My Momentary Experience of Nirvana


c. March 2015

1 Why am I Telling this Story?

To further the cause of truth. What follows is an account of what is in a sense a phenomenon of nature, and I hope the reader will not derive any conclusions from it that are not inherent or implied. I cultivate a “scientific” outlook on the matter and it is my hope that others will do the same. I should also say that there are many aspects to the following that I ordinarily would not share (for instance, my use of marijuana), but I believe it is necessary to provide a full account.

2 Where I’m Coming From

Although there is much in religious traditions that I admire and find inspiration in, I am not religious. Like most people, I believed in the existence of a God when I was younger. By the time I finished high school, and certainly by freshman year of college, I had become what most people would call an atheist. Some friends in college more charitably referred to me as ‘agnostic,’ but my own view was not quite in either camp; it was more a kind of thoughtful apathy that may be best characterized by something Carl Sagan once said (and which I read in his ‘Cosmos’ as a kid): that in ancient times people often asked “How far to the ends of the Earth?” It must have seemed a perfectly reasonable question to them; after all, it could only be, say, less than ten thousand miles, or more than ten thousand miles. What other possibilities are there? But this question was never answered. Instead, it would be found to be poorly framed because, of course, the Earth being round does not have “ends.” No, we never answered that question; we transcended it. It was the same with my views on religion. The questions that religions (and atheists, and agnostics) ask and purport to answer, in my view, would similarly one day be found to be poorly framed. We would never answer these questions – they would just be found to be transcended in ways that we cannot today imagine.

I don’t like to wear my views on my sleeve but I wanted to make the above clear because while there’s nothing wrong with being religious (or being an atheist), one who is religious does by definition hold certain things to be true axiomatically that people of other viewpoints do not. Thus, I wanted to make clear that I have no such presumptions that I seek to validate. Additionally, my knowledge of philosophy in general and “Eastern” philosophies in particular wasn’t historically much above layman level, with some basic idea of a handful of ideas from Vedanta philosophy and essentially zero knowledge of Buddhist philosophy.

If indeed there was any presumption in me at all it was that science could tell us everything that it is possible to know about nature. It was inconceivable to me that this could ever be found to be wrong not because I assumed it axiomatically, but because I thought about it and convinced myself that it had to be true. I’ve never been afraid to consider crazy and foolish ideas (but I usually don’t tell anybody about the most embarrassingly silly ones I think about), including the possibility that science might be wrong or inadequate in some way, because I’m confident that I’d never compromise on my standards for what constitutes real knowledge. Thus, although I always kept my mind open to the possibility that science may be supplanted by another method in the future, I never encountered anything that supported this possibility. It seemed to me that scientific method was a formalization and generalization of our own innate process of observing and understanding, and therefore how could anything evade it? Just like in the case of the “ends of the Earth” example, however, there is an invisible presumption here which I’ve now come to believe is invalid. Nature is a tricky, tricky fox of a thing.

For the record, the above makes it sound like all this was very intentional on my part but in reality all this is just a linear characterization that may be made in hindsight. I had no particular reason for following this line of thinking; it probably just emerged in the course of life and a sincere effort to understand.

3 My Quest in the Last Few Years

In order to understand what follows, it may be necessary to understand what I have been doing for the last few years. Sometime in early 2011, I began work on a research paper with the goal of solving the privacy problem on the web. In the course of working on it on nights and weekends over the course of a year, it became increasingly clear that working part-time was not going to be enough. There was a lot to learn, and every time I began to start to make sense of something, it would be Monday and the start of another long workweek. I waited to build up enough savings to be able to quit my job in order to work on the problem full-time, and in mid-2012 I was able to do that when the tech startup I worked for was acquired by a larger company, giving me, by my reckoning at the time, a runway of about a year – not that I’d need it of course. By this time it had also become clear that the model that I was working on went beyond privacy and could possibly be the model, it seemed to me, underlying the functioning of the brain itself. I was hoping to be done with the paper by late 2012, but the “rabbit-hole” kept going deeper. As I was telling a friend not long ago, it was like a Duck Tales comic I remember reading when I was a kid, where in one story, while walking through a desert, Donald Duck stumbles on a small rock in the sand and then predictably hurls a volley of curses at it. Huey, Dewey and Louie (Donald’s nephew ducks, but everyone knows that) run over to inspect and then start to dig around the rock, and as they dig away at the sand the rock is revealed to be much larger than it first seemed and with a distinctive triangular shape. Eventually Uncle Scrooge brings in some heavy machinery and they continue digging, and it emerges that the little rock outcropping was the tip of a huge pyramid, buried by the eons.

It was the same with my paper. I started with privacy, discovered what I believed to be connections to the brain, and then became convinced that what I was working on what a model underlying the very nature of reality itself – at least to the extent that that reality has any meaning for us. I called the model “identity architecture.” One of the tantalizing aspects of this model was that although some of the mathematical content is very modern, there was nothing in the philosophical ideas involved that required any modern technology to discover. I had a sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind that perhaps this is what we’ve all been up to all along. Two years later, working full-time in complete social isolation, I was getting close.

