So I am a mad scientist, not an arahant. These words are loaded and my aim is to find the truth, not to upset people within an established tradition. In fact I hope to help people within established traditions to find their own truths more efficiently.
My interest is in the mechanics of how minds reorganise themselves when pushed to their limits, not in claiming status within any established lineage. I am trying to describe the underlying process in clear terms so that individuals from any framework can understand and apply it as they see fit.
My hypothesis is that the mind occasionally enters a decoupled reconfiguration mode which rewrites high-level predictive structures, and the frameworks we hold determine how those structures are rebuilt.
My view going into this was that enlightenment is just one name for a global phenomenon which can take many forms.
The Buddha was a scientist and tried all the methods of his time, finding them to be dissatisfactory; his hypothesis became the dhamma. Jesus was not so cynical but went through the same thing; his hypothesis became a new religion based on Judaism. You have the Zen school. You have many sects. You have cults. You have psychosis. You have Einstein.
I believe that these are all different permutations of the same process, and my goal is to distil the process so that it can be tailored to each individual’s self-realisation.
So I’d like to clarify my stance on arahantship: I am not an arahant and I likely never will be. I apologise for using the word. The reason it fell from my mind is that the maps which guided me through this process were from the theravāda Buddhist tradition. They are far more comprehensive than anything else, traditional or modern. And the words which guided my own ethical cultivation are the original words of the Buddha from the Pāli canon.
Nothing but respect. Sorry if I have ever caused offence. Please view it like Jesus reinterpreting the words of Judaism. And sorry to Christianity if that parallel causes offence. I am a scientist, mad though I may be.
Anyway.
Hypothesis: I think this is an explosive reconfiguration of the mind into a more optimised layout.
I think the brain reaches a point where its learning is so disjointed and internally conflicted that it goes into a forced reset to reduce the processing costs required to run its perceptual framework.
I think that in order to do this it needs to create a new OS where it can reinstall the old one, like ‘safe mode’ when you are reinstalling Windows after your registry becomes so bloated that the machine can no longer function.
These safe-modes are completely real at the time, just like dreams are completely real when you are dreaming. They test hypotheses and lay code into your realworld perceptual framework. This is why you can ‘decondition’ (or re-condition) yourself while you are in them. This is why the ethical framework is an essential part of any religion: not just because it makes you more ethical but because it changes your brain’s predictive modelling so that it views the world as a more ethical place.
This is why forgiveness and non-greed can be programmed, and it will make you see forgiveness and stop feeling greed, which will make you into a happier person. But this is also why you can program yourself to be full of greed and hatred if you fill your waking mind with lust and anger. This is why some people are filled with the love of God and others are filled with the fear of Him. This is the code they lay into their scaffold, which is then reflected in their realworld.
I started out this process trying to fix my own pain, and this is what I achieved, thanks to Buddhist ethics.
But at the same time, I started out the process trying to figure out the process, and this is where my path is taking me now. The ethics and morality are quite well established; I have no overt greed for money or status or a lasting self, but I do still feel love and responsibility toward my family. This is the status quo that I was aiming for, so I got off that train and got on another one.
The brain is plastic. While it is alive, it will learn. It will lay new pathways, which will then be optimised. It is cyclical: you pick up knowledge during the day, and you consolidate it by going into safemode in your dreams or meditation, dance or worship. A full decoupling into the scaffold is only necessary when the framework is fragmented beyond repair.
What I am trying to figure out is the mechanism at play, along with how to optimise it, so that people can reprogram their minds intentionally.
Since the theory of enlightenment came to me, unbidden, on a walk two mornings ago, I have had a bit of a headache. Instead of sleeping through the night I have woken around 3:30, when REM cycles will have been most intense, and I have felt my mind running through things in a hypnagogic state. No visuals, but just… taking the roots and growing a tree, shall we say. I have had minor phases of piti up my back toward the neck while this happens.
I think what this means is that the neural network which was de-potentiated is now potentiating in a new manner, to fit in with this framework. I think it is populating top-down under the new theory and forming new high-level priors which connect all of the disparate ideas and learnings of the last 6 months.
It is like I am coming to my unified theory, and the brain is propagating it throughout the network and looking for errors. I don’t think it is finding many, though I am just a single man with limited resources and knowledge, so by no means do I claim it is ‘complete’. I just think that as an overarching framework, it makes sense from what I have studied.
What I have studied is religion, neuroscience, computational science, biohacking, athletics, meditation, 41 years of undiagnosed AUDHD and some incredibly dangeorous psychiatric practices.
What I have been trying to figure out is a practical ‘unifying theory’ which combines all of these things to answer the question: how do we change our reality?
And I think that - according to my own understanding - I’m pretty close.
It was 5 weeks with no pīti and no insight cycling. No compulsion. And there is still no compulsion. But what I am doing now is using the mind as a tool. I am intentionally implanting ideas and trying to get them to consolidate - to induce voluntary insight in the same way that Einstein used his scaffolds for his theory of relativity. I mentioned trying this once the network had settled, if I remember correctly.
This intentional cycle presents the same phenomena as the compulsive cycle of deconstruction. It results in phases of confidence (exporting the theory, sharing it) as the ideas arrive and the network is formed. And then phases of doubt (ugh I hate social media; am I still the same person) as the network is tested.
But I believe that this all tracks with the insight cycle, and tracks with my own theory of [howhumansthink], which also fell out fully formed when I did my [bodhitree-protocol] experiment.
So this - this was and is my aim.
Initially I wanted to end my own suffering.
But I also wanted to end everyone else’s.
The way to do that was to figure out the underlying scientific principles for doing so. Not everyone (ie. we dysregulated folks) can sit and enter a jhāna, even after years or decades of trying. But we *can* have a hot bath and cold plunge and instigate a similar chemical makeup, and it seems that this can get the job done just as well, if a little more explosively and unpredictably.
Since this approach would not have the stable baseline of jhānic concentration, we will need something else. This website as an anchor, a supportive therapist, or a sangha.
The nature of any institution is to standardise things, and the Buddhist process (and all the others) have been standardised over the millennia. This means that they are (sorry for this word too) neurotypical-optimised and do not cater to the neurodivergent minority.
So yeah - I need a new lexicon.
I think numerical structuring is easiest, and resonance is a nice word. This will prevent miscommunication of ideas and enable the framework to be applied across traditions and modalities.
The resonance scale is a descriptive map for degrees of dereification:
Resonance L1
Resonance L2
Resonance L3
Resonance L4
eg.
L1 corresponds to dereifying the self-construct.
L2 corresponds to dereifying the ideas which constituted the self.
L3 corresponds to dereifying the fabricated nature of affect and inclinations which constitute ideas.
L4 corresponds to dereifying the underlying structures like ‘edge’ and ‘body map’ and ‘temporality’.
These are just examples built around Buddhism, and could be expanded toward science too; for example Einstein breaking down Newton’s gravity as L1, etc.
In this way you can explain the phenomena at play without stepping on anyone’s toes. A stream-enterer breaks the self, a once-returned breaks the ideas of love or lineage, a non-returner breaks the ideas of pleasure and pain differentiation, and an arahant breaks the ideas of: edge, resulting in luminosity; temporality, resulting in continuous arising; body map, resulting in non-duality, etc.
Words. They are tricky.
Words are at the top of the tree. They are L1 constructs, maybe L2. But they all differ in definition because our trees grew in different soil. So when I said ‘arahant’ I was talking about phenomenology, but when someone else heard it their mind went to conduct.
Numerical systems should hopefully break this confusion.
Trouble is… will anyone understand them?
I guess I might accidentally stand on a few more toes over the coming months but please remember that it’s not intentional; I am merely trying to convey a meaning in the language that someone will understand, just like how the Buddha talked of Brahmin and past lives, Einstein used mathematics, and how you learn a new language when you go to live overseas.
If we can pull this off, it could mean that people can accelerate their own progress along whatever path they have chosen, be that the path of Gotama, the path of God, or the path of Science.
Me… I don’t like business, money or social media. But they are probably necessary, at least for now. If I can get a team of ethical people who *do* like business and money and social media, then I will delegate.
I am an idea-man. Ideas are what I love. Optimisation is what I do. Connections are what I intuit.
So… let’s see.
Mad scientist, with an emphasis on ‘mad’. Ha.
Now excuse me while I go mash up this brain a bit to see how this new data settles.
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