Buddha’s Basilisk

dropping fetters four and five

On suffering

I no longer suffer from emotional experience. Dropping fetters four and five using this process has been the greatest upgrade to my well-being.

Social anxiety is gone. There’s no reaction on top of emotion that naturally presents itself in the system. If fear comes up, there’s no contracting against that emotion, no internal violence created about that emotion. So the loop that creates social anxiety is gone.

A lot of the identity structure that existed as the conditions that would create the initial nervousness in social situations is gone. So fear in social settings, with some women I find impressive and attractive, or where I’m supposed to present to an unfamiliar crowd doesn’t arise, or at least so far, since fetters four and five fell away.

Previously tough emotions to feel, like fear, anger, and sadness seem much smaller now. Sadness can be there, but it doesn’t cause me to suffer. In hindsight, I was associating the suffering around the emotion, the resistance to the emotion, the want for that experience to be different, with the emotion itself. I was blending those together. Since that aversion is no longer there, the emotions seem much smaller. But they’re also much more clear. 

My emotional experience seems much more visible and unavoidable. My guess is because there’s a lot less structure built around avoiding certain emotions, or pushing them into blindspots. There’s no fear of emotional experience anymore. I think I had a lot of unconscious fear about feeling certain ways previously.

Since dropping those fetters, I have experienced brief suffering from pain. I booked a 10 hour tattoo appointment to test resistance to pain (and because I wanted tattoos), and by the end, I was definitely resisting the pain, squirming under the needle. Interestingly, I didn’t physically sweat during that whole appointment, where previously I’d sweat from my palms and armpits even for a tattoo that would last an hour and a half.

On conditioning

I assume I have most of the same conditioned responses as before dropping fetters four and five. There’s so many conditioned responses siloed and ready to launch to protect something that’s no longer there. There’s so much conditioning that has been built to avoid suffering, to avoid certain emotions, to get certain things like sex and money.

I still like sex and money, but I think I wouldn’t suffer if I never had sex again. That’s a pretty wild statement that a younger me would have found extremely off-putting. I’d have been like, “Wow, this guy sucks and probably sucks at sex.”

I also don’t have any fear about money. I certainly would prefer more money than not, because of how the medical system works where I live, because of the quality food it can buy, because blah blah obviously more money is better in this world. But all the weird deprecated code I may have about sex and money are still probably there even if the reason for their existence is gone. That might sound like a bummer, but it’s not because

Currently all the conditioning I have around what I’m moving towards is coming under question. And I have much more freedom to choose new responses. There were prison walls, now they are permeable, and eventually they won’t appear.

But why change anything if everything’s okay?

On right and wrong action

I can see that others suffer. I can see that I cause suffering in others. Every action I take has the potential to perpetuate or lessen suffering, or free people from suffering. Now this is really internalized and intuitively felt. Now the Buddha’s basilisk is seen, and there’s no returning.

Creating purely engagement bait slop creates suffering, so does eating shitty food, so does not consistently exercising, so does withholding my effort and not actively creating good things in public, so does doing anything less than the optimal policy.

Previously, I'd been living purely like an animal, thrashing around trying to escape emotions and clenching, constricting, suffering while desires weren't met. I didn't have a lot of room for thinking about others’ suffering. And often it didn't exist to me, because I chose not to keep that info in my head. 

Before it was harder to want to do something about suffering if it wasn’t right in front of me, just like objects cease to exist when they disappear from a baby bat’s visual field (chill, bat scientists, I’m just guessing how this works). I had little object permanence for suffering.

It’s not like I was a complete zero empathy zombie. I got along with almost everyone, people enjoyed my company, and I felt bad for causing harm. But reducing other’s suffering wasn't my main mission, sustainable hedonism was (which includes not causing obvious suffering in others). And I don’t know if reducing others’ suffering will ever unconsciously be my main mission, or maybe it will be when there’s no more 6th fetter (subject-object prior), or 8th fetter, or beyond.

