Embedded Files
The model we use for the mind has three tiers: dopamine, formations and consciousness. These correspond to the Buddhist insight theory stages of regulation, deconditioning and cessation.
Dopamine --> regulation
Dopamine is the foundational substrate on which everything sits.
As a baby our brains are mush. Through D1-dominant phasic encoding of reward and threat we form our view of the world. When a D1 spike of dopamine hits, the consciousness 'binds' a stimulus with a feeling.
A mother's smile causes pleasant feelings while a hot pan results in pain. These pairs are encoded into the mind as a formation.
Think of dopamine as an inland sea with waves, a tide, and a limited amount of water. D1 phasic dopamine is the waves, D2 tonic dopamine is the tide, and the water is the overall supply.
The first step is to calm the waves so that you can begin to cultivate your formations. We do this through regulation.
Formations --> deconditioning
Formations are the learnings of life. Over time they become convoluted and outdated. Not all smiles are well-meaning and not all pans are hot. We un-learn these rules through a regular supply of tonic dopamine to our D2 receptors. We do not lose memories; we only lose the painful emotions attached to them.
Some of us are dysregulated because of genetics, trauma or past addiction. We need to put more work into up-regulating our D2 receptors and modulating dopaminergic tone or we can end up with a head full of noise and conflict.
You can think of dopamine as being stuck potentiating maladaptive neural pathways so you have less left over to comprise the tide of unlearning. This results in painful thought-feeling loops we struggle to drop.
Formations are channels and tunnels carved in the beach. Waves of phasic dopamine make them deeper and more convoluted. Raising the tide of tonic dopamine will consolidates them and washes the feelings away.
We spend time de-charging the maladaptive and traumatic deep learning of our lives through deconditioning.
Consciousness --> cessation
Consciousness is the kid on the beach with a shovel. The kid can't do much while the waves are tempestuous. We need to shift our propensity away from D1-phasic and toward D2-tonic dominance if you want the kid's efforts to bear fruit.
Once the waves have calmed, the kid can come in and start to consolidate the tunnels of learning. They can cultivate new, wholesome learning which will help us have a warm outlook on the world. The kid can also line up negative viewpoints which will cause you harm, so be careful what ideas you consume.
Once the groundwork of identifying maladaptive learning has been done, raising overall dopaminergic tone sufficiently will serve to bridge the formations and make them into a lower-noise, lower-energy circuit. It will make your mind quiet and easy.
This process involves a calming and focusing the consciousness so that the various waves in the brain can near synchronicity. When people say they are syncing their consciousness with the universe, what they are (probably) doing is syncing their various brain waves so they approach harmony. For example, taking the alpha wave to 8Hz and the gamma wave to 40Hz, meaning that they achieve parity for 1 in every 5 gamma cycles.
Combined with stable D2 dopaminergic signalling, this eventually results in a cessation event where thalamo-cortical signalling drops to near-zero and all active formations see their operation cut off for a split second.
The system reboots but it is no longer trapped in the concurrent marble-runs of formation and can instead start the calculation anew, redistributing dopaminergic tone across circuits.
Modalities
The curation of our mental landscape can occur through two primary modalities: intentional cultivation or forced defragmentation.
In intentional cultivation, the individual consciously refines their cognitive and emotional frameworks. This tends to produce gradual and stable improvements in mental clarity and well-being, as old patterns are replaced deliberately rather than reactively.
By contrast, forced defragmentation arises when the mind becomes overloaded with conflicting rules, beliefs, or emotional imprints. When the internal contradictions exceed a tolerable level, a spontaneous reorganisation may occur, sometimes experienced as an explosive awakening.
A history of dopamine dysregulation, trauma, and addictive behaviour can prime the system for such a rupture, often around midlife or following a triggering event like acute stress or PTSD. At that point, the brain prioritises survival by purging incompatible patterns.
If no coherent scaffold for meaning exists, the mind constructs one from whatever data it has accumulated. This is how religions are born.
Misdiagnoses
Awakenings have existed for as long as humans have. So have forms of dopamine dysregulation. By contrast, the psychiatric framework, formalised through the DSM, has existed for about seventy years, and has stabilised conceptually only in the last thirty. This mismatch in timescale explains many of the misdiagnoses that occur when natural cognitive reorganisations are filtered through a medical model.
The awakening process is frequently misinterpreted and sometimes dangerously mistreated by modern psychiatry. Because the process involves cyclical and accelerating phases of deconditioning, its outward expressions can resemble mood disorders - most often bipolar disorder.
The clarity phase is often mistaken for mania.
The doubt phase is mistaken for depression.
The crisis phase is mistaken for a mixed episode.
Standard psychiatric interventions then introduce neuroplasticity-suppressing medications, such as valproate or benzodiazepines, which can trap the individual in the darker side of the cycle, sometimes inducing genuine depression or suicidality.
An intense crisis phase can feel as though our world is collapsing, while an intense clarity phase may temporarily decouple perception from consensus-reality as the mind rebuilds its interpretive model. Being labeled manic or psychotic at this juncture can damage both the inner scaffold and the functional systems that operate in daily life.
Traditionally, such passages were supported by priests, shamans, or guides familiar with these psychological terrains. Today, many who enter this process - often through trauma, deep inquiry, or mere circumstance - find themselves without cultural or spiritual frameworks to navigate it.
The aim of this website is to serve as a modern touchpoint: guidance for those who find themselves in the midst of reorganisation without a clear map.
A practical distinction between awakening and pathology lies in the outcome.
If you emerge from a cycle with increased clarity, peace, and coherence, albeit with a fair bit of confusion, it is likely a deconditioning process. If you emerge diminished or destabilised, pathology may be involved. But even then, poor outcomes often trace back to a malformed scaffold shaped by chronic exposure to fear, greed, and negative media.
Ultimately, both your inner scaffold and your external world reflect the quality of the data you allow into them. Each can become heaven or hell, depending on the information from which they are built.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse