Manic. Psychotic. Crazier’n a coconut.
These words are likely to come up for a while.
To quote The Donald:
‘wroooong!’
Let me explain.
This is a deconditioning process. It is how the brain naturally heals from deep learning which has become maladaptive.
In a normal brain, this would mean trauma or addiction. In my dysregulated brain, it means any learning.
Higher levels of phasic dopamine signalling mean I learn hard and fast. All people like me do. We walk and cycle and jiggle and dance as a way to stabilise our dopaminergic tone and consolidate this learning.
When we can’t, the bungee snaps. This is why kids should be allowed to move in school, and adults in the boardroom.
I spent 1.5 years dissecting my ‘self’ with art, controlling my deconditioning. Then I found a suicide body and developed PTSD.
I entered a crisis phase which was mislabelled a mixed episode and was given valproate which held me there for 6 months and nearly made me kill myself.
Aripiprazole took the brakes off is all. There was a lot of tension in that bungee. I decoupled from reality for 2 whole months and spent that time reprogramming myself according to Buddhist ethics.
I then oscillated and was given valproate again. I nearly killed myself within a week. It held me in confusion and crisis, when I should have been healing into satisfaction and love.
I have cycled maybe 50 times in the 4 months since then. These were intentional.
I constructed two experiments:
cycle tour = gentle deconditioning
cold exposure = explosive deconditioning
I sat in total equanimity for almost a month. I could have stayed there but I have a family and want to help people, so I decided to stop being selfish and de-enlighten myself.
I did this with my cold-exposure routine on 13th Nov and the phenomenology has been the same, but milder. I now know what the scaffold is and how it works.
I have already gone through the entire insight cycle twice since writing the message to Mark this morning. It will be finished by evening, but I might well instigate a new one, just for shits and giggles.
This was all an experiment, recorded with time stamps. Unedited, stream of consciousness. There is documentation to analyse which should reveal my state of mind. It is on webarchive so you know the data isn’t fudged.
My mission is to stop the suicides.
I cannot sit in some enlightened haze while people kill themselves due to these awful psychiatric practices.
This is going to ruffle some feathers, I know.
But the divergent crowd. They know this is right. People like me. They know. They have spent their *entire lives* reprogramming themselves, whether they realised it or not.
And now we have this bullshit narrative around dysregulation that we are permanently broken and need to take drugs forever. And this is why we feel shit, guys - this fucking narrative. Because our brains learn. Fast. And our natural ways of consolidating that learning have been taken away from us.
This cycle is a known phenomenon in Buddhist insight practices. It is more intense for neurodivergent people, since we can’t develop the grounding jhāna practices that rely on stable tonic dopamine.
What we CAN do is explosively consolidate all the learnings of our lives, like Einstein did using his own scaffolds.
Siddhartha and I went a few steps further. We went all the way. Sometimes that is what is needed.
And this is why we need the metaverse and guidance instead of drugs and labels. We need a safe container where we can be guided to heal. This also counts for 'vanilla' trauma - it is not exclusive to some imaginary boundary of 'divergence'.
This is what healing looks like.
And maybe we can stop drugging our genius into normality.
Get behind me guys.
It's time to fix this shit.
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