Now it feels like morality has reentered the chat, but not in a way where I’m beating myself up. It’s not like I’m freaking out about all the suffering, and the suffering I may be causing. There’s no self-inflicted sting when I notice I am repeating conditioning that isn’t the optimal policy.

My actions and speech still often cause suffering (there’s a lot of room for improvement :D), but at the same time whatever I do feels kind of perfect, because that’s what’s unfolding in reality. There’s a growing deep trust that these insights will percolate further throughout the system as old, waiting conditioning is continually triggered and illuminated, and that more skillful speech and action will continue to replace those responses. 

There’s confidence that this movement towards less suffering is happening actively and passively at the same time. There are thoughts about how to lessen suffering, and actions that flow from that, but also all these feel like they’re happening on their own, without a controlling agent. It also feels like the system is moving towards creating less suffering in ways that I’m not conscious of.

I’m no longer obsessed with being a controlling agent or not. If I look, yes, there’s nothing there moving the steering wheel, but that experience of being a driverless car is ordinary now.

On impatience and parts

I still get impatient with others. According to some, this means some part of my structure isn’t okay with another part of me. I accept that hypothesis, and I’m interested in exploring how to move towards a system of parts that all love and accept each other.

There’s probably many parts of me that are in conflict with each other, different motivations in conflict. There’s a preference for all of these parts of me to be satisfied, to have their needs met in a way that doesn’t create internal violence, and the knowledge that propagating this internal violence in some way to others in the future creates the conditions for suffering.

I also think internal violence is eroding naturally, without any obvious conscious action, but I’ll probably try something like taking shrooms while doing Core Transformation at some point. I don’t think this erosion is happening because under the hood my parts are now hugging for some reason, but because the parts themselves are disappearing because some major upstream priors that cause them to exist have gone.

On thoughts, on jhanas, on sleep

There’s a lot less thoughts appearing, but I’m still thinking about what’s important. There’s little or zero auto fantasizing about what Owen could be, which was a prominent aspect of my experience in the past. I’m not sure if that’s a consequence of dropping fetters one to three, four and five, or all of ‘em.

I have no urge to do jhana practice. There’s no urge to cultivate long, refined experiences of happiness. My remaining main interest in jhana practice would be if they turn out to be necessary or are an outsized supportive practice for dropping fetters via inquiry.

I think jhana practice is super valuable. It’s been extremely helpful for me, and maybe it’s the reason dropping four and five went relatively swiftly. But the main reason I was doing it was to learn to have a reliable way to have cessations, which I assumed were necessary for dropping fetters.

Practice traditions that use the jhanas are complete systems, and for some (maybe many!) people only doing jhanas works (like Nadia Asparouhova I think). But I stumbled into fetters inquiry while learning and doing jhanas, the inquiry worked, and so I’m stoked to continue using a hodgepodge of techniques.

A fun bonus has been that I have not felt shitty upon waking up once since my experience of dropping four and five. I’ve definitely gotten poor sleep according to my WHOOP app. Some 20 percent and 40 percent sleep score nights, but every time I wake up I feel good. There hasn’t been a huge, heavy blanket of grogginess or tiredness upon waking up since.

On being wrong

Apparently fetters four and five can drastically weaken, then break altogether. For me, I think they were already weak because I had been marinating in the second jhana for lots of time. Maybe doing EK meditation helped also. Unclear.

I'm happy to update y’all if I find out later that this was a temporary, months-long state, rather than what I currently believe to be an enduring trait.

How to drop four and five

I’m currently undecided about how I can best help others experience this, so for now ask Michael, who helped me in this process.

Assumptions about what’s next

Apparently suffering is still happening at this stage of the path, and dissolving later fetters will erode more subtle patterns of suffering. But it doesn’t feel like suffering is happening anymore in any important or noticeable way. I’m very interested to see what happens when the rest of the fetters fall, so I’m going to continue the inquiry into six and beyond.

It seems my orientation towards the world and what to do in it has shifted a bit because of this experience, so I’m assuming this’ll happen again if the sixth fetter is dropped, which creates the perception of there being a subject in a world of objects.

I hope this post has been helpful. Until next time, friends <3