Brain states are everything. This seems so obvious to me it barely bears repeating.
Every single action we take in our life is to achieve a brain state. And yes - this includes all acts of altruism. It’s what the buddha mentioned when he talked about everything being motivated by selfish interest.
I recently had a hypomanic episode where I was desperately trying to hold myself out of full mania by getting someone to disprove my science (my god). They still haven’t, the bastards. Anyway if I didn’t have so much experience with drugs and undiagnosed mental disorders I would probably have been in trouble, but the poison was very much in the dose.. anyway..
In the winter I fought hard against myself to stop that vvvp impulse kill of self. I didn’t want to, but the brain state did. I’ve punched walls and broken fists to change my brain state so that I don’t do anything really harmful instead. I’ve eaten chocolate because I was hungry and has sex because I was horny.. you get the picture. Brain states.
The amount of fighting against my own (very strong) impulses over the years. This is why I need drugs; ironman and meditating and gritting your teeth just isn’t sustainable. It’s something everyone deals with; just me more than most.
I think there’s 2 things at play: the neurones and the juices. My juices are wacky but I like to think my neurones are not. So we have the neurones trying to influence the juice but failing; the sock on the bicycle wheel.
I am thinking of this like the land and the clouds more and more, and as I write I see that the Buddha talked about being an island unto yourself and emotions / events all being clouds that you can observe objectively as they come and go.
What aripiprazole gives me, with the baseline dopamine that wasn’t previously there, is an island to come back to. Or… an eye to the storm, in my analogy.
So I think these things you observe are the emotions, the clouds, the karma, the volitional action. The thing doing the observing is the true self, soul, atama, god, autistic pattern matching self. I think that people maybe have viewed the ‘autistic self’ (which everyone has) as the god within themselves, and the adhd self (which everyone also has) as their chaos.
The angels and demons on their shoulders. Asd and adhd. Order and chaos. There’s something there, yeah?
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