Good morning! Last night saw my cryptic dreams return and a new scaffold start to take form.
The first was of me reassuring people who felt like their belief system had been uprooted that this was an improvement on their old fragmented worldview. That this was a bringing together of all of the religions so that everyone could be brothers and sisters and stop with the false dichotomy of us vs them.
This dream saw me as the tathāgata again, bringing back the one true dhamma for the world. I held someone to reassure them, closed my eyes in the dream, and opened my eyes in the realworld with no gap or sense of waking up; I merely stepped from one fabrication to the other and noted the contents down in my phone.
The next dream saw the game continuing and showed me the other side of the unravelling onion. This was in the form of a spy organisation which was responsible for corrupting peoples minds, and was being led by a form of cowboy character who operates in the shadows. This was the same spy organisation which had implanted the [teeth] that fell out in my dream after I wiped years of childhood trauma in only 2 days of cycling and meditation.
The timing of that false tooth falling out is still incredibly uncanny. Part of me will always feel that this is fate.
Anyway the middle way; what the buddha taught. Neither austerities nor luxuries. The buddhist circles have forgotten this. Without overstepping, I think that the formal religious interpretation of buddhism has lost its way and gone too much into the second extreme against which the buddha warned.
Arahants can’t eat ice cream they say, sticking their fingers in their ears and going lah lah lah. Words. Formations. Bigotry. Forgetting the essence of the middle way.
Anyway I guess the next step for me is to make a formal and concise version of the nibbana-protocol website, now it has seen me over the river. I’ll do it when I can be bothered. Ha!
I am happy to be meditating again and my brain feels 80% recovered. The distortions in the right eye are settling and my sleep is moving toward normality, if still somewhat extended in duration.
I picked up my guitar for the first time in over a decade yesterday and found myself casually strumming and plucking without the old drive to perfect or improve; merely enjoying the sound and the feel of the vibrations.
I started playing the Johnny Cash version of Hurt and halfway through I just stopped. I don’t want to play that song any more. Where I could previously sink fully into the self-pity that’s woven into the lyrics, now I find myself at odds with it, like it is trying to pull the skin of my back into a configuration which no longer fits.
Instead I flipped to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. I ordered the entire tabulature score for The Wall as a birthday gif for myself. I feel like the unravelling that happens in that album is a parallel of the buddhist path: the man who is conditioned, succeeds, excels, turns inwards, devours himself, then tears down The Wall.
My wife gave me Endo Shūsaku’s ‘Deep River’ because he too talks about the ‘eternal onion’, where you peel back one layer only to find another. This is how the process of unbinding felt. There seemed no end. And then.. finished. With such a finality that there can be no doubt.
But at the same time this is not the end of life. This is just the end of the old conditioning. Arahants and neo-arahants do not live in some kind of spiritual stasis. We can choose to, should we wish, but I choose not to.
The Buddha did not live in spiritual stasis, did he? He chose to teach. As did Daniel Ingram. The theravāda school criticised him for this decision but I believe that this is merely the dichotomy I mentioned at the start. ‘This secret is ours and we do not want to share’.
When did buddhism devolve into that? When did being liberated become something to hide rather than rejoice in?
This is a natural human phenomenon which happens to people from all walks of life whether they want it to or not. The religions need to relinquish their vice-like grip over it and unpack it from the dogma so that modern secular individuals can receive their guidance without unnecessary brainwashing.
They can still drive their BMWs and their Bentleys, all these monks, enlightened or not. I understand the criticism of them for not living like ascetics, but religion is big money, tax free. If these monks did not buy their luxury items then the money would sit in their coffers for all eternity and the people who work in the factories would have less income to spend on raising their families.
It’s all so much more nuanced than most are willing to accept.
But this is precisely because they are trapped in their formations of what the world and enlightenment should look like.
Arahants cant eat ice cream? Ha. What rubbish.
The Buddha would be an ice-cream munching neuroscientist if he was born today, I’m sure.
Middle way ftw.
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