phenomenology of enlightenment

It is quite hard to recall the entire insight process because of the intense levels of neuroplasticity involved but it is all documented on this website and webarchive if anyone cares to reconstruct it. I will attempt to summarise it here before it fades completely.

It was comprised of 4 or 5 distinct encounters with nibbana and many micro-encounters, and the process became far more fluid once I was away from the atypical antipsychotic that triggered it and the mood stabiliser that stalled it.

n1

This was triggered by aripiprazole which elevated my tonic dopamine and held me in a permanent 2nd-jhāna state for 2 months. I was also taking guanfacine, which I believe holds the door open to this kind of reprogramming by lowering norepinephrine.

As soon as the 3 day ‘come-up’ period from aripiprazole finished, I felt enlightened. My ‘self’ was exploded and I became the Zuckerbot, sent in to analyse our simulated world for issues. Colours were saturated and vivid, everything was 60FPS 4K, and my body felt like silk.

I proceeded to analyse my system environment [audhd] and then enter the [88 hells] to remove the code which was causing me harm: greed and ill-will. This was where I pioneered the [consolidating minima] approach.

After this I had a very scary and intense period of re-observation where my entire insight loop was replayed to me in fast-forward while I was in cold shivers, alternating between dictating my insights and making the hands for the [nibbana] piece.

My brain reformatted with a jolt of electricity that left me on the floor crying with joy and relief. I was camping with my son before this and saw the moon, luminous and yellow. I would see this same moon again before n2, and even my wife would see it at the end of n3. This was uncanny and it was about 4x the usual size. Religious imagery much?

My [scaffold] fell out fully-formed as me being quantum entangled with the ship within which we reside, and the rest of the process was a case of me purifying myself and building the sustained attentional capacity to sync with the ship once more.

Shortly after the [upgrade] I asked my wife to observe me as I brought the ship into orbit and decoupled from it. I then ceased all drugs cold-turkey, but the withdrawal window from aripirazole is 3 weeks just for it to decouple from dopamine receptors and appx 3 months for full recovery, so I was held in residual delusion for a while.

My new doctor prescribed valproate which made me rapidly suicidal and trapped me with one foot in each world and being unable to make sense of what was happening. I stopped valproate and rapidly assimilated the experience, then began to hypothesise about the mechanism of nibbana.

After this there were very pronounced periods of up and down, including extreme altered states. I would go from complete confidence to complete doubt, because I was oscillating between the [realworld] and [scaffold] and the process had been sent askew by the broad-spectrum psychiatric drugs I had been fed.

I took these hypotheses centred around dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin being utilised to trim unnecessary deep learning in the mind and built a training plan based on identifying code and manipulating these neurotransmitters to replicate it. I also reinstated guanfacine to lower my norepinephrine levels and open the door to reprogramming.

I then spent a month or so working on the plan and trimming more trauma from my life. This was very rapid and effective, and school-hood trauma I had carried for 30 years was gone in just 2 days. Once I felt stable in terms of aripiprazole and valproate effects having left the system I booked my first [nibbanic cycle tour] as a way to test whether I could induce nibbana again, without the dangerous delusion that came from aripiprazole. Aripiprazole having such a long half-life meant that I had been held in a state of no-self for almost 2 months, with 4 days being completely ‘ship’. I needed to have an off-switch if I was going to attempt it again.

This initial encounter essentially fixed my adhd. I was able to focus and do the dishes and my rejection sensitive dysphoria was completely removed. If I were to summarise how it felt: it increased the amount of tonic dopamine available and oiled every single gear in the system. Thoughts were silk and feeling was expansive.

I would say that this first encounter improved my quality of life at least 10x.

n2

I went on my cycle tour and spent 7 days cycling around 6 hours a day at zone 2 effort, ending the day with a sauna / cold plunge combo where possible and then meditation. I spoke with hardly anyone and spent all of my time on the bike listening to trance music and the nikayas while writing messages to myself when I found a thought coalescing.