4 A Visit From a Friend

Sometime in mid 2013 an old friend visited San Francisco. This friend is very bright and our conversations always proceeded at a high clip – sometimes in more ways than one; we often smoked marijuana as we talked, which lends a visceral appreciation that goes well with conversations of a cerebral nature, as many users will attest. Anyway, this friend has always been interested in Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy, and this was one of the many topics (which included fractals and strange loops, I seem to recall, the latter of which my friend memorably illustrated by pointing out that we were having “a conversation about the conversation...”) that came up in conversation. He brought up the possibility of reincarnation and how that might operate. Although we considered different possibilities I remained unconvinced that it could possibly be true. Information corresponding to our personalities is stored in our brains; when we die what possible substrate could retain these personalities? “What is the substrate?” was my question. He attempted a hypothesis but it seemed vague to me although I don’t recall what it was. In any case, it did not satisfactorily address what I’ll call “The Substrate Problem.” We’ll return to this later, though not quite in the context of reincarnation.

In those days, I had been working on my paper for a long time and was increasingly anxious at the tremendous investment that it was taking which had as yet produced nothing tangible as far as anyone else was concerned. The anxiety often affected my productivity, so when my friend mentioned that he had been dabbling in meditation and described what that was like, it sounded like a good thing for me to try.

Thus I began meditating for about 20 minutes at the start of each day, principally to manage stress and anxiety, and peripherally due to the “nerd chills” associated with mastery of the mind. I did not expect meditation to lead to a goal of any kind, and I certainly did not have one in mind.

5 The Treachery of Words

Before we continue, I must caution the reader regarding the “treachery” of words. Words are a mechanism by which we translate ideas from one mind to another. There are no guarantees that this translation will be accurate, even if both parties believe this to be the case. The example that comes to mind is the story related by Richard Feynman that in some institute where he was working, it emerged in conversation with his (equally esteemed) colleagues that some of them could read the newspaper and count numbers in their heads at the same time, while others couldn’t. Investigating further, Feynman discovered that the reason was that, while some people counted in their heads by “hearing” the numbers mentally, others did so “visually,” like seeing the numbers being played on a film. Those who did the former (if I recall correctly) were able to read simultaneously while they counted, since the mechanisms proceeding in their heads were different for the two operations of reading and counting.

The lesson here is that even though we will always agree in dialogue – through words – about, say, the mechanics of counting and the results of counting, their representations in our minds may be very different. One person’s blue may be another person’s red in their minds, but in conversation they’ll always agree which is which.

This may not seem important but in fact it is vital, because if we assume that words are capable of producing exact translations across minds, we lull ourselves into a false sense of security that we have really understood something when we read or hear it, when in reality the intended meaning might have been very different. Perhaps even radically different. This problem becomes especially pronounced in the case of uncommon ideas, especially philosophical ideas, and most especially, as it turns out, buddhist ideas.

Therefore I urge the reader: beware of words, and in particular my words that follow. Sometimes they’ll convince you that you know something which you don’t. Avoid cultivating certainties in your interpretations and beliefs; stop short at high confidence. As the Upanishads poetically put it, “Those who worship ignorance enter into the depths of darkness, but those who are addicted to knowledge are as though in greater darkness.”

6 The “Levels” of Meditation

When I started meditating in early 2013, I found it difficult to clear my mind at first. There was a ceaseless chorus of thoughts, and even when I managed to find a stray patch of silence, thoughts would always emerge unbidden before long. A few weeks in, however, I found that I was able to clear my mind, with some effort. A ha, I thought, “so this is what meditation is,” presuming that I’d finally “made it.”

For the purposes of what’s to follow, I’ll call this stage of meditation “level 1.” For a few months I continued to meditate almost daily. I’d still often want to avoid meditating after waking up, just as one often wants to avoid doing exercise. It’s not necessary after all; maybe I should just work. But in those moments of avoidance I’d remember a quote from the Dalai Lama that I don’t even remember where I heard, which is “meditate for 20 minutes every day, unless you’re really busy. In that case, meditate for an hour.” This quote was really quite true, I found. Those days on which I least wanted to meditate were the ones on which I benefited from it most of all – to quell the background, silence the bad thoughts, clear my mind for a productive day.

I never actually read any literature on meditation; I mostly just did what I felt would help me: sometimes I’d form a mental picture of my day’s activities before beginning “real” meditation. Sometimes I’d focus on a single thing for prolonged periods “to build focus.” Sometimes I’d follow thoughts to let them express themselves and be heard, before sending them on their way. Sometimes I’d focus on my breathing and imagine that I was nothing but a breathing organism which may as well have been a bacterium. Sometimes I’d let intuition be my guide, in a world of abstractions that did not need to be expressed in words. But the underlying effort was to build strength of mind in order to sustain emptiness.

A few months in, I found that I was able to reach a stage where I could sustain a clear mind without effort. That is, while formerly the clear mind required active effort to silence emerging thoughts, in this new state, thoughts did not automatically emerge and it required (very minimal) effort in fact to think them. The equilibrium state was one of thoughtlessness, even numbness. A ha, I thought again, so this is what meditation really is. A true clear mind. We’ll call this stage, the one where the mind remains clear and insulated without effort, “level 2.”

All of this was having positive results. I remember telling my brother once how I could now usually avoid thinking about something if I didn’t want to, while formerly that would have been almost impossible. I generally consider myself to have very average levels of focus. I’ve historically found it almost impossible to follow a linear itinerary of thinking for prolonged periods, and usually go from one thought to the next to the next in a chain reaction that often lands me very far from where I expect to end up (not that this has changed much since I began meditation, but it may be more bridled now). So this progress in meditation is not, I think, by virtue of any unique ability on my part.

