Here are a few examples of unpacking the fear and anxiety that often acts as the paralyzing force, showing what can happen when we release it.

“A Refreshing Transformation”

Mike worked with me for just one hour over the phone, focusing on a fear of public speaking which was affecting his professional success. Here are his words, including a description of how he experienced our work together:

“We talked about some physical distress I exhibited each time I presented a seminar or hosted an event. Through a series of guided imagery questions Joe had me actually visually place the feelings that came up during presentations in a specific place in my body. He prompted me to describe, locate, and get very acquainted with those feelings. He asked me to allow those feelings to transform into a different shape, space, and place.

“I immediately received a sense of lightening up, a refreshing transformation that freed me up and left me very, very energized. He left me with specific instructions as to how I can re-create that transformation and recall the image I created prior to my presentations. I now cue myself before every presentation, client meeting, and networking opportunity to fortify myself with that powerful image of who I am and what I offer those I connect with.

“I found the experience of my session with Joe invaluable. I easily connected with the model of creating visual images and descriptions for the questions he used to guide my learning experience. I am a very visual and creative person. Though we did talk of some very intimate things that lead me to a fairly vulnerable place, I always felt safe with his guidance and support. One of the best things is that he took notes and had a way of recording our session so whenever I want to go back through a reminder or refresher on my discovery, I can. I was completely free to do the work necessary.

“Being freed from the focus on how I’m being perceived, or how am I doing, or what am I going to say next is invaluable. It has allowed me to truly listen and be present while presenting, whether to a group or just one person.”

Mike’s experience was brief and focused. We did not work a full set or go deep into the structure that held his fear of public speaking in place. He is describing our session in the conversational terms in which he understands it. We focused on a simple strategy of shifting the fear itself, and anchoring that new state in a tangible, easily-accessible form.

From there, Mike simply activated that state whenever he needed it. Psychotopology fieldwork makes this strategy practical and straightforward.

“I felt good. I felt victory!”

One more client, Peter, had this to say two weeks after working over two long days with me, maybe 12 hours total, where he transformed a fear of public speaking that was so bad it had put him in the emergency room a few times before he sought my help. He’s describing a recent sales presentation he did:

“If I would have walked in there before I met you, I know I would have been sweating, stuttering, and probably left the room five, ten times, because I just would not be able to stay in there because of fear.

“Yesterday I sat in the middle, spoke to everybody, looked everybody in the eye, and talked to them like I had something to offer. I felt like I wanted to feel, the whole time, without feeling fear. Just like I’m talking to you here.

“It didn’t matter if it was one person or ten people, I was me, all the way through, and not out of whack, not too scared, not nervous. And I felt good. I felt victory!”

A couple years after I worked with Peter, he sent me this note:

“Your work has truly changed my life. I now look at my life as before meeting with you and after. I am now more of the person I have always wanted to be because of our sessions. Thank you so much.”

The Difference Between Moving a State and Moving a Set

The example of Mike’s leaping forward out of a single hour of working specifically on the fear shows us that yes, it is straightforward to narrow our focus to releasing a single state. When we do, we gain wonderful agency for being able to cultivate that specific new state and deliberately return ourselves to that state when it serves us.

But that can take significant effort. In contrast, Peter’s example shows what is possible when we take the time to also work the interconnected parts of the entire set in which the anxiety is situated. When we do that, the shift is more comprehensive, and requires far less effort to maintain.

Let’s see how this works with Sam, who worked on a set that had to do with feeling thwarted and overwhelmed trying to go to school full time while supporting her two children. We worked together weekly over a period of about three months.

To give you a glimpse of Sam’s experience of this set, here is a composite drawing of all nine of its states. At the center of the belly is Vulnerable, a cold, churning liquid surrounded by Anxiety, like a tense anemone. On the outside of the body we have Overwhelm, “like radial explosions all over my borders.”

Really, really doesn’t look fun, does it? And finally, here is the composite drawing of the set after it was moved to its ideal state of natural wholeness:

This is how Sam described the shift she experienced after completing that first set:

“So the first set of feelings that I moved with Joe had to do with feeling really unsupported in my work. Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, and just alone with it all. And within weeks, I felt a spaciousness in my life. I did not feel stressed out any more. I wasn’t getting overwhelmed. All of that just kind of stopped happening. Without any conscious effort, I was just living differently, naturally, without even having to think about it.”

So, this is what I’m talking about. This is what it feels like to thoroughly excavate the complete set of parts that governs a pattern of distress in your life, and to fully restore its natural functioning.

Some Context

Before we take a look at another example, let me share a further thought. We are large, we contain multitudes (to use the Whitman phrase). This set that Sam worked was one of many that participated in her experience of being. But this one was at the center of her drive to raise her children while pursuing her vocation, and when it was released, it stayed at the center for a time.

Within a few weeks, though, another part of her, another self with all its complexity, stepped forward and captured her attention. So we worked on that one next. I wrote about that one in chapter SO-6: Multiple Coexisting Feeling States.

Most of us have this external container to our lives — the responsibilities, relationships, and physical environments — that somewhat constrains our freedom to foreground the various selves that constitute our full being. And so working those key selves by using fieldwork to restore the natural functioning of the full set of parts can go a long way toward greater ease and effectiveness in pursuing our goals. Peter is a great example of this.

Some people, though, have either more spaciousness in that life container, or at least give themselves more freedom to wander internally. For those people, restoring the functionality of one self/set is likely to open the door for another to surface. This process of working one set after another can go on indefinitely, at least from a practical perspective. There is a limit to how many selves we contain, but it’s large enough to keep us busy for a very long time.

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I would like to wrap up this series on the science of first-level observation in psychotopology and set things in motion for the next phase. Here are the key discoveries from each chapter so far:

1. Validity - Establishes a foundational relationship between feeling states and their corresponding virtual material properties, along with methods to ensure our observations are accurate and reliable through validation techniques like the slider test.

2. Difference - Challenges our initial hypothesis that people experience emotions like sadness in similar ways, revealing instead a surprising diversity of virtual material properties across different individuals mapping the same named emotion.

3. Context - Overturns our tentative hypothesis of consistent “emotion signatures” within individuals, showing instead that context deeply influences how a person experiences the same named emotion across different situations.

4. Not Somatic - Reveals that feeling states frequently extend beyond the boundaries of the physical body, challenging the dominant theories that emotions are fundamentally bodily processes confined to physiological systems.

5. Body Schema - Explores how the virtual materiality of feeling states connects to our body schema and embodied cognition, suggesting our capacity to model extended embodiment may underlie our ability to experience feeling states.

6. Multiples - Demonstrates that feeling states exist not in isolation but as complex networks of coexisting states that interact in dynamic patterns, forming intricate structures in our inner landscape.

7. Beyond Emotion - Shows that virtual materiality extends beyond conventional emotions to include experiences typically categorized differently (like identity, awareness, or conceptual states), suggesting feeling is the foundation of all conscious experience.

8. Witness - Examines the actual experience of the self who observes feeling states, revealing that the witness function itself has virtual material properties and is subject to mapping and transformation.

9. Spiritual Teachings - Uncovers how transcendent experiences accessed through fieldwork correspond closely with states described in various spiritual traditions, suggesting these traditions reference a shared inner architecture accessible through observation.

10. Hell - Reveals the profound depths of human suffering typically hidden from awareness, showing how networks of painful feeling states underlie many aspects of personality and behavior, while suggesting this suffering is normal but perhaps not natural to human experience.

To summarize further, it seems that as far as our nascent science goes, we have broken new ground, but to be honest, we have no clear idea where we have arrived. All we can say for sure from our observations so far is that they do not match well with existing maps.

• The hypothetical “thingness” of sadness, for example, shows up as having an insufficiently stable pattern when we examine its virtual material properties across different people and even within the same person. We cannot say for sure what the “it” is that we are observing beyond a unique inner experience correlated with a unique name.

• Our observations of para-somatic feeling experiences that extend far beyond the body do not correspond with strongly somatic maps of emotion.

• The multiplicity of concurrent but distinct feeling objects is inconsistent with models of emotion grounded in a kind of integrative summation or interpretation of physiological states.

• Our observations of purely “mental” or “abstract” experience as having tangible virtual materiality similar to that of distinctly emotional experience contrasts with our current understanding of feeling as limited to emotion-centered phenomena.

At the same time, we can see a few possible bridges to existing maps.

• It seems there may be an overlap between our virtual material basis for feeling experience and models of embodied/extended cognition.

• There arise some intriguing overlaps with longstanding spiritual and esoteric traditions, validating our work through its connection to millennia of earnest efforts to master our complex inner lives.

• The complexity and depth of suffering we are able to observe resonates with our intuitions about the gravity and significance of human pain.

• The descriptions of connections between earlier life experiences and related states echoes certain theories of psychotherapy.

What should we do with this? Where do we go from here?

Beyond Passive Observation

At this point in our science, we have applied our new observation tool, fieldwork, to a relatively passive exploration of the territory inside. We’ve opened the door and tip-toed around, peering around corners, shining our light into crevices and under overhangs, and noticing further possible portals to the unknown.

What we have been able to observe so far gives us confidence for raising the level of our engagement. Our observations seem to validate both our intuitive sense of what it is to be human and our dissatisfaction with our current maps for navigating our inner landscapes. We have found both a resonance with prior attempts to understand this inner territory and clear divergences which offer intriguing possibilities for further exploration.

We have also established that our slider test for confirming the accuracy of our observations can be expanded into a full-scale interaction with what we are observing. It is time for us to apply this capacity to a more involved engagement with this mysterious territory of the virtual materiality that anchors our felt experiences of being.

As we prepare to do so, I want to establish an overarching principle for our continued investigations.

Prioritizing Structure over Content

Typically in conducting observations of subjective experience in service to scientific investigation, we prioritize collecting information about the contents of what it is we are observing. Data from this measurement, responses on this survey or that button push, reports about this or that memory, correlations between A and B. In the realm of inner human experience, our primary data has focused on the what of our thinking, feeling, sensing and perceiving.

In the realm of subjective experience, the “whats” we are typically able to collect can be made sense of directly. The memory of an experience, reports on a survey, the name of an emotion, the belief about a situation — all of these can be compared to similar phenomena in similar people. But this direct interpretation has its limits. For example, it tends to be culturally bound, which limits the universality of what is discovered. (See, e.g., discussions of WEIRD in psychological research.) Even more important, when we interpret such observations from standard cultural perspectives, we are unable to step outside the limited box we inhabit, complete with filters and blind spots.

When we use fieldwork to observe inner experience, however, we are forced to abandon that standard approach. We don’t get very far when we try to interpret the meaning of a hard, cold, dark lump of clay in the throat, for example, or attempt to compare such a lump to a stream of glowing electrical particles flowing upward through the heart. Oh, we can try. But it’s not terribly satisfying. We have no standing basis for such interpretation, and while in cursory observations we may see connections with lived experience, when we go more deeply in comparing these observations across larger numbers of people, it becomes much more difficult to identify any obvious patterns emerging.

This makes our slider power even more important. Passive observation alone will not move our science quickly enough to answer the many questions that emerge with our observations. The biggest question — what the hell is it that we are observing — begs us to engage with the “it” in order to learn more about it.

At first, we cannot even be sure what is possible. And so it can be difficult even to craft reasonable hypotheses. At the same time, we have been inhabiting our implicit and explicit models of inner experience (which may or may not match one another) for our entire lives. Much of those models remains outside our awareness.

What this means is that our first efforts are likely to be rather clumsy. That’s OK. Our job will be to stay alert for surprises. These startling moments will throw flags for us to pay closer attention. They signal that our implicit assumptions have been violated, and that our observations are revealing something truly new.

I had many such moments in the early years of developing this work. For example, I think I’ve mentioned the shock of facilitating someone mapping their experience of anger and having it show up as a green pair of stomping boots embedded in their feet. The fact that my own anger never looked like that, plus the gigantic stretch I had to make to imagine such a thing was even possible, encouraged me to accept the diverse uniqueness in every feeling experience and to set aside my expectations. As we move forward, we will encounter more such shocks, and they will point the way toward our further investigations and discoveries.

The shock of the green boots shoved me away from the expectation of a pattern centered on universality of feeling-name-defined configurations of virtual material properties. In place of that, I was forced to embrace a different pattern in which something like “sadness” lives very differently in different people. As I’ve described, over a period of accumulating further experience, I also had to let go of any expectation of similarity patterns even within the same person.

As you will see, as we begin to employ our slider superpower to directly manipulate these whatever-they-are entities we’re encountering that show up as virtual material objects that are free to transform their properties, we will encounter several significant shock moments that open doors to new discoveries. I’m looking forward to sharing those with you.

At the heart of these new discoveries is a very strong shift of our attention from the snapshot observational data — the specific configurations of virtual material properties — to the behavior of the underlying “things” that host these configurations. The patterns of their transformations, and the interactions between the transformations of one of these objects with other related objects, will begin to take shape.

As they do, we will find ourselves shifting from what might be best described as a topographic descriptions — the contents of our observations, the configurations themselves — to topological descriptions capturing a deeper structure of relationships among functional entites. We will shift from the topography of surface contents to the topology of deep structure.

One of the ways these new patterns will take shape has already revealed itself to us in our observations so far. Let’s take a look at the phenomenon of what psychotopology refers to as the field dimension of conscious experience.

Introducing Inner Fields

Throughout our observational examples, we have noted how the virtual material experience of feeling seems to occupy space. There is a distinct region within the total available space in and around the body within which the feeling experience seems to be located, outside of which it seems to not exist. Within that three-dimensional, spatial region, the experience carries distinct qualities that the observation practice illuminates.

We will find it very helpful to think of these feeling spaces as fields, similar to the electromagnetic and gravitational fields we find in physics. In this specific case within psychotopology, we will refer to these experiential spaces of feeling states as affect fields.

Let me acknowledge that this is a bold redefining of the term “affect,” which at this point in the sciences of mind tends to be used to name a very low-resolution, generic physiological activation. Affect is supposed to live on a two-dimensional scale with one axis defined from positive to negative valence from pleasure to distress, and the other from low to high intensity.

Over the course of continuing to roll out my presentation of psychotopology, you will see how it makes sense to separate the somatic dimension of emotion from this experiential field dimension. The two-axis concept of somatic experience might prove to be useful in the long run, but for now, I find it to muddy the waters and diminish the appreciation of the richness of inner experience. Our actual experience of affect, feeling — the experience of being — is vastly more complex than plus/minus, hi/low.

Let me make it clear up front that by assigning the concept of field to these experiences of feeling, I am not intending to infer that these fields are parallel to those of physics and that they objectively do occupy space in the way that a gravitational field does. I am saying merely that we experience feeling as if it occupies space and carries specific properties in a way similar to that of a field. How that actually intersects with the dimensions of physics and physiology, as well as its role in the generation of our personal and interpersonal psychology, must emerge from our continued investigations. I will have much more to reveal about this over time.

Clarifying the Term Fieldwork

In psychotopology, we are working with inner fields of consciousness. At this point, we have entered the domain of affect fields and will limit our focus to these for the moment. In the future, our work will expand beyond affect fields to explore related fields of imagery involved in the generation of thought.

The nascent practice of observing affect fields as we have noted at this point, along with more advanced practices of interacting with affect fields, and observing and interacting with other related fields, I call psychotopology fieldwork. I hope it is clear now where that name comes from and why it applies to this work.

Placing Feeling at the Center

Explaining feeling experience in science and psychotherapy has taken many forms:

• It doesn’t exist and/or is not important (behaviorism, materialism, logical positivism).

• It is a product of unconscious patterns anchored in the past (psycho-dynamic/psychoanalytic).

• It is a product of thoughts and beliefs (cognitive therapies).

• It is a product of neural activity (cognitive science and neuroscience).

• It is a product of interaction between our parts (parts therapies).

• It is a product of physiological activation (somatic therapies).

We are taking a radical new approach here. First, we are not explaining feeling experience in terms of other phenomena. For psychotopology, feeling is a thing in and of itself, not a “product of” something else considered to be more “real” than the actual experience. We are placing the experience of feeling at the center of our science rather than holding it as a secondary epiphenomenon.

