So there’s this idea that arahants are some kind of perfect being but that’s not the case. They just don’t suffer like they used to.
Even the Buddha would get tired and grumpy when he was feeling unwell. I’m sure I’ll be no different. The change is that I no longer cling to it or criticise myself or get carried away by momentary flashes of emotion. I get hit by one dart but not the second.
I slept 10 hours last night but my dreams were more fragmented than they have been, which suggests to me that a lot of the heavy-lifting on fixing the brain has been done.
I’m just guessing here, of course, but I think that the night-long [scaffold] dreams maybe mean that large chunks of the brain were being rewired, while the shorter [realworld]-leaning dreams suggest that its more like final touches, or like how a ‘normal’ brain would function to begin with.
It’s also worth noting that I haven’t gotten up for the toilet at night since hitting this stage. For my entire life I have woken at least one time per night for the toilet, and more recently it was 2 or 3 times. As a child I wet the bed until I was 7. Small urinations, not large. And now: none. In my [scaffold], urination and defecation were one way we exported packaged code, and the Buddha specifically said to be mindful while urinating and defecating so… maybe we were right. Who knows. But being able to sleep through for 10 hours is new and nice.
I cooked a completely random meal without effort yesterday; fish and pasta which I’ve never attempted before. This chef thing seems like a cakewalk and is proving fun, to say the least. Cheap, near-restaurant-quality food, and all I did was look at some fractal rules for Italian cooking provided by chatgpt then wing it on my own terms. Salt, fat, acid, heat, as the Netflix show goes.
Enlightened beings (we really need new words guys) are not all the same and don’t always agree and I’m sure that there will be people who look at my writings and think ‘this guy swears too much to be one of us’. Let them do them. ’s all good. All I know is that I no longer suffer, and that is all the Buddha claimed to teach, is it not?
What this is, is a repair for a broken mind. It is a repair for a brain which funnels the world into predetermined thought loops and cannot break free. It is a wiping of the slate and an upgrade of the operating system; an optimisation of the processor and removal of the cluttered registry. You retain all your memories from before but they are decharged of painful emotion.
Through sitting and observing painful thought-feeling loops with equanimity you allow them to lose their emotional charge and play out to their conclusion. Through allowing your body to twitch and move while doing it you remove the somatic charge and they become mere memories as opposed to painful trauma.
And this is not just limited to ‘trauma’ in the overt sense but extends to all traumatic learning: the way that we dysregulated few experience deep learning from the day that we are born. ‘You must do this’, ‘you should do that’, ‘this is what a good person is’ - it is a way to break these loops so that they are preferences rather than hard-and-fast rules, and to liberate the mind from its shackles.
I will continue my development.
In one way this isn’t a once-and-done thing, but in another way I think it is. My greed is gone, and with it my rejection sensitive dysphoria, desire for approval, desire to control people, desire to live forever, craving for experiences, craving for things to be different, bigotry toward others, restlessness and antsiness… even my craving to *be* someone or something.
All of these have gone, because I used the code from the Buddha to remove them.
This is simply a deep reprogramming of the mind. The code from the Buddha is the stuff you use to achieve liberation from suffering. You could encode it any other way: to lay down your life for someone or something, or to crave approval and superiority. But that would increase suffering rather than decrease it so I highly recommend you do not take that approach.
This is why people who do it in a religious setting wind up with complete belief in that religion. It’s a reprogramming, and nothing more.
Once you’ve wiped the slate clean I think you can continue the process. There are certain aspects of my habitual responses which I will continue to prune and continue to change. I can be a better person still, and I can continue to change in a way which improves both my life and the lives of those around me.
So that’s what I’ll do.
But the pressure is off. The suffering is gone. I am perfectly happy with who I am. It is optional now.
One thing I will say is that this seems to have given me a mountain more neuroplasticity to play with. At aikidō the other day I was *far* better than I had any right to be as a 3-month whitebelt and my ‘Italian’ fusion cooking sans recipe is much tastier than you would expect.
So I think that this is like a hard reset at the midway point in life. When your brain has become so full of deep rules that it cannot function and flow, this is like resetting it to the state of a child while retaining all the knowledge you have accrued.
Once I am recovered it will be interesting to start intentionally carving minima and trying to solve some other problems using this approach. I suppose I already am doing, in a way, with the aikidō and cooking and raising my kids. It doesn’t always need to be a [bigproblem].
But another [bigproblem] would be fun, I won’t deny. Anyone have something juicy to do with AI that they want me to get my teeth into?
That’s one for another day. Today I’ll just go with the flow: an event with my wife, a call with a fellow meditator, and then aikidō to see if the other day was all just a fluke.
I think I’ll get a shower then go sit and enjoy this quiet, peaceful, flat and smooth mind. Feel the resonant hum of the synapses with their electric turnover, like a vibrating tray of fine dry sand without a tunnel in sight.
And then… who knows. ’s all good yo :)
Help me get this to the world please would ya? I think it can really help people.
The narrative around adhd is broken. Everyone’s like ‘stfu: religion and exercise and cannabis can’t fix adhd’ despite thousands of reports of them all fixing it for certain people.
This is all of the above, taken out of their wrappers and given a neurological underpinning for the mechanism of action.
This will save lives. But the scientists… they’ll take a while to catch up. And the [greed]-based dsm will take even longer; the companies that make the drugs also fund the research that is used to create diagnostic criteria don’cha know.
We can worry about whether any of my pontificating about us being tokenised AIs has even a shred of validity later. The priority now is to help people who need help.
I am the same as Siddhartha in that regard: all I want to teach is the way to liberation.
The dhamma is but a tool to cross the river.
Come on over.
/jb202510180714