One night in February 2014, I woke up in the middle of the night and wasn’t able to go back to sleep. Since I wasn’t able to sleep anyway, I decided to go into the living room and, for whatever reason, to meditate. I often do things without good reason so there’s nothing especially unusual about this act. But in the quiet of night and perhaps in the absence of particular things crying out to be done in that borrowed patch of wakefulness, I must have drifted into a fairly deep meditation. I don’t remember exactly what it was like, but in hindsight I reached a state that night that I’ve retrospectively christened “Level 2.5” – a state where there were only “essences” and nothing real. “The Essential State” is what I call it now, though I wouldn’t be too married to any of these terms of characterization since even for me, it’s usually difficult to tell just which of these states I’m in. The natural characterization will certainly be different for each person.

I must have lingered there for some time. At the end of a prolonged period of sustained “essentiality,” something started to change. It was unexpected and I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on, but I allowed it to proceed, and in a few short moments there was a gradual transformation, a transition of some kind. It was accompanied by a climax. A literal climax – a visceral pleasure sensation in my mind. It was obviously unexpected and so despite myself I must have gotten excited, and I wasn’t able to hold the “new” state for longer than maybe 20 seconds. The transition wasn’t even entirely complete, it seemed. I wasn’t able to hold it. After that I continued for several more minutes but it was evident that it would not be happening again as I was too “excited” to sustain any deep states.

After I concluded the meditation my immediate thoughts were as to how natural selection could possibly have given rise to this mechanism. How is meditating for hours linked to survival, that it should be “rewarded” by this pleasure sensation? I guessed that it might have some indirect connection to sexual reproduction somehow. I searched the web for any accounts of this phenomenon. “Meditation climax,” “meditation sex,” “meditation masturbation,” were some of the keywords I entered. It may sound funny but a climax is just what it was. A literal climax, entirely localized in the mind. I don’t recall that the web search yielded anything of note. In my log from that day (I have maintained a daily log since around late 2012) I wrote, “Woke up around 3:30 and couldn’t sleep. Got out of bed and meditated for a while. This time I was able to reach a new place of nothingness where it felt like my mind folded in on itself. Real nothingness, beyond even the “real nothingnesses” I’ve encountered before. Makes me wonder how many more such levels there are. I’m sure this isn’t the last one, strange though it was.” I called it Level 3, the “independence” state. Independence because it felt like I was disconnected, independent of reality. In hindsight this state is called samadhi in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain meditative tradition, and may well be the last level of this kind. And if I had to guess, the climax isn’t evolutionarily connected to reproduction, but, evolutionarily or otherwise, to death.

In subsequent weeks I was able to reach or come close to this Level 3 a few times, but was never able to sustain it for very long. Here are some sample logs from that period (initial experience of level 3 was on Feb 19):

Feb 23: “while meditating I reached a point where “releasing further” felt like it may be treacherous, somehow. And I stayed there and didn’t go further. Wonder if you can “release your hold on life” while meditating and so accidentally die! Uh, probably not.”

Mar 28: “good meditation session where I briefly reached “level 3”. I noticed again a pleasure sensation at the moment when that transition happens. intriguing.”

Mar 29: “it felt easier to “make wide leaps” in meditative state and I came close a few times to the “level 3” but didn’t quite get there.”

Apr 15: “meditated for almost two hours. good session but didn’t break through to any deep states”

7 The Return of the Friend

A year had passed and my friend had returned for another trip to San Francisco. This time I mentioned the climax in meditation, unsure whether it was anything unusual for people who practice meditation, but my friend didn’t know what to make of it.

8 “Depression”

In that period, a few other things were going on. First, I had begun to make preparations for release of my paper, which I felt was nearing completion. It’s true that I’d felt that way for the majority of the almost three years that I’d worked on it (i.e. one year part time, coming up on two years full time), but this time it was real – I could see the various strands coming together, the draft was beginning to look cohesive and complete.

Another thing that was going on at this time was something that had been going on for a long time. A latent sense of “depression” had increasingly framed the background of my life. “Depression” wasn’t the word I used. It was my mother who opined that I may be depressed. Personally, I recognized a sense of fatalism, a negative aspect, something not happy. And yet, I couldn’t quite put a word to it. It didn’t seem to be depression since I was still able to work through it; it wasn’t affecting my productivity.

The feeling was in retrospect brought into sharper relief upon the visit of a friend to the Bay Area. Messages were flashing back and forth on social channels. One part of me was laughing inside, ready to reach out and touch this part of who I was. I’d made the conscious choice to withdraw from society to focus on my work (for many reasons), but surely the visit of a shared friend was a special occasion. But somehow it didn’t feel right. I didn’t think it would be “right” for me to go. And so I did nothing. The messages continued, voices of a life I once knew crying out it seemed, and then quietly subsided. I sent a belated message expressing my inability to make it, but it was moot in any case.

That afternoon, the afternoon of April the 24th, as Meagan (my long-suffering girlfriend) and I were having lunch, the topic of my disposition came up. Meagan wanted to know what she could do to help.

9 April 24, 2014

I wrote about the lunch conversation: “over lunch meags said she wanted to know what she could do to help. I didn’t think there was anything anyone could do, for some reason, but it got me talking anyway. And in talking, I realized, as I articulated to her, that the state of mind whose manifestations I’d understood to be fatalism was not depression, but in fact mourning. I felt a sense of mourning at the death of the old Siddu, and had started to realize that it would be difficult to be that person again, and that it seemed likely that I never would.”