Our goal is to create a map of this territory: the felt experience of being. This is an ambitious goal, but we have tools by our side that make this goal achievable. We will do this thing.

A Note of Care

Please do not expect to understand all of this right now. We have not established the basis for genuine understanding. All we have established is that the territory we are choosing to explore is indeed a frontier, and we are best served by continuing to honor the pioneering attitude proposed at the end of the Introducing the Science series, in IS-10: Radical Curiosity.

Also, please do give yourself the benefit of direct experience. It is impossible to understand what I am sharing here without it. Let me know if or how I can support you in that.

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Fieldwork opens up the deep interior of our conscious experience in ways that provide access to entire worlds of inner pain that have previously remained hidden beneath the surface, locked into what has been referred to as “the unconscious mind.” It turns out, much of what lies beneath the surface has been “unconscious” for good reason — because it is just too damned painful to endure.

The pain itself could potentially be tolerable in small doses. But this small pain turns out to be connected in sprawling networks of interrelated states of grief, rage, terror, agony, despair and all the rest. And because we have not developed reliable or effective methods for healing or transforming that pain once it is exposed, oftentimes when we uncover such pain it sucks us into intolerable and inescapable vortexes of darkness. So of course we avoid it with all the canny tactics we have available to us, and it remains deeply buried, outside of our everyday awareness.

Fieldwork enables us to crack open the basement door and to more safely enter these dark chambers with full illumination and agency. First, the mapping practice itself strengthens our natural capacity to hold a witness position to our painful states, holding them as something we have, not as something we are, grounding us firmly in a larger self. We have a place to stand as we shine our light into the darkness.

Second, the powerful moving process — essentially our slider test applied to a swift transformation of the state into a powerful inner resource — enables us to trust that we have a straightforward path through the pain into liberation. Because this is immediately available to us as we excavate old bones of pain, we can engage with curiosity rather than fear, and we find ourselves entering these dark chambers with a sense of empowerment.

In what follows, you get to look over my shoulder as I wade into the muck of my own inner life in a series of maps I made in 2012. We have not yet fully toured the moving practice here in Volume 1, so we do not officially have the tools and skills necessary to safely conduct an investigation like this. I do not recommend that you attempt such a deep dive on your own at this point. I offer it as a glimpse into what the simple practice of mapping makes possible. All of the following states were excavated and mapped over the course of three days, maybe five or six hours’ work in total, immediately following which they were cleared through the moving practice taking a similar amount of time.

For now, let us enter this particular dark chamber within my own torment, and take in the view from below.

One Small Chamber of My Own Inner Torment

To give you context, this journey was one of several I made during this period of my life. The chamber I entered after this one was even more intense, having been hidden from my awareness by the first. I’ll give you a peek at what that second one looked like, but we will focus this tour on the process of mapping the first set of states.

I offer these as examples of the kind of complexity and pain that lives in all of us. On the surface, my early life was not one of intense suffering. I grew up in the United States, in relative material and cultural privilege in a white, working-class family, with an added benefit of having a knack for academic performance. Under the surface, though, I accumulated the toxicity of that subculture, absorbed directly from my parents and my social surroundings.

Within our respective cultures and subcultures, we are taught norms for how to manage the inner torment. For my father, control and domination were the primary strategies. I rejected the crude form of these he inhabited but took them on nevertheless from an academic angle, pursuing intellectual supremacy. This landed me in the more elite environment of an Ivy League university.

Eventually, though, my unsustainable numbing strategies collapsed, mostly because of my isolation in a subculture with which I could not identify and from which I was unable to draw support. Over time, I found myself needing to devote ever-more intensive efforts to simply remaining alive. Psychotopology is a product of those efforts, and the examples below give you a small glimpse into the sheer weight of what I was carrying. I consider this a tiny core sample from the stratified subterranean bedrock of the human experience we all share.

“My Small Life”

On May 13th, 2012, I wrote this as the beginning of my inquiry into an inner pain. I called the focus of my inquiry “My Small Life” to capture the essence of what it was I was feeling.

I ache inside.
I ache inside for a place to be held.
Held, seen, mirrored, loved.
Held in a way that makes it easy to be, me.

At this point, I made the following list of distinct feeling experiences at the heart of and adjoining this ache.

• Ache/Longing

• Inundation/Overwhelm - too much sensory input

• Unconscious Assault (by Others) - random, harsh, oblivious

• Despair - the damage is done, there’s no turning back / going forward

• Abandoned/Alone - nobody else sees this, the insanity, the alternative truth

• Dangerous Chaos - the world

• Lack of Support - no place in which I am nourished

• Anger/Rage - I want them to stop, to wake up, and I want to destroy them if they don’t

• Withdrawal - Pulling away, a buffer or barrier, muffling sound, distance

On May 17th, I captured these additional feeling experiences.

• Fear/Anxiety - a sense of being tiny, in my mother’s arms, she afraid and I afraid, merged, in a way; my father as the threat/danger.

• Wanting to curl up and cry - strong, connected to the fear and wanting to be comforted, held.

On the evening of May 21st, I sat with a friend to do the Being With Practice described in FM-12 (taking turns identifying and briefly mapping whatever we were feeling). I identified and mapped two distinct states that I called Cringe and Hurt, as follows.

Cringe

Soft solid, 1/3 of core/trunk, contracting, twisting as if to avoid being hit; bluish gray; body temp or warmer; like putty/clay, porous, not real dense; whimper; a sense of curling into someone’s body. Primitive self-protection.

---

Hurt

Heart, like galaxy stuff, toroid shape, turning in on itself, as if imploding or being sucked into a black hole at the center; giant internal dimensions but only 6-8 inches external dimensions, spheroid.

An ache, longing. Impulse to cry. Something really important is missing. Loss.

---

On May 22nd, I wrote the following note about my experience from the previous evening, after mapping Cringe and Hurt:

There was a moment of physical inability to lie still, my body was climbing out of its skin, very uncomfortable.

I continued to note my state on this day as I began to work through my mapping process, starting with Bombardment and Overwhelm:

Now, today, it is as if a more unpleasant state is lurking. As if there is a deafening, body-smashing noise, but there isn’t. As if I am being beaten, but I’m not. As if the entire world is being fed into a galactic wood-chipper, but it isn’t.

This is the Overwhelm, the sensory overload. This is cacophony, this is strife, this is Bombardment.

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Bombardment

Assault from the outside; Overwhelm, pain of overload. Two parts of this, the external Bombardment and the experience of Overwhelm as a result. Need to stop the Bombardment first, but the Overwhelm is what’s most distressing.

Loud sound, as if sound is massive and dense, surrounding me on all sides, expanding to fill all space, wanting to expand into the space of me and eliminate me from existence. Highly heterogeneous, multi-directional, random, intense bursts of aggressive expansion happening in all directions, like boulders scraping against one another as they expand into one another’s space; extremely dangerous, not safe; a synesthesia where sound = substance: sharp, hard, massive, unconscious; neutral temp; dark gray colors with flashes of red where sounds/boulders collide. The sound hurts it’s so loud; male voice sounds but they don’t fall into meaningful patterns - random, chaotic, meaningless, dangerous.

---

Overwhelm

Like a protective buffer between the outside and Cringe & Hurt {the two states I mapped the night before}; my whole body, from surface in, leaving space at the center; it is losing the battle, the encroaching Bombardment is too strong, and if it loses, I will be wholly sucked into Hurt and annihilated.

Frenzied, chaotic movement, like an army of ninjas on meth trying to defend against the outside but more often banging into each other; like a churning, seething horde of insects, large, 4 inches long, in constant motion; in some places they are strong and the collective effect is that of a strong body; in others they are weaker and the structure is crumbling, with clumps of critter-things falling away and exposing vulnerabilities; neutral temp; dark gray or brown-red; the panic (Cringe?) of being covered or eaten by swarms of giant bugs but needing them for their protection against something even more dangerous (Bombardment); the sound is as if each critter-thing is wailing and the collective rises into a high-pitched shriek of a baby in pain.

This is partly what contributed to the squirrelly, antsy feeling of crawling out of my skin last night; I am in big danger; I must sacrifice everything for the singular goal of preserving my existence. No help is available. I am all Alone. Nothing else is important.

---

After mapping Bombardment and Overwhelm, I continued by mapping Alone/Abandoned and Cranky/Angry/Rage.

Alone/Abandoned

I want/need an ally, protection from the Bombardment, and there is someone who is supposed to be, or who was, that ally/protection. But she is absent, unavailable, not any protection. In fact, she is just as Overwhelmed by it as I am, and is not present.

Close behind this is Cranky/Angry.

A vacuum where a protective, warm, nurturing body is supposed to be. An empty, vacant space, all around me, about a foot or two. It’s just empty. No protection from Bombardment. Cool/chilly temp; color like an insipidly flat, non-blue, non-clouded sky, with a sense of darkness also, or like highly mineralized water in a hot spring; no movement; no sound.

My instant response to this is to expand it, to create a large buffer between myself and Bombardment, and between me and anyone who could potentially abandon me. This is the Alone phase of this, and with it goes judgment of others – they don’t see, are unconscious, etc. This feeds into a larger, more generalized Angry. In Alone, I want no enmeshment, no responsibility, no impingement of another’s needs on my own.

---

Cranky/Angry/Rage

Generalized anger/irritability at everyone and everything; probably originally an anger at being Abandoned, in its generalized form, very connected to Alone. Feels like this can also be escalated into Rage.

Starts/rooted low in the belly, rises up through my body; the higher and stronger it rises, the more intense is the anger; comes up to face and emanates out there; can come up through arms and have potential to drive striking out, (higher intensity = focus on sources of Bombardment); younger age = more focused on Abandoned, more Cranky, just a smoldering fire, chaotic, non-directional; older age = more focused on becoming the protector, punishing my father or other unconscious authority; like a larger ember, carbon, ash, and fire, just kind of smoldering in Cranky phase; fire increases and fills body, emanating from face in Angry phase; erupts into volcanic torrent in Rage phase – this only in rare fantasies of retribution against my father; sound is congruent with image/substance.

Cranky: I want my comfort. Angry: Damn you. Damn you all. You all suck. Rage: I hate you.

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After mapping Alone/Abandoned and Cranky/Angry/Rage, I took a bit of a break. Whew! In the break, I connected to another part of myself that often stepped in whenever I was at risk of sliding into this morass: Drive to Triumph.

Drive to Triumph

As if I could either a) install a permanent buffer / Alone, or b) conquer Bombardment. The point is to make the pain (Overwhelm and Hurt) stop.

Not sure what this is in early life. Maybe a simple tensing up of my body, “steeling” myself against the onslaught. An attempt to force things forward, sometimes with some effectiveness, but without sustainability.

Physical body, muscles; a tensing up, with forward focus.

Even more, a sense of being a flow forward; it’s like I am carried in a flow of very thick, dense liquid, like molten rock, (but room/body temp), yet I am the flow and am directing it; requires some tension/effort to direct/control it; when I am in this, the other stuff, (esp. Bombardment, Overwhelmed, Abandoned), can’t affect me. a deep purple/maroon/brown, opaque; flow channel is 8x8 feet; sound is of long, deep breathing, especially the exhale.

I can do this. I am strong. I will keep trying.

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This Drive was how I managed the Overwhelm, the Bombardment, the Alone/Abandoned, and the Hurt. It was a force that kept me going, kept me working, kept me striving to pull myself up and out from the mess I perceived humanity to be.

This kind of dynamic is very common — in all of us. We have one or two parts of us that lock into strong, seemingly positive states in order to prevent being overwhelmed by underlying painful states. In myself, this pattern of some kind of ambition or drive or aspiration has been common. It took shape during my childhood, where my home life was very painful but I could go to school and succeed.

After mapping Drive, however, I turned my attention back toward the pain, found myself slipping into Hopeless, and mapped that.

Hopeless

Belief that it’s too late, there’s no way to overcome the Bombardment, and I no longer have the capacity to successfully create a sufficient buffer/barrier. (I wonder if some rich people have put their energy into this, out of a similar place.)

It’s too late for me. It’s too late for all of us. I’ll never be free. I’m too old, too weak, too broke. I’ll be dead first. I give up.

Blackness, like an egg surrounding me and through me; it permeates everything inside, blocks everything outside, (only partially – it’s more of an overlay, so I can still feel all the painful stuff); a sound-dampening “cone of silence” inside it; substance is like egg white but dry, has viscosity and thickness but not moisture, resists movement; neutral temp; completely opaque, black; no movement; a sense of suffocating, like it would be so easy to just give in and die, now.

---

Finally, in a natural segue, as a secondary compensation for the pain, I found myself feeling Longing for Comfort, and mapped that.

Longing for Comfort

Food, sweets, numbing, “atavistic.”

Super heightened sensitivity, reaching, on all surfaces of my body, including the alimentary canal; moist, red, soft, fleshy solid; surfaces, 1/2-inch thick; small peristaltic micro-movements, heightened around the mouth, satisfied by taste, feel, at which time the movements subside. This may be able to become over-activated and become the jumping-out-of-my-skin feeling / sensation from last night; whiny groaning sound.

I just want comfort. I just want the pain to go away. I want to be distracted. Make it stop.

---

That was a long session of mapping, and at the end of it, I was sitting with the weight of it all, mulling whether there was anything more to find as part of this pattern within myself.

The next day, May 23rd, I wrote the following before mapping Core Fear.

Suspecting there is a deeper fear. Feeling a total-body, near-paralysis when I go into it. It’s not the Overwhelm. Starting to feel sick/nauseous just acknowledging its existence. This is a core fear, inside the Anger, hidden in my belly almost always outside my awareness.

This also resonated with the “fear/anxiety” I named on May 17th, the only one of those named states that did not yet yield something explicitly mapped.

Core Fear

Going into this, I find the Longing for Comfort is stronger, and I am drifting toward feeling practically comatose, moving very slowly, thinking very very slowly, blank expression on my face.

In my belly, hidden inside the ember of Cranky/Anger.

Ice cold; small, maybe two inches diameter, spherical; a dense, concentrated gas, swirling viciously around its center; nearly empty, vacuum-like at the center; has the capacity to expand instantly and stop everything, freeze everything, paralyze everything. {See Numbness below.}

This is the horror of being alive, held as a contrasting juxtaposition with the extreme impersonal nature of the universe; this is the vacuous cold and meaninglessness of the universe held within my own core, as the essential truth of existence.

{Where did this come from?} I don’t know. It seems maybe I was born with it. Having this made the pain and discomfort of my parents’ crap much more difficult to bear, as it removed all hope of something different. No meaning, no comfort possible.

My Drive is a nihilistic raging against the machine, in some ways. I want there to be meaning, I want there to be possibility, and I have taken it upon myself to create that out of my own solitary effort, in the face of the meaninglessness (Core Fear) and insanity (Bombardment). There’s no way it can win, but there’s no way I can accept anything less than trying. To surrender is too intolerable.

This intensifies Hopeless. Also intensifies, paradoxically, Drive. But Drive is frozen in place, massive but not moving forward. (Ah, perhaps Drive and Hopeless are alternates, same part.)

---

As you can see from my notes, as I delved into this, the experience was intense. The whole group of states seems to revolve around this Core Fear. I call such a state a “pivot” state.

Notice also that I identified Drive and Hopeless as two sides of the same coin. This possibility for states to have a non-coexisting, either/or relationship also shows up in our observations. We will learn much more about this once we start applying the fieldwork moving practice.

This kind of intensity is very difficult to experience. The whole group of these states coexisted simultaneously in my awareness as I wrapped up my mapping investigation of the pattern. To provide some comfort, this Core Fear was able to slide into something I called Numbness — hinted at in the mapping thread — in order to enable me to function.

Numbness

Lifelessness in my entire body, flesh in suspended animation, no thought, no breath; neutral temp; neutral, like silly putty but matte instead of shiny and an off-white color; very, very slow morphing movement; sound of things slowed way down beyond comprehension. Highest intensity in my face/head.

I am frozen, I cannot move, I am in stasis, there is nothing I can do.

