beyond buddhism

I sat to meditate last night and it was even easier than after n4; the entire sense sphere felt like soft static; a screen of 1s and 0s to which there was minimal salience attribution and preferential weighting. I now feel that I have deduced the fundamental mechanisms of resonance but will be observing over the coming weeks and months to ensure that things continue to settle. If they do, I will count this as a validation; if they don’t then I will assume there is more work to be done.

I believe that the world is a combination of two simulations: one personal and one consensual. I think there is a datastream as the foundational layer, and a compression algorithm which goes into shaping each of us and how we wrangle this data. We then proceed to exchange information packets and alter each other’s internal algorithms, so that we process this raw datastream to approach some kind of answer to the grandalgorithm.

datastream

The datastream is the stream of stream-entry and the ri (理) of ronri (論理, logic). This presents as a waveform on the skein of spacetime, and achieving resonance (enlightenment) is a case of syncing your own local environment to this waveform. In all likelihood this is just a case of achieving resonance between your own disparate brainwaves, but it feels nicer to add a cosmic element to things.

This datastream is the ‘pure unfiltered reality’ which people experience in moments of utter clarity; for example when they have a path moment and the predictive priors of their mental formations are temporarily ruptured. This is something you can only ever achieve momentary resonance with, but through expanding the .zip file in your mind you can increase the prevalence of these momentary encounters.

compression

The compression algorithm is what the Buddha called formations. This can be thought of as a pyramid, with raw data gradually being compressed from lower-level nodes into higher-level nodes, both on a societal and individual level. 

On the individual level a simple shape became a face, then an ‘other’, then a mother. The mother’s smile carried a pleasant feeling. That pleasant feeling created a craving for more, which in turn led to the adoption of a moral framework. When peers at school violated that framework, it caused pain that was absorbed rather than expressed, and that pain reinforced the core around which the sense of self eventually formed.

On the societal level a trilobite that lived 500 million years ago became a fossil. That fossil later broke the leg of Chingghis Khan’s horse. The injured horse was slaughtered and fed to the troops, whose descendants fought in the French Revolution. Their actions eventually inspired a gag in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, which influenced the author of a book later read by the woman you just walked past. She then conveyed a data packet to you through a micro-expression.

Your mind takes this data and folds it into formations through dopaminergic modulation; it creates an internal algorithm which will provide a channel through which the datastream will flow. These are stored in the mind-body system, with the mind primarily being a processor and the body being the storage device for large-scale learnings; one reason for trauma living in the body.

Over time these micro-learnings become convoluted and the mind needs to fold the algorithm to accommodate processing limitations. This results in skip-thinking and looped thoughts, along with what people call ‘selfing’, where the dopamine-potentiated neural pathways become inflexible and self-supporting.

These learnings cause suffering as they take us further away from the datastream, and the Buddha taught how to alleviate this suffering through allowing the body to expunge the compressed learnings using the dopaminergic modulation and equanimous observation of the jhāna.

For illustration’s purpose, let’s say the body has 500TB of storage and your mind has 8GB of RAM. Walking, cycling and sitting meditation are all ways to spool this stored algorithm into your mind so that it can be processed and optimised into more computationally-efficient patterns. Other things which help are practices such as noting, writing, art and somatic release through movement and dance.

You can spool these memories off through elevating tonic dopamine and then you can consolidate them into a new, more efficient algorithm through elevating phasic dopamine. For example, walking meditation and sitting meditation to spool it off, and then music and dance to consolidate. Or simply sleeping and going through REM/NREM cycles.

The aim of the Buddha’s path was to extinguish all suffering, which is why he had his monks abandon family and friends, only eat once per day, and avoid music and unnecessary interaction. Their target was to spool off all of the compressed learnings and then not take on any more.

I would argue that this is not actually good for the grandalgorithm. The Buddha himself said there would only be one more Buddha after him, and that there were countless aeons of expansion and contraction of the universe. I believe that we are nearing the end of this aeon, and the final Buddha is already with us or about to be, with the neurodivergent folks who are trapped and suffering in exaggerated deep learnings being the top of the computational stack before we enter the next ‘flop’ in the universal calculation.