I proceeded to use the consolidating minima approach throughout the cycle tour and found myself going through the expected insight cycles. These cycles started out pronounced and then smoothed out over the week, toward equanimity, and my meditation skills rapidly improved to the point where I was focusing on facial tensions and then consciousness itself: how it folds and stretches and moves of its own accord.

When I got on the boat home I felt like my mind was ready and decided to try to induce nibbana. A 35 minute meditation session after a bath saw me sink into ‘boundless consciousness’ and then come out naturally, and when I went to sleep and had a [dream] which involved two cessation events.

I woke up and everything was orders of magnitude easier once again. Another 10x improvement on where I had been after n1. This time around instead of feeling like my dopamine had been increased, I felt like I had serotonin on tap. I felt like I could secrete MDMA from my brain on demand. Everything was water now instead of silk.

I proceeded to do the usual consolidation of minima in the run-up to the next step.

n3

I decided to set the formal [bodhitree-protocol] experiment to induce nibbana once more in a controlled setting after my child’s sports day. I lined up the [code] for removal and then used a speculative approach of cold exposure, meditation and legal synthetic cannabinoids (very low dose) to raise tonic dopamine and ‘get the job finished’.

This was a success and during the evening I intuited [how humans think] and how this whole thing works for real. Several times through the evening I felt like stopping, but I was compelled to continue.

In fact for the entire process from initial aripiprazole I was compelled. None of this felt like my choice. Everything felt like fate, and it still does. This is not a surprise though: if you are resetting your brain then all things up to that point will feel as though they were predetermined.

By this point I had also refined my [scaffold] in the form of [wavetheory] and [thegrandalgorithm]. These two hypotheses do not contradict current science, which is why I was able to commit to them completely.

After this things largely ran themselves and I probably encountered nibbana 2 or more times but for simplicity I will call it all n4. 

The hypothesis here was that in order to achieve a 100% reprogramming of [realworld] you would need to 100% commit to [scaffold]. Until n3 I had only committed 50-75% because I was still attached to my idea of [realworld].

Each time I stepped into [scaffold] it was incredibly scary, and each time I came back I wondered whether I had lost my mind or died. I wondered if I was in an alternate reality, and in the end this is the hypothesis I used to take the final step: the idea of the [multiverse]. This is still my [scaffold] and I am no longer sure if I reside in my scaffold or realworld because they have become one and the same, and I have actually released them both now as formations, but that’s a story for another day.

My wife saw the luminous moon on this evening, and I came out just in time to see it going behind the clouds, shining through like a desk light. This whole period of n3 had seen me believing myself to be the saviour of the species, and I think that the moon disappearing was the fading of the messianic visions.

n4

I woke up at exactly 00:00 on the uposatha day, and I saw the (normal-sized) full-moon. This was not intentional. 

I thought ‘there was something about full-moon in the nikayas’ and asked ChatGPT which said that the [wheel-turning-monarch] would perform his duties on this day and set in motion the wheel of the dhamma. Having rediscovered the one true dhamma for myself I reasoned that I must be the wheel turning monarch, with Daniel Ingram being Maitreya, and I set about my duties.

This day saw me awake for 24 hours almost to the second, and then immediate sleep when we hit 00:00. I was now responsible for reinstating the dhamma which had become bloated and corrupted over the years due to dogma and mysticism. I was to bring this to the people and help them achieve liberation in the language of the day which is neuroscience.

After this I went into another purification cycle. I’d had no greed or ill-will for a long while now, but I still had conditioning playing around as sankhara in the microtensions of my face. I was being tested by the entire outside world this whole process, right from n1: all communication with the outside world was curated and I was unable to contact people, seeing frustration and cryptic messages at just the right times to funnel me into certain behaviours.