---

I didn’t actually draw this one because it was an alternate state of the Core Fear. I could shift them back and forth between the two forms.

All together, these states (with the Hopeless rather than Drive, and Core Fear rather than Numbness) came together in the following composite drawing. The drawings for each state are my original, in-process drawings, but I’ve upgraded the quality in the drawing below.

My Small Life

The Buried Group: Berserker

After clearing this My Small Life set on May 26th, I had a few good days. But very quickly, the next set of states raised its ugly head. Within a week, I had mapped these.

This set of states included three I shared in SO-4: Challenges to the Assumed Somatic Basis for Feeling: Trapped, Trap and No Way Out. The full set also included Hurt (a different form from the one in the My Small Life set above), Get Away, Hate plus an out-of-control phase of the Hate part I called Berserker, Judgment/Analysis, Edgy Hopelessness and Vindictive Retribution.

This set was intense, nasty, and frightening to experience because it seemed capable of great destruction. Thankfully I had successfully kept it buried throughout my life. This is what the composite drawing looked like.

I was grateful to shift it within a few days. At some point in future writing, I may take you through the full transformation.

At this point, I want to provide some further context as well. These two sets of states I’ve shared are but a very small fraction (about 1/40th) of the extent of hell I was able to find, excavate and transform within myself through persistent work over a period of many years. And to reiterate, I am relatively “normal.” I believe this level of interior, deeply buried pain is common among us all, even among those of us considered “high functioning” or even “happy.”

What This Suggests

Fieldwork gives us the power to more safely enter realms inside of us that were previously off-limits because of sequestered forces too powerful and dangerous for us to dare to approach. Our new tool for high-resolution observation, combined with its capacity for direct and efficient transformation of dangers into resources, empowers us to directly enter these dark inner realms and begin to learn much more about what actually lives there.

Although we have sensed such darkness in the human heart for millennia, the details that reveal themselves through fieldwork bring us far closer to understanding its nature and origins. We still have a long way to go, but simply through the practice of mapping, we have advanced quite a distance. Let’s keep going.

As we prepare to take on the moving practice and to employ our fieldwork tools to their full extent, we will discover much more. One glimpse into our future understanding: we will come to realize that the predominant drives that shape the fabric of modern culture and the systems of our society, along with our personal habits, preferences and personalities, all rest upon a vast ocean of unbearable pain.

This inner pain and the destructive behaviors it fuels are normal in today’s world. But they are not natural. They are not the truth of human nature. As we proceed, you will learn much more about what is true, what is natural, and what is our gift to bring forward. And you will learn how to begin to engage with the larger question of how to liberate that gift into the world.

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These transcendent experiences are in fact an ordinary outcome of fieldwork. The examples below are a glimpse of what awaits in the fieldwork moving practice. For this chapter, I share these simply as more advanced observations. We will dig further into an understanding of these states from the scientific perspective of psychotopology after we thoroughly cover the moving practice and the discoveries that emerge from it in Volume 2.

For now, I want to draw a connection between these states that are easily accessible through fieldwork and the kinds of states referred to by various spiritual and esoteric traditions throughout history. These states are powerful, and entire lineages have been built around them. Fieldwork offers us a valuable opportunity to learn more about these states through direct observation.

These examples are drawn from some of my own inner work as well as from work by Louise and Rebecca, some of whose other states we have seen in earlier chapters.

The Nature of Transcendence

The states I share with you below fall into a category psychotopology calls source states. Source states have a unique quality of being experienced as an infinite supply of some kind of experiential resource in the form of its virtual material feeling substance. It is this felt sense of having access to the infinite that gives the states their quality of transcendence.

In doing fieldwork, we typically encounter three types of source states, in which the resource enters the experiential space from a point inside or outside the body, or is located infinitely, everywhere. Let’s look at examples of each of these. (In the title, I have also provided the name of the state which was originally mapped and moved to its ideal, the illustrated source state. I have more to say about this at the end of the chapter.)

Source States Originating Inside the Body

These are experienced as an infinite supply of feeling substance, providing some kind of experiential resource through an origin point located on the midline of the body.

Sharing (originally Hurt)

A joyful light at my throat, just under voice box; blue-white light, shining out in hundreds of narrow rays/beams in all directions; soft but bright; neutral temp, some warmth; can be other colors also – ROYGBV etc; this really opens up my back, the light reaches people I can’t even see; my voice animated, level (at the same time), confident.

I am sharing what I have learned and observed, my questions, my challenges, and my support. I am speaking. Others can listen or not, engage or not. I inspire many others. My inspiring helps others contribute to / participate in the big give/receive.

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Lion Heart (originally Tranced Out)

{From Rebecca.} Light/energy from my heart, radiating outward; white and silver, luminous; pretty hot; sound of radiating light/energy; really intense.

Something about peace, and strength, and giving, and passion. I’m infinitely stronger than I think I am.

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Power Core (originally I’m Dead Already)

{From Rebecca.} Belly; energy; warmer than body temp (but not hot); orangey red, luminous on the inside but not on the outside; red blood cell shape; medium-high vibration; medium-low hum; limitless. It’s where the power is, where my source of power and strength and solidness comes from, as opposed to being flaccid, unmotivated, or unduly influenced by outside influences. It’s the engagement, taking myself from potential energy to kinetic energy, the source of strength in any other system; it touches all systems.

I am strong. I can handle it, whatever “it” might be. I can trust myself.

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Creative Expression (originally Rigidity)

{From Louise.} Warm; softer, rounded edges, pliable... a shimmering energetic light, lengthened, a long, cone shape, all shimmery, silver and gold, the way sunlight looks on water; it moves into my body, my throat area, shining outward, forms a cross with the focal point at my throat, a strong energy there, golf-ball size; movement is sparkling, energetic, outward, the throat is an origin, and it’s moving out, rings pulsing out from it, with vertical and horizontal axes. Sound of sparkly laughter, my voice.

It’s the integration between self (vertical) and expression (horizontal). Self is expression. You are, right now, living the absolute, creative, expressive life of yourself, and it’s all in the moment. You’re living your expressive self every day; it’s not about what you could be in the future, it’s about what you are right now. Everything I do, I am living my absolute creative expression, the life of me.

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Source States Originating Outside the Body

These are experienced as an infinite supply of feeling substance, providing some kind of experiential resource from an origin located outside the body, with the feeling substance traveling into and through the body.

Here (originally Trapped)

Light, a column shining down and through me from above; yellow/white, shimmering, glistening, like mother-of-pearl; fills me all the way up, I am bursting from within with the energy and power of this light; some strong/fast vibration; strongly anchored in the earth, as if the whole point of its coming in is to provide that anchor; sound like a large waterfall, a roar that softly fills in all sound space.

I am here. On this earth. As this person. Among these people. My power comes through when I embrace my role, my identity, my time and place. I am here. Not anywhere or any time else.

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Wu Wei (originally Hopeless)

{From Rebecca.} An energy; a posture facing up, arms up; orange-red-amber cloud of energy; all through my body with concentration at the peaks of the posture, so tops of cheeks and blades of my arms where it comes out, upward, extending far out; a feeling of movement, my whole body moving upward; cool; it’s effortless and it moves forward, it just is moving; sound of wind rushing past my ears.

Reminds me of Wu Wei in the I Ching, the easy path, the path of least resistance. This allows for inaction as the appropriate course of action at times. There’s no such thing as being unproductive, because the movement is always forward regardless of what it looks like to me, and because I know when I need to take physical action and there’s other actions that are non-physical, and other actions that aren’t my actions, and it’s always moving forward. Sometimes the appropriate action is non-action, because the other elements haven’t done what they’re supposed to do yet. Waiting is an appropriate action sometimes.

The energy comes from behind me, moves through me and forward/up.

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Bigger than Happy (originally Helpless)

{From Rebecca.} Pulsing up through my body in waves, from ~ one foot below to 2-3 feet above me, opening up above like a sprinkler; gold, shimmery, appears gold and white; same substance; same sound.

Something special is happening. This is it.

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Infinite Self (originally Longing)

{From Louise.} Slightly above body temp; energetic light; luminous gold/yellow, warm, rich egg-yolk color; steady, expanded, coming into me from above, all the way through my body; a real sense of awareness of the different chakra points illuminated; peaceful and quiet, with a feeling of all sound, an energetic hum of everything.

Feeling of connection. I feel this real height, like my whole being is really tall. This feeling of this constant source of, more of an energy, this constant supply of love. It’s a feeling of being perfect in the moment, not perfect as a closed, achieved thing, but more an energetic balance in the moment, the feeling of being perfectly supported, prepared; perfectly comfortable in the moment and present for the moment. I have everything I need, and it’s just there.

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Source States Infinitely Occupying All Space

These are experienced as an infinite supply of feeling substance, providing some kind of experiential resource that is available everywhere inside and outside the body, infinitely in all directions, occupying all space.

Breathing/All (originally Vindictive Retribution)

70 degrees; yellow, luminous; energy; there is “breathing” going on everywhere, in the space of me and everywhere else, a constant give and take, from one area to another, back and forth; the pattern of this “breathing” is grand, like Van Gogh’s Starry Night; sound of deep breathing everywhere; energizes my whole body.

I can simply breathe. My breathing is a participant in the pattern of all breathing; we are all connected through air and water and food and energy, each one into another into the next; nothing anyone can do can take that away or stop it; it has always been so and will always be so.

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Be Peace (originally Guilt)

{From Rebecca.} Cool; like every atom part is, the first thing is, just expanded, but expanded like this opening where all the stuff that constructs my body is separated into its energetic elements and is slowly expanding; just peaceful matter; just the awareness of being matter; energy and lots of nothing; spread out infinitely everywhere, but that is me infinitely everywhere, there’s not a body separated from everything; the universe is me, it is inside my body but there is no outside of my body.

Darkness with points of energy-light, like stars; sound of “Aaaahhhhhhhh,” the voice of the cosmos, (therefore, my voice).

No thoughts, just peace. Be peace. It’s simple.

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Joyful Zest (originally Everything Is Wrong)

{From Rebecca.} Light, sparkly, like shooting stars in random directions, inside and outside; shooting stars sound effect; warm tones of color, orange, red, amber, yellow, with a little blue, green for balance; where they go through my body, they leave a vibrational chaser sensation for a second; one to several at a time; infinite, everywhere, and I can feel the vibration inside and outside my body when one shoots through me. The green and blue ones are more playful.

It’s very joyful, playful, happy, bright. It’s not about agency, it’s just context, it’s zest for life. Everything is really fun. Massive fun. This is my native ground. It brings a sweetness and levity to what I do, regardless of the heaviness of whatever content may come. It’s that appreciation for the magnificence. It makes it possible to not go in-fucking-sane. Instead: fun, puppiness, playfulness, joy, lightness.

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The Infinite Universe (originally Chaotic World)

{From Louise. This one was shared in the earlier chapter, SO-4: Challenges to the Assumed Somatic Basis for Feeling.} Goes out infinitely, these floating shapes, golden color, close/far, all accessible, infinite different shapes, moving gently, all different directions, pulsing almost; they move through me or touch me and move in another direction, all really gentle. Very gentle humming sound, vibration. Shapes are gold and shapeable. Gentle warm to hot temp.

Everything is accessible. Therefore, reach out and select what you want. You can select from an infinite array of choices, all different ones, and they’ll all fit together somehow.

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Connections to Spiritual and Esoteric Traditions

I am no expert in spiritual and esoteric traditions. In fact, ever since I set foot in virtual materiality land, I have assiduously avoided dipping into such waters on purpose. It has been of the highest importance to me that I maintain a disciplined focus on the raw data of direct experience above all. The opportunity of this discovery was too rare to dilute with other teachings.

Nevertheless, the parallels here are too strong to ignore. I thought you might have some interest in unpacking them somewhat. So to help draw the parallels for you, I’ve turned to the strengths of current AI resources — this is one of those places where the extensive training of the LLM comes in handy. The following is a commentary by ChatGPT on these examples, making comparisons with spiritual and esoteric traditions.

Note: I debated whether to include this, but decided at the last minute to go ahead with it. It’s useful, and while I have no experience with any of the spiritual connections made here, I anticipate that some of you might, or at least might find these interesting. And of course, take it with a grain of salt, and use this simply to stimulate your own exploration and inquiry.

The transcendent states described above align with several spiritual and esoteric traditions. Below are connections between the three categories of source states and their potential parallels in various traditions:

1. Source States Originating Inside the Body

These states involve an infinite supply of virtual material substance located at specific points within the body. This resembles Eastern esoteric traditions, particularly those involving the chakras and kundalini energy.

• Sharing (Throat Light) → Resonates with the Vishuddha (Throat Chakra) in Hindu and yogic traditions. This chakra governs communication and self-expression, and the described experience of light radiating outward suggests an alignment with its qualities.

• Lion Heart (Heart Energy) → Aligns with the Anahata (Heart Chakra), which is associated with love, courage, and connection. The mention of peace, strength, and giving echoes Sufi teachings (e.g., “expansion of the heart” as an experience of divine love).

• Power Core (Belly Energy) → Resembles the Manipura (Solar Plexus Chakra), traditionally linked to personal power, confidence, and motivation. It also parallels the Dantian in Taoist practices, the energy center believed to hold personal vitality.

• Point of Total Awareness → This description evokes Zen and Dzogchen Buddhist notions of a point of awareness illuminating everything, akin to the Bodhi (awakening experience) in meditation, where a single insight shifts perception into clarity.

2. Source States Originating Outside the Body

These experiences describe an infinite supply of virtual material substance entering from beyond the body, which aligns with mystical experiences of divine transmission, cosmic awareness, and surrender to flow.

• Here (Light Column Downward) → Very similar to Divine Light transmissions in Christian mysticism, particularly experiences described by Christian saints (e.g., St. Teresa of Ávila’s “transverberation” experience). It also parallels Shaktipat (energy descending through the crown chakra) in Hindu traditions.

• Wu Wei (Flowing Energy, Effortless Action) → Directly corresponds to Taoist Wu Wei (effortless action, alignment with the Dao), which emphasizes moving with rather than against the flow of the universe.

• Bigger than Happy (Golden Light Fountain) → This could align with beatific vision experiences in Christian mysticism, where divine joy and bliss permeate the body.

• Infinite Self → Closely mirrors Advaita Vedanta’s notion of Atman-Brahman unity, where the self is recognized as an infinite, unchanging presence beyond the body.

3. Source States Infinitely Occupying All Space

These experiences describe an infinite expanse of energy, presence, and interconnectedness, echoing non-dual traditions and cosmic consciousness.

• Breathing/All (Universal Breathing Awareness) → Directly parallels pranic breathing in yogic traditions, where one becomes aware of breathing as a cosmic exchange.

• Be Peace (Expanding Infinite Presence) → Mirrors Nirvana in Buddhism, where the dissolution of personal boundaries leads to pure being. The cosmic “Aaaahhh” sound also resembles Om/Aum, the sacred vibration in Hinduism and Buddhism.

• Joyful Zest (Playful, Expansive Joy) → Could correspond to Sufi ecstatic states (wajd) experienced in dance and music (e.g., whirling dervishes), where joy and divine connection merge.

• The Infinite Universe (Golden Moving Shapes of Possibility) → Resembles Tibetan Buddhist teachings on infinite potential in the Dharmadhatu (realm of pure potential and interconnected movement).

Summary of Key Similarities and Differences

To review:

• Similarities:

  • These states strongly parallel mystical, yogic, Taoist, and Buddhist traditions, particularly in their descriptions of light, expansion, flow, and interconnectedness.

  • The midline energy centers correspond well to chakra and Taoist dantian mappings.

  • The outside-body energy sources resemble theistic or divine light experiences.

  • The infinite space experiences strongly resonate with non-dual traditions.

• Differences:

  • Fieldwork provides a precise phenomenological map, while many traditional systems rely on symbolic/metaphoric descriptions.

  • No deity or external figure is invoked in psychotopology—traditional systems often frame these states as divine gifts.

This comparison highlights how psychotopology independently maps transcendent states with a phenomenological precision that aligns deeply with, but is not dependent on, traditional spiritual systems.

