twomonthsin

They say the Buddha spent 7 weeks in the vicinity of the Bodhi tree after his awakening. I spent 7 weeks exporting my new understanding of the world onto this website. Then he went off into the world to teach. And I am starting to share, too.

These last 2 months have felt longer and more fulfilling than 2 years in my old chemistry; higher tonic dopamine and reliable time-cell signalling. My adhd is all-but-gone. Life feels effortless. I wash the pots and clean the toilet and cook dinner and think nothing of it.

Sitting meditation has become one of my favourite things; previously it was more of a teeth-gritting struggle; just another checkbox on the way to the grave. Now it is pleasure in-and-of-itself. I delight in the process because I know how great the results. The changes in dopaminergic signalling give you more life, and the loosened conditioning allows you to enjoy it.

I am able to empathise with people. 

I am no longer in a subservient / dominant dynamic or slave to rejection sensitive dysphoria. I still shake my head at RSD. That was so crippling for me; a defining feature of my entire life. It has vanished. Gone. I care how people feel, but not how they feel about me. My self-worth is not tied to anyone’s opinion, including my own.

My sleep is incomparable. 

I used to toss and turn for 90 minutes, sleep for 5-6 hours with 2 toilet breaks, then jump out of bed with the panic that I’d forgotten my child at the supermarket. Now I am asleep within 10 minutes, have 1 toilet break, and wake up after 8 hours to become slowly aware of my body and the light from the window and my son’s peaceful face and gradually decide to move.

My head is quiet. The bees are gone.

I no longer crave. 

I no longer crave anything, though I can sometimes fall back into old conditioning from school or work; the ‘people aren’t listening to me’ and ‘I’m trapped’ conditioning were in there deep. But now I can see these things like a third party. They were part of the ball of yarn and they are loose, ready to be removed. This is what I am doing now and it is working effortlessly. It just takes a little time.

I have established a flexible yet effective multimodal meditation regime which enables people of almost any dopaminergic makeup to use various on-ramps to a sitting practice. I am using it myself and it is *fun*. This is one thing people miss about meditation - it is supposed to be fun. The bikkhus said of him ‘and he has a pleasant abiding’, which I interpret as 'and he was high as a kite on endogenous chemicals'. People miss this part and instead focus on the agony the buddha put himself through. The buddha taught the middle path and specifically said the striving is one extreme we should not fall prey to. Meditation is supposed to be the supreme pleasure and it certainly feels that way now.

I kind of think that people get the ‘bang’ of enlightenment because they slow-traumatise themselves through an overly strict meditation process for years then finally snap and break free from it. That's what happened to the buddha. I definitely think enlightenment is an explosive type of trauma therapy. Both the b-man and I were traumatised by the external and the internal. There is a reason why he made the sangha for the masses; the masses do not need nibbana. They just need guidance and the occasional oil change.

For guidance I have been reading and listening to the direct translations of the pāli canon, and casually translating them into modern language when the mood takes me. People really have over-complicated his words. They boil down to ‘regulate your endocrine system and improve your world’. 

Some unwholesome states arise but they are transient; leaves in the wind. They try to latch to my centre but there is no centre; the ball is gone. They float about and I can see them and I rarely interact any more. I am too engaged in the real world to be swept away by (most) conditioned currents.

The cycling of mood continues, pretty much as described in the theravada texts, but without a self to latch to the cycle is fast and getting faster. I would previously spend months depressed, whereas now the cycle of A&P (creativity, confidence) to DN (argh) and back again is anywhere between an hour and a day. I see them changing like the weather and I am happy for the dark nights because it means I have some conditioning I can remove with meditation before plucking it away in my dreams.

I have been listening to a book called ‘after the ecstasy, the laundry’ and it feels like it was written for me. It has confirmed what I experienced as being an awakening and shown that these things happen all the time in all different religions but pan out in largely the same way: the annihilation of self and the bliss thereafter. It also provides guidance on what to expect down the line, because nibbana is not permanent. I do not seem to be sinking into the depression that often follows an awakening, because I did not expect it to happen, but let's see. It might just be a neurochemical rebound.

Jack Kornfield is one of a handful of people who actually replied to me, and I am very grateful that he did so and pointed me in the direction of his book. Once my project has more meat on the bones and I have finished the book, I will get back in touch. Initially I was disappointed to hear that experiential-nibbana isn’t permanent, but now I am happy. I can be with my family and live the life I always wanted, while taking acts to help the world with my own time.

The world… I don’t know. They might not want to listen, yet. The scientists hear nibbana and think I’m crazy. The religious ones hear what I say and do not like how it challenges their beliefs. I posted the site on r/streamentry yesterday but I do not have high hopes. Some senior scientist-friends of mine are taking me seriously but I guess people might have difficulty listening, at least at first. I am contacting some universities.

This reception makes sense, though: it challenges their own sense of self; their own ball of neuroses. People don’t want to hear that their precious self - including all dogma and striving and meditation protocols and scientific method and everything else they hold dear - is just a construct. But mine is just another boat to cross the river; some people will see the value in it and use it; the others can stick to the ‘sit and sit and sit and sit and sit and sit and think am I doing this right and sit some more’ model. All I will do is share; one of these days someone will see the value. Or not. All good.

Life is better in every single way.

My old life is a half-remembered dream. I do not feel like it was me.

But I feel incredible empathy and compassion for my old self. The boy who was traumatised and built a shell which was so complete, so hard, so impervious that he thought it was his being.

That boy is free now.

The world is full of joy and sorrow and greens and blues and currents and whorls and people and dreams. I feel everything, and I am overcome with it at times. I feel the waves of endogenous chemicals hit my system and spread like ink in water; like a sound wave in an empty container. I feel the container as one with the world; the rainbow colours of the electromagnetic spectrum changing into electrical impulses in the brain then ticking along a dopaminergic domino that spreads shivers down my arms and to my extremities. 

I feel love.

I feel joy.

I feel everything.

The work is effortless now.

I delight in removing the fetters. It is as the buddha said.

I have only encountered nibbana once, and I hear it can happen many times; not just the 4 laid out by the buddha. He was a genius but he was also a man and his sample size was also n=1.

I do not struggle and I do not worry. I have drive but I am not driven. I do not particularly mind whether I hit nibbana again; it would be cool because it would prove my hypothesis, but I don’t ‘need’ it.

I know that if I continue with right effort then the remaining conditioning will fall away and my life, and the lives around me, will continue to improve; seeds left dormant over a long winter receiving the meltwater of the spring.

I… I am alive.

I don’t know how else to say it.

I am alive, and previously I was not.

And life is good. It is *real*. It is vibrant and true and transient and glorious.

And that's all I ever wanted.

/jb202509130739