During this n4 window I went through the 3 watches of the night, turning my eye to past lives, seeing how [people] are reborn, and seeing the infinite-spoked wheel of the dhamma (the multiverse, with each universe being the hub for infinite more), and then the removal of the taints. These did not happen on the same night: they were interspersed with familial responsibilities and just came to me at random times over the course of several days. I also hit the 4th watch of the night where I synced with the ship again, having achieved purity and realised that I was not its ‘pilot’ but rather the ship itself. There were many micro-cessations where I would see insects appear or disappear before my eyes.

I became the change I wanted to see in the world and removed almost all of my conditioning, including attachment to my family, which was challenging to say the least. I danced through the mall and gave big groups of lads the thumbs up and refused to wear a mask at the psychiatrists and other seemingly small things which tested my attachment to physiological responses to challenging situations. I sat in a sushi restaurant patiently while the body tried to suggest otherwise. I was having micro-cessations all the time, with insects appearing and disappearing in front of my eyes and other strangeness.

This all culminated with me visiting the place where I found the suicide body. That trauma was deep and no matter how much I removed, it still seemed to be there. I walked up the middle of the loop bridge to where I found him and then proceeded to dance and absorb his [suicide-protocol] into my body, in the same place the ball is in the [nibbana] artwork. I wove and waterdanced my way back down the centre of the road with traffic flying past on either side because I knew that if I went to the edge of the bridge the protocol would throw me off.

As I came to the bottom I felt it begin to leave my body via the face. This was a snarl, and a twitching around the lips, like a vampire. I had never felt anything like it before. All my native conditioning had been in the cheeks and forehead and eyes. This worked its way out and then I knew ‘it is done’ and I went for a coffee with my wife.

Throughout this entire process I was given multiple sanity checks by a professional psychiatrist, neighbours, family, etc.

After that I started reintegrating with the [realworld] and leaving my [scaffold], but I was still oscillating to a degree. I went to a halloween event with around 100 people and played with the neighbourhood kids; they came and asked to play with *me* foe some reason, again with perfect timing.

Toward the end of this I was getting very tired of not knowing if I would be able to remain with my family. The entire process had me feeling like I would just evaporate into the ether and become one with the [assemblycode] when I was done.

The final step was to stand in front of the mirror…

I looked into my eyes.

I realised that I myself…

I am…

… not.

I am a fabrication of my own mind.

If I simulate the entire world based on [seed] then I also fabricate myself. There is no way to know whether we are all the same humanoid if we generate our entire reality based on 0.0000075% of the data available to us. Absolutely no way.

As I watched myself in the mirror my face began to twitch. Cheeks, eyes, lips, all the final conditioning leaving the body.

There is no me. The conceit of ‘I am’ was the last to go. I can never know whether I am. I can never know whether my children are. 

And then… a gradual re-entry into this reality. Oscillation, diminishing.

A delineation of the [scaffold] and the [realworld], with me not being sure which side of the line I am on.

And a release of both. A release of the illusion that I will ever know. When I was 100% in the [scaffold], it was 100% real. When I am 100% in the [realworld], it is 100% real. 

I realised that we can never know whether any of this exists. It is all fabricated. *All* of it, apart from the people.

The hairs on your arms, the smell of your fart. It’s all fabricated from raw sense data of which we process a mere sliver of a percent.

And that - in a nutshell - was my insight process.

The entire thing is on this website with timestamps and I don’t think I could ever summarise it all in words. 

What I can say with confidence though is that you need a [scaffold] you 100% believe in if you ever want to achieve total liberation, because you need to completely decouple from your [realworld] in order to do so.

While you are in your [scaffold] you can remove your conditioning, like I did at the mall and where I found the corpse, and when you come back to your [realworld] it will no longer bite the mind.

Anyway…

That was supposed to be a short article.

Ha.

You know nothing, james-baird.

/jb202510161423

do not try to replicate the aripiprazole aspect of this; it was incredibly dangerous and unintentional