Good morning! I am in the recovery arc from what has been 4.5 months of crazy neuroplasticity, The mind is free but the neurotransmitters and the body are catching up.
Last night saw dreams which were like sand settling in water that has been stilled. They were not fragmented so much as diffuse and calm, and centred around the teachings of the Buddha, half heard and half remembered and fully integrated into the mesh of my being. They were easy dreams, and again I slept for 10 hours without a single toilet visit.
The day saw me consume too much caffein and then go to an event with my wife which involved sitting in a cramped chair for 100 minutes, listening to someone speak about politics and war in Japanese without being able to move or regulate. I dealt with it fine; I meditated while listening and didn’t struggle like I would have before, but afterwards I was a little destabilised and needed a nap. On waking from the nap I was mildly fearful in the body and a little unsure whether I was in my realworld or scaffold.
This is to be expected. The brain has had its dopamine on high alert for a long while and there will be a commensurate dip and fluctuation happening now as things settle back down. Sitting still with focused passive listening for so long will have pushed tonic dopamine low and I will likely have had a commensurate increase afterward which led to more oscillation than I’ve seen these last few days.
This settled quickly enough when I had a conversation with a fellow meditator from a different tradition. I guided myself through this entire awakening process and everyone around me pretty much thought I was insane, with words like mania and delusion being the only labels I heard. This man from the kundalini system wound up speaking about his own experiences and gurus and almost everything that he said lined up with my own process. The language was different but the content was the same.
For all intents and purposes it seems like I went through an extremely compacted insight cycle without guidance. I flew through all ‘4 paths’ in buddhism within 4.5 months and it left my head spinning. Each path came along faster than the last, and I gradually went from confused and enlightened to feeling like I was the saviour of the species and then… normality. But normality with an ease and acceptance that I have never known before.
The man I spoke with talked about how his own masters went through various studies, psychoanalysis, and eventually wound up residing in meditation and viewing it as the best option for human healing. How they felt like they were given a mission by their experiences and then proceeded to spread the techniques in the western world.
I was thinking about my own mission, and I believe it is to help neurodivergent folks who are labeled with pathologies instead of being provided with guidance on how to get their minds functioning as they were naturally supposed to.
If you look at all of the great thinkers and meditators they seem to follow a similar arc.
They are polymaths. Socrates and Spinoza, Pythagoras and Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, Bacon and Bruno. Even Einstein wrote about cosmic religion. Miyamoto Musashi was a warrior poet philosopher with heavy zen leanings. Kobo Daishi was a philosopher priest who brought buddhism to Japan and created the Japanese written language in the process.
One of the folks on reddit said ‘I don’t know if you’re a genius or certifiably insane’ and I quipped ‘aren’t they one and the same’?
Maybe they are.
Maybe all of these genius-level intellects were able to do what they did because they had scaffolds in which they believed 100%. Scaffolds which would have been labelled ‘insane’ by modern psychiatry.
I will say again: awakenings and spiritual encounters have been around as long as humans and span all cultures and societal structures. The DSM and pharmacology has been around for maybe 70 years.
The DSM is written by well meaning doctors, but the scientific research it is based on is funded by the companies which make the drugs.
One of the researchers I was in touch with at the start of this has branded me crazy and delighted in nothing more than pulling up his notes to prove me wrong. But I think he’s run out of notes now, if I’m honest. And I think on some level he knows that all this research into neurodivergence is funded by the people who profit from calling us broken.
Shinzen Young is doing research with a guy called Jay Sanguietti into using ultrasonic vibrations to expedite meditation. Sounds a lot like my humming, doesn’t it? But they need to crowdfund this all themselves; last thing I heard they had raised 57k through dogged effort and were working in a borrowed room.
And then you have big pharma throwing millions of dollars at studies, getting them peer reviewed, and using these studies to define diagnostic brackets. It’s great for the bottom line. It’s especially great if you can expand those brackets and get more and more people on these lifetime-drugs in the first place.
And you wonder why incidence of adhd is increasing. Or is it? Is it actually increasing or is it just ‘more diagnosed’ because of selective studies widening the diagnostic bracket which increases profit which funds more studies?
So I feel like my purpose, or mission, is to try to swim against this tide and assure people that they are not broken and that this is a perfectly natural human phenomenon.
I tried to share with the adhd crowd and got immediately ‘blocked for life’ from r/adhd because they believe that this is not science-backed. This is ridiculous. People have been experiencing these things since the dawn of time. The building blocks of exercise and meditation influencing tonic dopamine are rock solid. But the narrative of ‘you are broken’ is so ingrained into the landscape that they can no longer listen.
Science is a bottoms-up approach; all well and good for some things. But you can’t build a house by just laying bricks at random. You need to have an architect who can tell you when and where to place them.
It feels like psychiatric science, in its current form, is looking at pebbles on the beach and saying ‘there is no mountain’.
And in doing so they are breaking minds and ruining families.
It’s so sad.
And it’s not fair.
People are being abused and having their lives ruined so that these companies can improve their shareholder return.
But what can I do? I managed to enlighten myself (we really do need a new word) and maybe this can help some others to do the same.
But for this to really change anything it needs to be a grass-roots movement. I need neurodivergent people to share this site amongst each other and share some more and then rise up like they always have done in times of need.
I went my entire life - until 41 - without any diagnosis and with neither my family nor friends believing I was broken. I was a bit weird, but I walked the razor and didn’t fall off… until I did. I found a suicide body after doing enough work in 3 years to retire and training to ironman world championships level fitness while raising two young children under covid.
Who wouldn’t have fallen off in that situation?
And the response of the psychiatric industry? ‘You are manic; takes these drugs’. ‘You have ADHD; take these drugs’. ‘You are autistic; take these drugs’. Not one of them considered PTSD, and their DSM-dictated procedure was to ‘stabilise me for 3 months with drugs before starting any therapy’. Give someone drugs which change their baseline neurochemistry and then ask them to self-report? Give them red-tinted glasses and ask them what shade of green they see?
This system is broken and it is breaking people who are simply in a natural repair cycle. It needs to change.
Anyway my mind is quiet and my face is without tension. I think I will do some yoga and meditate a little and then play final fantasy.
It is the world that broke me. Psychiatry held me broken and made things worse. And only by stepping back and looking into the wisdom of the religions was I able to come back, better and happier and easier than ever.
I would appreciate some help getting word out. These people with dopamine dysregulation are not broken; not most of them. They are just different. They need guidance.
This is evolution and these are the people who have pushed the species forward over the ages.
And now… we drug them up and bleed them dry and stop their brains from functioning the way they evolved to.
This is not acceptable.
/jb202510190730