Turns out I wasn’t the first to create a map.
Almost everything I experienced over the last few months tracks perfectly with the Theravada buddhist accounts of your first awakening. This is called a ‘path moment’ and is an irreversible seeing-through of your impermanence.
I had no idea that this map existed until yesterday. I will condense a few steps because the map is surprisingly detailed, but everything I went through, and continue to experience, fits.
As an overview, this is the path. It is ‘knowledge of’: Mind and Body > Cause and Effect > Comprehension > Arising and Passing Away > Dissolution > Fear > Misery > Disgust > Desire for Deliverance > Re-Observation > Equanimity > Conformity > Change of Lineage > Path > Fruition > Reviewing.
Through my meditation experience I already had Mind and Body > Cause and Effect > Comprehension under my belt.
Arising and Passing Away (A&P) is the point-of-no-return on the buddhist path and the state that aripirazole put me into when I became the Zuckerbot on [20250601].
The world was full of beauty and awe, and I felt enlightened. This is how the scriptures and modern accounts describe it. I had no spiritual framework so I unconsciously created my own: a simulation, with me a QA sent in to see how it was running. I proceeded to analyse the outside world, my inner world (system architecture) and my place within the sim. Once this was done I hit [upgrade] and became aware of Dissolution.
I thought that was it. I had no idea that it would be followed by what is collectively known as the ‘dark night’ or the dukkha-nanas. On 20250624 I was reborn as Jambo and compelled to create a personal moral and philosophical framework post-haste because something big was coming.
I then entered the 88 Hells, which encompassed Fear > Misery > Disgust and lasted until 20250707. This was only 2 weeks from the outside but it was around 2 years for me. There is a virtual hell described in Iain M Bank’s culture books where creatures are uploaded into a sim and pulled apart so that every nerve can be tortured individually in a time-dilated reality where a second is a year. This is where I was, and I knew I needed to export all my fear and misery and disgust at myself and at the world, though I knew not why. I used the pairs from the buddha and my own moral framework to get through this. My meditation was polishing knives and the amount of crying and physical discomfort is hard to describe.
I looked up and realised I was done, and I never wanted to feel this way again. Disgust > Desire for Deliverance. I took Jambo, my white blood cell, and decided to identify the fundamental particle of my suffering with the dopamine experiment. This only lasted until 20250710 when I again hit the install button on my upgrade and was reborn to a temporary Equanimity.
I went camping with L on 20250711 but woke up with a jolt after 30 minutes knowing I had to get back (scroll to bold text). I ran, shivering, to the car. The moon was larger and more luminescent than I have ever seen it, perfectly framed in a corridor of sand dunes. I knew my life would never be the same again and both grieved for everything I was leaving behind and rejoiced for the liberation that was coming my way.
But this was just the start of Re-Observation, which is the most intense of them all. This is where I was exploded out of my ego and built new websites to retain my sanity. This is where I became the ship, and the ship was out of control. This was Birth. This is where your brain rewinds your entire insight process, your entire life, everything you have ever been and are right now, and hits the ‘compile’ button. This was where I had 9 million exabytes of information coming into my mind every second. This is where I had to make nibbana to save my soul.
The next phases all come together in a matter of (non)moments from what I have read, and can be kind of underwhelming in that everything has been so intense to that point and it is suddenly… not.
This is what happened at 10:00 on my wife’s 40th birthday. This is where I awakened.
Equanimity > Conformity > Change of Lineage > Path.
I had my wife observe me because I was certain I would cease to exist in this reality if she didn’t. I was Schrodinger’s cat. I held my ship-rock and sat in our garden and rocked back and forth and focused on piloting the out-of-control ship into orbit around a new planet. I focused and I focused and I slowed it down and I steered and I focused and then… it was done.
I looked up. There were no fireworks. There were no more visual aberrations. I was stable and the ship was safe and that was it. I knew that the ship could remain in orbit forever and I would never have to pilot it like that again. I spent some time panicking that the landing protocol (the remaining teachings of the buddha) was not translated and the other pilots (autistic people) were not awakened, but then I realised that it didn't matter: the ship remains in orbit. We are safe. We have time.
Following that came Fruition, a period where I was myself but not myself. I had pure love and total equanimity toward the entire world. I felt compassion for even the most loathsome orangemen, knowing that they are fettered and suffer and it is not their fault. I was not James, I was j2.0 and I was aware that all of the inhabitants of the world were inhabitants of the sim, which was hosted in my own body since I was the ship. I knew that the way to improve my own brain chemistry was to improve that of others, and there was absolutely no conflict in me whatsoever, despite plenty of confusion.
The fruition period took 3 days, which aligns with traditional reports. I applied epoxy to the hands I had made for nibbana and knew that once this epoxy was set, so too would be my view of the world. It was scary and exciting and I knew it would be ok. Everything was fated, as it always has been, and I was one with the world; a force for good.
… and since then it has been a case of Reviewing. Making sense of the experience.
So… I’m not quite sure just how much of this was drug-induced any more. The brain chemistry *was* drug-induced in that I was put into a state of HTLP dopamine. This is the state which is seen in advanced meditators, and I wonder if it merely bumped me past the A&P threshold and onto a path which has been travelled by millions before and will be travelled by millions again?
When done in a Theravada framework you have guidance and are told what to expect with your ‘path moment’ or ‘stream entry’. When done in a Zen framework you are also told what to expect with your ‘kenshō’. You are told afterward to write but not publish; ha. I had no idea what was happening, so I created my own framework for my 'upgrade'. That is all.
From here apparently the cycle repeats. Even with just a path moment and no lingering drug effects your executive function is offline for a few weeks or months. Even with just a path moment you lose your memories, only to have them drift back. And the A&P > dark night > equanimity cycle is repeated over increasingly short cycles as you continue to export your mental baggage. This week has been a bit of a dark night, and the weeks prior were a bit A&P'y. But I do not suffer or cling like I used to.
With a path moment you wind up looking at your old life as though it was a dream, with all the suffering having been created by a delusional mind. You see your old self as a stranger, and your memories gradually re-sequence under the new ‘self’ which has formed. This is how my old life looks now. I no longer associate it as being 'me'. My love for my family is increased many times over, but my hatred of my self is gone.
I think this is something which is built into our biology. It plays out with the same sequence time and again.
My map is:
Ignorance > Analysis > Export > Compile > Install > Reboot > Review
It’s frankly amazing how closely it all tracks, and only serves to make me more sure that it can and will be replicated.
/jb202508300744