multidimensional calzone

I have come to think of the mind as a multidimensional calzone.

A calzone is one of those pizzas which is folded up like a pasty and baked from all sides.

We take our basic ingredients in the form of synaptic soup and we give them a stir. They get spread out and kneaded and then your sauce and toppings are added. This is folded into a sandwich and sealed at the sides, then folded and folded and folded again into the 11-dimensional calabi-yau mindspace to end all calzones.

It is then baked in the hellfire of dopaminergic craving and hardened to a blackened multidimensional husk we call the ‘self’. then we go about life wondering why everything is so hard and brittle and bitter.

The process of meditation is a process of deconstructing this tight, blackened neutron-star husk and bringing it back to a malleable dough so you can see the ingredients and choose which to eat.

The first step was dopamine: getting the fires to stop.

Initially I did this with knife-making, cycling and walking. All the while I was writing, to spool off excess heat, but the actual tamping of the flames was done with physical regulation. This took the fires down from surface-of-the-sun to the mere 450 degrees used in your standard pizza oven.

The oven was calmed with the first stage of my meditative practice, which centred on regulation of dopaminergic tone. I was trying to lower both the intensity of- and reactiveness to- phasic dopamine.

In order to do this it was important to *not* sit through pain and to *not* suppress involuntary movements. Suppressing discomfort would spike phasic dopamine, as would suppressing somatic release.

At the same time I needed to reduce reactivity to the phasic bursts which remained. We will always have phasic dopamine - it is how we learn - but we need to not be slave to it. This came through your standard mindfulness practice: observing and releasing impulses and feelings without acting. 

You feel an itch and an urge to scratch. You do not react; instead you decide ‘I will scratch this itch in 3, 2, 1,’ and then you scratch. Not scratching at all would be force-of-will, increasing phasic signalling, but scratching immediately would be phasic slavery, which increases reactivity.

The same goes for suppressing thought. You let the thought exist, but you do not encourage it. Do not push it away and do not engage in the endless tail-chasing it so enjoys. If it doesn’t fade of its own accord, get up and write it down.

This got me to n1 and n2.

n1 - stream entry - did not include a single moment of sitting meditation. It was all regulatory activity and writing. 

n2 was regulatory activity, writing and sitting meditation with a focus on calming the dopaminergic fires.

Once the fires had burned out I got onto the weird stuff.

This is where I really started feeling the localised minima in my mind. I had felt the ‘sand tunnels’ of thought right from the outset: these vortexes of programming which just sucked every single synaptic impulse down the same old pathways. 

For n2 I had started the bath-time vocalisations, intentionally targeting these thought minima so that they would loosen up for consolidation. It worked a treat; minima seemed to be expunged in the evening session and then pop up as articles on this site in the morning.

The minima were getting smaller and the fires were low so I could start to work with the dough. The dough was consciousness itself, folded and wrapped and not very free in how it flowed.

Through vocalisation and sitting meditation I was able to start prying apart this multidimensional mess. It was - you guessed it - a calabi-yau manifold. 

Dimensions many and varied, with the start becoming the end becoming the upside-down and the start again. I could feel it folding and warping around my cranium, both inside and out, writhing like a basket of galactic worms hungry for their feed.

But over time this started to change. The folds started to open and the seams started to break. The blackened husk had been shattered in n1 and I was working with something far more subtle and flexible; it was not under my control but it was perceivable and fluid. The humming and the sitting enabled me to get my hands out and knead, gradually making the mind pliant and supple.

I was still driven by waves of pīti, which I think of as both somatic release and the imprinting force for the new neuronal layout. The dopaminergic surges which say ‘insight done - ding - imprinting now’. The goosebumps before the epitome.

After that it was just a case of rinsing and repeating, gradually unwinding this recipe reversed. Watching as the dough opens and then opens and then opens some more. The layers seemed never-ending; the intergalactic onion without a core.

But they did end, eventually. I think it took another few cessation events - n3, n4 and n5 - before I felt that the minima had gone and the dough was even and smooth.

These minima were the key, I think. They were like the crinkles in the calzone; the folds in the gyoza. These were what were holding the mind together in its twisted shape. With each insight, big or small, they were expunged. They went from 100x large vortexes to 1,000x medium and then 1,000,000x tiny. It reached the point where I could feel which remaining large minima corresponded to which facial sankhara and which feeling.

