I’ve woken up and the forest is covered in snow. The first real dusting; maybe 4-5 centimetres and rolled out over all the branches. The seasons are changing again.
Last night saw some fairly normal dreams; it was almost as though my mind was rehearsing being the ‘old me’ as part of the process of building the nibbana-protocol website. I found myself feeling the frustrations and confusion of my previous life, and the dreams were fragmented and multiple; none of the night-long sagas I have had recently.
There is a slight flicker in my left eye; like a minor version of what I had with the various encounters with nibbana. The big encounters - the first one and the final one - left me with a very obvious halo in my vision for several days, slightly off centre to the top left, and this mild flicker is off centre to the top right. This suggests to me that there is still reprogramming of the neural network happening. [the flicker was gone by the end of this article]
And this makes sense. The process of neuroplasticity is not a once-and-done thing. We learn and we grow and we unlearn so that we can learn again. Buddhist practitioners continue cultivating their mental landscape until the day they die, and this is my plan too. Over the last 3 days I have been intentionally laying new code and reviewing it before bed. You can stumble over the finish line of a race or you can place on the podium, and just because you have a finisher medal doesn’t mean that you’re ‘finished’ as a specimen.
My process was very accelerated and approached things from the opposite side to the canonical method. The canonical method is a one-size-fits-all DSM approach, if you like, tailored to the typical neurochemical makeup. Build the jhāna first and then proceed to vipassana. I did it the opposite way; the way that suited my brain. I did the insight first and only now am I building the bodily jhāna. It makes sense that there would be more reconfiguration happening in my cortex.
So let’s say that the root code has changed. I still feel no suffering or greed. The dreams made me wonder why I was replaying my old modality, but maybe they are part of the pruning process. Maybe the trunk of the tree has been reformed but the branches weren’t fully removed, and the dreamscape is where the remainder will be trimmed.
I don’t know. What I do know is that my meditation seems to be coming along, but with a very different flavour to previously. The sits I did during my process were intense and systemwide. They resulted in strong pīti through the entire cranium and intense sensations and visions before cessations and decoupling from reality.
These sits are very different: they start and end with the same tone and are more aimed toward perceptual change. Feeling the entire body and the space it inhabits as a field. Folding away the perceived gaps between the hand and the face so that consciousness is witnessed as it truly exists. These perceptual changes will involve alterations in the neural network, and I think I read somewhere that the visual cortex alters as we learn to view the world in a peripheral and non-dual manner.
I am now focused on fusing all the senses together so that sound becomes sensation becomes sight becomes taste. When I say ‘focused on’ I mean ‘allowing to’, in the sense that I am not so much trying to make this happens as allowing the constructed barriers between the modalities of consciousness to dissolve.
Though the Buddha talked about the six sense bases having their own corresponding consciousness he also talked about breathing and experiencing the body as a whole. Consciousness is a single unified field and though it can interact with these various senses (including the mind), it does not change abruptly. There is no flipping of the switch between the ear and the body; you hear a sound and your body floods with a sensation in response. This counts for every sound no matter how small; your kids whispering in the other room will cause minute energy patterns in your shoulders which spread through your entire being.
These might be facilitated by pre-cognitive filtering in the mind or they might not. Does the sound hit a formation which triggers a physical response before the consciousness plays catch-up? This seems likely; formations are mostly ‘learned reflexes’. Mistaking a stick for a snake is one of the few inbuilt instincts we seem to have, and it occurs pre-cognition. It seems that reward- and threat-prediction (error prediction) would also be laid in a pre-cognitive manner to shave milliseconds off your reaction and increase your chance of survival. See a dog snarl and snatch your hand away without thought, because of a learned formation from a childhood bite.
Whatever the case, reaction of the body is pre-cognitive. The sound and the bodily reaction register at the same time. The field behind the eyes also reacts, though I have a harder time tying them together. I guess that’s what the consciousness is doing - tying them together. The consciousness which has created all these formations of ‘this’ and ‘that’ and ‘if’ and ‘then’. The formations of ‘threat’ and ‘reward’ and ‘greed’ and ‘craving’.
I guess what is maybe happening is this mind is laying new formations; or possibly dissolving old ones. Maybe it is dismantling the formation of duality. Maybe the dreams were showing me that these modalities still exist in me somewhere, or maybe they are in a process of deconstruction?
I am still sleeping 10 hours a night but my diet and activity levels are back to normal. I do not find action games rewarding any more; I’d rather have a book. I haven’t watched youtube and other media for years. I no longer listen to music to drown out life, though I do enjoy walking or cycling with a tune on the go. I seem to have stopped drinking all forms of caffein and even caffein-free coke doesn’t hit the spot like a glass of ice cold water. I wear my clothes until they are falling apart and only buy things which I truly need or will make good use of. My room is largely bare, with a yoga mat, some books, a tidy and compact art station, and a large window looking out over this forest. It is comfortable in how it lacks clutter.
These last few days have seen more conditioning trying itself out; the ‘tired and grumpy’ conditioning, I guess. It hasn’t won and the grumps have been bodily not mental. But there remain mental formations that produce these bodily sensations, and maybe the dreams are part of the expunging process.
I don’t know. Let’s keep observing. I do know that this process usually takes decades so the mind will have plenty of time between the fireworks to trim the physical manifestations of old thought. My own process only started… 5-and-a-bit months ago, if you don’t count the two years of self-guided art-therapy and 5 years of athletic and behavioural asceticism.
So I guess it makes sense the physical brain has some catching up to do.
Anyway enough of this shite. Time to take the kids for a walk in the first real snow of the year. Let’s hope the local bear takes the hint and tuckers in for the long night of winter.
/jb202511080801