The construct of self is just a big ball of outdated legacy code which is no longer fit for purpose.
We are told by our parents that we are good and beautiful or bad and ugly and this gets ingrained into our psyche at a deep level. The definition of these words evolve as we grow but the code does not. The code is simple, the input complex.
We experience trauma or love or any number of other things in early life and this goes in hard.
We remember who we used to be, who we wanted to be, who we want to become, and who we will never be. Some of these things come to fruition and some do not. The code is laid regardless.
Every cell in your body sees physical overturn apart from your neurons, your retina and parts of your heart. This means that once these neural pathways are set they can be incredibly difficult to change. Your OS is out of date.
Your brain can rewire, through a process called neuroplasticity. This is slow, especially as an adult. It can’t keep up with the rate of change of life. We can sometimes create minor hacks but the deep code remains largely unaltered.
So you end up with this tangled mess of conflicting algorithms which no longer matches your reality. You are running OSX on a virtual machine on top of Windows 98 which is on an IBM mainframe server. There's a non-negligible chance it's gonna crash.
The ways we can increase neuroplasticity are exercise and meditation. With these tools we can erode some of the outdated algorithms and build better ones in their place.
I unwittingly reprogrammed myself on the bike a lot. I was dumb and focused on stuff like productivity and success. I suffered.
But we can take a more considered approach with how we do it. We can remove legacy code which causes us suffering: greed, hatred, competition, consumption. We can cut out the need for a defined and constant self in an ever-changing world.
And if nibbana does come, recognise that this is just a hard format of certain core neuroses. It destroys the root access to your algorithms. The code is still in there; it’s just not connected the way it used to be. You need to be careful that you don’t reactivate it.
And going forward you need to make a conscious effort to trim the new code that is laid. Decide what you install. Use exercise and meditation to prune the rest.
Your reality was programmed for you. It’s not your fault; anything you did or anything that happened was just a result of the data fed into the system.
What happens from here can be in your hands. To an extent, of course. Neuroplasticity will always take time.
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