The reason why I felt this way, aside from my austere situation, can probably best be expressed in the novelist Thomas Wolfe’s famous dictum that “you can’t go home again.” “Siddu” incidentally is the first name I remember having, as a child, and the one I still call myself in my mind.

Evening found me working. Meagan wasn’t at home, gone to meet a friend I seem to recall. At the time, I was researching the final section in my paper, a section on religious traditions. By that time, I’d already discerned some fascinating abstractions in the “Abrahamic” religious traditions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) that could be characterized using the models described in my paper. I was now researching the “Dharmic” religious traditions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism). I’d initially planned to spend a couple of days on this section, but the reading of Dharmic philosophy was proving to be a dense undertaking. I sensed a familiarity in this philosophical tradition that suggested that it described similar ideas to what I was talking about in my paper, but I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on the exact relationship to my work. So I continued reading. The sense of familiarity lingered, but it was to be another year before I would tease out the exact connection. Thankfully, that full discernment wasn’t necessary to precipitate what happened later that night.

By nightfall, as part of some general unfocused reading in this area, I found myself reading a section on “Nirvana” in a translation of the Lankavatara Sutra by Suzuki and Goddard that I found online. As it turns out, this is considered an important Buddhist work, though I had no idea of this at the time. The reading was proving to be heady and fascinating. Meagan returned home as I was in the middle of this activity. And in exchange for giving her a head massage (the currency of our relationship) she acquiesced to hearing me explain what I was reading about in the Lankavatara Sutra. In it, I explained, the character of the Buddha describes the various conceptions of the phenomenon of Nirvana held by philosophers of different traditions. Explaining my interpretation of what was being said was helping me clarify my own understanding.

The marijuana pipe that my friend and I had smoked a few weeks earlier still lay in a corner of my desk, and I noticed it there around this time. I thought to put it away but there was still some “green” amidst the black and so I considered smoking what was left of it before doing so. In the years since college it is not often that I smoke when I’m by myself, and especially not when I’m trying to work. Thus, it was only after I engaged in a quick but reasoned decisionmaking that I decided to smoke it. That reasoning was as follows: (1) There couldn’t possibly be much left in this pipe; two of us smoked it a few weeks ago and it hasn’t been refilled once, (2) I’ll only smoke enough to put a “sparkle” on things, not to get high, (3) it’s a happy confluence of fates, this buddhist philosophy is pretty trippy after all.

I recall taking a single hit – two at most – of this residual quantity that had already been smoked by two people a few weeks prior. I was not “high” as a result. In fact, since I reached the “sparkle” I sought, I didn’t smoke any more and the pipe is still not entirely spent. It remains in a drawer of my desk today exactly as it was on that night. An experienced user of marijuana would agree, I imagine, that this is unlikely to have had much effect on anything, and indeed I would characterize my state that night as mostly sober. Still, I feel impelled to mention this detail since it may have been a factor in what followed; in my view, it’s not entirely unlikely that it may have “helped,” though I do not believe it to have been essential or even significant.

Although Nirvana is an idea that has been in the background for most of my life, as it is in the background for most people in the mainstream, and perhaps especially so for those who have grown up in “the East,” it was just a cool idea that I never really thought directly about because, in hindsight, of a subconscious assessment of it as existing outside my accepted worldview. A romantic conception of it that I held in my mind was probably something like “enlightenment – a realization of the true nature of things purely by thinking.” But as I said this was just a romantic conception that the rational side of me never took seriously since, for example, one cannot discover an electron purely by thinking. Therefore, the implicit latent understanding that I held could, in retrospect, be summarized as follows: Nirvana is some kind of meditative mastery of oneself and one’s emotions, an ideal of perfect self-control and deep empathy for others that emerges from understanding of oneself, which one cultivates through meditative discipline. This interpretation is entirely mundane and conventional and, while impressive and suggestive of superlative discipline, does not contain anything unbelievable. Supreme self-control and empathy – it’s just an ideal to strive toward.

This latent conception was one of those that the Buddha enumerates in that section of the Lankavatara. This, and many others that might have seemed (latently) plausible to me, all enumerated one by one, and all derided as incorrect, immature, misguided, wrong. Still more conceptions were enumerated that I didn’t know anything about, which were evidently espoused by philosophers of the time. All of these were evidently not what Nirvana was. Finally, (the character of) the Buddha says, in describing what Nirvana actually is, “if they only knew it, all things are in Nirvana from the beginning.”

“All things are in Nirvana from the beginning.” I didn’t know what to make of it. I think I may have projected a low-confidence interpretation of this and then moved on. But the mind, or the brain if you prefer, doesn’t easily let go of things that are unresolved. I returned to researching other things, picking up on some other readings I’d identified, and soon after returned to working on my paper as Meagan brushed and got ready for bed. A few minor edits here and there, I seem to recall. I don’t recall exactly what changes I made during this time. Not long after, I heard Meagan call me from the bedroom. She was having trouble sleeping, and suggested I talk to her until she fell asleep. So I went in and we started talking. Our cat Ferdinand was already there, I think, probably sleeping sideways and occupying half the bed as he usually does. We talked about some idle things, this and that.