Back to Me — And You

Let’s review. The states observed here were reached, not through an aspirational practice aiming at achieving those states, but through a practice of simply being with an ordinary state that showed up for observation (named in parentheses in the state-name header), and inviting that state to shift in a direction that felt natural to itself. There was no specific goal and no alignment with a tradition. The practice involved simply showing up with what was inside, inviting it to reveal a more deeply authentic expression for itself through shifting its virtual material properties, and being open to whatever showed up.

In Volume 2, we will deeply examine the fieldwork moving practice, but for here I will just say that we can hold fieldwork moving as a more engaged practice of observation. You will see what I mean when I cover that phase of the practice and go into the science of what it reveals. These source states arise naturally in the course of doing fieldwork, and turn out to be built into the interior structures of all of us.

The fact that they show up very easily through a practice of enhanced observation validates that these longstanding traditions are very much rooted in a tangible reality that is accessible to you and me — to everyone. At the same time, we shall see through more extensive and systematic observation as we moved into more advanced work in Volume 2 that each tradition seems to focus on a portion of the whole. Together they represent a more comprehensive map of our inner universe, and independently, each one highlights and emphasizes one portion of the vastness within us.

Another aspect of this comparison to spiritual traditions that stands out to me is the difference between holding states as a kind of aspiration or goal, and holding the structure as a whole as the primary focus. Psychotopology clearly establishes that these extraordinary states inhabit a context of multiple parts of the self, and their role seems not to be to maintain any particular state but to respond more adaptively to life as it occurs, holding the ideal state as a reference point but fully inhabiting whatever state is most authentic for the moment. It’s a very different priority.

At the same time, these extraordinary states do offer certain gifts. I have invested very little time in investigating or cultivating these states and their specific gifts, though, and at this time I don’t have much to share about those.

Overall, we’ve barely scratched the surface (of the surface) here, but I’ll leave you with this. Psychotopology does make it possible for us to achieve a far more expansive understanding of these inner realms. It enables us to more fully map the territory available to all of us and provide more universal and diverse access points and pathways for us each to seek and find the inner ways of being we uniquely long for.

For those who are drawn to such states and the insights and experiences that come with them, fieldwork offers a very smooth road to accessing versions of these states that are unique to each individual and their life context. This path promises to be much smoother, more direct, and more personally meaningful than the more protracted paths offered by many of the world’s spiritual traditions. I’ll be curious to see what other people might do with this.

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But we must also acknowledge a fourth variable in the observation practice. Who or what are we observing as? Fortunately, our instrument of observation is actually able to be turned upon itself. Simply by naming the experience of the observer, witness, or self who is doing the observing, we are able to enroll that specific experience in the process of mapping. We do this in the same way that we observe any other state, taking it through the same systematic approach to collecting our observational data. (See FM-10: Cultivating a Witness Awareness.)

This capacity to observe the observer opens up an exciting opportunity. First, how does this method of inner observation actually work? At this point, we don’t know much about the “how.” What exactly is going on, and what might we learn about it by turning fieldwork toward the observation process itself?

Second, the nature of the self — the lived experience of being an “I” — has been explored throughout all of human history, through spiritual traditions especially, but more recently through psychology and cognitive science. But these explorations have never had a rigorous method for directly exploring and documenting the actual felt experience. Instead, they have relied upon isolated adepts delving into the mysteries within and relying upon mythology, theory, indirect practices, and various kinds of abstractions and correlations in their efforts to describe that inner terrain. What might we learn by attending to the virtual material properties of the experience of self in ordinary people?

Let’s find out!

Mapping a Witness State

In the chapter, SO-5: How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense, we viewed four states mapped by Hannah. Here is their composite image.

After mapping these, I invited her to identify and map the “observer self” which had been the seat of witness from which she conducted her observations. She mapped the following witness state. (The “Core” state she refers to is a small bead located at the center of the molten ball in her chest in the drawing.)

The Mediating Observer

This seems to be a connection between where my mind is and where my heart is. Internal. Almost like there are two spheres, one behind my forehead, and one where the Core hangs out. They’re about the size of tennis balls and there is a connection running directly from one to the other.

An energy, seems weighty in that it’s important, but it doesn’t feel heavy or dense. Neutral temperature. It’s a very light blue, pale. And then there’s kind of an electric current to it that moves on the outside, and that’s a darker blue.

It’s really pretty to look at. It moves like electricity, and it’s almost hypnotizing to look at it. Sound like a pulsating power sound, about heartbeat rate. Feels very even.

Even though it’s alive and moving it seems very predictable. It feels stable. It seems like it wants to be methodical. It feels very even-tempered, interested in all of the aspects of feeling, instead of just recognizing what seems dominant at the time. It’s like an illumination, like a light.

Everything is going to be heard. You can take it or leave it. You can drop the things that you don’t want, but you need to find them first. It’s an inner insight that hasn’t been as clear before. I’m not in any danger.

It’s more than just an observer. Seems like it also facilitates. It has the ability to communicate between the states. It’s a mediator.

This is fascinating, is it not? Where have we ever been given the opportunity to bring this high level of resolution to our observation of such a typically ineffable inner state?

Mapping the witness self raises a new question, though. When we are observing the witness self, where are we observing from? Who/what are we observing as? Are we on a slippery slope here, in danger of sliding into an endless regression of nested homunculi? Well, we have our prime tool for observation: fieldwork mapping. Let’s find out!

Identifying and Mapping Three Levels of Witness

In what follows, I’m going to lead you through a series of observations made by Jerome that culminate in mapping three levels of witness states. We worked with a few states from Jerome in the last chapter, SO-7: The Feeling in Every Conscious Experience, as examples of tangible states anchoring more abstract components of being and thought. Jerome exhibits a high sophistication in his inner structures and a strong capacity for observing these structures, so this sequence provides a wonderfully detailed tour.

Let me begin by summarizing the three reactive states where we began.

Panic

I think it’s my head. Flat, kind of sticks out on both sides. Green, opaque. Fist size thickness, like a squished cylinder with axis right to left, squashed in the vertical dimension. Hard, like a plastic. Some kind of energy coming up from below, encompassing it upwards. {See Obligation below.} Very inert, a little below body temp. Shiny, reflective. It wants to move up but it’s constrained in its motion on the top edge, so it’s stationary. At the top is like the boundary of my consciousness. There might be something beyond, but there’s no access. It’s a limit to where I can get in my consciousness. Sound is like nails on a chalkboard, but muffled. Hearing it more on the periphery.

It’s giving me a headache. Very much head centered. Like a numbness, and an end. I want to not be here. I need to back up, or backing up is the only way out. {My question: What is forward?} It feels like a hole in my memory {see below}. {My question: Related to “the boundary”?} Yes. It feels like in that space is useful information that would help me get out.

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Obligation

Obligation is the moment when you go from being empowered to feeling trapped. It’s when internal needs have been neglected. This is like an external force is denying you your needs.

Feels soft and persistent, but constant and malicious. Soft is the material quality. An energy coming up from below Panic {see above} and encompassing it, pushing it against Hole {see below}. Coming through my neck, almost like a spinal column alignment, from just outside my mid-back, behind me. Panic is coming right out of my spine, so it’s connected to some place beyond, with a stem in the center. This is coming up around that stem, the plastic form of Panic, and then is gone, disappears like vapor.

Like a gas vapor, a little bit uncomfortably hot. Color is hard to tell, translucent so the green is showing through, maybe magenta. Flowing up from the stem, engulfing the Panic, mottled, like there is turbulence. Silent.

Everything is focused on pushing that Panic. I can’t see around the Panic from the perspective of this Obligation. I could shift views between seeing myself from the third person to that of Obligation, from which I’m seeing the bottom of the Panic and I’m trying to get around it.

Mapping the Panic, I felt right at the edge of the Hole in My Memory {see below}, but from this, I have more perspective, I don’t feel as close to the hole, but I’m still headed that direction.

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Hole in My Memory

From mapping Panic {see above}: At the top is like the boundary of my consciousness. There might be something beyond, but there’s no access. It’s a limit of where I can get in my consciousness. It feels like in that space is useful information that would help me get out of the situation, but I can’t get to it. It’s missing. It’s a hole.

This is bizarre, giving me physiological effects. I open my eyes, have a slight headache, and it’s very disorienting. My question: OK to map?} It’s liking being back out. It got pretty intense. Yes, OK to map.

Seems to be in the very top of my head, just under my skull, but it’s enormous, goes way above. Like a big, graphite sphere. Maybe the size of a house. It does not feel like it has a finite edge. More like a high density liquid, buoyant, pushes back but with a tiny little give. The graphite is completely non-reflective, almost an absence of color. Feels like a brain freeze, but it’s not showing a temperature right now.

It has a gravity. It’s hard to tell whether I’m being pushed against it or drawn to it. I think I’m being pushed against it by an outward force. Something in it is swirling like currents, like the way the globe has currents. Maybe it’s spinning but that’s on a magnitude (too big, really slow) I can’t experience. The globe is large, but I’m not on it. If anything, it would be scraping past me, in a slow kind of way.

I may be on one of the axes, and it’s twisting, and that’s the slow movement. Coming up through that same axis, the stem of the Panic. Seems to be moving right to left perceived from in front of it; subtle. There’s a sound of no sound, like when you listen to a shell. It’s heavy.

It’s like nothingness. There’s actually an active destruction. If I was to push beyond that surface that’s keeping me out, I would lose it, all my memory or consciousness would dissolve.

---

The three states above were mapped in November, during a period of time in which Jerome was doing deep, extensive work with me. We revisited them in February and raised the question of the witness. The following three states were an explicit and detailed observation of Jerome’s witness experience in this context.

The Thinker

The place I go when I’m trying to solve a problem. “If I could just map every facet of this, I could find the right solution.” Which is when I push against the Hole in My Memory {see above}. It’s that relationship.

Right behind my eyes, maybe the center of my forehead, just behind it. Rigid substance. I’m getting a cube, like a crystal, lots of faceted edges, kind of square-ish, size of a golf ball. Smooth surfaces, fractal edges. Brown, opaque. Hot. It’s totally fixed, unmoving. It exerts a pressure forward from behind my forehead. Sound like high voltage power lines.

Strange, I can either be inside of it, looking through it, or looking at it as an object. When I’m inside of it, it’s like I am it. It’s cut off from other senses. So even if I open my eyes, I’m not paying attention to what they’re seeing. There’s kind of a singular focus on the problem. I often occupy this place when I’m trying to calculate the tip at a restaurant. Like, this is a complicated problem to solve, and I have to cut off all external contacts to get this done.

---

Awareness of Self

{After mapping The Thinker, inquiring about the observer/witness who conducted that observation.} As the observer of this: When I’m looking at it from the outside, it is just this inert thing. I guess it’s putting pressure, but it’s kind of just sitting there, motionless. “What’s that doing?”

This seems to be embodied. When I’m inside The Thinker, I can’t interact with Expressive Awareness, or Integrity, or Creative Expression {other related states}. Don’t have access to any of those. When I’m outside, I can see everything together.

It feels as wide as the back of my head, just to the inside of my head. Substance is like a down pillow. Room temp, warm. A cream color, opaque. No movement/force. Sound of a single violin. I can imagine any different number of melodies. The particular tune I settled on is a bit sad, in Scheherazade, Symphonie Fantastique. Wandering minor note solo. It feels a little sad and lonely in the solo bit, but then it’s answered by this larger string section with warmer strings coming in and receiving it. Then it’s this grand, rich crescendo. But the beginning solo part is what is attached to this place.

I have great awareness. From this place I can see my whole body, I can see in all directions. But it’s a bit lonely. {My question: Name for this?} Maybe Self Awareness. No, Awareness of Self.

---

Embodied Presence

{After mapping The Thinker and Awareness of Self, inquiring about the observer of these.} All around my body, at about two or three feet out. I can switch, be in the Awareness of Self {see above} place, looking out at this third witness. Or I can switch to this third witness and be looking back. Where this witness looks from is limited to the upper hemisphere.

It’s everything in my body, a liquid that fills my entire body. Warm. Water consistency, has weight to it. Orange, translucent. Slow drift of little particles. I don’t know if this is becoming a trope of mine, but there are little multi-colored granules floating around. Gurgle-y, healthy biological sounds like digestion.

A very comfortable place to be, very much in the moment. I can’t embody this feeling and go or think about anything that is not here and now. {The topic of a restaurant meal came up. I asked something about the experience at the end of the meal.} I’d be aware of being full and a little tired, feel myself absorbing the nutrients from the meal. (Didn’t even think about the tip. Doesn’t even matter.) {Name?} Embodied Presence.

It feels good to imagine being in this place in a restaurant, at peace with the whole sustenance thing. So often for me a restaurant is anxiety producing, needing to figure out the bill, worried about eating something that will make me sick. Nice to imagine a positive experience, nurturing, sustaining. In drawing this, it’s primarily filling the body rather than being on the outside of it.

---

Generally, when we turn the light of observation back onto the observer itself, we can go three levels like Jerome did. Taking our observation further seems much more difficult. But still, three levels of the witness self — what does that mean? What are we actually observing here?

New Questions, New Possibilities

The fact that we are able to actually observe the observer may not have seemed possible before we actually attempted it. Now that we have done so, the door is open to ask some much bigger questions and attempt to relate our observations to other frameworks.

For example, despite being embedded in the Western culture, one of the most committed to a unitary self in all of history, modern psychological and cognitive frameworks increasingly recognize that the self is not a singular entity but a dynamic multiplicity of interacting parts. From Carl Jung’s archetypes and complexes to Richard Schwarz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS), many people have proposed that we are made of distinct parts or selves, each with their own roles and motivations. Similarly, spiritual traditions across cultures have long described the self as layered, multiple, or evolving, offering models such as Hinduism’s koshas, Buddhism’s skandhas, Sufism’s seven nafs, and Kabbalah’s soul levels. Many of these teachings recognize distinct modes of selfhood — whether as shifting mental aggregates, progressive spiritual refinements, or inner voices that guide or obstruct realization. One resource that offers a wide-ranging tour of these various theories and teachings throughout history is the book, Your Symphony of Selves, by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber.

Yet, while these traditions offer profound insights, neither the spiritual traditions nor the psychological theories or practices offer precise, systematic methods for directly observing self-experience. Without a structured approach to mapping these inner states in real time, their descriptions remain speculative, often requiring faith in abstract principles rather than grounded phenomenological inquiry.

Fieldwork provides a disciplined, first-person method for investigating the discrete, material-like qualities of self-experience. We are now able to systematically observe, describe, and experiment with self-states, mapping how they appear in felt space, where they exist, how they interact, and whether they correspond to — or diverge from — existing theoretical frameworks and spiritual traditions.

This marks the first steps toward a rigorous science of subjective experience, one that does not merely speculate about the nature of self but observes it with precision. In developing and applying our new method of observation, psychotopology may gain the capacity to bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and empirical discovery, offering a truly experiential science of self that is available to anyone willing to look within.

One thing to note: At this point, we have just gotten started in investigating this phenomenon of the self. There will be much more to reveal in Volumes 2 & 3, and it is quite fascinating, to say the least. What we discover breaks with our most long-standing assumptions and challenges our most closely-held ideas about the nature of the self.

In the next chapter, we will focus more specifically on experiences that resonate with other aspects of spiritual traditions.

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At the center of this trio is Trapped, a writhing mass of raw organ meat. This state is congruent with the ways we typically approach working with emotion. It is experienced as occurring inside the self in reaction to things outside the self. It’s turbulent, uncomfortable, and located in the core of the body space.

But what about the next one out, the Trap state? In conventional methods and theories of inner work, the “trap” experienced by a state like Trapped is commonly treated as purely conceptual, a perception based on past experience and used to interpret reality in ways that warn about a threat to freedom and trigger the Trapped state. Working with this experience might involve examining the beliefs that interpret the conditions of a situation as being a trap, or working with the somatic or nervous system correlates of the Trapped state, attempting to calm the system and induce a sense of safety.

In psychotopology fieldwork, though, we are able to turn our attention toward the inner experience of the trap itself. When we do, we discover that it, too, holds distinct, tangible qualities of virtual materiality, an impenetrable solid shell. Not only that, but when we dig further into the experience, we discover a sense that “The trap is controlled / created by what is outside it.”

Turning attention to the space outside of it, we discover the zone of “people everywhere,” a space where there is no freedom I called No Way Out. Again, this “no way out” would be treated in conventional modalities as purely conceptual, a cognitive labeling that would be challenged in one way or another. In fieldwork, we discover that it also carries distinctly tangible virtual material properties as a weightless, rigid solid that is impossible to move through.

The Nature of Virtual Material Objects

Now it might seem to someone with no experience of fieldwork that we’re just playing around with our imagination. Of course it’s possible to imagine a metaphoric substance that could represent your experience of what it is that’s trapping you. You just get creative, and if what you come up with “makes sense,” well, that’s great. But so what?

From this place, it might seem that we could come up with a virtual material configuration for any concept or other category of thought or experience. It might seem that the field of possible configurations and their attachments is infinite, and that this makes the correlation meaningless.

However, the actual experience of doing fieldwork runs contrary to this interpretation. When we direct our field of awareness to the task of first locating the space occupied by “the actual, felt experience” of whatever it is we’re investigating and then investigate the virtual material properties within that space, we experience a tangible presence of a “something” in that space.

More often than not, we are surprised by what shows up. Almost always, what shows up contributes a great deal to our understanding of our experience. And again, we are easily able to verify our observation through our various confirmation strategies including the slider test. These virtual material objects are as “real” to our embodied inner experience as the cup of coffee we hold in our hand is to our physical self.

If this experience were generated by the imagination, it would exhibit a tendency to proliferate endlessly. This concept with its virtual material object would be linked to that concept with its virtual material object, on and on in prolific circles and skeins of conceptual linkages.

But that is not what we experience. Instead, when we investigate the inner feeling experience within a relevant context, we find ourselves rather quickly identifying a finite set of available virtual material objects underlying that experience. Multiple concepts and stories weave themselves through and among these central nodes, and it is fairly easy for us to identify and map that central structure.

This idea of a finite set of nodes is getting ahead of ourselves. We have a lot more to discover, not just in this current The Science: Observation series but in Volume 2 after we cover the fieldwork moving practice. Just know that in this place we’ve arrived, using fieldwork mapping to uncover the underlying structures of any contextually bound experience will yield a limited set of tangible, virtual material objects.

For now, I would like to share a variety of further examples of the kinds of non-emotion “objects” we are able to identify and map through fieldwork, along with their underlying virtual material manifestations. As you read through the descriptions below, notice how complex the experience of a single state can be. Every one of these examples arises in the context of a set of other states, and these sets can anchor immense complexity in thought, perception and motivation.

Enjoy!

A Few Examples from Jerome

The following five state examples are from a single explorer, Jerome. Except for the first coexisting pair — Rat Wheel and Responsibility — they don’t belong to the same contextual set of states.

Rat Wheel

Seems to be my back. All the way from my tailbone up to just below my shoulders, maybe including my shoulders. Not very wide, goes to my sides. You could barely see it if you were looking straight on at me. Hard, like a plastic material. Room temp. Quarter inch thick. Translucent red.

Pretty rigid and stationary. Inner sound of breathing. This object I’ve described is kind of pushing me from behind. Almost feels like it’s pushing the top part of my back forward, and it’s not necessarily a direction I want to go. Also keeping me from turning around.

There’s an anger, actually. I think it’s, (if I’m going to let the child in me speak), “It’s not fair I have to do all these things, and my needs aren’t being met.” So I’m angry at the powers that be. So I’ll show them, I will run even faster.

Don’t look behind you. Don’t look behind you because you’d be staring straight into the eyes of obligation. That’s scary.

Seems to be attached somewhere around my tailbone. Which is interesting. My legs feel engaged, or at least below my torso.

---

Responsibility

{In facilitating, I asked Jerome, “What’s behind Rat Wheel?”} I want to say responsibility. When I can’t look directly at it, it’s scary. Obligation is external, but responsibility is internal to some degree.

About 10 feet behind me, shoulder height. A little, bright point of light and it has spider-web tendrils that come out and attach to my back, or are touching my back at least. Almost looks like a projector. Golf ball size, an object in the same way the sun is an object, has a shape and size but you can’t see the surface because it’s just light. Hot. Yellowish orange. Beams of light are scintillating, moving around. No sound.

I really want to turn around and look at it. It’s attractive and warm. I’m exploring how it’s related to my body. If I turn, it turns, so it’s definitely related to me. Strange that it’s connected to me somehow. It kind of wants me to not pay attention to it, wants me to trust that it’s there, so I don’t have to look. And it really feels great to know it’s back there. {Interesting shift from the first encounter, which felt “scary.”}

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Identity

As witness, looking at myself I have this shape. If that went away, it becomes a mass of stuff. Imagining if it did get pulled away, it’s really disorienting.

Charcoal, light-absorbing surface almost like velvet, same feeling as velvet. Coincident with my skin, only above the plane, but feels like it’s connected to all of my body. Body temp. Movement is only if it starts slipping through, but it doesn’t do that. It only moves in response to what’s underneath it. No sound.

There’s a pride here. I’m kind of proud of the shape of this thing. I’m aware of, either it’s me or there’s some other eyes looking at this thing, I think. It’s something I’d really like to keep. If Failure {another state} is pulling it away from me, it’s something I’d like to prevent.

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Spaciousness

This is bigger than my body. In some ways it’s an environment. I’m getting this swirling. I’m almost thinking of a galaxy. It has arms and maybe pieces of light, almost stars. They define a loose sphere with an outer edge maybe 5 or 10 feet away from my body with a semi-diffuse edge. Not substantive, more of a light. I probably couldn’t reach it if I tried to touch it because it’s farther than arm’s length. I’m the center, so it moves with me. Warm. Sound is like snow falling.

I can actually touch it, and when I do it scatters into a new orbit. Touching it doesn’t give a haptic experience, but made the snow fall sound. Interesting, the touching it was a creative thing, and it’s inviting me to be playful.

I’m free to move around within my environment and interact with it. Freedom is a strong component. It feels very secure.

Earlier this week, I think I had created this Spaciousness through focused self-care and boundaries. I was enjoying being in it, and that was influencing other parts of my life. In that space I am able to summon the Gentle Caring {another state} when I ask for it.

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The Mind’s Eye

Three or four feet behind my head, above me. It’s a glowing orb, maybe six inches in diameter. Purple. Pure light. The whole orb is moving in a kind of a circular motion, an oscillation.

This purple orb feels like it’s a head, thinking kind of perspective. Sound of tenor humming. Has the magnitude of an organ, same pitch as a vacuum cleaner.

Seems to want to look at everything. Vision is important. Wants to see an appearance. It wants everything to fit together and make sense. I can sense that this is curious, but I can feel how it goes to a bad place {referring to another state} if it gets too much power, if I’m pushing it hard. There’s a respect of the relationship between me and it.

A Few More from Rebecca

We first saw a few states from Rebecca in SO-3, the chapter exploring the failed hypothesis of the “sadness signature.” Here are a few more from her.

Tranced Out

Torso, inside, slightly smaller than my torso; a sucking down into my belly, a sucked down, it’s still, like it has pulled in on itself and it’s still, quiet; temp neutral; energy that is not vibrating at all, or anti-energy, the space between the molecules of energy, black energy; black, possibility for translucence but there’s no light shining through this place; very silent. It’s very still. I can trance out in it.

I am gone. It’s really kind of a nice, little place. Just totally checked out. Lonely is safe. It’s that place that I get where I’m just not responsive, because I’m just checked out. It’s almost like being in suspended animation. Time stops and I get to take a break. I think I want to avoid being lonely. This is a way to avoid feeling anything.

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Apathy

Back of my head, back of my back. Every part of my body I can’t see. Half an inch thick, gray, (it would be black if it mattered); like smoke; moving without purpose or direction, real slow and weak; really heavy, like a magnet pulling back and then down; low tone like the humming of a machine, a low, white noise, droning on and on, unrelenting.

It doesn’t matter. Whatever. I give up. Fuck it. Not the good kind of detachment. The bad kind of detachment.

---

Higher Self

“Nope, you’re already figuring it out.” Something else in and outside of me that does know what’s going on. The part that’s fucking with me for my own good, a conspiracy plot.

Head, a cone going up and out; energy; radiating upward about 10 inches, spiky upper edge, almost like an effervescent fire boiling up; all different colors, including white and iridescent and really energized; really powerful; occasional sound of my voice, only lower, coming from left side.

It knows what it’s doing, and it’s not going to tell me not to worry, because it’s my job to worry if I’m worried, so I can see the worry.

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Stuffing Feelings

In and around my body, thick gas; cool; light gray; not much movement. Everything is OK. I’m fine as long as everyone is happy.

Two More

This example is from Sam, other states from whom we saw in SO-6, the most recent chapter on multiple states.

Awareness

It just feels like my conscious mind. This is the place from which the old reactions feel like they’re “not me,” an old costume. In my head; most of my skull; it feels like a light or energy. It just feels like, clean, exacting light; white light; neutral temperature; it’s radiating all around, 3-4 inches from my skin.

It doesn’t have a sound of its own; it’s the part that hears the sounds the other parts are making. It listens; it doesn’t sound. It’s funny how the feeling states that feel odd and foreign feel outside of this. Describing them as a costume means there’s something going on over. So I can sometimes feel those other things as trying to cover this light.

I have an essential nature that is unchanging. It just is. It being essential and unchanging, it’s a constant. It’s like wisdom — it has wisdom. While those other feeling states are just feedback.

The following example is my own. I thought I’d include this one because it’s a great example of something that represented something “not me,” yet it had a very powerful presence in my inner feeling experience.

Punishing Universe

Black. Harsh. Cold. The force of galaxies directed inward at me, like hurricanes of punishing energy. Very black. Crushing force. There is no air, no life, no reprieve, only condemnation.

This is a very bleak existence. Humanity, and my place in it, are damned. Feels like there’s no way out of this. It is a terminal condition.

The Unavoidable Outcome of These Observations

Let’s step back for a moment and reflect on what we have just seen throughout these intriguing examples.

• My experience of the world’s “trap” within which I feel trapped is itself a feeling object. So too is the judgment that there is “no way out.”

• Jerome’s experiences:

  • A “rat wheel” of endless tasks he needs to do with no support,

  • His own “responsibility” for his commitments,

  • His “identity” which carries a sense of pride,

  • A sense of “spaciousness” he achieved “through focused self care and boundaries,”

  • And his own “mind’s eye” which “wants to look at everything;”

  • All of these are also distinct, tangible feeling objects.

• Rebecca’s experiences:

  • An “apathy” that carries the “bad kind of detachment,”

  • Her “higher self” that “knows what it’s doing,”

  • Her “tranced out” which is “a way of not feeling anything,”

  • And her “stuffing feelings” that tells her “everything is OK… as long as everyone is happy;”

  • Every one of these is also a distinct, tangible feeling object.

• Sam’s experience of “awareness” that “just feels like my conscious mind” and my own experience of “punishing universe” that feels like damnation are also distinct and tangible feeling objects.

These feeling states represent types of human experience which have been approached as categorically different from experiences like sadness, anger, fear and joy. They have been approached as different in therapy, research and theory of all kinds.

What seems to be showing up here in this early stage of our observation of the actual, inner experience of feeling is this. We really, really do not understand the phenomenon or function of feeling from within our current paradigm. There is a “something” here that is not on our maps — at all.

What we find here, by applying fieldwork and actually observing this virtual material dimension of inner experience, is that there seems to be no conscious experience without feeling. Feeling is integrated into every experience, and when you actually observe what’s there, you will always find some wrinkle or warp you would not have expected. Our existing models do not accommodate the actuality of what lies within ourselves.

Let me emphasize again, we are in new territory. There is nothing in our existing knowledge that has prepared us for what we are observing. It is very important that we maintain our radical curiosity as we continue. What are we finding? We honestly do not know yet. And that is an exciting state of affairs.

In the next chapter, we will take a very close look at one type of these seemingly abstract but tangibly present types of states: the experience of self. We will be turning our light beam of observation back on the observer, and what we find will very definitely raise new questions and suggest new possibilities.

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The first group of example states were highly related. The following is a composite drawing of these four states:

• Anchor of Powerlessness

• Cables of Confinement

• Indignation

• The Core

Just looking at the drawing, we can see very clearly how these four virtual material feeling objects relate to one another. They interweave their virtual materiality with one another as if occupying space and carrying their respective properties.

One important characteristic of this group of four states is that the explorer who observed them was able to hold all four states in her awareness at the same time. They coexisted as a dynamic polarity between two states combining into an experience of powerlessness and two more into an experience of outrage. This was not a situation where one state turned into the other along a sequence of four different representations. Rather, they existed in her awareness simultaneously, occupying distinct expressions in explicit relationship with one another.

Current Models of Emotional Complexity

Traditional models of emotion, rooted in psychology and neuroscience, often portray emotions as singular, discrete phenomena, experienced one at a time or occasionally as binary “mixed” states (e.g., joy and sadness). This perspective reflects the broader cultural tendency to reduce emotional experience to simplified categories for the sake of clarity and study.

Some contemporary advancements challenge this view, recognizing that emotional multiplicity is a common, if underappreciated, aspect of human experience.[1] Research on “mixed emotions” highlights cases where individuals hold opposing emotional valences — positive and negative — simultaneously. This often occurs during significant life transitions, such as graduations, where joy and nostalgia coexist. Neuroscientific studies affirm the distinct neural patterns associated with such states, supporting their validity as a phenomenon. Yet, this focus on binary opposition tends to neglect more intricate experiences involving three or more emotions.

Theoretical models like Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion suggest that emotions are not hardwired but constructed from individual perceptions, cultural influences, and past experiences. This approach underscores the potential for ongoing emotional complexity but does not explicitly frame such complexity as universal or continuous. Similarly, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model and other pluralistic approaches to the psyche emphasize that our internal worlds are composed of multiple parts, each capable of holding distinct emotions. These models provide valuable tools for navigating emotional multiplicity but stop short of asserting it as a defining feature of all experience.

Embodied cognition further enriches our understanding by examining how bodily states contribute to emotional experiences. Emotions are viewed not only as mental constructs but as phenomena deeply tied to physical sensations and movements. This perspective hints at the layered, interconnected nature of feeling states but often addresses them in isolation rather than as part of an ongoing, coexisting tapestry.

Despite these advancements, most models and practices treat coexisting emotions as exceptions or context-dependent occurrences rather than intrinsic characteristics of human emotional life. This oversight becomes particularly evident when examining the subjective experience of emotion. Even in studies that include “feeling” as a component of emotional experience, the subjective dimension is rarely rigorously defined or explored, leaving significant gaps in our understanding.

Unpacking Another Example of Coexisting Multiples

As we can see, nowhere else in the existing sciences and models of the inner world do we find the complexity that shows up in our observations. Our ability to observe this complexity depends upon turning the light of awareness to the virtual material properties that comprise our actual experience of feeling. It has simply not been possible to observe without this new discovery.

This phenomenon of simultaneous coexistence within awareness will turn out to be key to our further investigations, as we will see especially in Volume 2. For now, let’s take a look at another example.

The doorway to our next example of multiplicity showed up in the chapter SO-2: Surprising Results as We Begin, in a gallery of images depicting observations of the experience of sadness. There, we see the drawing of a state Sam names Sad, reproduced below. This is Sam’s description:

Sad

There’s a funny kind of cascade down my front, over my belly, and it scoops back in around. More like mud than anything else. Feels like it’s on the outside, but then it scoops in and under my stomach. Kind of warm — balmy. Black. The motion of it makes me think of what a mudslide might sound like. Starts at the collarbone, wide enough to kind of cover my arms. Scooping around a good, solid ball of my belly, a power center in my belly. Maybe the sadness is just like shrouding that. Feels like it just goes out the back, away. I don’t know where it’s coming from.

