I know that this is not a ‘once and done’ thing and never will be. That is not the nature of the brain. The nature of the brain is to lay new cables and form new pathways and so long as you are learning you will always suffer.
My initial encounter with nibbana was 100% self-led and I had no idea what was happening. My mind made its own scaffold around ships and sims and quantum computing. I exported some of that and then when I realised that it tracked with the buddhist maps (after countless hours trying and failing to find an adequate psychiatric explanation) I started to track my progress against those.
I knew that the 4 steps to enlightenment model was just an abstraction. The map of insight was helpful but honestly the dark night / dukkha nana section is over-convoluted and I find that the body and mind section doesn’t always come into play, so I simplified it a bit and used it as a loose guide to see whether my own experiences matched. They did, to a degree, but I still used my own experience as the compass.
These maps were fairly helpful but they never fit 100%. It was like borrowed clothes from your smelly old neighbour; there were holes in them and they didn’t allow me to move properly. Not meaning to be rude with that analogy; things just fall out of my brain now. They were good quality clothes, just not for me.
So now I’m nearing the end of the path, maybe. The mind is liberated and the final vestiges of conditioning are falling away. The physiological conditioning remains and takes longer, but that will fall away over the coming months and years through repeated exposure and the body learning that the mind does not play ball.
However now we are on to names.
I have been quantifying my progress today against arahantship, which is the final goal in buddhism, but I will stop. It has painted an undesirable target in my mind, if I am honest. Let me explain.
So the Buddha and his arahants renounced worldly life and lived in seclusion avoiding sense pleasures. There is a reason for this, and the Buddha pulls people up in the suttas when they say that they can have sense pleasures and attachments while walking his path to completion.
You can’t.
Any contact with the outside world will carve a phasic groove into your mind. That hug with your child will carve a groove of love in there. That ice cream will carve one of pleasure. That washlet cleaning your bum will carve one of sensation. They will all leave their mark, however small.
So you can go for full liberation, and I am like… 99.9% certain that I could ride this wave and go all the way if I wanted to. But in order to do that I would need to leave my 2 kids and loving wife, I would need to leave my beloved ice cream, and I would need to go back to trying to clean my bottom by rubbing it with dry paper.
This is not what I want and not what I ever wanted. What I wanted was liberation from suffering. And that is what I have got. I am liberated.
I have a choice:
1 - go full recluse and meditate until my mind is a blank slate and just let reality wash over me with no attachment
2 - spend my life with my family and living in moderation while meditating to bring my mind back to a smooth-but-not-perfect state every day so that I can walk the wire
Wire, not lantern. Clever wifey.
So I choose to walk the wire. It was slack but now it is taut and I can walk it again. That is what I will do. I will go to my own realm to clean house and I will come back to this one to let the kids muck it up again.
I mean… the Buddha never told householders to leave their families. All he said was that ‘full complete liberation’ wasn’t possible unless you did. I do not want that. That would be *incredibly* selfish. To leave my kids and my wife and my ice cream just so I can go and fucking meditate in a hut somewhere and be in total bliss for the rest of time. What a wanker!
Nope. Not gonna happen. This is a wire, matey.
For those of you who want to do the hermit thing, it’ll work. Make no mistake. But for me, I will stay in this world. I will help the world and I will help my family and I will have a good impact.
You could call me a bodhisattva I guess, but that word will have baggage too.
So why not use a word I made up in as a child, before the wire went slack?
Wollywollybogs.
That’s me.
I’m the world’s first wollywollybogs and the theravāda guys might come at me with a little less venom if I phrase it like that :)
Time to go enjoy my mind.
Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.
/jb202510022045
[stream of consciousness]