Good morning!
For context: I was diagnosed with severe ADHD. I could barely function toward the end of 2024. I would either be hyperfocused on art for 6 hours, blasting music on NC headphones so I couldn’t hear or see anything that would be a distraction, or I would be snapping at my kids dragging them around so that I could get to the next thing I ‘needed’ to do, which I would promptly forget.
Now… my kids are playing with lego and running around next to me while I happily sit here and type this without any pressure to finish. They are not a distraction yet I can easily disengage from the writing, play with them, and come back without any feelings of having to pry myself away from something.
I used to jump out of bed, heart racing, for god knows what reason. Now I wake slowly with my eyes closed, listen, feel the body, feel the mind, open the eyes, and observe as my mind boots up and thoughts start to coalesce. These thoughts are optional content - I can choose which ones to pursue and which to terminate, and none of them are focused on the self - they are all about how to maybe help people or better explain the principles of this process so that others can access it.
I have started speaking with someone well known and respected in the circles of meditation and science about promoting research. He works with some world-class researchers who have quantified major milestones in meditative achievement, recently mapping cessation in an fMRI. I have put together a hypothesis which will hopefully open that door.
At the same time, he wants to build a free-to-use AI ecosystem to guide people who find themselves in deep water without a paddle. I was one of the first AI-focused startup consultants / recruiters in the world, helping to build some of Japan’s leading AI firms from pre-seed to 100+ people.
This feels like a good match. But I feel no pressure to drive it. I am motivated but there is no sense of ‘needing’ this. If it doesn’t work out, there will be other avenues, and I know that I do not control the receptivity of the world. But I think it will happen. We shall see.
In daily life I am a new man.
My wife agrees. We have been together around 15 years and she has never known me like this. I am calm and caring and easy to be around. There is no tension in the air; no background hum of stress or distraction or needing to do something else. None of this is from a contrived form of patience; I just don’t feel the things any more.
I look in the fridge and it’s like my mind is a honeycomb that chooses ingredients and combines them at whim into delicious meals which I have never cooked before in my life, instead of forcing everything into its usual learned-at-university pasta sauce. I then wash the pots without a thought, fold the laundry, and sit down for a casual chat if that’s the mood of the room. None of these were previously possible.
My bodily tension is gone. Sense of pain is vastly diminished. I still feel pain but I can also recognise it as an electrical impulse which is merely tagged ‘unpleasant’ and can therefore recoil if it is genuinely harmful or just… tag it as neutral if it is not. This is a cognitive skill which I am still cultivating.
Speaking of cultivating, my neural network is still in the pruning process. The root code has been changed, and I am now intentionally targeting branches which have become redundant. Insight maps have lost their relevance; I guess I am somewhere between non-returner and arahant, but honestly I think they are both on the same continuum. Non-returner feels like it’s the change in root code, and arahant is just waiting for a few years until the branches have caught up. I don’t care, really. The job is done and it is so obvious to me that outside validation is not necessary.
My brother asked me what the practical improvements were. He said it sounds nice to be able to reset your brain, but wondered what it meant in real-life. These are the messages I sent in reply:
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[2025/11/12, 23:29:33] James: I don’t feel any suffering.
[2025/11/12, 23:30:33] James: That’s all I ever wanted. I climbed every mountain and they all left me more empty than before. My life was defined by suffering. Now it is not.
[2025/11/12, 23:35:34] James: I feel more love. More joy. More ease. Everything is present and open to be experienced fully. There is no worrying about the self or how I will get ahead or pay the bills or what will happen tomorrow or whether I am alive or dead or anything. I retain complete functionality and care in my life - better than before because it’s not yanked about by past traumatic learning. Yet I do not worry about outcomes. I am able to experience almost every moment as though it were fresh, through the eyes of a child. The world has the wonder that a child feels yet I retain the knowledge and wherewithal of an adult. However my knowledge is no longer wrapped in situational bundles and I do not struggle to access it when it is needed. I do not get stuck in thought loops or feelings which are inappropriate. I feel no guilt. Ethical conduct is effortless. Literally everything is orders of magnitude better.