I’ve been witnessing a lot of the yucky parts of people. Seeing ways that maintaining classroom order brings out the worst in the teacher; seeing the kids being defeated and apathetic. It’s sad seeing that. But it ties in with my daughter talking about not wanting to go to school; she’s bored, wants to do something meaningful. Tied to this fucked up system. So hard to find alternatives without removing yourself completely from the system. It’s sad. The whole rat race thing. It just feels like toiling.

Feeling states never exist in isolation. Multiple states coexist and interact, forming complex, interdependent structures. Using the clues given to us by the virtual material forms to discern related states becomes a key skill in the application of fieldwork.

In this case, notice where Sam describes the following: “Scooping around a good, solid ball of my belly, a power center in my belly. Maybe the sadness is just like shrouding that.” What might that be? What is the sadness shrouding?

When I ask her about this, Sam discovers a state she calls Fucking Furious and maps it. (In her description, she references two states she previously mapped, Abandoned and The Hole. I’ll show their images later.) Notice how something else she said in mapping Sad, “Tied to this fucked up system,” carries the energy of this fury state. (This is an example of our language pointing to underlying feeling states as described in FM-9: Identifying and Mapping Multiple States.)

Here, let’s track the series of three states mapped as a result of inquiring into what Sad was shrouding. See if you can follow their connections.

Fucking Furious

Tense, teeth grinding. In my pelvis, sacrum. (Directly attached to Abandoned, my mom expecting me to validate her. “I’m not supposed to be your mother, you’re supposed to be mine!”) Coming up clearly last time, mapping The Hole, felt like somebody ripped something from me, and somebody was supposed to be looking out for me, and nobody was. And nobody should even have to because nobody should want to hurt little children. Everybody should have been looking out for me, because I was a little kid!

Three sensations: one in gut, one in sacrum, one in throat. (The gut one is The Hole.) The fury is in my sacrum. Something else in my throat goes all the way up to behind my sinuses.

Fury in sacrum. Size of a grapefruit. Solid, hard, like a cannonball. It’s like a cannonball because it’s full of fire.

{Here I asked her to discern between the fire and the cannonball, and we went into the fire first.} The fire is the furiest part, furious at being in this container. Like fire. Hot, burning in a really satisfying way, like I can imagine how fire must delight in a fresh piece of wood. Deliciously, destructively, furiously hot. Not unpleasant at all. Red and orange and yellow. It burns straight up. Sound is the wind of a fire, like how a big, huge fire sucks air, the flames make a wind. No crackling, the flames make a wind of their own.

This has always felt really destructive and scary for that reason. But it’s exciting too. It feels like boundless energy, uncontrollable.

It wants food. It wants to gobble up evil and push out all the dark. It wants to burn up everything hurtful, every injustice and every malice. It makes my throat really tight.

It has a god-like feeling to it. If I am just that flame, it feels immense and so limitless, like invincible. I could see how a person could go the wrong way with that. (I suddenly understand Lex Luthor. It’s a consuming, intoxicating sense of power in that fire.)

Notice here how the Fucking Furious shows up with its own complexity, the “cannonball” containing the “fire.” Also notice a suggestion of something else located in the throat area. We’ve mapped the fire part of this, and now we delve into the cannonball.

Restraint

Cannonball surrounding the fire of Fucking Furious. Larger than grapefruit size, hard solid. Thickness is like a coconut, maybe an inch thick. Metal. It can hardly do its job - it’s under so much strain, and doesn’t do its job. It has a fuse hole, from which there is a constant geyser coming out of the hole. My sacrum throbs. Geyser is upward. The geyser is all of it I can handle, it’s as much as I can make use of. Especially since it’s so connected with my sexual energy, which I have so much of. Maybe keeping it restrained is what makes it so intense.

It’s cold. It has to be, or it would melt. Black. Like cast iron. It’s resisting all the pressure from the inside. You would think it would blow apart, but it’s just cold, hard iron. It throbs, aches, and makes me think of Atlas, because he never ever could have a break, or fall. He just stood there. You would think he’d be crushed or something. He just had the constant tension. Sound is the ominous hissing of the discharging fire.

It believes that if I am as big as I can be, it will be destructive, it will alienate me, it will create a bunch of desperate leech energy all around me. It’s trying to ward off fans, so that I can just have friends. (High school, top everything, no friends.)

The fire feels so powerful. With great power comes great responsibility. Without elders to teach me how to use this energy, I’ve had experiences where you make mistakes and people suffer. So it’s really scary to consider wielding that energy responsibly. It’s hard to trust that I know what to do with it. It’s easier to just keep it under wraps.

Notice the complexity in Sam’s understanding of herself and her life journey that emerges with the awareness of the dynamic relationship between these distinct state objects. Here, we also can sense another energy, as if there is a higher-level concern for bad consequences directing the constraining efforts of the Restraint. She says, “it’s really scary to consider wielding that energy responsibly.” We find that fear by asking her to feel into it directly, and we find that it corresponds to the previously-noticed location of the throat.

Fear

Bracing myself for a blow. Any time I would take a risk to express unhappiness or a need, I was taking the risk that someone would get mad at me. Even sharing this stuff with you, you’re going to see how fucked up I am and you’re going to go away. (Abandoned.)

Fear is a response to this, “Just bite your tongue and get through this.”

Constriction at my throat, with Fucking Furious and Restraint. A really physical sensation. Size of a big walnut. Feels like a cap. Caps the fire that streams out of the fuse hole of Restraint. It’s blue, opaque. Like rubber. Neutral temp.

I have to keep my experience to myself because nobody understands, and it scares people. My full genius terrified people when I was little. And the ideas that I had terrified people. And the way I saw the world was always very threatening to everyone. So it was very important to keep it all to myself, and to just figure out how to go along with the play, or I’d be completely alone. There’s a lot more, but I don’t know it any more. I was a lot smarter when I was six.

The Quartet Plus Abandoned and The Hole

Looking at these four states together — Sad, Fucking Furious, Restraint and Fear — you can vividly see their intimate interconnections.

‍As Sam mentioned, there were also the states she referred to as Abandoned and The Hole. Here’s what they look like in combination, with descriptions below.

Abandoned

It’s just a mound shaped blob with a point that comes up to my heart. And there’s a hole in my gut. (The Hole.) Like wet play-doh, the word putrid comes to mind, it feels rotten. Yellow and green, kind of opaque, a little snotty, like goo. Warm, 102 degrees, like when you go into a dance studio where people have been working out for hours and hours with the doors closed, stinky and hot and stale. Not moving, but it’s flexible because it’s goo. No sound.

I am alone. Therefore I’ll always be alone, I’ll never be loved, and I’ll never be happy because I won’t have my needs met. I need people and I need love.

The Hole

Empty, inside Abandoned. Size of a bowling ball, but it feels like a tunnel from my front to my back, like a bowling ball went through me. I feel like something that belongs there was taken from me. Temp is just nothing, not cold or hot. Neutral. Black. Feels like sucking in from both sides, like air is being sucked in from the front and the back. Like a black hole, it’s sucking things in there. It’s a vacuum. Sound of air, sucking. Like in the movies when the wind moves over the desolate plain and you don’t hear anything except the wind across nothingness.

I feel like something essential was ripped from me, and that’s the place where it belongs. Because it’s gone, it means there’s this emptiness at my core that leaves me hollow. I don’t even have any words for it, it’s just a part of me that’s mine, that’s gone. Like a piece of my soul is missing. Part of me belongs there, and it’s not there. It makes me feel hopeless, like there’s just this big gaping hole, hopeless about feeling complete and whole.

It makes me mad. It feels like it was taken from me, like I had it once and somebody took it, like I got robbed. It makes me feel violently angry.

All Six States: A Quick Review

What do you make of this? Again, Sam was able to hold all six of these states in her awareness at the same time. Within that encompassing awareness, each of the six states existed independently from the others, and each was fully engaged with others in the group in ways that shaped Sam’s inner experience.

Being able to actually examine this inner dynamic with such tangible precision gave Sam far greater understanding of her complex inner experience. This is the kind of power that lies in psychotopology fieldwork, simply through the act of observing the virtual material properties of our inner feeling experiences.

In the next chapter, we will track further examples of these interrelated states to discover that our experience of virtual materiality extends into “mental” experiences typically held as being completely different from that of feeling and emotion.

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[1] My expertise in these areas is limited, so my summary here is rough.

We experience ourselves as these substances, and we experience our environments as these substances. It is this world of substance that our embodied consciousness must first make sense of, navigate, and master in order for us to take on all of our higher functions and awareness.

So it should be no surprise that a fundamental substrate of consciousness seems to be the felt experience of the stuff of our lives. Try this little thought experiment as a demonstration of the ubiquity of the extended felt sense:

Close your eyes. Imagine picking up a broom and sweeping a floor. Or choose some other tool (and goal) more familiar to you. Can you sense the extension to your body, its weight, rigidity, and other physical properties? Can you sense just how you would move your body with this extension in order to accomplish your goal?

What Neuroscience Has to Say

According to neuroscience, your brain starts with a detailed model of your body, and then incorporates your tool into its model. It is as if the end of the broom becomes the edge of your hand. It does this in order to reliably predict what will happen to the end of your broom when you move your body in a certain way, and to deduce in reverse just how to move your body in order to get the dust out of that corner. A little push here, a little twist there, and swoosh, the corner is clean.

Not only does your brain model your body — referred to as your body schema — to incorporate the tools you are using, but it also creates a model of the space immediately surrounding you. Again, it is as if the space has become a part of your living self, in service to your being able to reliably navigate that space using the vehicle of your body.

This modeling can become quite extended, for example in aerobatic pilots. The phrase “flying by the seat of your pants” comes from the ability of experienced pilots to feel the connection of their body to the airplane as constant feedback, enabling them to fly as if one with the plane. Similar functionality can be seen in excellent operators of any such equipment. The other day, watching the garbage truck driver manipulate the grip mechanism to gently nudge the trash bin back into place after dumping it into the truck, I got the sense of that oneness between the driver, the machine, and the trash bin.

This is not a capacity limited to examples like these. We are doing this all the time, constantly maintaining a felt sense of our vibrantly dynamic body while taking on the objects and materials of our surroundings as extensions of our physical being. We are continually forming a multi-sensory, virtual material representation of our body-in-the-world, and using that representation to navigate the world.

Always and Everywhere

Let’s reach beyond tools for a moment. Imagine dipping your hand in a pool of warm water and swirling it around. Can you sense the weight, the fluidity, the texture of the water as you move your hand through it? Can you sense how you would push the water to create a small current?

Now imagine standing somewhere outside in a strong breeze. Reach your hands out to the side as you face into the breeze, and angle your hands to catch the wind as it pushes them upward and back.

One of my physical practices used to be a dance discipline called contact improvisation. Contact improv is a practice of taking on the weight and dynamics of another person as an extension of your own body in dance. You move together, communicating through touch and gravity and motion, becoming one expression through opening to one another’s embodied physicality.

Many disciplines draw upon and refine this power of virtual material projection including various sports, wilderness pursuits, expressive arts, crafts of all kinds, and many more. In fact, you will see eventually if you dig deeply enough into psychotopology and fieldwork that even the most abstract and sublime of human pursuits, those we deem spiritual or mathematical for example, rely strongly on this capacity for virtual material projection. For myself, I remember becoming aware of this functionality when studying organic chemistry. (I mentioned this in IS-7: My Approach to Science.)

The Fish in Water Limitation

But why is this central capacity of our consciousness so unacknowledged? I believe it is a case of fish in water. We are immersed in it, so stepping outside the phenomenon to examine it can be difficult. And when you almost always have real, physical things to point to as origins of your somatosensory experience, you attribute the experiences to the things. Counterexamples, as when you experience strong somatosensory images with no physical referents in dream or fantasy, or when you engaged in exercises like those above, are dismissed as irrelevant, just “in your head.”

What I am saying here is that underlying all of our directly physical experience is a duplicate or shadow representation of our body and its physical environment, generated by the felt sense. The more accurately it represents actual properties of our material surroundings, the more effectively we are able to navigate and manipulate those surroundings. I believe this virtual material world may be an essential component of the consciousness of all embodied, mobile creatures.

For humans at least, that felt sense has a creative capacity as well, able to generate somatosensory images having no material origin. Our capacity to both perceive and create virtual material imagery is profound. And I believe it is that capacity which gives rise to the endlessly diverse profusion of actual feeling state experiences we encounter in the course of our lives.

The diversity is far greater than our current language of feeling accounts for. And because feeling has been highly subjective, available to no one but ourselves, it has been difficult for us to talk about feeling in ways that accurately communicate to one another about our actual, felt experiences. We have had no way to objectively corroborate our descriptions in the way we find so easy to do with visual, auditory, or kinesthetic/tactile experiences.

Until now. The explicit questioning technique of fieldwork fills in this gap and reveals astonishing elegance, complexity, and intelligence in the realm of feeling. I anticipate that these questions will also eventually provide the means to scientifically verify the suggestions I am making, and to connect them to current theories about embodied cognition and body schema. (Even more, I have a hunch the cerebellum may be involved.)

What do you think?

Let’s take a look at a few more feeling state observations to further motivate your curiosity about all of this.

A Few Examples to Contemplate

The following examples are from a single fieldwork session with one woman, who I will refer to as Hannah. Notice how intertwined they are with one another. She experienced the first pair, Anchor of Powerlessness and Cables of Confinement, as two facets of what she experienced more generally as being Powerless.

Anchor of Powerlessness

It’s incredibly frustrating. The sense that I can push and push and push and still not get closer to obtaining what I want, of not having any control over really important aspects of my life or even what direction I’m going.

In my throat, going down to my heart, like a cylinder, maybe four inches diameter. Solid, almost like a pipe, like it’s hollow on the inside. There are filaments that spread from it. (See Cables of Confinement below.)

Pipe, feels metallic and corroded, heavy and black, half-inch thick, open at top and bottom. Neutral temp. Pushing down on chest and shoulders through the filaments. No movement or sound.

It’s hard, rigid. It’s like an anchor. It’s like it’s a piece of me. It doesn’t feel bad or good, but it feels like it needs to be inside. It doesn’t go outside. It feels almost like it contains my throat and vocal cords, and when I have this feeling of being Powerless, it constricts them, reminds them not to move, just to wait. I might say something I regret because I’d be angry (hinting at Indignation below).

Cables of Confinement

Filaments are coming from the pipe, (Anchor of Powerlessness), but are an electric blue and glowing; seems to be some kind of electricity. Rubbery, wiry vines. Hot. Like an electric shock. Filaments are located in the hollow of the pipe, exit the bottom, and crackle as they exit. It’s like the electric current is moving through them and you can hear it popping like power lines.

Filaments initially spread out to grab my shoulders, but after they’re in place, they don’t move. Just the current moves. Feeling of being weighed down. Current moves outward through the filaments. It’s like one of those lightning balls where you put your hand on and it attracts the current.

They are clutching me, almost like they want to hold me together but they’re just holding me down. If they didn’t, the pipe might sink. These filaments are there to keep it in place.

The next pair of states emerged out of observing/mapping the first pair. They showed up as confined within the tube of the Anchor of Powerlessness, and together Hannah referred to them as Outrage. The Powerless structure above keeps the Outrage at bay.

Indignation

I feel I don’t have any control over what’s happening, so I feel angry about it. I feel angry that I can’t change the circumstance. It feels like something outside is almost punishing me. There is this want for things to be better and I don’t understand why I can’t make it that way.

In the middle of my chest, above where my heart is, right where the pipe (Anchor of Powerlessness) is pushing down. About the size of a baseball. Hard, lighter than the pipe, and it’s like it’s shooting up my throat and hiding under my tongue, making my jaw really tense. Fiery red/orange and hot. It’s like the core in my chest is harder, and it’s shooting flame up from that core.

Rocky, but there seems to be this molten lava texture to it. Hard inside, and the surface is moving and bubbling. Hot. A hard center, like a core. (See The Core below.) Just the outside is molten. Two or three inches thick. As I think about it, it feels like it’s getting bigger than a baseball. Sound of the bubbles popping. Bright, fluorescent orange, with a blackish crust.

