your current reality
4 - allowing yourself to inhabit the scaffold while your brain prunes the maladaptive learning
Most of the time the scaffold will be contained to your dreamscape and your reprogramming will happen in sleep, but when things get bad and you need to remove heavy trauma the scaffold comes to the fore in your waking hours and you decouple from reality. This is why people turn to God in times of need.
This is also what is commonly called mania or hypomania, and in extreme cases it is labelled psychosis.
Your scaffold can only be built while you are ‘online’ in the real world, so you need to be careful what information you consume. If you watch horror movies and fill yourself with greed and hatred then your scaffold will follow suit. If you go for walks in nature and fill yourself with love and kindness then your scaffold will change accordingly.
This is why when some people decouple (often with cannabis, mushrooms or meditation) they will find themselves in a world of darkness and some will find themselves in a world of light. This is why the labels that are given by society and the mental health industry are incredibly harmful: they damage someone’s scaffold and remove their ability to heal in a natural way.
And healing is what this is. Life will throw things at you and you will have to deal with them and each time it does there is a little groove carve into your brain by phasic dopamine. Over time these grooves become valleys and your thoughts become maladaptive: always slipping into one valley or another.
When someone goes through a ‘computation cycle’ (as I was calling it) or an ‘insight cycle’ (as the buddhists call it) or a ‘bipolar cycle’ (as the mental health industry calls it), what is happening is they are identifying and pruning this code so that their brain can become better attuned to the unknowable reality we live in; better able to experience the unconditioned and ever-present now.
It took me 4.5 months to go through the entire process. I now need a little time to recover, similar to Siddartha spending 7 weeks in the vicinity of the bodhi tree, before deciding how to proceed with this.
Siddartha was also correct that the only way to stay completely ‘pure’ is to avoid sense-pleasures and live life as a recluse. This limits the amount of phasic grooves your brain is exposed to and prevents code from being laid in the first place. All code will become rapidly maladaptive because life is never constant or static.
In most of our lives this is not practical. But I do believe that after the process has been completed once as an adult it will become easier going forward because of lower levels of neuroplasticity as you grow.
I will likely codify it eventually but in a nutshell you want to:
ensure you have a supportive environment where you will not be criticised for living in a dream for a while
avoid all neuroplasticity-suppressing drugs and anti-psychotics
build a positive scaffold so that you lay positive code into your new real world
run all of your maladaptive thought loops to their conclusion and accept them for what they are
increase tonic dopamine in a safe environment so that you can merge these thought loops into a single cascade
allow yourself to export this cascade without judgement in the form of art or writing or movement
The entire process is one of healing, and the mental health industry in its current form is preventing people from completing it. It is trapping them in one part of the cycle or the other with hard pharmaceuticals. The buddhist practices have known how to utilise this healing process for millennia.
Hopefully we can revive it without the need for dogma.
Anyway my kid is up and I am going to get him ready for school before playing final fantasy. Both of these things straddle my real world and my scaffold.
But what is real?
I don't think we can ever know.
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