so here’s the funny thing - i feel less enlightened now than i did throughout the process. if anything i felt the most enlightened right at the start after my initial awakening and then the subsequent steps all showed me that there was more work to do.
each step gave me a huge bump in wellbeing which still remains. i am looking back at my initial 88 hells writings now and sorting them out and i barely remember who i was. the amount of pain and struggle that defined me. i can’t really get my head around it - the guy sounds like a stranger.
and i suppose that carries because you can’t remember pain. people would never have a second child if we could remember pain. just like you can’t remember a meditative state; you have an echo but you can’t recall the biological makeup that you inhabited at the time, and the endocrine system is the primary driver of pain i think.
but now this most recent event has not actually reduced the pain all that much it has just removed the insight machinery. the seemingly endless unravelling of the onion has ceased and all that is left is … normality.
yet at the same time i have more clarity than i ever had, and that is a double edged sword.
in the previous events i felt such relief that i was sure they were all ‘final enlightenment’ and was going around telling everyone so. but this one hasn’t brought as large a relief and is more like a settling of the system into a new baseline, which is, from what i’ve read, more like ‘final enlightenment’. silly term - the entity continues to grow and change and evolve.
but i think that the suffering of which the buddha spoke is the endocrine system and the dopaminergic thought-feeling-loops and how they just gouge and gouge and gouge away. dopamine being the primary motivator of movement and action and craving and hnnnng not enough need more need to be different need to be other need to live need to die need to think need to be.
but what’s happened now i think is that the dopamine has stopped playing ball. so i still have the grooves which the dopamine carved over the years - the thought-habits and behaviours. the status seeking and the ‘he wronged me’ kind of thoughts in the neuronal landscape, but the valleys have run dry.
so it’s like i am sat on top of this mountain in the mind and i can look down and i can see these valleys and see them trying to pull the water of dopamine into them but the water isn’t playing ball.
but the thing about this new layout is that the valleys are really obvious. i can see ‘oh james is doing this again’ or ‘oh that thought is trying its hand again’ and even if they don’t bite i am aware of them and they kind of try to play out but they never get the dopaminergic reinforcement that they used to.
but this isn’t particularly nice a lot of the time. it’s nicer than it was, don’t get me wrong. this is the burning out of the sankhara that the buddha talked about. this is where a thought-loop gets played but it doesn’t activate a feeling so it doesn’t get reinforced and over time it will burn itself dry and just stop trying in the first place.
but comparing to the ‘i am enlightened’ phases it’s a bit more uncomfortable. when you are going through the insight cycle and especially after one of the earlier events your dopaminergic tone is so incredibly high that you can’t see the valleys any more. it’s like the ice caps thawed and the water rose so much that you couldn’t see them; the valleys were under the ocean and you were sat on your mountain and everything looked like plain sailing as far as the eye could see.
but then the system adapts and the levels go back to normal but they just… they don’t engage the old systems any more. the systems try. and you can feel them. you can feel them try to tug the dopamine into the old ‘comparison’ routine. there are three or four people who keep coming to mind while i am doing art and making swords. one is the dogman; a betrayer. another is a potential competitor. and another is a marker of lost respect.
so i guess that these are three major social conditionings trying to play themselves out with the most prominent figures that my mind can find. betrayal, competition, respect. three of the biggies. and it makes sense that the big sankhara would be the first to go.
but it’s not particularly joyous, and it doesn’t make you ‘feel’ enlightened. this is ram das saying that he is a ‘connoisseur of his neuroses’. you watch them arise, and you say hi, and they faff about for a bit, and then they are one their way.
but also i am intentionally cultivating their erasure, i think, through making art and doing the sword polishing (raising dopamine and serotonin through repetitive motion) and then writing. so i guess that true to form i am trying to optimise away this further deconditioning.
so that’s it, i reckon. i guess the reason these people are coming to mind is that my mind is trying to exhaust the old loops. the things that would formerly have filled me with rage but now just kind of irritate me a little by their arrival.
that kind of makes sense. i wonder how long they will hang around. not too long judging from the old times when i would burn out on a hobby. a few weeks or months maybe. let’s see.
i have got 5x historical wakizashi to work my way through and have started with the rustiest and smallest; the hardest of the lot. and i have one full-length tachi on the way which will compliment them well. 6 blades. i think there were maybe 12 in the original broken blades and these are the repairs i have going on.
i might even make handles and sheaths for the ones which are missing them. who knows.
i have a few new cuts on my hands. i always liked my hands to look like they are being used. but ill be more careful going forward and am only at 500 grit so far. once we reach the 40,000 grit equivalent you wouldn’t want to accidentally slip your hand down the length of one of these blades.
anyway… time to cook.
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