Being ever-more happy & harmless, as a baseline, allows the always-existing purity & perfection inherent in the universe to operate ever-more freely in this body.
With that increasing purity penetrating, the contradictions between ‘me’ and that purity become ever-more apparent, until a point comes that it becomes obviously sensible to ‘me’ to allow the purity to take over.
Once that ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ decision is made to allow it to happen, the universe takes over and sooner or later, ‘I’ am extirpated… not of my doing, but ‘I’ had to allow it to happen.
How does it happen? Richard points to the substantia negra as being the potential source of ‘me,’ and in my own amateurish neuroscientific investigations I uncovered some clues that the organization of the motivational ‘dopaminergic system’ may be the source of ‘me,’ or perhaps a larger system implicating more neuro-systems.
Either way, it seems that as ‘I’ am weakened, make that ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ decision, and allow the universe to do what it does (purity in operation), that dopaminergic system (which is self-perpetuating and verifying) is no longer able to sustain its structure, and collapses. With this collapse the frontal cortex is able to take up the load, with a completely different logic of operations than the ‘yes/no’ ‘black/white’ ‘good/bad’ dopaminergic-amygdala pathways.
You have experienced a sneak-preview of what this looks like in operation, if you can remember a PCE.
Some evidence for this include that with Richard’s entrance to freedom he was unable to drink coffee for a time (coffee is a major dopamine dump) and experienced overwhelming sensory clarity (again, dopamine is implicated). The overall sensory clarity experienced in a PCE is something usually reserved for ‘very special circumstances’ by the dopaminergic system, but with freedom the on/off switch has been disabled, allowing for full engagement 100% of the time.
Interestingly, Richard seems to be the only one who had this experience with coffee… though perhaps one of our resident ‘free people’ can chime in with their own experience. Richard notably went through enlightenment first.
This bit about dopamine is entirely my own conjecture, but at the very least something structural deep within the brain breaks down permanently, and a different system takes its place.