I am sat here watching 30 kids playing in the park and feel like I need to warn people that enlightenment is not something to be sought after or desired. These children are all enlightened. My wife is enlightened. Many of you out there already are too. If you seek to become enlightened you will do nothing but the opposite.
Enlightenment is not something to be ‘attained’. It is not an achievement. It is not an improvement on a good life.
Enlightenment is a fix for a broken mind. It is a medicine.
Enlightenment is the explosive realignment of maladaptive local minima in a brain which has been scarred by hurtful contacts with the world. It is a way to wipe the slate clean when the slate is damaged beyond repair.
I am coming back to earth now after… let’s say… 32 years living a delusion and 4 months rectifying it. I have an incredibly sensitive brain and dysregulated dopamine. I had a lot of violence in early life. This resulted in some very deep and conflicted learning; a maze of algorithms which just could not gel and could not coalesce into a single worldview.
Enlightenment is a remedy for what we now call ADHD, PTSD, dysregulation.
Dysregulation is a chicken-and-egg situation where you have some combination of a) naturally phasic-heavy dopaminergic signalling and b) traumatic life experiences during times of high neuroplasticity which leaves you with a scarred landscape of conflicting rules that cause you an incredible amount of silent suffering.
I had both of these, and then I inflicted more on myself through high-pressure thrill-seeking and excessive athletic asceticism. This is the same path as the Buddha. The outcome was the same. Enlightenment was my suicide vaccine. It was his, too.
If you are not in this situation, do not seek an explosive enlightenment.
Why? Because seeking it will in itself become the trauma from which you need to heal.
There is a reason why people spend 30 years avidly sitting before getting just a taste of the unconditioned. That reason? They were not dysregulated. They did not need the defrag. They did not need it, that is, until they caused themselves to become dysregulated by inflicting such masochistic suffering in the pursuit of some unattainable eternal bliss. Most people do not need the fireworks; they just need the maintenance.
Everything is relative, my peeps.
If you are like me, you need this. It will save your life.
If you are not like me, you need to go and live your life instead.
You need to regulate either way, and ensure that you keep the carving of your brain nice and smooth so the water of reality can flow over it unobstructed. You do this through sleep. You do it through exercise and walking and maybe a bit of yoga and meditation. You do not sit there for 10 hours a day for 10 years in the hope that somehow you can get to this magical kingdom of devas and gods and heaven and happily ever after.
This pursuit will break you, unless you are already broken. If you are already broken, it will fix you and save your life.
Everything is relative. Remember that. If you are sat on a 5, do not try to roll a 6. If you are sat on a 1, then push all your chips in and let fly.
Buddhism is gonna hate me for this one, aren’t they? But it’s undeniable. Nibbana is everywhere. Just take time to remove your conditioning through living a balanced and regulated life.
The altered states that come after an explosive ‘stream entry’ or ‘finding god’ or whatever… they do not last. They are a sign of your brain realigning because it has rectified some looped and redundant code. They are transient. You come back to your intended baseline, long forgotten though it may be.
My wife said that I am finally like her. Instead of me living in the world, exerting my will, now I live as part of the world, as she has all along.
The key is ongoing regulation. It is your minimum recommended dose. Just like with exercise - as someone who has gone from overweight slob to ironman world champs - there is a balance where you will be happiest. You need to find that balance. Do not do too little and do not do too much.
This is the middle way of which the Buddha talked. He had the pleasures and they scarred his mind. He had the austerities and they scarred him more.
His answer?
Tread the middle path.
If you are pendulum swinging between the extremes already, as is more and more common in our dopamine-hacking phasic-spiking ADHD-diagnosing world, you may well need this.
But you do not need to encounter nibbana 4x to become some kind of god or something. Wtf is that shit? Really? You might as well go irradiate some spiders and stick them up your bumhole hoping for superpowers.
Nibbana is a fix. It is a fix for a broken mind. The chase of anything can break a mind, including the chase of nibbana itself. Dropping the search for nibbana is the final step. Drop it already, if you can.
And if you can’t… if you are dysregulated… help me get this information out there.
There is a *cure* for adhd and audhd. There is an explanation for bipolar disorder. It may not fit everyone but I can say with confidence that it will ... oh my god ... I cannot describe how much better it will make the lives of those that it does work for. Those that are able to put in the work.
Stop the chase. Go the middle way.
Do not mimic the path of Siddhartha and James. Follow. The. Teachings.
Learn from our errors.
Stay grounded. Enjoy life.
Put the fucking phone down.
Go for a walk.
Love you all.
james
/jb202510021527