Happy birthday james.
42 years old. When my head was exploded by aripiprazole I kept calling myself 42. It was one of the forced corrections from ‘ship’, along with talking about the 'species' instead of the 'human race'.
This whole episode is starting to fade into a half-remembered dream, but the understandings and peace I have gleaned from it remain. I guess I will do those accounts tomorrow. Back to reality.
But reality without an edge. There’s still that industrial hum but it no longer eats my psyche. There’s still uncertainty about the future, and the past, but I am accepting of it.
I wound up a little overstimulated yesterday and a bit tense in the body so decided to have my first proper meditation session since hitting this final ‘path moment’. The previous path moments saw me just plough ahead like a man possessed and continue digging into the mind, but this last one left me feeling like the work was done and there was no more digging necessary.
At the same time, the mind was exhausted and needed rest. I was unable or unwilling to really sit and meditate in a focused manner. But I believe that now I am somewhat recovered, the meditation will become a key feature of my life. A mini-defrag every night to unwind from the day.
I did my bath, and hum, and cold shower, and then I sat on the balcony with a little white noise to alleviate the industrial hum. I let my attention drift to the field of consciousness and just rest there with full awareness of the peripherals. I felt the tingling in the brain and then the coalescing of sensation around the forehead where the third eye is said to reside.
I then expanded out to the whole sense sphere and allowed myself to step back, and back, and back some more, behind the curtain of awareness. I felt several micro-cessations, which are akin to a blink of the eye for the mind, or that brief falling sensation you get when you lie in bed and lose consciousness before jerking awake with some somatic release.
My goodness was it nice.
I opened my eyes after 35 effortless minutes and felt like a new man. I felt refreshed and rejuvenated and full of this soft kind of joy. The softness is the key, I think. Everything feels so… gentle and easy and effortless. I came downstairs and hugged my kid and we played a little then went to bed.
I woke at 5:30 and thought about getting up to meditate but decided to lie in bed and observe consciousness instead. I drifted between awareness and sleep and then it was 6:50 and I was downstairs hugging my kid again.
The altered states are completely gone, as are the physical manifestations of minima or sankhara in my brain and face. My visual cortex is still a bit wonky and I have trace distortions in my right eye, but the halos of light that I was seeing after each path moment are gone.
I feel like this is the end of ‘the path’ but the beginning of life. I feel like I can take this blank slate and live the life I always wanted, while continuing to improve myself on a daily basis. It feels like these evening meditation sessions are further trimming unnecessary code from my brain, but like the heavy lifting has been done.
I’m quite interested in expanding this meditation toward nirodha samapatti and it feels like this should be possible. Somehow I went from a fairly amateur meditator to someone who can experience micro-cessations while retaining retrospective awareness of thoughts and sounds in a matter of months. The thoughts and sounds register but are not recognised for a second or two, which suggests that the sensory apparatus is running while the consciousness is pruning or… I don’t know. Whatever it is it feels super nice.
Nirodha samapatti seems like the next logical step, but more for fun and curiosity than any kind of striving.
Let’s see. There’s a bear in the area. They get to 600kg and this one was spotted 100m from our house. I’ll be walking my kid to and from school for a while. All this rubbish about arahants not caring for their families is overblown. But I’m not an arahant anyway; that level of detachment from life was never what I wanted.
I’m a neo-arahant, whatever one of those is.
I think it’s whatever you choose to make it, to be honest.
And it’s a hell of an upgrade from my old self.
Laters.
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