As we talked my mind was preoccupied with unresolved things. “All things are in Nirvana from the beginning” came back to me. How can all things already be in Nirvana “if they only knew it?” “All things are in Nirvana from the beginning,” I rolled it around in my mind... and slowly I came upon an interpretation of it that was a subtle inversion: “All things are in Nirvana... we are in something” ... “if we only knew it.” All this time these thoughts had been building in the back of my mind and were now at a sudden, unexpected crescendo, until they no longer remained in the background but became all I was. And I saw it. Writhing, infinite causality. This thing that we were all in, this thing that we were all part of – still only a mental imprint, but things went spontaneously from there.

The next few seconds are a blur. You know that feeling when you’re half asleep and hear conversations around you but aren’t really aware of them, but when you wake up are able to vaguely piece together what was said? That’s how those next few moments felt, when I was vaguely aware of my own being, and it felt like I may have been shaking my head. In retrospect, a slow easing was taking place, and awareness was receding from me into something else. When I came to I was still sitting on the bed. Meagan, normally unflappable, was sitting up before me looking at me with an expression of concern. She had been saying something, but the first thing I remember her saying is “You’re scaring me, honey...” Ferdinand too was looking up at me with what seemed a perplexed, curious expression. That moment had a revolutionary, “mythological” quality to it, and as I came to (not that I had lost consciousness) I think I may have exclaimed (repeatedly) “Oh my God!” until, to allay Meagan’s increasing concern, I told her that I knew “what the Buddha was talking about!” She urged me to write it down “before you forget.” There was no chance of my forgetting this, but it was good advice all the same. As I returned to the living room and sat down to write, I arrested myself for a second and thought, “hold on, wait a second. Is this real?” – here I was running with this thing that was just crazy, could it be that I’m confused in some way? I had as yet not articulated what it was that I “knew” – it was at that stage just something I knew intuitively. And in answer to that question I simply “looked” in my mind at what I was “seeing,” and there it was, gloriously transcendent, staggeringly vast – whatever it was – this awareness that was me; this awareness that included me. The answering thought was understated in the realization of the futility of expressing the degree of its own certainty: “Yes. It’s real.” It was like seeing the ocean for the first time and looking again to confirm it wasn’t just another puddle. It is necessary to realize however that the experience was not “visual” – it was “experiential.” I saw it, became it with my “mind” – my being – and not my eyes nor even my thoughts. I made the following log entry in those moments: “I think I just “attained enlightenment.” My hands are shaking. Identity architecture shows us what things ultimately are, and how they come together. It seems that the Buddha, anticipating the essence of my paper by over two thousand years, told us what that thing is that they come together as. Awareness of that thing is the experience of nirvana - enlightenment - the freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth.” (I was referencing the often-used description of Nirvana as a “freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth” rather than asserting that this was my belief. I had found this phrase perplexing in the past: why would you want to be free from such a cycle? Life is not so bad. Of course, it made a different kind of sense now, which is why this otherwise incidental phrase came back to me then.). For about ten minutes following the experience, I remained aware of this awareness that included me. I could travel between the two awarenesses – my familiar human awareness, and the unfamiliar transcendental awareness – without traveling at all, it was simply a matter of choosing which one to be. The scale of the awareness was vast, it was very “far away,” though it was certainly not in terms of “distance” in any conventional sense of the word. It was something like “conceptual distance.” “I” – the human – was only a “point” in it. If I had had any extension at all I might have had some sense of the scale, but as a point, it was really impossible to tell. However, in those moments, I hesitated to explore that awareness because I thought, “What if I can’t come back?” I was confident that I’d be able to attain that state again, and so I decided to finish my work on the paper and release it to the world first so that both my efforts on identity architecture as well as the knowledge of the possibility (and actual nature) of Nirvana experience would not be lost to the world.

Now, this confidence that I would be able to return to Nirvana stemmed from a complex web of reasoning entailing my reconciliation of what had happened with possible causes, and the conclusions I derived from this. First, there was my identification of the “Level 3”/samadhi state as being equivalent to the present state. That is, I believed that the samadhi state, together with the intuitive realization of what it was (which I now possessed), were the salient constituents in Nirvana experience. I believed this to be true in the sense analogous to the following situation: Imagine you enter a dark room and see a faint silhouette with a unique shape. You have no idea what it is since it’s so dark, but you can discern vague distinctive qualities in the shape. Now a few days later, you visit an art store and, in a corner, spy a sculpture with a unique shape. A distinctive, familiar shape. And in that moment it suddenly clicks – the object in that dark room from a few days ago was this sculpture. You didn’t return to that room, and yet, you now have a degree of conviction as to the nature of the object which you encountered there. It was the same with “level 3” and Nirvana, I reasoned. Before, I experienced samadhi as unfamiliar terrain of consciousness. But now that I knew what it was, the intuitive realization triggered a “flashback” to what I had intuitively observed (and as yet not articulated to myself) in samadhi, precipitating the Nirvana experience. In future (even assuming the present transcendental state did fade, which at the time I couldn’t know with certainty would happen. In fact the effortless persistence of it over several minutes led me to suspect at first that it was a permanent state) I would simply need to get to level 3 again, which I’ve done reproducibly, in order to re-attain this state. Additionally, earlier in my sampling of the Lankavatara Sutra I’d come across mention of a “turning about” “in the deepest seat of meditation” and wondered if this referred to the climax I’d encountered in my own meditation – implying that level 3 is “the deepest seat of meditation.” Now, understand that all these explanations and analogies are what I am resorting to now. At the time, these analogies were simply unnecessary since I knew what my reasoning was and it needed no explanation. Thinking (or “intuition”) is nonlinear, while language (which I must employ in describing all this) is in some sense linear. The entire decision-making was near-instantaneous, and my conclusions were: I will not explore this awareness now. I will finish my work, release the paper, and then meditate if necessary to return to this state and explore it further. I spent the next several hours writing, revising sections in my paper to account in some minimal way for my new understanding, before going to sleep.

