medlog20251024

I am still an experimenter and still have plenty of residual conditioning in my body and mind since I flew through this process so quickly. I also have my own thoughts on how ‘liberation’ manifests as a play between baseline dopaminergic tone and extreme conditionings. 

Essentially I believe that the progress sees a gradual stabilising of dopaminergic tone so that the extremes of high and low are not activated as often, along with a ‘cutting off’ of the extreme responses through exposure to them while in a state of equanimity.

This would mean that an ‘arahant’ is only deconditioned ‘within constraints’, with those constraints being their natural dopaminergic bracket. If one were to be given chemicals which alter their dopaminergic tone or to undertake acts like intense exercise or cold exposure which manipulate the bracket, I think they would be able to extract and remove further layers of conditioning by ‘activating’ them with the chemical memory that encoded them.

… or something like that.

Anyway last night I decided to try a microdose of THC-analog (non-psychoactive level) before doing my bathing and meditation.

I sat to do some art and noticed that the increased amplitude of dopaminergic tone was making my body have more conditioned responses: stomach sensations of agitation at the industrial noise, fiddliness with the wood I was cutting, and the sound of my kid munching away on his snacks. This didn’t ‘bother’ me like it would have but it was something I haven’t felt since the recent breakthrough.

I sat for maybe 90 minutes total, split between 3 sessions, and the final 45 minute session I went pretty deep.

I could feel facial sankhara, which have been nearly completely absent since n5. These felt like movement around the eyes, cheeks, and even like a scowl at one point, and I felt the face to check if there was any movement.

None of these perceived movements manifested in the muscles; they were completely slack. It was all procedural somatic release, and had no attachment to any memories or thoughts. It was merely the body going through its learned responses, and through observing them with equanimity they would release eventually, like when a stretched muscle releases in yoga.

I then spread awareness to consciousness itself, being able to feel everything in my head, my body, and the space inbetween and outside and behind. I could feel consciousness pooling a little in the back of my mind, at the bottom, where it has rarely focused apart from after a cessation as my consciousness was recontainteraising.

This proceeded to become very diffuse, being both aware and unaware of the entire sphere around me; let’s say 5 metres, with sounds and word-thoughts also being ‘there but not there’. I was at the same time ‘flipping the arrow’ and finding that the observer was merely the field through trying to look beneath the field and finding nothing.

This provoked a very strong awareness of no-self. I did not know where the self began and ended, or indeed if the self was distinct from the vibrating air around it. I felt feelings of both falling-back and being totally steady at the same time and spent maybe 5 minutes with this sublime experience of one-ness and non-duality.

Shortly after that the stomach began to knot in a learned response of anxiety due to the lack of awareness of self. Almost like you’ve forgotten your keys, except you’ve forgotten yourself. I observed this with equanimity and it too passed, and then I was back on the face and consciousness and gradually released and went to bed.

This morning I did the school run and then went to a sauna / cold plunge, doing my 3x repeat and getting tonic dopamine nice and high. I ate a little cereal and then sat to meditate, with a clear awareness of consciousness as not-self and minimal facial sankhara at play. I did 25 minutes, felt it was enough, and laid down for a 1 hour nap.

I have woken up calm in the body and mind, with clarity about some images and how to present some ideas on the nibbana-protocol website, which I should start making soon. There were no explosive fireworks and no distinct cessation events.

It feels like the microdose of THC probably raised tonic dopamine a little and phasic dopamine quite a lot, kind of inducing an artificial isight cycle for things which would usually be hidden below the surface of my smoother dopaminergic makeup. This maybe artificially unravelled the network a little so that it could be played with.

It then feels like the meditation and nap today kind of ‘bedded in’ whatever insight was induced last night, tightening up the network in its new formation.

Who knows. All I know is life feels pretty easy and good and I’m looking out of this window with a decaf and not really worrying what I will do or who I will be today. Things will happen when they happen. They might happen fast, because that’s who I am, but I also don’t feel a neurotic drive to make things happen, or the usual anxious tension I would have around the facia of my chest.

As mentioned, neo-arahant isn’t the end. It’s just a blank slate. You can choose to go full-renunciate when you’re in your final years or if something happens to your family. I doubt any of this is ‘permanent’ in the sense that it’s ‘irreversible’. 

You can never ‘go back’ to not understanding, that’s for sure, but I think you can still chose how you ‘go forward’ in life after finishing your unravelling.

/jb202510241249