Things continue to stabilise and improve as the new perceptual framework is integrated.
Sleep is still extended. I had a nap after seeing my first child off to school and woke from the dream with the realisation that everything in this world is fabricated by the mind and the way to achieve nirodha samapatti was to see through this perceptual veil. Then I woke again with my second child coming up to me on our sofa and saying he loves me, with me happily embracing him and realising that I will never know if I am alive or dead and this does not matter in the slightest. Then I woke again in bed and saw through yet another perceptual veil.
The lines between self and other continue to blur, as do the lines between self and self. Things feel immediate and close, and I can stare at an insect or a vista for a minute or an hour and it all feels like the same thing. There is no need to conceptualise distance or time, beyond the practicalities of moving through the world.
I often find myself with the feeling I had as a child, wondering whether the world is moving around me or me moving through the world, though this too is starting to blend into one perception whereby the overall phenomena of life are merely changing and my vantage point is just one part of the picture; both the centre and a smudge of paint in the overarching milieu.
This all sounds very mystical and probably a bit disorienting and crazy but thankfully I no longer have a psychiatrist or drugs to take. I am happier and more stable without either. My life is quiet and peaceful and there is no confusion or dissociation; no disorientation or distress.
I believe I hit the conceptual breakthrough of no-self without the usual meditative run-up so I am playing catchup on that front now. The perception of non-duality is rapidly following suit and is a significant step up in terms of ease of living.
To explain: it feels like I was formerly a container, a violin shell, which would capture the vibrations of emotions and then proceed to echo them inside myself, building in intensity until I would eventually rupture. I have always been an empath and have always absorbed the feelings of the people around me; I realise now that this was not an illusion.
It has been this way since I was a child, which is why I struggled so much with presenting the blank facade that most people view as empathy. When someone is called empathetic, what is really meant is that they show very little of themselves and instead allow the speaker to project their own emotions onto the screen, acting like a simple mirror.
For me, the emotions of the speaker would enter my body and become trapped, like discordant frequencies in the body of a violin, and they would ricochet off the walls causing valleys and peaks of destructive and constructive interference. I would eventually reach the point - over days or weeks or months - where I felt like I was vibrating apart at the seams, and this is when I would turn to alcohol back when I was a drinker. I believe alcohol is the reason I did not awaken at an earlier date; its neuroplasticity-suppressing effects bring initial relief but they prevent the mind from releasing and expunging the trapped learnings. Maybe my own insight cycle started properly when I replaced drink with exercise. Anyway, I digress.
Now these emotions still enter me, but they do not get trapped. I can almost feel it happening; my wife was stressed with the children yesterday when I picked them up, and I could feel the vibrations in the field of consciousness enter my body from her side of the car; but instead of bouncing around inside me they merely condensed a little so they could be felt and then expanded out as they dispersed from the other side of my being, like the sand dune analogy in [wavetheory].
I have not experienced any waves of spontaneous pīti for a month now; no random goosebumps and no sense of having to gather steam and break down walls during my meditative sessions or bath-time humming. I can still induce feelings of utter bodily bliss using music, but honestly it feels unnecessary and coarse. The feelings of gurning excitement and motivation which used to drive me have been replaced by an easy hum which is present at all times, yet I still need to turn my attention to it and it is not 100% stabilised in certain situations; for example when I spend too long at this screen or when I am interacting with large numbers of people.
Meditation is a completely different animal. I sit, and I stand, and I feel like nothing has changed. There is no - or very little - difference in the calmness between the start and the end of a session. Yet at the same time, meditation is one of my favourite parts of the day, and the things I experience while sitting are striking in both their mundanity and profundity.
I can feel the sensations of my body blending with one another; the hand becoming part of the face becoming part of the leg, in a formless manifold space which defies quantification in typical dimensions. The calabi-yau manifold of consciousness, which I spent so long trying to sync with the ‘external’ consciousness (likely syncing brain waves internally), seems to be everything and everywhere. It does not need quantification of near and far and tall and short; it merely is, and where it is not, there is not.
The easiest explanation would be how spacetime is, where there is universe, and is not, where there is not. There is nothing outside of the universe, including dimensionality, because dimensionality itself is created by the universe. We perceive 4 of these dimensions in daily life but when we close our eyes it is like we can perceive all 11 of them, either resting easily or folding in on themselves according to what resides within them, even if all that resides within them is the echoed trail of a bodily sensation brought over that way by meandering consciousness.
It is Schrodinger’s cat, both alive and not alive, and the act of observing it is what brings it into state.
