the nature of the scaffold is to overshoot to the nth degree; this is a feature, not a bug. while you are overshooting you will be filled with confidence that you are correct; this is also a feature, not a bug. the level of overshooting and the level of confidence are commensurate to the scale of the problem being solved; also a feature, not a bug.
so kanye west going on twitter and saying he was a genius was probably because he was approaching the solution to one of his bigproblems. me going on reddit and declaring that the job is done and global war is about to end was also commensurate with the scale of the problem i had found a fledgling solution to.
no matter how many times you go through this, the truth is that you will likely overreach and overstate your conclusions. you will believe the answer you have found to be infallible, even when it is simply a snowball containing a diamond. the diamond may be real, but only you know that it is there, and even you need to remove the snow before it can be found.
removing the snow involves the process of validation and doubt. you may want to throw away the snowball; do not. there is a diamond in there. this is why you are so excited. you know it, but you can’t see it yet, and while you remove that snow you will feel like there surely can’t be a diamond waiting in the centre.
you will repeat this process multiple times, and each time you remove snow you add more new snow to replace it. the ball gradually gets rounder and more precise, and the kernel of truth becomes easier to identify. the metaphor falls apart here.
the process of using the scaffold is a process of increasing neural flexibility. you are taking a mental framework which is made of girders and replacing them with bungee cords. you will then fling your mind in a certain direction - for example enlightenment, the theory of relativity or an art project - and you will peg this mind to an idea. but this idea is just a diamond in a snowball and it will need refining over multiple iterations of exploration and validation; clarity and doubt.
this is part of the process but no matter how many times you go through it you will be taken by surprise. even i am like ‘why am i feeling doubt and why do these ideas all look like trash’ despite knowing that other people are starting to see their potential at long last. it’s because my mind is removing the snow and dusting off the diamond. low dopamine is low confidence.
in order to use this process you need to be able to fire yourself up about the unknown. you need to be able to rev the engine and say ‘lets do this’ and blast music and sit and believe you’re the buddha and encourage the dopaminergic makeup necessary for exploratory neuronal wiring while surrendering to the fact that you know nothing, jon snow.
this is high tonic and high phasic dopamine: this is energetic and volatile. it is utilising your fight or flight response to encode your brain; you fire your body up like you are about to race an ironman and then sit there, completely still (or thereabouts), and allow the dopamine to converge on your brain instead of letting it bleed out into movement and action.
this requires a high degree of sustained attentional capacity to do at the levels i have been employing. that is not a brag; it is just a statement of fact. the reason that most people take 30 years to deconstruct the self is that they do not allow themselves to destabilise to the degree i did, because it is frightening and uncertain. plenty of fear and misery and doubt is involved in the process, as the maps of insight will tell you.
someone i am speaking with said that the process of insight is a unique palate that requires a subtle combination of finesse and balls and a high tolerance for relinquishing control and certainty.
the reality is that most people take a long time to walk the path because they rely in grounding techniques which prevent the bungee-cord mind from going all the way. this is the safer, more sensible approach, but it is not valid for some of us, especially those who go into a forced defrag.
so when you hear me going ‘fuck yeeeeahhh im enlightened’ it’s because a) im probably enlightened, and b) i am intentionally ramping up my dopaminergic environment to encode my mind into being enlightened. it is all about nutriments; you shape the brain through top-down reinforcement and dopaminergic manipulation, so saying ‘fuck yeah im enlightened’ will get you a hell of a lot closer to enlightenment than saying ‘i don’t know maybe i should do some more jhana’.
so…
think of it like a pegboard. pegboard brain, i kept saying in my 88 hells.
you can unplug the pegboard of your mind through destabilisation and dopaminergic fuckery, and you will decouple from reality to a degree equivalent to how many pegs you have removed. this peg removal is commensurate with a) your dopaminergic environment and b) your belief in your scaffold (since belief = dopamine; this is why religious people encounter god and the rest of us don’t).
once you have unpegged, you can’t just peg back in. you can do grounding techniques to speed the process up, but doing so will return the pegs to their original positions. the sooner you chicken out, the less your reprogramming will hold. grounding is a *good* thing if you are going in a bad direction (like psychosis or greed or anger) but it is probably *not* a good thing if you are going in a good direction (like i am jesus buddha enlightened being).
