everyone gets stuck on the phenomenology of enlightenment and misses the mechanism.
these videos and reports of altered states are phenomenology. the oneness with the universe and the non-duality; the luminosity and blending of senses. these are easy to explain under the theory of enlightenment model.
so when a baby is born they have no perceptual framework; just raw data. over the first weeks and months of their lives they begin to populate a framework by noticing patterns.
the first things they notice are edge, self/other, shape, colour, object permanence, and such. these are also the last things to go when you are deconstructing yourself through an insight process.
the destabilisation and violation of these low-level predictive priors are what result in feelings of non-duality (self/other violation), luminosity (edge), spontaneous or conditioned arising (object permanence) and the viewing of every leaf as its own entity.
layers above this are more abstract concepts like left, right, hand, foot, tree, shape. and above that they are things like acquisition, social interaction, status, morality. a step above this is the construct of self: i am this and i am not that and all of these combinations of xyz are what make me into ‘me’.
the first thing to be violated is the idea of a static self, and this results in ‘stream entry’. this is the violation of the highest level prior, and usually occurs when the learnings about the self and world have become maladaptive. for example in adolescence, during a traumatic experience, or when in a meditation retreat and intentionally bending your perceptual framework to the point of rupture.
the mind then goes into exploration mode. this resembles psychedelics in… almost every way. psychedelics lower the activation energy necessary for the bridging of local minima of thought. local minima are things like ‘this is a hand’ or ‘money is important’ or ‘acquisition is good’ or ‘i have adhd so can’t do shit’. these are the minima which made up the self-construct which has been violated, and they are now being tested for suitability.
during this phase you will have extreme plasticity. it is like your perceptual framework was the eiffel tower but you have suddenly replaced the girders with bungee cords. you can pull it this way and that and it will go to extremes. messianic aspirations are *good* because they are pulling the tower toward goodness. the tower is elastic so they are exaggerated. it can also be pulled toward psychosis and fear, so be careful what top-down reinforcement you employ.
the stretched priors will result in very unusual feelings such as oneness and luminosity, and thinking in absolutes which remain plastic. you can have ‘goodness’ as your new polestar but someone can come in and stretch the bungee from the side, and your definition of goodness will adapt around that new input. this is how you can change your habitual conditioning: you let someone rage spittle in your face and you smile and feel compassion, and going forward the minima which comprise ‘goodness’ will include more forgiveness.
deconditioning. you feel this happening in your body; you feel the release of dopamine from habitually potentiated pathways in the form of piti and this then consolidates in your brain and rewrites the neural layout (speculative). this is why you let yourself tingle but you do not move and express the surges in a physical manner: you want the chemical to converge in your brain and not just give you pecs of steel.
this is all very psychedelic. the brain is rebuilding and testing all the old assumptions. green is no longer green. insects are no longer boring. the ants and their colonies will fascinate you for *hours*. you are investigating the world in the same way a baby would.
but then the brain starts to reach stability and it all calms down. a week or two for the extreme state, and then a month or two for the oscillation. you will question whether it was all real as models are validated, and then you will fly off into certainty and non-duality again for a while as new modes are explored. this is all just a process of the web of perception reforming around the new prior.
once the web has successfully recruited all the datapoints from your life to date it will solidify into a new worldview. this worldview can also be violated, and it often will be with or without intent. in the earlier stages of enlightenment your web will reform but it will be dissatisfactory; it might include appx 80% of the data from your life but that remaining 20% needs to be accounted for and the brain will instigate a destabilisation and validation protocol on the remaining concepts.
this is what people call the dukkha nanas or the knowledge of suffering. lots of things, fundamental level, being vibrated apart. disgust at the old self and assumptions. then as the system identifies redundancies, equanimity as dopaminergic tone stabilises and elevates. then another washing away through phasic destabilisation in this elevated tonic state (speculative). arising and passing, more altered states, more non-duality, and then the cycle repeats.
this will go on for a while, and you will hit 3rd path before too long. alcohol and other neuroplasticity-suppressants will stop it, but cannabis and psychedelics can expedite it if used wisely. there’s a balance between destabilising and grounding; exploring and validating. not many people can handle the levels of destabilisation required for an expedited path so not many brains do it. it’s not really a choice as such and nothing to be proud of; the brain is the sculptor and the clay and you are slave to its whims. silly to even talk about ‘it and you’ as separate things. the system is the system and it will always aim for computational efficiency and operate within the parameters that it feels are not going to result in implosion.
the main reason to avoid drugs is that they stop the brain from being able to self-modulate these parameters. pretty hard to ground yourself after two ounces of shrooms and two mitsubishis two days running. personal experience, ha. psychedelics and mdma; great combo but probably needs a research team and supervision. anyway maybe that’s why i was able to do this process so fast. training, adaptation. anyway. all chance; no ego; just facts.
so you get to third path and you’re like mr buddha and everything is calm but still… it is not complete. you have leaned your eiffel tower over as far as it will go, but there are still other biological and autobiographical factors which do not fit into the buddha fabrication. so the brain will destabilise that too.
and then you come full-circle, and you are you again, but you retain the new tower trajectory. you have seen how all these altered states come and how they go and how nothing is constant and everything is change.
you have seen that everything is a formation and formations are necessary. everything is a perceptual model which is always changing, and you cannot perceive raw data without a model. so you stop taking it all so seriously. all these ideas of ‘an arahant should be bla bla’ are also formations; they are nothing but a polestar which you aim your new tower at, stretching the bungee and experiencing wild altered states and ‘final enlightenment’, before the tower consolidates and sets back into some form of slightly more malleable alloy and you are back to yourself, just minus the suffering and with a newly acquired humility that your self never really existed in any way outside of that of relation with the world around you.
so people get hooked on the states.
it’s what the buddha said.
all these wooo, ahhh, amazing, i am enlightened reports are cool and everything, and i went through them all myself, but they are temporary and they need to be released. this is exactly what the buddha said. read the suttas. people will try to sell you things based on the magic of the states (and they are magic and the people probably mean well) but the magic of the states is nothing but a byproduct of your brain repairing itself. it is a temporary symptom, not the goal.
this is what neuroplasticity feels like. it’s cool, ngl. but it is not something you need to or should try to maintain. walking around the world with some floppy bungee tower instead of a functional model? it just won’t work. the brain did not evolve to stay in baby-mode all day every day.
but you can keep that flexibility through regular practice and keep the alloy of your tower malleable. just don’t expect to go floating around in some permanent bliss or whatever. it is transient. everything is transient.
i teach the end of suffering and nothing more. that is what the buddha said. i am but a man, and i teach the end of suffering and nothing more.
remember those words and don’t chase the lantern. it is a wire. you go out, you come back, you are fixed while you are in the other world (or you are broken if your environment breaks you), and you come back.
you always come back.
until you die. ha. parinibbana that shit. anyone’s guess what happens then, but you won’t fear it any more if you do this right.
/jb202512300950
stream of consciousness