I sat to meditate and didn’t feel it so did a little art then had a 2 hour nap with further dreams that enhanced my comprehension. I think I know what is happening.
During each ‘path moment’ or cessation event what I think happens is your neural code is packaged and compressed, being taken offline while unnecessary pathways are trimmed. The [rootcode] for your system is altered, and the algorithms which you will access during your waking hours are curated.
I flew through all ‘4 paths’ very quickly, probably because of how I approached it with the consolidation of minima.
This is how I approached study in school: I would take an entire year’s worth of study then condense it to 3 pages, then 1 page, then half a page, then 3 sentences. These 3 sentences would serve as a [seed] which I could then use to expand out to the entire codebase of the course.
This is what I did with my mind, and why the ‘fetters’ fall away piece by piece, until there are none by the end. It’s worth noting that these fetters are *cultivated* away; it is not a natural or predetermined process. You could just as easily program yourself into a jihadi. Indeed I think the dopaminergic modulation of the religions is how people do this, and maybe how you could undo it.
Anyhow what this means is that with each subsequent ‘path’ you are cultivating the [seed] further and trimming more and more unnecessary chaff. So for first path maybe you go from 1 exabyte to 1 terabyte, 2nd you go to a gigabyte, 3rd to a megabyte and 4th to a byte. This is for illustrations purpose of course and not literal, but each subsequent optimisation sees less and less unnecessary stuff left over.
You then hit your cessation event and the neural code is trimmed. You are left with this ever-smaller and ever-lighter seed from which your new neural network propagates. This seed becomes your new [rootcode] and decides which of your old code will be activated.
This is when the ‘fruition’ happens in buddhism and your ideas come flowing out, or in modern clinical terms this is when someone has a manic episode and does their masterpiece, or has dangerous psychosis if their [scaffold] was not curated to be happy and healthy.
Over the week and months following a cessation event the new neural network propagates outward from this [seed] which you cultivated. New insights fall out fully-formed and your old insights seem trite and obvious.
You also have a lot of phantom sensations and thoughts arising and testing their validity against the new rootcode, often coming up blank and falling away never to return. Goodbye rejection sensitive dysphoria, you absolute bastard you :)
This initially happens in your waking hours because you are oscillating rapidly between your realworld and your scaffold. Before the event you were heavily into your realworld, but then the event snapped the anchor holding the rubber band of your mind in place and you flipped over, and back, and over, and back, and so on. You bounce between the two like a man on a bungee and you aren’t quite sure which is real (hint: they both are and neither are).
So your initial thoughts to coalesce will likely be your scaffold. You will be with god, or the devas, or in my case you will be an enlightened L10 node. You will seem crazy. Then you will flip back hard to realworld and wonder if it was all true. And then back to scaffold and utter confidence, and so on, with decreasing amplitude.
This can be very confusing which is why I recommend writing yourself a [welcome].
Anyway as you proceed through the [upgrade]s the code becomes more and more optimised toward whatever you are building. In each step you take your soul and you package it up as a zipped file and you switch the power off and reboot the system and then it propagates out from this zipped package.
This is why you decouple from reality and why you are able to retain the programming you instil while in your scaffold in the realworld. This is why I was able to remove most of my conditioning but retain my love of family and ice cream, and my desire to help neurodivergent people access the tools of religion without the dogma, not to mention the desire to save the world. That’ll come later though, maybe. Ha. :)
As the process went on I had fewer and fewer [fractals] I took with me. I whittled them down to 4 meteorites which represented [self], [love], [healing] and [truth] by the end. But then I gave [self] to my wife, [love] to George, and [healing] to Luca, and took my family as my fractals instead, with me retaining only one rock, which was [truth].
My world would go offline, I would enter safe-mode in my scaffold, I would reprogram my [rootcode], and I would come back. Then as the code propagated outward I would present as manic, until that settled enough for me to sleep and only have wild dreams instead. These dreams would start out as all-night events and wind their way down into a more normal structure.
At final path (n4) I wrote on my phone: package [james-baird], queue [purge].
I then coupled with the ship, became one with the universe, accepted every human being of all time as a member of my temporo-spacial neural network, and rebooted.
All the time you are doing this, your [QA] will be testing your codebase for flaws. Your QA is Mara and doubt. Your QA is your friend: you cannot have a dev without a QA, not if you want the code to come out clean and coherent. You need to embrace your doubt and listen to the input because it is ensuring that the codebase you reboot with will be functional.
This is why the initial encounter didn’t go smoothly: aripiprazole held me too much in one world and I was unable to oscillate effectively.
I believe that these oscillations correlate with changes in dopaminergic tone.
In order to hit the full reset you need to hit a state of maximal dopamine through one means or another. This potentiates the new attractor states you have cultivated and your system flips tracks from one algorithm to the other, causing a cessation.
After this your system will rebound over and over, placing you on the proverbial bungee, testing your new codebase with the QA throwing up doubts on one side and the developer throwing out code on the other.
Phenomenologically this fits with what I experienced and what the suttas and modern accounts of awakening report. I am just using language to try to make this into a science instead of religious mumbo-jumbo. I’m tired of these tools being gated behind dogma and want the scientific community to take them seriously because they are *far* superior to our current ‘drug people to make them behave like an imagined norm’ approach.
So yeah I’ll be sleeping 12 hours a day for a while longer I think, as the new [james-baird] protocol propagates across the system. This one feels aligned with reality though, so there are no altered states or delusion. There’s also no ‘suffering’. I have ups and downs and all the usual human emotions but they do not ‘bite’ the mind.
This is where people mistake enlightenment. They think it means no more human emotions. You cannot have a human without emotions on both sides of the spectrum.
But what you *can* have is a human who doesn’t spiral into thought loops and a rejection-of or clinging-to these natural emotions which ebb and flow like the tide.
You have the yin with your yang and you have the doubt with your confidence. There is nothing more dangerous than someone who does not doubt themselves or is permanently elated.
Cool stuff, huh? I spent my entire life reprogramming myself and now it feels like I have figured out the mechanism which underpins the whole thing.
A devkit for the soul, indeed.
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