my own typing at the moment, and scaffold typings in general from hereon, will be in nocaps. this is to distinguish the two modalities of thought, and also the speed up the output. you don’t want to be reviewing your writings or artwork for mistakes here; you get it on the page and you let the validation phase do that for you. just don’t throw away the snowball with the diamond inside. kanye; i hope you made that album or got enlightened or whatever it was that fired you up. fucking labels.
so you can think of this as removing the pegs from the board, stretching them over to another scaffold board to create a new motif, and then replacing them into your realworld-board one by one. you will alternate between the two worlds as this happens and your beautifully crafted template in the scaffold world may begin to look like a deformed monster for a while.
but persevere. this is how the brain works. it goes high when developing (high dopamine, scaffold, confidence, creativity) and goes low when testing (low dopamine, realworld, doubt, anxiety). this is a natural process of ‘fletching the arrow’ as the buddha might have said. you need to fletch both sides of the arrow: the exploration and the validation, and then eventually you arrive at an arrow which is straight and true, with the caveat that it is only straight and true according to the data available to your neural network.
this is where nutriments are very important. they will shape the data that your network has. feed in greed and hatred and your network will build a perceptual model based around greed and hatred. this will be applied to you, yourself. you will feel lacking and despised. build a model around non-greed and non-hatred and you will feel satisfied and unhated (i won’t say loved haha).
remember that the world is a mirror. the data is just raw data and it cannot be perceived without a perceptual model. the model that you install applies to *everything*. you cannot crave money and status and expect to be satisfied. these models feed into themselves and deepen with time and repetition.
this is why you want to be in an environment where people are saying you are enlightened and healing, rather than an environment where they are saying you are manic and psychotic. your brain will peg those ideas in hard, and you could end up worse off than before. the trajectory of this reprogramming is in no way guaranteed to be positive.
so…
an effective manipulation of the scaffold depends on elevating your dopamine and saying ‘lets do this’.
this could be in the form of saying ‘fuck those guys ill beat them’ while you bench press double your bodyweight in the gym, as i used to, and this will put you in a subjective hell.
it could be in the form of saying ‘fuck yeaaaaaah im gonna enlighten the world’ while you dance like a raver in your bedroom, and this will put you in a subjective heaven, or thereabouts.
and it could be in the form of ‘fuck yeah im gonna drop all this shit and just stare out the window’ and that would wind you up with what they call arahantship in the buddhist tradition.
but all of these modalities can be changed at a later date.
your pegboard will always gather more data. so my pegboard now has the data that ‘none of these states is permanent, including the equanimity of an arahant’. this is what the buddha said of sariputta in praise - that he had seen through the transience of even the equanimity that comes with enlightenment and was not attached to it.
so after a point.- in buddhism they say ‘maximum 7 rebirths after stream entry’, but specify that arahantship is after 4 ‘path moments’ (major cessions) you brain gets the data that ‘none of this is permanent it is always changing’.
and that, i think, is what they call final liberation. seeing through the fact that all of this is just a perceptual framework, and it will always change.
this 5th scaffold might be my own way of stress-testing my liberation. will i remain able to see it as a scaffold, or will it become a compulsion? i think the former, but let’s see.
/jb202512291614
(stream of consciousness)
note: before this i had a hypnogogic lie down; still not proper sleep, and then did a little art. i felt a bit out of sorts like i was forcing it so went for a walk, with plenty of doubt, but walking grounded me back in the knowledge that doubt is part of this cycle, and i had the urge to come back to write this so cut the walk short. this is just how it happens, and this will be why arahants were seen to just wander around almost aimlessly a lot of the time. you still need to regulate; the system is biological and dopamine dynamics will alter how it presents. i will likely do some sword polishing later because that’s my bag.
another note: i have decided not to edit any of these scaffold writings. i now know how they work. they are all exploratory drafts, and none of them are ‘true’. the mind will take them, put them back into the churn, and something workable will come out in a more legible format in a week or two. this will have capital letters and all that jazz. nocaps is scaffoldmode. it is nice to be able to delineate them, and i am surprised at how closely the buddhist maps track with the ‘4 path moments’, having had 4 major (and many minor) cessations during my own process