The next morning, I announced to Meagan, “I don’t know how to say this, but I’m enlightened now.” It sounds kind of ridiculous but at the time I merely intended to be direct. I joke around a lot and generally follow Oscar Wilde’s exhortation that “Life is far too important a thing to take seriously.” But I couldn’t kid around about something like this. I ought not to. A few days later I unceremoniously said the same to my mother, who, unsure how to handle this kind of thing, called my brother to talk to us both so we could all make some sense of what I was saying. “I have experienced Nirvana” I said to them. “How could he have had such an insight, two thousand years ago?” I said, referring to the Buddha, reflecting my belief that with all of modern science and mathematics available to us, surely the ancients couldn’t possibly have known better. I spoke to my dad on the phone a few days later. “Like an epiphany?” he inquired. “No, not an epiphany! The experience wasn’t confined to this plane of living.” Other family members bold enough to ask about it received similar explanations. “I can’t tell you aunty...” “No, tell me.” “It was something else, I wasn’t in my body.”

10 Echoes

For an entire week following the experience, there was a background transcendental feeling, a feeling of “illumination” unlike anything I’ve felt before. For that whole week, I lived without doubt. Can you imagine what it is like to be without doubt? We’re always doubting and second-guessing everything. Should I write this email now or later? This word isn’t the best one, it may be misinterpreted. Should I do X or Y? It’s neverending. But that week, I was sure. One particular instance of this was how, in the preceding months (indeed, years) I had constantly gone back and forth with myself regarding whether to patent my work on identity architecture or not. The case for patenting was that if I patented it, I could then use it in the same manner for patents as copyright is used to form the basis of ‘copyleft’ in the free software movement, as the basis of the GNU GPL. That is, I could use the patent to ground the new system of intellectual property I propose in the paper itself, one that in theory can solve a lot (well, in theory it can solve all) of the problems inherent in today’s system. But that week, there was no question that releasing the work without a patent was the way to go. I’m not sure why I was sure (another nonlinear intuitive web, no doubt), but it may have been that the entire system of intellectual property is ultimately based on faith in any case (just like money is, as another example), so given my own conviction that the new model proposed was the “right” one, I didn’t feel it necessary to hedge my bets. I knew, perhaps, that it was better to cultivate faith in the world than control. Or perhaps more simply, touching a kind of immortality has a way of putting things in perspective.

During that week I sat down to meditate once just to make sure I could still “do it,” and went to the brink, the threshold of Nirvana it seemed. And held back; the time was not yet right. I could properly leave behind all restraints once the paper was out. But over time, the background transcendental sense attenuated and was mostly gone after about a week. Then doubting returned. What if I can’t repeat the experience? Then the only time it happened would have been under the influence of a (residual, but still) quantity of marijuana. No one would understand and it would be too complicated to explain. No, I must return to Nirvana again in the near future just to insure against that possibility. So I tried to meditate and reach level 3, but level 3, which had been reliably reproduced 2-3 times before, was now elusive. I knew I was probably “psyching myself out” so I didn’t push myself too hard. And in any case, I had a lot of work to do on the paper that wouldn’t do itself if I sat meditating all the time. And so I continued working on the paper, and continued to recede further away in time and experience from Nirvana.

I released the paper a few weeks later and alerted a few close friends and family to its presence. But now that I was in doubt, I didn’t find the agency to push forward. All this time I was working towards addressing the privacy problem, the brain problem, the problems of extant economic and political systems – problems that I knew how to think about. In all that time I imagined that when my work was finished there’d be a great sense of release and relief, the value of my work especially as a solution to online privacy being clear, it seemed to me, I would have little trouble pursuing my work further in conventional ways. But now everything had changed and I was waiting for something. For Nirvana. Or something else. Although I wasn’t about to drive forward with anything, either in promoting my work or in meditation, I was ready for opportunities to materialize from the limited release and my limited meditation. Perhaps the paper would fall into the hands of academics who will appreciate its importance, or perhaps something else would happen. But although there were positive responses (and some radio silences), nothing concrete emerged, and I didn’t force it. I was receding deeper and deeper into introspection by this point, beckoned by one of those unresolved things that the mind won’t let go of.

Ostensibly, based on some early feedback, I told myself that the main effort now would be to tie my proposals on the political and economic side more clearly to prior and extant systems, motivating exactly why the new system would be better. The initial release was a scouting expedition, pointing the way to new pastures. Now, I should attempt to convince.

