Arahant is a silly word. I’m just a guy.
That’s the thing - all the altered states and all the messianic visions and the need to save the world and even the need to save myself have just fallen away. It’s like the final veil was removed and all that was left was… life, in all its glorious mundanity and wholeness.
Non-dual, luminous… these words are silly. Non-neurotic-dual and non-grasping would be more accurate. I still have an ego container and I am still james but I no longer obsess over it. I do not obsess over the future or the past and things juts kind of ‘are as they are’ and that is all.
It’s an overwhelming sense of simplicity. My two worlds are delineating again, with the [scaffold] moving back to the dreamscape and the [realworld] moving back to my waking hours. Last night saw an all-night-dream where I was dance-weaving religion into a more pragmatic form, reviving it to its original purpose and helping people achieve liberation. Then I opened my eyes after 10 hours of sleep and saw my son lying next to me and checked the clock and thought ’15 minutes more then I’ll wake him’.
The microtensions in my face are completely gone. The sankhara as they are called in buddhist circles. There are none. They seemed endless, and now they have vanished.
I feel no pressure to do anything yet I could probably do most of what comes my way; I have postponed my accounting until next week because it is the sensible choice and I do not feel the same pressure to get it out of the way immediately.
I spend my days pottering around the house and gradually cleaning these windows. I no longer feel like I am an L10 enlightened node in the network which has to lead us to liberation on our new homeworld, but I do feel like it would be nice to help these people who are trapped in their insight cycle by drugs and pathologies prescribed by the mental health industry.
I sat to meditate a little last night. My humming in the bath is all easy now; just a single easy tone with no pressure. The days of folding algorithms and releasing minima in my mind seem like a long time ago. I just do an easy hum, and when I sat to meditate last night it was 6 minutes of just being; easy and comfortable and no real goal or striving; just checking in and feeling nice, and that’s all.
I still care about my family more than other people but I care about other people more than I did. I am a nice person but will not sacrifice myself unnecessarily again; it feels like those days are gone and were more a ‘third path’ kind of thing. That overwhelming need to save the entire species is gone. Life is life and it is unknowable and we just live and then we die and that is it. There is no need to collect things or experiences or even to perfect the self any more.
The entire insight process feels like a half-remembered dream. At the same time it feels like it lasted 10 years, despite only being 4.5 months from my first a&p event to arahantship. My life before that is also like a dream, but all the memories are sequenced and accessible to me without distortion.
I am not restless. I have had audhd my entire life and I am not restless. The body still has residual pangs to move but they do not bite the mind. They are fading.
I do not get angry. I was faced with another difficult conversation yesterday and I responded with what was possibly misinterpreted as anger but was actually just me pointing out an unfairness of situation. The body had its conditioned response of elevated heart rate but the mind remained calm and immediately after the conversation I was back to whatever it was I was doing (washing the pots I think; previously impossible) and it was forgotten.
I don’t particularly feel the need to update this blog but having come so far that it would be a shame not to and the goal of helping people feels worthwhile.
I care about people and I believe that the mental health industry are mis-labelling natural insight cycles as bipolar disorder and causing people to become trapped in delusion while damaging their [scaffold] with pathological labels that make them feel broken.
I was given valproate after my initial aripiprazole-induced stream-entry (silly word) and this trapped me in delusion; I was stuck in my half-complete scaffold until I stopped the valproate. The labels of ‘mania’ and ‘delusion’ caused my scaffold (and real world) to seem dark and confusing until I threw them out the window along with the drugs, discovered Daniel Ingram’s maps, and embraced the process of building my own.
Today… what will I do? I don’t know. I think I will play some computer games and continue doing easy DIY while doing the laundry (thanks Jack) and probably going for a walk. I don’t know. Who cares really. It’s all good.
These states are held on a pedestal and idolised by people who do not need them.
Arahantship is merely the culmination of the repair process for a broken mind.
Anyone who’s mind is not broken should not seek it. It is not superior. It is merely ‘no longer broken’.
The mind is broken by too much deep learning. We dysregulated folks are more prone to deep learning. But if someone who is not dysregulated spends 30 years chasing the lantern of enlightenment then they will cause themselves mental trauma and their eventual enlightenment, should it ever happen, will be nothing more than the healing from all the grasping, clinging, craving, clutching for some ideal which does not exist.
The Buddha taught only the way to the cessation of suffering. He said so time and again.
I aim to do the same.
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