Good morning! I am back in Hokkaidō and my kids look older. They are older, as am I.
I am going to enter observation mode now to see what has shifted in me following my bike tour. I definitely had an insight and my view of reality is changing again, but I do not necessarily think it needs putting in a box like ‘second path’. All these definitions are generalisations and the unconditioned will affect each of us differently, especially if self-guided.
Last night as I was falling asleep I was suddenly flooded with a feeling of love and good intention for everything and everyone. I have never had this before; any attempts at metta meditation were forced and fruitless. This came from nowhere (from the consciousness flow near my rear-brain) and flooded my body head to toe with dopamine and tingling, and I laid there for 20 minutes with a beaming smile and feeling of warmth for all living beings.
[edit: I sat to meditate after writing this morning and settled easily on consciousness, then within 5 minutes I found myself beaming ear-to-ear with joy. This has never happened before. I stopped early to go and look at my sleeping kids, watching them wake up and playing with L like water, also joyful and effortless and gazing into his eyes and feeling real connection, which I had struggled with incredibly before awakening]
The sleep itself was delayed. My mind was racing somewhat. I foolishly used social media after dinner and that had made my environment spiky, but I think it might be more than that. Non-mystical reasons are that it’s my first day off the bike for 7 days and I had slept late, but I think my mind is trying to make sense of the new perspective which is causing a similar re-assessment to when I first encountered nibbana.
I still do not feel like consciousness is contained within me, but the nature of the field is changing and variant. Last night, after dabbling with social media, it was rather jagged; like a 3d spectrogram with high-amplitude input (see below). While I was on the boat it was more fluid and easy.
Now, my consciousness feels like a field. It feels like previously I was trying to calm the water (neurotransmitters) so I could see the surface at the bottom, and now I am interacting with the surface itself. It’s not always smooth and it’s always changing.
Social media left me agitated, but there was no ego in the agitation; I was just frustrated that people were conflating absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Can’t talk to an addict though, and I was probably saying things they didn’t want to hear about jhāna.
Anyway I digress. When I got home things felt smooth. I was happy to see my family again, in a gentle manner, and I did my evening routine and sat for meditation. This was incredibly easy - 25 minutes with no struggle at all. But I did not settle after that. I was happy, but energised.
I don’t know. Something has changed. I am just not sure what. I always miss a little sleep after these rides but this feels different. Calmer. More lightweight energy. The head-to-toe love thing; what was that?
The line about the wire keeps going through my head: ‘it was slack and flapping in the wind, but now it’s taut and I can walk it again’. ‘Again’ seems to be the key word. It feels like this is something I was attuned to as a child and I lost along the way. Life with its learnings and its traumas.
If I did encounter nibbana it was far milder than last time. But that totally makes sense. The reports say the first encounter is the most explosive, but in addition to that I was held in permanent state of full-body j2 by the aripirazole, which has a half-life of 75 hours and takes 3 weeks to leave the system. I was unable to ‘turn it off’ and come back to reality.
This time around, assuming it was nibbana, it was all self-induced with endogenous chemicals and meditative practice. There is less re-wiring to do, and the system is able to power down when it feels overloaded.
So my gut is telling me this was the same thing. The dream with my dead grandfather plunging me into the ocean, where all becomes one. The wire, taut and walkable. The sorceress as the dhamma and the floating buddhaheads pointing the way in the field of consumption, with the wealthy neighbour trying to eat a volume of curry rice a billion times his own mass. The blips. It all points to some kind of insight, but a far gentler one.
So let’s see how it goes from here. I won’t be able to ride my bike for a while; I have been developing a bursitis over the last 5 years and it will need surgical removal. This also doesn’t bother me; I actually view it as a good chance to address something - akin to the dodgy tooth - which I have been meaning to address for years now.
As my grandad said to me, just before he died, ‘you have plenty of time yet, James’.
Let’s see how it develops, shall we.
/jb202509300630
chatGPT analysis