cessation

This is where the protocol gets its name: we induce a cessation event and an encounter with nibbāna.

A cessation event occurs when the mind completely shuts down its perceptual and temporal frameworks for a brief moment. Nibbāna is the term the Buddha used for reality in its unfiltered, purest form; this is what you experience for a brief moment when the system reboots.

The process is like rebooting an operating system after clearing its cache and redundant processes. Cessation is the restart; Nibbāna is the clean baseline the system briefly touches before normal processes resume. We enter a kind of 'safe mode' within the mind to make this possible, which is why maintaining a stable and wholesome scaffold during ordinary consciousness is essential.

This isn’t a mystical state but a reproducible phenomenological event that reveals the contingent, constructed nature of all experience.

The Buddha instructed his followers to reach cessation through absorption in meditative states known as the jhānas. These states progressively refine the brain’s neurochemical landscape, enhancing neuroplasticity by elevating dopamine and serotonin while modulating norepinephrine*. They are mirrored in modern trials of MDMA and aripirazole-assisted trauma therapy.

When a stable and balanced equanimity has been established, the practitioner allows perception of the conventional world to dissolve and enters directly into the internal scaffold; the 'imaginal world' as Jung termed it, or a 'safe container' in trauma therapy lingo.

The scaffold reflects the qualities you have cultivated throughout your life. It is also the domain you encounter as the perceptual framework collapses during death, which is why many people report visions and transcendental experiences, and come back a changed person after a near-death expeirence.

Individuals with stable dopaminergic environments often find it easier to cultivate jhānic absorption prior to cessation. Those with more volatile neurochemical patterns (such as myself) may find insight meditation more effective, as it engages attention through continuous observation of changing phenomena rather than resting in stillness.

Both approaches are valid. After a cessation event, jhānic entry typically becomes far more accessible, as the mind’s baseline stability has been fundamentally recalibrated. In this guide, I will focus primarily on meditation-adjunct techniques for modulating neurotransmitters in order to facilitate this process.

Following the reboot you will experience an accelerated and intensified phase of deconditioning. During this period, perception will oscillate between the ordinary and scaffold frameworks, and mood will swing between confidence and doubt. This is a normal part of the reintegration process and will stabilise over time. Productive ways to support this phase include writing, creating, spending time in nature, and engaging in grounding activities such as cooking, eating, and sleeping.