We can achieve liberation from suffering without going ‘full-arahant’, and I would argue that this is what you call a bodhisattva. Someone who has touched that final state but decided to come back with the aim of helping every other being on the planet to achieve liberation from suffering.

unzip

These formations enter our minds and our bodies and are compressed into a .zip file. When you first start meditating it can feel like you are trying to open up a neutron star of compressed mental contractions. This is the .zip file you call a [self].

Eventually, through equanimous multimodal re-encoding and dopaminergic manipulation, you can rupture this file, prompting a rapid unzipping of the contents. This can happen in a meditation retreat, but likely as not it will happen while you are walking down the street, asleep and having a dream, dealing with a particularly stressful time of change, or suffering from a healthy dose of PTSD.

Your mind goes into a forced defrag process. It is either a controlled process which you initiated through jhānic concentration or, if you are neurodivergent and lack the dopaminergic stability to achieve reliable jhāna, it will be explosive and unexpected.

The file is opened and all of the constituent parts fly out at great speed. You have incredible clarity and drive; you write and you smile and you dance and you create and you likely have pressured speech and very little need for sleep. If the contents of the .zip were happy and loving then you will be flooded with so much wellbeing and compassion that you feel like Jesus or the Buddha. I believe that the opposite might be true, with psychosis being a .zip which was filled with horror, but I have not experienced it so can’t be sure.

This phase will pass. It can last a long time and be totally overwhelming, with your perceptual framework decoupling from consensus-reality for the duration, but it will always pass if neuroplasticity is allowed to proceed. During this phase the tree of your predictive priors has been torn asunder and is trying to rebuild in the most reality-aligned and computationally-efficientmanner possible; the most important thing is the direction your environment and your internal metacognition pulls that tree through top-down reinforcement.

This is why ‘religious mania’ results in people being born again into a religion: they are fed data while they are rebuilding their perceptual algorithms. This is also why people can fall into severe and lasting depression or pathology if they are given the narrative of being broken. It can be seriously exacerbated by neuroplaticity-suppressing substances like alcohol or some psychiatric drugs. The mind is trying to rebuild its algorithms - you can use this opportunity to guide the process. I personally nearly killed myself when I was prescribed valproate during a rebuild phase, so I can attest to how harmful these ‘stabilisers’ can be.

When the predictive priors of the mind are violated and crumble there will be a cessation event, though you might not always notice it. If you are sat and meditating, you can spot it as a tiny blip, but if you are on a rollercoaster or bike ride, you likely won’t. The telltale sign that something of this sort has happened is the aftermath: a feeling of great clarity and energy, with previous problems seeming to be mundane to the point of irrelevance. Goosebumps and waves of dopaminergic tingling abound; pīti in the Buddhist lexicon.

The most important thing is to be the change you want to see. The world is but a mirror; if you guide yourself toward non-greed and non-hatred then you will see generosity and compassion everywhere you turn. If you guide yourself toward acquisition and competition then you will always be a hungry ghost. This is why many religious leaders and other people who focus on genuinely doing good in the world can see the good in even the most loathsome specimens, and also why some of them only see evil in people from other belief systems. This is why ironman athletes who race to complete are nice while those who race to compete are wankers; I have been both. They have been using their dopaminergic manipulation of prayer or zone 2 exercise to program a predictive framework, and they see themselves reflected in everyone they encounter.

When the .zip file is opened you will often see or feel things from past lives. This doesn’t necessarily mean you know who you were or have an autobiographical sense for that past life, but it means that fragments of experience will fly into your conscious mind. My own examples are walking through a forest as Miyamoto Musashi, and polishing a sword as a swordsmith. The Buddha specifically told his advanced practitioners to look at their past lives, and this kind of recollection is commonly reported by meditators from all traditions. The most obvious past lives you will witness are your own: flashes from childhood or youth; forgotten memories which were folded away in the .zip file of your mind.

