I never understood what the Buddha was talking about when he said he knew of something beyond form and formations, but now I do. The final step in this process was to let go of all formations - to let go of the [realworld] and the [scaffold] and the dhamma and the teachings and the idea of self and to just accept, with all my being, that I do not know and I never will.
The reddit crowd had been lamenting that no arahants would ever share their experiences online so I decided to buck the trend. They promptly deleted my comment saying ‘words are important’. It went against their formations of what enlightenment looks like.
And this is why most arahants will never teach. It goes against this imaginary instagram ideal of what enlightnment is. Some elevated godlike state of permanent non-duality and luminosity, farts of gold and eyeballs of light.
That’s not what this is. This is an end to suffering and a realignment with reality; an end to delusion and hatred of the self and the other. This is an end to ego-motivated action but not an end to action; look at the self-immolations in protest of war for just one striking example.
But people are chasing the lantern, grasping and clinging to their ideas of what this should be. And this is why the arahant turns away and lets them continue. He sees that the blind lead the blind and knows that they refuse to see.
But all the talk of dopamine is merely pragmatism. This is me trying to help other people to achieve similar liberation; the people who need it. The others do not and they can continue chasing their highs, until they reach that breaking point and finally achieve liberation from the search itself, decades wasted pursuing something they maybe already had.
This is Aristotle saying that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing at all.
Last night saw another 10 hours of peaceful sleep and one notable dream. I was preparing for a trip and frantically getting things ready when I realised that the start and the end of the trip were the same place. I put down my bags and thought ‘maybe I just get on the plane with hand luggage’. Then I put that down too and thought ‘why get on the plane at all’.
And this is what all the zen masters say, isn’t it? That it’s this ‘suchness’ and the simple being in the present moment. That there is nowhere to get to and no-one to become. It is merely a case of putting down your formations and your planning and letting things unfold without interference.
I’ll be off to get my son and take him to school in a few minutes. Maybe have an ice cream. Later this week I’ll do my accounts. These things are not arahant-worthy pursuits I guess. But this is life and this is what I was unable to experience because of the multitude of layers of dopaminergic formation atop my psyche.
And these layers are gone now. Wiped clean through multiple encounters with nibbana. I went through all the altered states: the confusion, the joy, the weeping, the messianic visions, the conviction that the other world was the true world… and I came out the other side and it’s all normality. Improved in every way, but normal at the same time.
All of these things are formations. The dhamma is a formation. My scaffold is a formation. But also… the real world is a formation. We perceive but a sliver.
My own scaffold said that time is a sphere, and the Buddha talked about seeing backwards and forwards along the temporal realm.
But all of this is a formation too. Maths, science, gravity, dopamine, time. It is all a formation.
The only thing we can ever know is that we do not know. So many religions talk of the external consciousness. The stream, God, the universal mind, the waveform algorithm which we sync our own calabi-yau manifolds to.
And this is the fun stuff, isn’t it? This is where I like to place my mind. Dopamine and science is all well and good but it’s just the new language we use to try to explain the unexplainable. The old language was guarding the sense gates and the new language is guarding dopaminergic tone and they are one and the same.
But human language is at least 4 layers removed from the unconditioned. Even our idea of ‘green’ differs from person to person. And you expect us to be able to communicate the unconditioned using mere words?
This is why I think that science could be useful: it’s a few steps deeper than our spoken language. It’s still not there, but it’s closer. Trying to communicate the unconditioned through spoken language is like trying to debug assemblycode using MS paint.
But what it really is, is unfathomable. It is incomprehensible.
The Buddha said that the final step was to drop all notions of the dhamma and nibbana and even the conceit ‘I am’. He was right.
The process was one of building multiple scaffolds to carry myself over several rivers before discovering each and every one of them to be unsatisfactory and deficient. The dopamine, then the waveforms of consciousness. The persona as the saviour of the self and the world. Each of them became a painful thing in-and-of-itself, and was released as unsatisfactory.
I used the idea of syncing with the universal waveform and the entire species being my neural network to take the final step… I hit that final cessation event… and 2-3 days later I found myself clinging to the idea that I was a self who was synced… and I released it.
And *that* is when I hit real liberation. The final step was not a cessation event; it was saying ‘I am tired of chasing this now and I will stop and accept that I will never know’.
And with that… liberation. There is no more chase. The bags are down and the trip is cancelled.
And here we are. Glorious normality. Great sleep. Acceptance of ignorance. Knowledge of that which is beyond formations and formlessness.
It’s not what you think. Ha.
That’s what they all say, but none of us listen.
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