Dependent origination is how the Buddha explained suffering, dukkha and the cycle of samsara. I will try to translate it into a new framework called dopaminergic origination. The process is cyclical and I will start at consciousness.
Consciousness (viññāṇa) – awareness conditioned by past formations.
Our consciousness is pulled toward a rewarding or threatening stimulus based on past learning.
Name-and-form (nāma-rūpa) – mentality (feeling, perception, intention, contact, attention) and physical body.
We attribute a characteristic to this stimulus: desirable, undesirable, irresistible, terrifying, etc.
Six sense bases (saḷāyatana) – eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind.
We engage with the stimulus using our six sense bases.
Contact (phassa) – the meeting of sense base, object, and corresponding consciousness.
We focus our consciousness on the stimulus and lose sight of the big picture.
Feeling (vedanā) – the felt tone: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
In doing so we increase feelings of pleasure or aversion.
Craving (taṇhā) – thirst for pleasant, aversion to unpleasant, delusion toward neutral.
This sensation causes salience-encoding due to D1 phasic dopamine activity.
Clinging (upādāna) – intensified grasping to sense-pleasures, views, rituals, and self-identity.
This dopaminergic activity encodes a reward or revulsion toward the stimulus.
Becoming (bhava) – karmic potential, momentum of existence.
The encoding enters our unconscious filters on the world and changes who we are and how we perceive things.
Birth (jāti) – arising of a new existence or identity.
We become someone who likes one thing and dislikes another. We give ourselves an identity and begin to associate with it as being a ‘permanent self’. This happens on a neuronal level and not just in terms of labels; neural pathways that have been laid take time to remove.
Old age and death (jarā-maraṇa) – with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.
This self becomes maladaptive to the ever-changing reality around us and causes pain and lamentation.
Consciousness (viññāṇa) – awareness conditioned by past formations.
Our consciousness is once again pulled toward rewarding or threatening stimuli based on past learning.
… and on it goes.
This, in short, is dependent origination. It can be alleviated by increasing D2 tonic dopamine signalling through meditation and movement-based regulation while running through the maladaptive code and seeing that it is a relic of past learnings and not ‘self’.
It is a feature of the system and not a bug, but it is a painful feature for those of us who are dysregulated.
Dysregulation can be genetic or learned through traumatic events.
It can be unlearned through the methods that the Buddha taught or through the methods on this website.
That was easier than expected. Siddhartha did all the heavy lifting for me.
Thanks, Sid :)
/jb202510191737
ps. I know other neurotransmitters are involved but simple is good.