This is shooting up into my jaw. None of the black crust comes up, just this pure, hot light, more like fire. As it rises, the intensity doesn’t change, but it becomes more limber, more free to move. It’s glowing, and it’s hot, and it wants to shoot out of my throat. Because it can’t, it’s tightening my jaw instead. It can expand but it’s not the molten-ness that really expands, it’s the little jets that it sends out; can fill my entire chest cavity when it’s really aggravated. It wants to be expressed, to be let out. It wants to shriek.

The Core

Size of a ping-pong ball, maybe smaller. Really dense like lead. Hard but heavier than just a beach rock would be. Hot but it’s hot because of the molten exterior. I don’t think the core has a temperature itself. Jet black, opaque, and matte, not shiny. No movement, feels very solid. It wants to go up. The whole mass wants to go up. Sound is like a repressed scream, like a shriek. I don’t know whether it’s a shriek of heat or human. Same all the way through, like it’s the pit in the middle of a fruit.

It’s just really angry. It’s violent. It wants to get some kind of retribution. Wants to feel like it’s powerful, like it’s making an impact, even if it’s destructive. Towards the sense of injustice, the Powerlessness. It wants to assert power and the Powerlessness wants to keep it sunken. It stays put because if it surfaces it’s not going to fix anything; it may make things worse, so it gets repressed and it just burns.

Noticing

What to make of these four observations, conducted within a single, two-hour session? We have a very specifically arranged group of four closely related components defining a dynamic interaction between powerlessness and outrage. The high resolution and fidelity of these observations, along with their strong congruence with the observer’s lived experience of this inner dynamic, require a very sophisticated functionality. Such functionality exists, as we know, in our capacity to represent our extended embodiment experience, and I suspect this same functionality is very likely to be employed for the generation of these virtual material feeling objects.

And Three More

I’d like to provide another trio of examples to make sure to illustrate the way these virtual material feeling objects often extend into the space around the body. The following trio also illustrates another common dynamic I’ll discuss below.

Trapped

Stomach/abdomen; tight, as if resisting an imposition; twelve-inch irregular ovoid; hard/firm like an organ that is sick with some kind of cancerous growth; red, white, meat colors with some odd yellow-green; writhing, undulating, slow; bigger and more movement = more intense; feverishly hot; sound of constant tone of anxiety, vocal, not my voice, like a deranged child. “Help me.” But no point asking for help.

Trap

A confining container around me; sometimes very close, barely an inch away from my skin; other times farther, giving me room to move; solid, rigid, not very thick (half inch) but impenetrable; gray like a kneaded eraser; neutral temp; no movement; no sound, but I am aware that beyond it is no freedom.

The trap is controlled by what is outside it. I hate this thing. I can’t get out.

No Way Out

Everywhere, darkness, no light, no hope; cold; like a solid with no mass; can’t move through it, yet it appears as if nothing is there; a transparent, weightless, massless, rigid solid, immovable; dark, dark brown/black tint; no movement; no sound, at least none I can hear through Trap. This is final, permanent.

Nobody is safe (to be around). People everywhere are seriously fucked up, both stupid and dangerous. There is nowhere to go. Nothing I do will change things, even a little.

Unpacking the Relationships of This Trio and More

The first feeling state of this trio expresses the experience of being trapped. But being trapped implies there is also the experience of a trap, does it not?

In existing models of the mind, feeling and emotion, there is no clear place for the felt experience of “other” entities. We shall see more and more as we proceed that psychotopology fieldwork reveals that every significant element of our experience is represented by some sort of virtual material feeling object.

Even here, the experience of Trap carries a subtle implication that the container is not just an imposition but a protection. This is further revealed by the experience of No Way Out, which gives emphasis to the confinement experienced by Trapped, and yet is even more definitively “other” in ways that carry a distinction from the experience of self.

This unpacking of the relationship between our language entities like “trap” and the inner structure of our virtual material feeling objects opens a bigger question. What exactly is the relationship between our language and our feeling structures, especially in the domain of feeling itself?

Further: A Quiet Clue Hidden in Language

Somewhere along the line in my journey of developing this science, I began to see something that really should have stood out for all of us a long time ago. But I had never given it much thought. I realized that our everyday language had been quietly pointing to this virtual materiality all along.

Consider this. We use the word “feel” in a strikingly peculiar way. On the one hand, it refers to the sensations of our body: I feel the cold breeze on my face. I feel a hand on my back. With my fingers, I feel the texture of the rock I’ve picked up on the beach. But on the other hand, it refers to something much more subtle and abstract: I feel anxious. The vibe in this room feels juicy warm and welcoming. I feel like you’re hiding something, and I don’t quite trust what you’re telling me.

These two uses appear to span entirely different domains, one grounded in physiology, the other in emotion, intuition, or interpersonal atmosphere. And yet we use the same word.

Not just in English, either. A little internet research reveals that French, Spanish and Italian use sentir or sentire, German uses fühlen, Estonian tundma. More research shows, similarly, Mandarin, Hindi, Bengali, Swahili, Zulu, Navajo/Diné, and Quechua using the same verb applied to both tactile or somatic sensation and to mood, intuition, or inner knowing. This overlap is so common, so taken for granted, that it almost never occurs to us to question it.

But once I was working with this virtual materiality at the heart of the feeling experience, the question was impossible to ignore: Why would we use the same word for experiences that are, on the surface, so radically different? At first, the easiest assumption might be that it’s just a metaphor, that we “borrowed” the language of touch and applied it to emotion because the latter is harder to describe. OK, sure, but why did we borrow that? What if the reason these different domains share a word is because they share something more fundamental, a kind of materiality that underlies both, one physical, one virtual?

The elegance of this realization strikes deep. I hadn’t set out to answer a linguistic puzzle. I hadn’t even noticed there was one. But as soon as the observation emerges, it brings a sudden coherence to something previously unexamined. It illuminates why we might have always intuitively reached for the word “feel” to describe these disparate kinds of experience. Because on some level, below the threshold of awareness, they are not so different after all.

Moments like this serve as inner confirmation for me. As I described earlier, my approach to science is guided by a certain aesthetic — a felt sense of elegance and coherence that arises when a new insight resolves not only the question at hand but also several others that had lingered unasked. When a discovery reveals not just a piece of truth, but the beautiful structure behind it, I take that as a sign that I’m onto something real.

In this case, the realization that virtual materiality explains the linguistic dual-use of “feel” is one of those moments. A quiet clue, hidden in plain sight, has been waiting in the architecture of language. What had always seemed like a strange coincidence now feels like evidence. It’s not exactly “proof” in the conventional scientific sense, but more like a kind of resonance, an echo across domains signaling that we are seeing into something deeper than any one domain alone.

New Ground: Multiples

Before closing, I also want to call attention to how we have broken new ground here in another way. As you can see in the above examples, when we bring our new powers of observation to investigate actual feeling experience, we very quickly find ourselves in territories of multiples. In the next chapter, we will further examine this phenomenon.

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We then examined whether individuals, while experiencing emotions in ways different from one another, might at least experience their own emotions in a consistent way over time, only to find that even this was not the case. What emerged instead was an undeniable influence of life context: the same emotion, as named consistently by a single person, could appear in radically different forms depending on the situation in which it arose.

In the most recent chapter, SO-3: A New Hypothesis: The Sadness Signature?, we began to notice even more disruptive anomalies between what we might expect to find in the actual experience of sadness and the wildly diverse virtual material properties and locations of the experiences observed. The latter was most perplexing as we discovered that nearly half of our observations documented the experience of sadness extending beyond the boundary of the body. This stands in contrast with conventional thinking about these things.

The dominant theories of emotion — whether classical, constructivist, neuroscientific, or evolutionary — are grounded in a common premise: that emotions are fundamentally bodily processes. Whether treated as physiological arousal, cognitive appraisals of bodily signals, or the activation of deep brain circuits evolved for survival, each theory assumes that the fundamental substrate of emotional experience is generated by and contained within the body.

This assumption has shaped the way we attempt to understand and work with emotion in psychotherapy, psychiatry, and self-help. Therapies focus on regulating the nervous system, reframing thoughts, or increasing bodily awareness. Medications target neurochemical imbalances, aiming to adjust emotional states through pharmacological intervention. Even in the realm of self-help, people are taught to manage their emotions through breathwork, grounding exercises, or external sensory interventions. Such strategies treat feeling as something to be managed, “regulated” or manipulated rather than trusted and engaged as real in and of themselves.

However, as our fieldwork observations have already demonstrated, the actual experience of feeling frequently defies these models. We have now observed numerous cases in which the virtual material properties of a given feeling state do not confine themselves to the boundaries of the body at all. Instead, they extend outward, forming fields, forces, densities, and structures that exist beyond the skin.

Not only do they extend outside the skin, but they carry experiential properties that simply could not be generated by somatically-based processes as we understand them. Substances like “thick kiwi skin,” “oozing blood tar,” and “empty, silent blackness,” for example, have no correlates in physiological tissue. Quite simply, these findings do not align with any current scientific framework, yet they emerge repeatedly in direct observation.

If we are to take our commitment to first-person science seriously, we must confront this gap between conventional theory and lived reality. Below, I offer further examples of feeling states that challenge the notion of emotion as a strictly bodily phenomenon. As you review these, reflect on what these suggest to you. What might be the origin of such experiences? What might they mean? How are we to make sense of them?

Delightfully Divergent Examples from Louise

The following examples are drawn from a single individual, Louise, whose maps we’ve encountered in our introductory chapter, IS-1: A New Science of Being. These and the following examples are representative of what we find in mapping feeling states across all people. I’m choosing to focus on one person’s maps to highlight just how rich and diverse any one person’s inner experience is when we turn our attention inward in such a way as to actually see what is there.

Fear of Loss

Out in front of me a foot or two, spherical, about a foot or two; a black gas cloud, with a smaller red gas cloud toward the bottom radiating out, infusing the black with color until it fades out; hot at the base and fades to cold at the top and outside; oval shape; not moving; sounds like a hollow echo.

The temperature contrast is important. It’s like a burning out and a dissipating. But the core seems really strong...

This one is remarkable because of its location completely outside the body. Also, it’s like it’s own little environment, with the red/hot infusing upward into the black/cold.

Eternal Self

A light; white but all colors; in the base of my core, and the shape is moving up into my chest, shaped like a candle flame; a very steady, gentle pulse, a fluid pulse, moves all through it, speed of a slow heartbeat; no sound; it’s very steady.

There’s this feeling of eternity; it doesn’t diffuse, it’s always in existence, it feels very much there; it’s a consciousness that exists, a consciousness that is me but it feels removed from everything else; it’s this feeling of strength, a place to return to.

This sense of being “always in existence” is very interesting in this one, and the description of it as “a consciousness that is me but feels removed from everything else.”

Lack of Awareness

In lower abdomen; a solid sphere, hard, heavy but floating; cold; black; floating motion, very slight rotation; a real silence. Feels like it’s in my core but it also feels like it’s surrounded by this vast, empty space that’s inside of me.

It’s inevitability... there’s no way you can possibly be aware of how it’s going to happen or how you will do it, but you will do it. It can’t not happen, and there’s no way to be prepared. (It = the thing you will say or do that will change everything.)

This one is interesting in that the name seems to point to something that has no emotional content, no “affect” or “valence” of any kind. Yet it reveals itself as being no less anchored in virtual materiality. I’ll have more examples of this in chapters SO-7: The Feeling in Every Conscious Experience and SO-8: The “I” Who Observes.

Another interesting feature, the “vast, empty space that’s inside of me” — how can it be both vast and inside of her??

Point of Total Awareness

Slightly warmer than body temp; a light; a white-yellow glow; a tiny point that sends light into an area all around me, a sense of the void filled with light, and it’s inside me but so much bigger than me, this feeling of vastness filling the space; no movement; no sound; this feeling of eternity and vastness.

Luminosity comes from a tiny point of awareness, consciousness; the tiny point illuminates everything around it, and it’s just a shedding of light, absence of shadows. You don’t need complete understanding. You just need a point of comprehension to shed light on the whole thing. This feeling of complete understanding being futile, and this point of understanding radiating luminosity and awareness.

Again, so interesting the way the vastness exists in a specific space, and how there is this origin, this source, for the light that is sent “into an area all around me, a sense of the void filled with light.” Also interesting is the way her words describing her experience of this sound so much like certain kinds of enlightened states, yes? These kinds of states can be found inside all of us, and you will see more examples in SO-9: Observing Transcendent Experiences.

Longing

Deep inside, small, extends out of me, kind of elastic, way out there; soft, like many silk threads, close, not woven together; gray-blue, opaque; a gentle tug; a whisper, my voice, from another space/existence, an older me, gentle.

The whisper: “Come forward, and trust.” A very steady pull. I don’t feel forced or like I’m trying to resist. I remember feeling this when I was six or seven, knowing something was possible but not knowing what it was.

This silken elastic band stretching out who-knows-how-far into the distance, and “my voice, from another space/existence, an older me, gentle.” To me, discovering this kind of amazing inner experience in someone is utterly fascinating, and completely unexpected.

Support

Between solid and liquid, very wet, sticky mud; cold, clammy; gray, gray/brown, not real specific, dark, opaque; no movement; up to just above my ankles, past my feet but the depth doesn’t seem to matter (or it goes down infinitely), and it goes out in all directions. I’m able to move through it but very, very slowly. A feeling of real weight about it.

When you can step out of this, you can answer that call. But you can’t right now because you don’t have the strength to lift your feet out of the mud. Without the mud holding my feet, I would fall, without the tools to stand above it. It’s telling me to “Step out, when you’re ready.”

Wow, this sticky, clammy cold mud burying the feet up to the ankles and “going out in all directions.” What do you make of this? Keep in mind that this is not merely a metaphor, not a “mental image” or construct of the imagination, but a distinct, tangible perception of the actual feeling state Louise named Support. She feels the presence of this “support” at her feet and all around her.

Chaotic World

Coming down toward my head at an angle, straight at me. Sharp, jabbing, hard, all different shapes and sizes, squares, spheres, rods, all solid but metal, all different textures. And scattered energy, more like gas, pushing at me, a constant onslaught. All temperatures but more in the warm to hot range. Bright, aggressively primary colors. A faint, continuous clatter of things bumping into each other, moving, random, scattered, voices, nothing very loud but everything from chattering to faint screams and shrieks, laughter (not the good kind). Threatening. Assault. Intrusive. I’m not prepared.

This one sounds downright unpleasant, don’t you think? And it is 100% outside the body, with a chaotic presentation that is very clearly not a somatic sensation of any form.

What Are We to Make of These Observations?

The current status of our science of human experience is extremely limited. We have plenty of data about physiological markers, and we have correlated that data (crudely) to reports of emotional experience. Despite these correlations being very rough and imprecise, the effort itself has bound our current understanding into this very small box: emotion is a somatic phenomenon.

This has disruptive effects on our ongoing awareness. We develop our habits of attention in close interaction with our shared stories about what is real. This shared story results in locking our attention exclusively to the space inside our skin when we seek some information about what we are feeling.

This is like looking for your keys under the street light even though you lost them in the dark alley. You’ll only be able to see the random stones and an empty vape cartridge or candy wrapper where you’re looking. No keys. So you will take on the assumption that the keys must no longer exist.

This is the cost of not having the capacity to observe actual subjective experience, avoiding factoring that limitation honestly into the interpretation of our investigations, and surrendering to the pressure to call it real science instead of overtly acknowledging its tentative basis.

A Few Examples of the Box

I want to share a few quotes from well-known experts who have contributed to this anchoring of psychology in the sensations of the body. These are big names, and they have had a huge influence.

• Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D. (psychiatrist, trauma researcher) — “Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. … Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.” — The Body Keeps the Score, p.103.

• Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. (psychologist, creator of Somatic Experiencing) — “Trauma is not in the event, but in the nervous system.” — Widely shared by practitioners.