This state itself can seem to flicker, though it takes conscious effort to notice it. When I turn attention to it, I can almost feel a frame-rate effect across all of awareness, with it flicking out multiple times per second and then receiving backlogs of sensory- and thought- data pulsing through, like a rapidly opening and closing loch in a canal.
Shifting attention away from the temporal nature and onto the granular nature, there seem to be infinitesimally small corkscrews or vortices of consciousness, too many to count or perceive, all appearing and vanishing of their own accord. I lack the words to describe this phenomenon, but it’s like consciousness is sucking itself into oblivion at every instance and every moment; every point in the calabi-yau appearing and disappearing of its own accord.
And throughout all this I feel perfectly normal; I am just sat there and I am aware of all the sounds around me and the occasional thought pops into my mind, which seems to manifest as a physical sensation in the left frontal lobe. But the thoughts are no more pressing or urgent than the sounds of my child gently snoring, or the rain outside, a bird singing, or indeed both children being rambunctious before bed. I can sit through them all and just observe them as phenomena arising and passing within the field of being which contains and creates all.
And then I open my eyes and everything is normal. Sometimes I will look out at the trees and feel as though I am one of them, rooted in place and sharing the same plane of ever-changing spacetime. Sometimes I just stretch my legs and limp around a bit as the blood returns to my left foot.
This all sounds magical and mystical and weird as hell, but it feels totally normal. It feels - in the moment - like I am just sitting there and doing nothing. It has always been like this - the nature of consciousness - and its merely that I am now aware of it instead of drifting along being controlled by the marble-runs of conditioned thought and action that chance and coincidence have carved into my neuro-physical being.
And these marble runs are still active. They are still there in social interactions, but they do not dictate either my behaviour or feeling any more. We went to an event yesterday which was rather pretentious and had some unusual characters, and I could feel my old subtle bigotry trying to slap labels on people and differentiate them from myself. These things are still there, but they are toothless, and I can watch them as easily as I watch the thoughts when I am sat there meditating. When I say ‘watch’, I do not mean consciously; it’s more like something will try to pull me along and I will only realise after the event; after it has failed. And I will kind of laugh internally as it skulks away.
I find myself spontaneously laughing a fair bit. Not crazy laughter, but just at the sheer ease of being. The lack of clinging or suffering or lasting feeling. The way that the water of experience just flows through me and how ridiculous it was of this container to try to hold onto it. Grabbing at this piece of water and trying to push away another, all while being filled with the next batch, and the next, and the next. Like I was trying to pick and choose which scoops of the river I would hold onto and which I would expel, using these leaky hands to manipulate a flow which is without size or shape.
And now I laugh.
Something I noticed yesterday is that memories do not seem to be sequential in the same way they were. I can access things according to chronology when necessary, but by default I think they are sorted more according to salience. Something that happened this morning can feel more distant than something which happened weeks ago, depending on how relevant it is to my current mind-state.
I have also started using the mind as a tool. I no longer get the pressing need to update these websites, though the echo of productivity and compulsion still remains. What I tend to do now is to feed information into my brain using multimodal re-encoding techniques and then just let it gestate. I will meditate and can kind of intentionally meld fragmented information into micro-insights, in a similar manner to how ‘the insight process’ worked but this time intentionally, and without compulsion. This is me experimenting, and further cultivating my mental landscape.
This all sounds pretty out-there, I know. Yet at the same time the easiest way to describe everything would be ‘utterly normal, intimate, as it has always been, and without suffering’.
Before enlightenment you chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment you chop wood and carry water. In my case, before enlightenment I frantically run around trying to hold onto to the stream, and after enlightenment I clean windows which will get dirty and make food which will be eaten.
I kind of feel like I should get these websites done - the nibbana protocol to formalise the process and the indexing of my own to review what exactly happened. I can feel the contents of the sites indexing in my mind. But I am intentionally not letting the productivity conditioning take control here; things will happen when they happen. I am using a wifi dongle which is unreliable at best, and where I would previously have fumed and hard-reset and banged my head against a wall to try to get work on there immediately, now I just kind of smile and go get a decaf and say ‘huh - fate isn’t playing ball right now so lets have a potter’.
We really need a new word. I can’t go around telling people ‘I’m enlightened’ and expect them to take me seriously. Ha. But honestly, I think that’s what it is, and I think that people make the mistake the Buddha specifically warned against and become attached to the altered states and bliss which comes along with the explosive neuroplasticity of the earlier cessation events.
Now… things are characterised by a sense of easy normalcy, even though experience itself couldn’t be more different. It’s just like I tore off all the crap which had accumulated atop that which has always been.
That which has always been is not scary or unusual, but tearing down the constructs of the mind sure was.
/jb202511101109
(stream of consciousness)