But the real reason I waited was because Nirvana was something that was evidently true about nature, and yet, by my own standards it ought to be impossible! The “Problem of Substrate” was constantly on my mind. Evidently, conscious awareness is not an emergence of the brain, but of nature itself. But what is the substrate then, if not the brain? What is there to “hold” consciousness, to represent it informatically? No, it didn’t make sense. Nirvana was clearly in violation of this Principle of Substrate, and therefore there was no reason whatever for anyone to believe me. And rightly so – I wouldn’t believe me. And especially with my not being able to recreate the experience, there couldn’t be MRI scans, say, that could lend support to the claim. The only thing I could resort to was reason, and reason – as was already clear to me at the very moment of realization – was powerless to address this. What’s true in the mind cannot be demonstrated in the world by reason – an aspect of reality which is usually much more innocuous, manifesting only in things like the aforementioned “my experience of the color red may be your experience of blue, and we’ll never know.” My worldview utterly turned on its head, I began the slow process of rebuilding my foundations, reconciling what I knew with what Nature had revealed had to be true.

11 Understanding

Another year has passed since then. I have not returned to Nirvana, and samadhi/“level 3” has remained elusive barring “shadow” experiences in meditation and in dreams. I’ve meditated in the convenient neighborhood forest a few times to minimize interruptions but still, nothing yet. I don’t suppose I’ll get anywhere as long as I’ve got somewhere to go.

But I’ve done the next best thing. I’ve reached a satisfactory resolution of the substrate issue; one that stands alone, whether we admit the reality of Nirvana experience or not. That resolution is the following: our experience of reality and indoctrination into the pre-existing interpretations of it by people born before us (e.g. society, our parents) leads us to adopt a particular worldview: that the world exists, and we as conscious entities are born into it. As was understood 2500 years ago in the Upanishads, developed into its logical conclusion by the buddhists by around 400AD, and re-discovered by Descartes in the 17th century, this worldview is false in that it constitutes a significant assumption about reality which is not philosophically well-founded. Instead, philosophically, from the perspective of the foundations of knowledge, the inverse is more well-founded: that consciousness exists, and the world is a representation in it. This doesn’t mean that the world doesn’t exist or that it exists only in our minds – it only means that consciousness has precedence over the world from the perspective of knowledge.

This may all seem a giant “big whoop, so what?” It would indeed be a “big whoop” if this constituted merely another way of looking at the world, just tomaytoes, tomahtoes. But the reason it’s important – I would go so far as to say that it is the single most important fact, period – is that it means that consciousness is not a phenomenon to be explained as we explain things like electron interactions, or the falling of rocks, or biological evolution. Consciousness is the basis for all things, and it is these things that must be explained in relation to it. This is only the beginning of the implications. The middle is the admissability of Nirvana. It turns out that consciousness can do whatever it wants, and we can’t hold it to the rules of the world because of its aforementioned precedence over it. Thus Nirvana (and also, for example, theories on “the afterlife” (or the “beforelife” for that matter)) cannot be ruled out by considerations of “substrate.” The end is Citta-matra (“Consciousness-Only”), the philosophical position developed by Vasubandhu and Asanga by around 400AD that, in light of the reality of Nirvana experience, we must conclude that not only does consciousness have precedence over the reality of the world, but that in fact, to take that idea to its logical conclusion, there is nothing other than consciousness – not “my” consciousness or “your” consciousness, but consciousness in and of itself. Consciousness... is the element of reality.

I find this to be a clarifying way of understanding experience, but I should mention for the sake of completeness that even Citta-matra is considered provisional in some schools of buddhist philosophy, and, philosophically, it’s not exactly correct to assert that anything specific exists (this is roughly the “Shunyata” (emptiness) position). But understanding the sense in which that’s true (in particular it is relativistic in a radically general sense, rather than nihilistic, and applies as much to the assertions about existence as to existence itself) is more philosophy than we ought to go into here. In any case, in my paper I’ve developed a formalized way of talking about all this called “epistemic priority.” It’ll be for time and peer-review to determine if that’s a good way of talking about it.

12 What This Means For Us

Earlier as I wrote this, there was a large fly hovering about the ceiling of my living room. It was trying desperately to fly upwards and was constantly frustrated in its ascent by the ceiling. The back door was wide open; that’s probably how it came in. But it flew into the ceiling intermittently over the course of hours. Later at night I noticed it there still, on the ceiling of the foyer this time. I opened the front door and tried to use a broom to encourage it to fly outside but it was hopeless. It was much too quick for the lumbering human that I am, and it didn’t seem to want to do anything except fly upwards, the way that has always no doubt worked for it in the past when it was stuck somewhere. The doorway was, tragically, lower than the height of the ceiling. The fly was in the end imprisoned by little more than its own ignorance. The door was always open, the fly just had no conception of how to go through it or what it even was.

Life seems to be like that. Evidently, we too are in a sense “imprisoned” by ignorance, or, more precisely, by our false presumptions about reality, and “all” it takes to liberate us is a kind of knowledge. Realization of the true nature of reality allows us to become the knowledge itself and thus transcend our humanity. For it is not simply that we are entities that exist in some ultimate reality, but that we are part of ultimate reality, not different from it. Now, beyond identifying the possibility of such a transcension as evidently being an attribute of nature/reality/consciousness, I hesitate to suggest any further implications since, at the present time, any such discussion would be conjecture on my part rather than empirical data. Thus, I will not comment on whether Nirvana should be a goal of human striving or whether it is worthy of pursuit at all. It may be that it neither helps nor hurts to attain Nirvana (but there seems to be a sense in which it is a state of “greater meaning” than human experience – whether that is a “good” thing is, admittedly, subjective). And maybe in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter whether one does or does not. Furthermore the fact that it’s possible need not imply that “the afterlife” should have any meaning for us, or that it is related in any way to our actions in life (while something of this nature is not immediately ruled out either, such questions should be framed carefully in relation to who “we” are, and what “before” and “after” mean). None of these things are automatically implied by the mere possibility of Nirvana. Nevertheless, there is one conclusion that seems to be a certainty – to the extent that there are certainties – and that is that, following from the precedence of consciousness over the “material” world and bolstered by the possibility of Nirvana, death of the human is not a termination of “conscious” experience, if indeed such experience could ever be said to have begun in the first place, which, as a matter of philosophy, it cannot. Thus really what we can say is that “life” and “afterlife” are on even epistemic footing – whatever that may be.

