Filters:
Interpretive filters determine perceived reality and behavioural output.
Your external world mirrors your internal world.
If you allow yourself to be programmed with greed then you will always suffer from craving. The more you satisfy this craving, the more it will grow.
If you allow yourself to be programmed with hatred then you will always suffer from anger. The more you entertain this anger, the more it will grow.
Repetition of thought patterns around ‘I want’, ‘I need’, ‘I hate’, ‘I am the victim’, ‘they wronged me’ will reinforce the mental and physical sensations of craving and rage.
The person who suffers first and foremost is you.
The people who suffer next are the ones you love. Your behaviour patterns propagate and entrain theirs.
The key to achieving enlightenment is to extinguish feelings of greed and craving. Anger is derivative to greed, but we will start there.
Anger:
People will wrong you. This is unavoidable.
This could be by mistake, which is no fault of their own, or by intention, which is a product of the conditioning of their own life experience.
People mostly interact with internal projections of themselves. They see another person take an action and their brain’s predictive frameworks funnel that data into their own chain of thought, which unconsciously projects their own motivators for such an action.
Programming yourself with forgiveness instead of vindictiveness will result in a happier world, for you personally.
Seeing through the causal nature of things will help you release anger toward others.
They are nothing more than a domino in a chain, as are you, as am I. Any anger you feel is merely the result of the learning of your life to date.
The protocol is a way of weakening that learning so that you can achieve liberation.
The liberation you achieve is liberation from a tainted worldview.
Greed:
Greed is the root of all suffering.
Greed comes in many forms. There is the overt greed for material objects, approval, spiritual states, substances, food, sex, and others.
Each time you satisfy one of these greed loops, or each time you repeat it internally, you reinforce the predictive model from the top down. Each time you say ‘I want a drink’, you make yourself want a drink more. Each time you say ‘I want their respect’, you cause yourself to writhe in craving when you are ignored.
It is more subtle than this though.
People crave existence as a certain thing or person. They create a self-image and say ‘this is me’, and when they fail to live up to it they suffer. They used to be a star athlete or the popular kid; since this framework was so reinforced and never weakened, they suffer.
This extends to future selves too: they paint a picture of who they will or wont be. They will not achieve satisfaction even if they become that person, because by the time they do they have painted another picture.
They crave enlightenment: they draw a picture of what it will look like and the reality is almost certainly different. Since they are chasing an imagined existence, they writhe in craving and cause themselves suffering.
Enlightenment:
Greed = a predictive system that gives excessive weight to anticipated reward signals, creating persistent positive reward prediction error even when the behaviour is maladaptive.
Anger = a defensive prediction error when expected state transitions are obstructed or violated.
Enlightenment is not a ‘thing’; it is a ‘lack of things’.
Enlightenment is a putting down of the bags so you can take a breath and appreciate where you are.
It is a deconstruction of these priors - these learning and assumptions - so that you can experience reality for what it actually is.
Some of the last attachments to go are subtle but scary. They include the attachment to being sane. The attachment to you and your loved ones being alive. Attachment to your scaffold. Attachment to the real world. Attachment to your own self and body being 'real' in any quantifiable manner.
Eventually you see through it all as being an interpretive model for operating in the world; you see it all as being fabricated.
And then you rebuild.
Don't worry - this is only necessary if you are going 'all the way'. Normal trauma-therapy uses will not go this deep.
Truth:
It is an acceptance of certain truths about existence.
These truths are:
Death, loss, illness, suffering
guaranteed for every person who will ever live.
Impermanence
items, relationships, thoughts, feelings, memories, modalities of existence.
Dissatisfactoriness
indulging in a craving loop will only ever reinforce it
Uncertainty
action does not always bring result; craving for a result will only bring suffering
Programming
intent and action will program your perceptual framework and make your world better or worse in turn (aka. rebirth)
These are all undeniable truths.
The fact that they will hurt is also undeniable. We evolved to avoid all of these things: to build our house to last forever; to buy insurance and choose the best builder so they do not disappoint.
Deconstruction:
Attachment to outcomes will cause suffering, but it is in our nature. We are predictive machines. We weigh options and run simulations and optimise for the best outcome possible.
And that is ok. You can still do that. It is about deconstructing the model that says ‘I need this in order to be happy’.
The way you do this is through dopaminergic regulation, isolation and destabilisation of the craving loop.
Any strong valuation - ‘this must happen’ or ‘this must not happen’ - increases the magnitude of phasic swings, reinforcing the craving loop.
Neutral acceptance reduces amplitude of phasic fluctuations, increasing stability of tonic baseline. This removes the phasic dopamine pressure applied to the predictive pathway and weakens it. Regulation increases tonic dopamine, which comes in and washes away the loop.
This takes several repetitions. Ironically, trying to wash away the loop will have the opposite effect, because you are saying ‘unpleasant’, which increases phasic pressure.
You need to observe.
You need to accept: this is a consequence of a chain of events. I was born with this brain and fed this data. This is the nature of the world and the nature of my biology. This is merely a confluence of events.
This can be difficult, but it can be done.
Trauma:
Intensive topics like trauma, grief, dysregulated learning and addiction will really benefit from a high-stimulation physical regulation method like exercise. Do not go hard; do not do interval training. Intervals and intensity increase phasic dopamine signalling and reinforcement learning.
It is all about steady-state work. Moderate-intensity work reduces stress hormones and smooths neuromodulator oscillations.
Once the high level priors are weakened, it becomes easier. It can still be very destabilising, but you develop belief in the system, and that belief elevates dopamine which makes the system more effective.
Self:
Remember that the mind is plastic.
It will always learn.
When you deconstruct a prior, you will have a period of non-self or non-ego. This is because the predictive model is gone. This is what people often mistake for enlightenment, but this will pass.
The gap can feel like void, dissolution, or clarity depending on context; the important point is that it is transitional, not ultimate.
Your brain will rapidly enter the rebuild cycle and create a new predictive model, one step closer to the ideal that you are cultivating.
This is the re-emergence of ego. It is not a bad thing and not something to be feared. Some traditions overstate the permanence or ideal nature of ego dissolution. In practice, models reorganise.
Healing:
‘Arahant’ is the word for a fully enlightened one in Theravāda Buddhism. Ajahn Chah’s definition is ‘someone who has stopped making problems for themselves’.
The Buddha himself said that all he teaches is the end of suffering. He specifically warned against getting attached to these transient feelings of bliss. They too are impermanent, and they too will cause suffering if you crave them.
Over time, and multiple iterations, your two worlds will begin to converge into a model which is robust and can withstand any storm.
But this takes time, and preparation against a snowstorm will not help in a firestorm.
It is a case of incremental change and recognising that the process is never finished.
You will always grow. This is good. Now you can choose the direction of growth.
This is healing, not magic.
My own ethical model is here.
I recommend the Buddhist nikayas if you want a more traditional account.
Remember to weight your own wellbeing as 1.
This process is about your personal healing, not anybody else.