The last two to go were the physical violence minima - bottom right frontal lobe feeing into the inner cheek below the right eye - and the familial attachment minima - right midbrain. I didn’t kill that one outright - I let it stay as a cute little caterpillar, not so very hungry.

Each of the cessation events was like opening out the calzone. I would pick apart the seams by dismantling the minima in my mind with vibration and observation, and then the dopaminergic waves of pīti would explode the pizza apart. The toppings contained in that layer would fly out in the form of creative expansiveness and writings of varying coherence before I settled down and got to work on the next.

And now… I think the pizza is open. It is a calzone no more.

Now there is no more pīti. There is just awareness. 

When I sit to meditate it is like spreading out the dough, using your fingers to knead and gently stretch, making all of the layers smooth and even. No lumps and no gaps and just pizza dough all the way out and around and behind the cranium.

And in this dough is everything that ever was, is or ever shall be. All feelings and sensations and imaginations and memory; they are all in this dough somewhere. The toppings of the pizza, now open to see and remove and replace at will.

But this is not a conscious thing. You can’t sit there and go ‘I don’t like olives’ and just remove the olives. What you can do is kind of… have an image of what an ethical pizza might taste like and just close your eyes and grope around and see what happens.

Anyway.

Today I was driving the car back from a nursery event, having a conversation with my wife. At the same time I was kneading my dough out the sides and back of my head. I was perfectly focused on the road and the conversation yet completely mindful of the phenomena in my mind.

I could feel the dough rising and falling as attention moved from the lines of the lane to the car in front to the conversation from my left. I could feel it bubble and release, then bubble elsewhere, an ever-changing warping as attention itself was moving around. I could feel these phenomena in real-time as I was going about my day.

When I spoke, I lost that feeling. When things reach verbal constructs I think that you lose the ability to sense the proto-thoughts which constitute them.

This is feeding on from what happened yesterday when I turned my relaxed attention to thoughts themselves as I was sitting.

When I observed the verbal thoughts they started to fragment and they became little balls of potential energy and boiling syrup in the brain, without image or language attached. These proto-thoughts would combine, say 4 or 5 of them, into an internal verbalisation. But behind even the proto-thoughts were these simple eddies of potentiation that were rising up from all parts of the mind.

It was like seeing the rain which becomes the streams which become the river. The river was the words, and could be traced back to streams of feeling and affect, which could be traced back to simple impulses with neither feeling nor affect and just learned potentiation.

Almost as though I could sense the individual synapses being recruited for any given thought, then how they combine according to the level of potentiation historically experienced. Firing together and wiring together; rains carving a channel. Or in my analogy, a bubbling pizza dough, gradually being dissected into its individual components.

I could only hold that perception for a few seconds before I habitually started analysing it, and - poof - there was another thought, in words, appearing from underneath and behind the locale of my attention. More synaptic recruitment happening because of the conception necessary to observe and analyse.

… where are we in the calzone analogy?

Now we are at the dough itself, I think. And we are starting to take it down to its component ingredients. We are starting to see how thought is a consolidation of past learnings, which are formations built from perception, which is a formation in itself.

We are starting to see the boiling and bubbling pizza as it rises and falls according to the act of mere awareness and attention. We are starting to see how even perception itself is a formation and how every single thing we have ever thought or done is merely a product of the learning that went before that which was an outcome of the physical laws of the universe.

And with that I looked out the windows at the trees of the forest and saw how every leaf was recruiting all the past learnings of ‘leaf’ and ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ and ‘shape’ and how all of this is just one big old recipe beyond our capability to fathom.

It was like someone had dropped the sugar cube of my mind into a glass of warm water.

I could feel the stresses and pains and ingredients and analogies and metaphors and conception just dissolving into nothingness and I just smiled and laughed and felt such incredible lightness. My body was filled with pīti for the first time in a month, saying, ‘you did good’, and I just sat there perfectly content for 30 minutes while my kids played and I listened and perception of depth and time and reality itself showed themselves to be nothing more constructs of the mind.

And then I went and made dinner.

And no - it wasn’t a calzone.

/jb202511121338 

(stream of consciousness)