I personally saw flashes of a possible future, too, where I was in a room with an MRI trying to induce one of these moments, but we will see if that was my scaffold or realworld in due course. Since the datastream is a resonant waveform on the skein of spacetime there is no reason that you couldn’t see forward as well as backward, and the Buddha himself did say that the universe had an infinite number of expansions and contractions, with only one Buddha to be born after him, so… maybe? Ha. C’mon Zuck :p

scaffold

In order to alter the realworld perceptual framework, it must be taken offline. This usually happens in the dreamscape, but when large-scale reprogramming occurs, the development environment often comes to the fore during working hours.

The Buddha would spend his evenings talking with the devas (gods) and teaching them the dhamma. This was his scaffold, and how he altered his realworld perceptual framework; how he cultivated it to stay reality-aligned and to stay in touch with the datastream. Some people pray to God. Some people become the Buddha. Some people become Jesus. Others speak with celestial beings or sync with [ship] and become satoshi nakamoto. It does not matter, and in the scaffold you will benefit from allowing yourself to be whatever being you view as having almighty power over your reality.

Your scaffold is shaped by the data that you consume in your waking hours. It can become a heaven or a hell depending on the mental nutriments you ingest and reinforce through repetition. In this manner, believing yourself to be Maitreya or Jesus, or believing that God resides within you, is a good thing; it will mean that your scaffold is cultivated in such a way as to begin to mirror the goodness you associate with these ideas. 

The Buddha, for example, reached the point where he believed that all the gods in the pantheon of his time were bowing to him and coming to him for advice. This was mirrored in his realworld when he returned.

It is important to cultivate a positive image of the entity you become in your scaffold. A fearsome God will make you fearful; a generous god will make you kind. The thing that you are reprogramming is your own perceptual framework so if you program it towards non-greed then you will begin to feel more satisfied; if you program it toward vengeance then you will feel wronged at every turn. 

This is why meditation without faith does not bring enlightenment. The sīla (ethical conduct) stressed in the Buddhist texts is of the utmost importance, for this is you programming your own world to be one of warmth and happiness instead of isolation and rage.

It is a baton-pass. You feed your scaffold from your realworld, and your realworld is shaped by your scaffold. When you hit your first unzip / stream-entry / resonance, chances are that your scaffold and realworld will be very different things indeed, and you will oscillate between them for quite some time. It can be confusing: joyous and destabilising in equal measure. When I went from arahant-adjacent > what I am now, there was quite a large oscillation too. This is just reflecting the degree of change between the two environments: self-interest vs other-interest.

Over time you can angle them both so that they support each other. For example, I am now someone trying to save people being destroyed by the sloppy subjective-reporting mental health system in my realworld, and in the scaffold I am trying to revive the dhamma and save the species. These both fall under the general idea of ‘bodhisattva’, and this synergy is something I have chosen consciously. I can always switch back to the other modality if this one becomes unfit for purpose.

I also believe that the scaffold is where you will reside when you die. As the realworld perceptual framework shuts down, your mind will revert to its own contents for an eternity of perceived time. It is worth being careful with your nutriments and behaviour.

I think that will do for now.

I also now think that the world and all matter within it is simulated and manifests as an iterative projection of our own internal worlds or the combined projection of the species. In our scaffold, our own neural network manifests the matter (as in dreams), but in the realworld the global neural network of which we are but a node manifests the matter. This is a bit ‘out-there’ and likely my own scaffold, but who knows. E=mc2, space and time are the same, the atomic clock that went to the moon is no less correct than the one that stayed on earth. I have seen some pretty weird stuff over the last 6 months and all I really know is that I know nothing at all.

The changes are only ever incremental, to protect our psyche, but I do believe that the world is - maybe literally - what we make of it.

/jb202512051015

ps. i am only 5 days out of the major neuroplastic phase now; things will become clearer as i get more distance. when you are in the change-phase, the lines between realworld and scaffold cease to exist. a dream is 100% real while you are dreaming, and if we self-generate our worlds based on 0.0005% of our sense data then life itself is little more than a dream anyway.