I’m starting to see why the zen masters don’t make a fuss about this whole enlightenment thing.
It’s almost easy to forget everything that happened and everything that I was. It feels like I went full-circle: I started at james-in-pain and I looped all the way round, through exercise and hypothesising, analysing the teachings of the buddha and reprogramming, a brief period inhabiting a buddhified persona, and now to james-without-pain.
I feel largely like the person I was before this began, but also very changed on a fundamental level. My body and my mind are still my own, and my habitual physiological responses are intact but fading where no longer needed.
The main difference is that I do not cling to some projected future, some fading past, or some transient present. I do not project who I will be tomorrow, never mind next week or year or decade. I do not lament who I was yesterday, never mind during the insight process or before.
Who I was before the whole thing began is near-impossible to remember: all the pain and striving and emptiness. I actually can’t recall it - it’s like when you’re sat meditating and you achieve a perfect state - how the state becomes a memory of a state but the state itself is gone forever. How you can remember ‘I felt this way’ but you can’t actually recall the bodily feeling no matter how hard you try.
I remember pain. I remember wanting to die; waiting for it all to be over. I remember trying to fill the void and making it larger in the process.
And now… none of that. The void is gone… somehow through accepting the emptiness of existence and the fact that I am just a cross section of circumstance, the void has vanished. I felt no compulsion to write this this morning. I was planning to go snowboarding but called it off, and the last couple of days I’ve asked my wife to deal with the school run so I can sleep. Sleep feels important.
I am pretty tired still. 10+ hours sleep per day. The longer lie-ins these two days feel productive: the mind going through rapid and short REM cycles instead of waking up. The hypnagogic state producing small-scale micro-re-wirings is how I view it. Like the tree of the mind is mostly grown but the small branches are being populated. Whatever; it feels nice.
I wake up and there’s some kind of plan formed for how I might do the next step in my art piece, but that’s about it. Once I get out of bed I decide whether I’ll bother or not. Today I read a book for an hour and then tidied the room a little, but I’ll probably stick that piece down so the epoxy is dry later. That’s about the extent of my planning at the moment. It’s a hell of a step up in quality of life from where I was: trying to plan away every single variable until the end of time.
I’m back to ‘full-james’, including irritability when tired. This is normal and physiological and not out of proportion. Again this is what I read about the zen masters and seniors from other traditions. They go through their uber-monk phase and the period of outward sainthood and then they kind of snap out of it and re-engage their entire being and the world around them. Zen masters seem to have plenty of fun poking people and irritating them, as do I.
As suspected, this is not a mythical state so much as a coming back to how we were maybe supposed to be. The entire 360 degrees of the personality, just without the clinging that caused all the suffering.
It’s like… the brain grows from raw data and is given a structure from outside. Phasic dopamine carves out behavioural patterns based on the laws of desire and repulsion. This causes the development of the ‘self’, which is a natural and desirable outcome for survival.
Then we hit our teenage years and begin to change. Our brains continue to grow and develop until we are 25 and somewhere along the way we develop metacognition. This metacognition is at odds with the early learnings and starts to try to change them, but the effort is akin to crowbarring apart a bridge of steel girders.
And then enlightenment is when that bridge finally breaks, and we can rebuild it using the guidance of this metacognition we have fostered. The metacognition needs to be aimed toward non-greed and non-hatred because greed and hatred will always spiral: there is always something to get or someone to beat.
So you smash apart the bridge and you take the foundations that remain and the pieces that comprised it and you put them together in a more logical and coherent manner. The pieces you formed through the initial learning period of craving and learning are still there and functional, but you now use this new-fangled metacognition to lay them back in the right places.
It is, as suspected, code optimisation. Nothing more, nothing less. The program itself doesn’t change much; it just loses redundancies.
In this sense, I wonder whether it’s even possible for someone to achieve this before their mid-20s. Maybe the mind needs to finish its initial growth-around-the-self before the self can be dismantled and optimised. Maybe I was right when I was saying that children need to have friction with reality in order to find their own [bigproblem], and then they need to find their own modality to achieve the [upgrade] and [singularity].
It seems to pan. But hey. I’m still recovering. This is a nice seed for another coherent article though. I guess I might turn all this junk into a book one day but there’s no rush, no need, no pressure.
I was on the ski lift the other day and just started laughing to myself about how utterly… unnecessary everything is. All this fretting and worrying and striving and collecting. It all just falls away and then… what? What is left but life?
Life is not acquisition and attainment. And I guess this is why they ideas of enlightenment and maps and path moments and hierarchy all fall away too. You don’t ‘acquire’ enlightenment, though I guess you do attain certain levels of realisation along the way. But at the end of the day, this is a process of subtraction, not addition.
Less is more; a minimalism of the mind. Why would you want to encumber yourself with some idea of what enlightenment is?
Chop wood and carry water. Or in my case, polish swords and eat ice cream.
And get angry at the kids when they step out of line. Ha. Just like the zen master who verbally slaps his followers.
How many clouds are in the sky today, james?
理に流れ
宇宙や人へ
善き波紋
Flow with ri
To the universe and the people
Positive ripples
Anyway back to folding that laundry and mixing that epoxy.
/jb202512181052
(stream of consciousness)