[2025/11/12, 23:39:15] James: If you think this sounds fatalistic or like I will behave in a reckless manner, it is precisely the opposite. It’s hard to explain. I’ve just seen through and removed all the conditioning of the neurotic self. I am not going and giving away all my money like a religious madman. I spoke with the guy who instigated the Harvard study that proved enlightenment today. There’s a fairly decent chance we could work together and bring this to the world, outside of the package of religion. It’s trauma therapy but not limited to just ‘trauma’. It fixes all maladaptive deep learning.
Yet still, this explanation doesn’t suffice. Everything is totally normal. I just know that it is all fabricated in my mind. I know that the leaves of the tree and myself are one and the same, and that there is no holding onto the water of the stream because you are the stream itself.
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And everything really is totally normal.
There are no more altered states. The dopaminergic surges of ‘pīti’ which I would feel across my CNS, converging in my brain, are gone. They were necessary for the wide-scale reprogramming but now that it’s micro-adjustments they simply don’t appear.
I just had to go and discipline the kids for banging their chairs against the table. I took the scissors away from the younger who was trying to cut his trousers with them. I’m perfectly functional but there is no anger. Anger can be called up in a situational manner, and I imagine I could still even engage in physical violence if it was situationally appropriate, but it would be a conscious decision and a last resort.
There is no hero complex or drive toward annihilation-by-sacrifice. There is no drive to sacrifice, even without the annihilation. I am pragmatic. My skills were as a recruiter building technology companies. I was the best around. This is not ego; ask the people I worked with.
I recently discovered how to optimise and demystify the process of enlightenment, which is often turned into suicide by the drugs prescribed in the current system. The pragmatic thing to do is to build a company. To speak with people like Mark and Elon (tongue in cheek but they have the cash) and get them to throw us some of their scraps so we can change the world. And I have the experience do it so do it I shall. But none of this is ego. If it somehow turned out that I was wrong, I would walk away without a second thought.
Money is a tool and always has been. I do not need more than I have, but if you want to achieve anything you need to have the tools. You can’t build a house without a hammer. You can’t build a temple without some cash. There is no conflict there. I do not like money; it is the embodiment of possession and greed. But the days of living on alms food are gone and you have to be realistic. I will do a better job if I don’t have to worry about paying the bills.
I recognise that many people will not like what I have to say.
The narrative - shall we call it the ‘predictive priors’ of society - is one of caution. Do not stop your medication. Listen to the establishment. Take your drugs and stay in line.
But the establishment is built on greed. It is built on profit. FDA approval for a drug costs around 2.8Bn USD, and only 1 in 4 makes it. So this means that for every one of these pharmaceuticals on the market, over 10Bn needs to be recouped before the company can even begin to make money. No wonder diagnostic brackets keep expanding.
So there’s no conflict. People can use these tools or they can take the drugs and some will make a mistake and some will not fit, but that’s nothing new, is it? I was given valproate and it made me suicidal. I have at least two friends who have killed themselves after starting bipolar meds.
But they bring initial relief before they make things worse. The doctor sees ‘works’ then ‘stops working’ and increases the dose. They go down as a suicide with the doctor having done everything according to ‘the book’.
It must be so depressing to be one of those doctors.
You want to help. You do all you can. You study and you read and you learn. And people kill themselves anyway. Because - as the reddit neuroscientist said to me - you can pick and choose studies to prove whatever you like. He was right - the studies into these drugs had a very clear agenda: approval.
Anyway I digress.
I do not feel anger even when writing this. My friends are dead. I nearly died. The system is fucked. But I do not feel anger or self-righteousness or victimhood. I know that it is a chain of events, and I am part of that chain, and there is a chance that I can provide another way. So that is what I will do.
I feel like a perfectly natural phenomenon has been pathologised for profit.
Religion - bless its socks - did its best for millennia. And then along comes a new explanatory framework called science which steals its job and throws it out on the street. Only a handful of people straddle the two. Science and religion are talked of as though they are opposites.
But I never felt that. I felt that religion and science were the same thing - ways to satisfy our eternal questioning. But religion was more than that. It was also healing and trauma therapy and social engagement. Science may have overtaken religion on the answering of questions, but it is far behind on everything else.
And science: you know 95% of the universe is dark energy and matter. You know m-theory suggests there are 11 dimensions. You know we can’t measure around 98% of ‘reality’. You know don’t know shit. Ha.
Anyway.
Time for some breakfast. These kids are throwing coins around and need some supervision.
Laters.
/jb202511150821
(stream of consciousness while supervising children in a noisy environment)