i am three weeks out from the final (?) extreme neuroplasticity and find myself a little embarrassed by this whole enlightenment thing.
apparently this is actually diagnostic of having reached ‘the end’, whatever that may be. the realisation that there isn’t really an explosive ‘end’. no ‘final enlightenment’ that you can record and codify and put on the internet and wear as a badge and say ‘i am done’.
this is why all the zen masters, dzogchen blokes and arahants go quiet - they kind of wake up one day and look back at all the striving and grasping and clinging to this idea of enlightenment and go ‘huh - so that was the raft, was it?’ this is why they don’t try to sell their ideas and push them onto people; why they don’t create a new persona around enlightenment and in doing so carve a new self they need to maintain. this is why a lot of the gurus out there are likely not there yet.
this is why only people who are pre-arahant claim to be arahant, i guess; why i claimed it around step 3 and thought i was done. but that was still a label. my own scaffold was trying to save the mental health industry, and i still think that the model i built around dopaminergic modulation is hopefully valid; but everything else - all the zuckerberg and musk and simulation stuff - that was my own raft to cross the river and it looks almost as flamboyant as siddartha’s raft of devas and gods.
and now i’m on the other side, my feet are on dry land again. there is no wobbling or altered states or anything particularly special about the days apart from when viewed in contrast to the days of old. the days are easy, and they have magic, but they are not magical. but the mind no longer compares and narrates that by default; there is no longer a single thread going from the start to now which as to be maintained and fed through all aspects of experience. experience just is and then it is not and when it is not, it is not.
but diagnostically speaking i think this was what you’d call enlightenment. just the word is so loaded with detritus and idolatry that it’s unfit for purpose. as mentioned in an article [somewhere], enlightenment is healing, even if it’s healing that most of us could benefit from.
now
no noticeable symptoms of adhd or ptsd; no asd processing headaches
no clinging to experience or labels
no clinging to states or identities, including ‘enlightened’
very little bodily or mental tension; no sense of ‘steel wool’ or knots in the brain
no unnecessary forecasting of the future or lamenting of the past
no painting an image of who i should or should not be; an acceptance of who i and others are
no sense of a central observer, though this one is misleading in how it is understood since i do not cling to the low-stimulation state of non-duality; the self exists as a tool and i still feel more sensation around the head than in the body due to nerve density
a sense of ease and lack of urgency unless appropriate, though the body still has echoes of its old conditioning
zero compulsion to do anything, really, yet perfectly able to act where appropriate
process
extreme phases of altered states with many discontinuities in experience
large periods of alone-time when this was happening; i was essentially living the life of a mendicant despite having a family, since we were in separate houses much of the time
extreme states of piti and waves of dopaminergic reprogramming coming up from my body and converging on the brain
messianic aspirations and a drive to save the world, though i see now that this manifests because of the drive to save the self, and the projection of self-model onto other
utter confidence that this is the way to do it, though again that confidence is necessary in order to actually get the job done because of dopaminergic modulation; prayer only works if you believe
extreme time-dilation around reprogramming events, decoupling from consensus-reality for long periods; high energy and reduction in sleep requirements; high creativity and compulsion
no ‘crash’ after the events apart from physiological tiredness, sleep and compensatory eating; zero depression or negative changes in mental landscape; each event saw ~10x improvement in quality of life, apart from this last one which feels more like i have landed the glider
so it all lines up with everything i’ve read in both traditional and contemporary reports - a dropping away of things rather than an accumulation of them. and it doesn’t feel like anything particularly special any more; ordinary mind, as the zen masters would say. i’m back to cutting wood and mixing epoxy, just like the chan master was back to chopping wood and carrying water.
but i have no trauma. i have no suffering from adhd or asd processing headaches. i feel liberated from the old sense of self. i have no fear of death or incompleteness, but i am not fatalistic. i know everything is just one big flow and we are flotsam in the river, or a section of the river with flotsam flowing through us, and we can maybe swim a little but whether we choose to or not is not really our decision to begin with.
i will spend the next few weeks sorting out this website and moving the scaffold writings over to the sister site, driab-semaj.com. my habitual response for something like this is ‘argh must get it done now’ but why? there is no need. it will be done when it will be done and i have art to make and swords to polish and children to raise and books to read. the body is still a conditioned thing, and the mind is too. when i wake up after a long night’s sleep the mind has done its work of planning and stacking up logistics for the day but the second i get out of bed i can look at those plans and say ‘chill winston’ and the mind immediately settles.
so…
enlightened embarrassment.
apparently it’s a thing.
and apparently it’s pretty much a sign that the job is done; the fact that you wonder whether there was a job to do in the first place.
it’s like losing a toothache. when you have the toothache, it is all you can think about. once it’s gone you forget it ever existed.
but it fuckin’ did, i can tell you that. i was just waiting to die, in constant pain about the lack of completeness of self. scatterbrain and hyperfocus and processing migraines and anger. everything that SN Goenka said he suffered from back when he was a businessbody and before he built his own raft.
so i might go and share this after all but it will probably be a lot quieter than my raft suggested, unless people come to me. a book maybe. i don’t need ownership of the process; i don’t want to charge money. ‘awakening, awakening, 300 dollars a bottle’. fuck that. the nature of the dhamma is that it should be free, and if it is worth anything in itself then it doesn’t need hawking like some lowlife street peddler. ‘the end times are coming; pay and you shall be received’.
but that’s the inclination while you’re going through the process. the relief on each step of the way is so incredibly, indescribably huge that you want to share with all. you had a thorn stuck in your foot and you used another thorn to remove it. ‘this thorn is the best thorn’ and we live in this capitalist society with refrigerators instead of alms food so you need to monetise it. most of these people hawking enlightenment don’t have bad intent; i guess you can look at what they charge and make your own decisions. a $10 book is very different to an hourly fee.
anyhow i’m blabbing a bit now. i never liked people taking advantage of the suffering of others.
time to go wash the pots.
/jb202512221107
(stream of consciousness)