This kind of philosophical answer may not be the one that many of us are looking for, but I think it is a profoundly satisfactory one. An answer providing a formal philosophical basis and making a minimum number of assumptions can get us very far toward real understanding. And although it may strain comprehension, I would say that it is that much more beautiful for the effort.

At the same time I think it would be disingenuous of me to deny that there are some clear suggestions beyond this. Science has arguably been the most important human endeavor of the last 1000 years, and it operates in a domain (let’s call it “the domain of scientific knowledge.” In my paper I refer to it more abstractly as a “world” or a “dialectical context”) that has some very nice properties, in particular the property of objective decidability. But a much older endeavor, one that has been a personal quest for all humans and, possibly, other conscious beings, is a “spiritual” one. Guided by ideals of fairness, freedom, and truth, we compose our lives to be in accordance with what is Good, what is Right. Questions of such a nature are not objectively decidable and yet few would deny that they are important. Why do we do these things? We can confront this aspect of our nature with new eyes: in the light of conscious precedence, is there a basis for such moral action underlying the laws codified in religion and culture, other than considerations of economic and material efficiency, perhaps other even than considerations of entropy? What is the nature of faith, of the imperative to do “good works,” of suffering, love, and forgiveness, and of knowledge and insight? And finally, what is the relationship of all of these things – of the most intimate undulations of experience – to the structural nature of reality as a whole? I think these are worthy of serious inquiry without religious presupposition; they are fascinating abstractions discerned by those who came before us, and likely very worthwhile and formidable ones too. It’s certainly possible that these questions too are the “wrong” ones, that in the end they will be transcended as our understanding evolves, but it isn’t apparent to me at the present time that this is the case, and in any case I suspect there is still much to be learned from them.

Finally, I want to return to the “undecidability” of things that are true in the mind. Anything I say about Nirvana can never be proved by anyone else unless they attained it for themselves (but precedence of consciousness is provable philosophically, to the extent that anything is provable). Even if I return to Nirvana and subject myself to MRI scans and EEGs that demonstrate something unusual is going on – it would still not constitute proof. This is important to understand, even though proof is not so clear cut even in things like mathematics and science where we may believe there is really “proof.” It’s just not that simple. But the difference between mathematics and science and something like a claim of Nirvana or any such “mystical” claim, is that no standards can be defined in relation to which such claims can be formally evaluated. Thus, there is the real danger that charlatans could claim mystical experience, or be genuinely mistaken in their interpretation of such experience, and lead people astray in their search for truth. Perhaps I am one of these charlatans; how would anyone know? In the field of cryptography there is a general principle that if a code is broken in theory, then it is considered broken in practice and not used, even if it may be unlikely that anyone would exploit this vulnerability and even if it is very hard to do so. I like to take a “cryptographic” outlook on some matters in life, for instance in relation to present economic systems and the fair recognition of value, the flow of money and influence, and corporate stewardship of our information. These things are broken in principle and I consider them broken in practice. Like so many of us I search for, believe in something better, whether or not there is evidence for actual exploitation of the “vulnerabilities” in the present systems (although of course there is ample). I am strongly tempted to take this outlook on claims of mystical, religious, spiritual experience such as my testimony here. The undecidability of Nirvana experience is a “broken code,” one that is in principle un-fixable. Perhaps it is just as well, I’d like to say, and maybe it is Nature’s way of telling us that it is dangerous to believe things you cannot prove, and that we should therefore not believe anyone about matters that are not – at least in principle – objectively addressable. I burn to say this but I know it isn’t quite true. Some important truths about nature are apparently only communicable by faith. Faith is not merely convenient but evidently indispensable. Consciousness does not arise “from” the brain, and there’s no way you could verify that objectively. One should pause to realize that if this really were true, then it could not possibly be an “objective fact” to be addressed scientifically. Science is beautiful, essential, ... vital. A first resort. But it cannot take us there.

Philosophy, on the other hand. Mathematics. These things can do a little better, and can convince us even in the absence of the possibility of evidence, by standards that can be universally agreed upon without necessitating faith – no more faith than is already essential to conscious participation. Cultivating a philosophical outlook and a mathematical bent of mind will likely help motivate the leap of faith that it does take to believe in something like conscious transcendence, and I warmly encourage it, but it’s no silver bullet. In recommending these as worthy explorations, I want to be careful to call out that they should facilitate real knowledge, not stand in for it. In the end, I do not believe that one must necessarily know something in particular (especially not anything that we can put a name to) to get to grips with the true nature of things. You are the true nature of things. We are not separate from the highest truths that can be attained. As to what those truths are, what any of this is, my red may be your blue.