• Pat Ogden, Ph.D. (pioneer of somatic psychology, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy founder) — “The body always leads us home… if we can simply learn to trust sensation and stay with it long enough for it to reveal appropriate action, movement, insight, or feeling.” — Widely quoted.

• Candace Pert, Ph.D. (neuroscientist, Molecules of Emotion) – “The body is the subconscious mind; information just below the surface, including the skin, is an autobiography of the individual and where life experiences went well and where or how they did not.” — Widespread quote.

• Eugene Gendlin, Ph.D. (philosopher and psychologist, developer of Focusing) — “A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one… a bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. … A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling.” — Focusing, 1981, pp. 32-33.

• Antonio Damasio, Ph.D. (neuroscientist) – “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” — From Descartes’ Error.

• Tara Brach, Ph.D. (clinical psychologist and mindfulness teacher) — “Mindful awareness of our bodies is a portal to full aliveness, wisdom and love.” — From Brach’s website, a Dharma talk in 2018.

Each quote above is well-known in its field and widely cited, reflecting a common theme: lasting insight and healing come from turning attention to the body’s sensations and signals, either as the primary focus or as an indispensable component of emotional awareness. Each expert calls for listening to the body to ground and inform our emotional life.

Now, I ask you: When this type of thinking and advice is so dominant, what happens to habits of attention for people seeking access to and understanding of their own inner experience? When these are the prevailing opinions, is it any wonder that our awareness of feelingmind has faded to the background? At what cost? For each of the examples I’ve provided in this chapter for feeling states that extended beyond the body, how difficult would it have been for these individuals to gain awareness of the actual presence of those states if they were immersed primarily in this somatically-dominated thinking?

At the same time, we really cannot fault these experts for this oversight. There has simply been no solid science establishing reliable maps for the terrain of the inner, subjective experience of feeling. These people are doing an honorable job of trying to connect our materialist science with the actual experience of being. But the task is simply impossible to achieve at this point if we must rely on our current sciences of consciousness and psychology. The discovery of the virtual material properties of feeling experience opens a new doorway to expand and strengthen our understanding, and it gives us much more agency in navigating this previously opaque territory.

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In order to proceed, we quickly devised a new hypothesis: that different people have different ways they experience the virtual material properties of such a universal emotion as sadness. In our new hypothesis, we propose that each person carries a unique “sadness signature.”

We have already established that within short-enough time frames, when we are observing the virtual material properties connected to a specific, unique feeling state to which our observer has given the name Sadness (or something close to that), we find that, if we have done a good job of collecting our initial observation data, we will find the same configuration upon a second visit.

So, in essence, we are proposing that this configuration of virtual material properties for the feeling of Sadness for a specific person will remain consistent as that person revisits their experience of sadness over time. While their personal configuration of virtual material properties for this feeling may differ greatly from that of another person’s experience, within their own inner world, we hypothesize a consistency over time.

Well, how do we proceed? We can test our hypothesis by revisiting the experience of Sadness over longer periods of time, using fieldwork to map the virtual material properties of sadness as it arises within different life issues or contexts for the same person, perhaps separated by time periods of months or even years.

Three Observations from Rebecca

Jumping into this question of whether people might carry a personal “sadness signature”, we will examine three observations of Sadness from a woman I’ll call Rebecca (not her real name) collected over six months.

Sad and Lonely, in the Context of “What’s Wrong with Me?”

Our first observation came in July, exploring an overall issue she named, “What’s Wrong with Me?” This issue centered on the experience of not being liked, or at least a deep belief that she is not liked. She said, “ Nobody likes me because of some essential flaw in my nature that I don’t get social stuff.”

This issue was characterized by a number of different feeling states, including states she named Abandonment, Anxiety, Guilt and Hopeless. Among them was one she called Sad and Lonely.

Sad and Lonely

A curved shell around my back, a caving in; kind of like being inside an egg; tough solid, like leather kiwi skin (prickly) turned inside out, it has some give; outside of me, touching me, like I’m nested in it, fetal position; body temp; some sort of muted color tone; my front is still exposed, but I could choose to close it and peek out; no movement; things look different when I’m in this state, dangerous; a groany sigh, my voice.

I’m always sad and lonely, even if I’m with somebody. I’m either trying to figure out how to be so they’ll like me, or they really just don’t and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m totally alone. Nobody could ever love me. I don’t belong. I am nobody. I am shit. This is very sad.

Deeply Sad, in the Context of “Voted Off the Family”

The next encounter with sadness came in December, about five months later. The context was an issue Rebecca referred to as “Voted Off the Family,” and it had to do with a relationship history of having been emotionally abandoned.

Rebecca experienced “Voted Off the Family” as carrying a number of feeling states including those she named Great Danger, Hurt, and Longing for Connection. Among them was one she called Deeply Sad.

Deeply Sad

In my chest/torso; black; these dark places, one big one on my heart, these distinct, stationary places, and from those places there is an oozing down; thick fluid, “blood tar,” constant oozing, down about four inches from each place; comes in waves of intensity, heavier and more concentrated in the center of my chest; warm, like the temperature of freshly killed prey; sound of me bawling.

(Also, there are tears.) It wants to be held. When I get there I just want to be held. I am very sad. Could be for any number of reasons. I just want to be comforted, specifically held or touched.

Deep Sadness, in the Context of Connection-Phobic

Finally, later in the same month, Rebecca was exploring another issue she called Connection-Phobic. In this pattern, she carried a hidden expectation of being deeply disappointed in her connections because of an underlying feeling that she was not worthy of caring and support. So she maintained a kind of irritable defensiveness with many people. This pattern included Armored, Deeply Worthless, Irritation, and Deep Sadness.

Deep Sadness

Heart; solid or vacuum; warm neutral; purple; turning inside out; hurts; sick heart.

I am damaged. I am sad and miss my soul of sweetness. It is not safe to be sweet, gentle and kind. I don’t want to have to be this strong.

What to Make of This?

The bottom line here is that over the course of Rebecca doing inner work on a series of issues in the course of half a year, she mapped a strong feeling of sadness three distinct times. Each of these yielded very different configurations of virtual material properties. Very different.

Once again, it seems we are forced to question our hypothesis. It doesn’t hold up so far with n=1. There seems to be no such thing as a “sadness signature,” at least not for Rebecca. And honestly, Rebecca seems to be fairly “normal” when it comes to experiencing feeling, mood and emotion. If such a sadness signature does not show up for her, then it raises doubts about whether we can find that in anyone else.

But just to make sure, let’s take one more pass through another person’s experiences of multiple encounters with sadness. I’ll offer some examples from my own extensive mapping.

A Bunch of Samples of My Own

At different times over the years, as I’ve mapped many states, I have come across a state to which I have given a name close to or strongly related to “sadness.” These have been in different contexts, different stages of my life, and each has taken on a different configuration of virtual material properties. Let’s take a tour.

Three Examples from 2007

The following examples are from a period in which I was still capturing my notes in handwritten form. I can’t say much about their larger contexts.

Abject Sadness

Sad/Hopeless

Sadness

Grief/Sorrow, in the Context of Vicious Enforcer (2008)

I mapped this one in 2008 in the course of digging into the experience of an inner tyrant I discovered inside of myself.

Grief/Sorrow

Very heavy in my chest, my heart, a foot in diameter, hard solid, resilient like rubber; black, opaque, dull; warm; a very slight pulsing variation in the intensity of the weight, corresponding with an expansion and contraction in size and weight, a slow pulse, like over a minute or more with each beat. Sound is a long, protracted groan, never-ending.

I have lost so much joy and pleasure, especially in connecting with and loving others, as a result of the damage I sustained in our toxic culture and the supreme effort I had to make to overcome that damage, (and continue to have to make today, working to help others overcome similar damage). My life may be meaningful, but only in the context of a world of hurt. I would prefer to have been born into a world of goodness and celebrated life every day I was alive.

Great Sadness, in the Context of Unless (2018)

Let’s skip ahead nearly a decade to some work I was doing in the context of three interwoven patterns I called Unless, Don’t Wanna Be Here, and Devastating Vulnerability.

Great Sadness

Even if some consummation of “Unless” emerges, the life I’ve had to live in order to get there has been filled with great and pointless suffering. Nothing can make that worthwhile. Nothing can turn the darkness of my suffering into light.

This is a great, stark, empty, silent blackness that crushes my heart with its emptiness, collapses with all the dark mass of empty space into my core. Neutral temp. Extends out as far as my awareness, centered on my vertical core. Echoing sound of sobbing. No movement.

Nothing can ever make this right. There is only everlasting pain.

Demoralized Sadness, in Insatiable Need (2020)

This one was mapped in 2020 in the context of work under the title of Insatiable Need, specifically a pattern in which I had assessed that life was not worth it unless I was to succeed in my quest.

Demoralized Sadness

Starting above the back of my throat, stretching down through the neck into my upper chest. Bent with a forward-facing concavity, more-or-less cylindrical,. My head wants to hang forward in alignment with its bend. A very dark, neutral gray, opaque. Resilient, similar to tire rubber or a little softer. Heavy. Warm. A steady drone similar to the tone of voice of Tuvan throat singers, very deep, steady.

I give up. There’s no point in trying. The job is too vast, the resistance too strong. Nothing will change. Nothing can make a difference.

Pervasive Sadness, in the Context of Helpless Surrender (2020)

This one emerged in an exploration linked to the larger pattern that included the Demoralized Sadness above, a sense of Helpless Surrender situated in an even larger context that I called Homeless in the Apocalypse.

Pervasive Sadness

Whole body, as if it is made of clay, dark gray-brown color. Not moist, but it behaves as though soft like moist clay, holding its shape but with a sagging. The density and weight of clay. It’s as if I can feel it in any part of my body from eyelids and fingers to torso, hips, and legs. It all feels heavy, not wanting to move, wanting to surrender into passivity and grief. Warm. (Oddly so; greater warmth brings more closeness to tears.) Sound of whimpering sighs, faint, not calling attention to themselves but released under the breath.

I grieve the losses in my life: the loss of joy, the loss of my own family, the loss of vibrant health, the loss of purpose and destiny, the loss of choice and expression. I grieve the loss of my life. It has never belonged to me.

Grief/Despair, in the Context of All Wrong (2023)

I mapped the following state in exploring a pattern I called All Wrong. Here’s how I described that: “I see everything about my father, and all of the behaviors of our western civilization from which he was formed, as perilously, egregiously, shamefully wrong. And I am committed to demonstrating that wrongness, and I want there to be consequences for it.”

Grief/Despair

A bone-crushing heaviness, a grief beyond words, an infinite well of sadness. A gravitational field influence that goes out several feet in all directions, and this energy kind of fills the entire space but is most highly concentrated in a ball of about three inches diameter in my chest. The ball is pure black, the field is transparent but visible, with a barely discernible translucence. Still, not moving. A prehensile silence that wraps itself around everything.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to be. I don’t want to be here. This is all wrong and I don’t see any way out.

Despairing Grief, in Hero Dude (2023)

I mapped this in the context of a pattern I called Hero Dude (related to All Wrong and the Grief/Despair above), a kind of grandiose attachment to my work as a contribution to the liberation of society.

Despairing Grief

Hips and above, entire upper body, extending outward maybe a foot in all directions, a dark, miasmic cloud. Saturated, very damp, very warm, black. Mostly on the outside of me but seeking to enter from all directions, especially through my breath. My body is occupied at maybe 50% density compared to the outer portion. The sense is of gradually increasing density, and it is this vector of intensification that brings the strongest sense of grief. Things are getting worse. The meaninglessness of my life is increasing. Some aimless drifting movement. There is a strange sound, some kind of muffled friction, like of a body being dragged across a concrete floor in a sound studio with sound-dampening material on all surfaces.

Re-evaluating Our Hypothesis

Hm. So much for the idea of a “sadness signature.” We might think, well, maybe sadness is weird, and that we should try again with a different kind of feeling state like happiness. But in this last case, reviewing nine different observations of feeling states that carried the name or the common sense of “sadness” in the same person, and finding every single one of them dramatically different from the others, we’re left with an unavoidable conclusion. We need to ditch our hypothesis. We have encountered no evidence that it is viable and lots of evidence that disproves it resoundingly.

Oh, well.

Updating Our Working Map

But!! We must also recognize that we have learned something that may perhaps be very important. It seems that the context within which a person experiences a feeling state has a lot of power, directly impacting how a feeling state is manifested in its virtual material properties. Or something like that. At the very least, we need to introduce context as an important factor.

How about if we propose a third entity of our map, the life context? The life context for a feeling state involves a particular arrangement of activity, location, relationship and other factors of a person’s life within which this feeling experience is common, outside of which it may not be. That is to say, for any person, a specific feeling state is relevant to certain situations and conditions, and we want to hold that context as important in our exploration. We might capture it in formula-form like the following.

Feeling_A ⟺ Context_A

In this case, the meaning of the directionally symmetrical symbol “⟺” is probably best summarized as “is mutually relevant to.” A specific feeling state A is mutually relevant to a specific life context A. Combining this with our initial map statement, that a unique feeling experience is essentially equivalent to a unique configuration of virtual material properties, we get something like this.

Context_A ⟺ (Feeling_A ☰ VM-properties_A)

Now, let me acknowledge that once again, n = 2 is a very small sample size. But let me reassure you that if we continue to work with other subjects to observe the feeling of sadness (or any other feeling state) in multiple contexts over time, we will find a similar diversity of form within each person.

Where Do We Go Next?

OK, let me ask you a leading question here. Have you noticed anything… well, shall we say “weird”… about the observations we’ve made so far? I mean, if you need to, just go scan this chapter and come back after you’ve reviewed all of the states.

What stands out to you? Specifically, don’t you think it’s rather unexpected that we find so many unusual virtual material properties? Let me just list a few of them for you:

• dark, miasmic cloud

• a gravitational field energy

• similar to tire rubber

• all the dark mass of empty space

• intense cold

• like a gravitational force

• like heavy gas slowly pouring over me

• oozing, thick “blood tar”

• solid or vacuum (?)

• like leather kiwi skin (prickly) turned inside out

And even more strange, how is it that so many of these occupy space that extends outside the body?! Just scan over the drawings, and you see almost half of them document the virtual material properties existing beyond the surface of the body.

Take a step back and hold this up to our long-standing assumptions about the fundamentally somatic basis for what feeling is and how it works.

This is not a trivial incongruence. And it warrants collecting many more observations. In the next chapter, I will share a few further examples to illustrate just how diverse and sprawling things can get, and we will try to reckon with that.

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Feeling_A ☰ VM-properties_A

We continued by establishing several key factors which provide confidence that our observations of the virtual material properties associated with a unique feeling state will be captured accurately and consistently.

Now that we have established this starting map, we are ready to move forward with our observations.

Narrowing Down Our Territory

Our opportunity is to begin observing the virtual material properties of specifically named feeling states. But the realm of feeling is huge. It might be helpful to narrow down the territory we seek to observe.

Perhaps we could choose to zoom in on a specific type of feeling experience. Because we have no idea what we will find, we’re probably better off starting with a very simple framework, one that’s been around a long time. Something like Ekman’s six basic emotions may fit our needs: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. Ekman’s theory held that people everywhere experience these basic emotions in the same way, and that, for example, we naturally “read” the emotions in others through their facial expressions, regardless of cultural influences.

Let’s move forward with that basic idea. We’ll pick one of these six that seems like it might be easy to investigate: sadness.

Starting with a Hypothesis About Sadness

If we begin with Ekman’s theory, our hypothesis will hold that all people experience sadness in a similar way. Perhaps we add further resolution by looking at some existing evidence that might point to exactly how people experience sadness and give us some direction in proposing what the virtual material properties might be. Let us draw upon the following two sources in constructing this aspect of our hypothesis.

First, we might look through common language. People often use metaphorical terms to describe the experience of emotion, and the emotion of sadness comes with many that are very common. Here are a few:

• Heavy – “A heavy heart” / “Weighed down by sadness”

• Broken – “A broken heart”

• Dark – “A dark mood” / “Dark thoughts”

• Aching – “An aching sadness”

• Drowning – “Drowning in sorrow”

• Waves – “Waves of sorrow”

• Sinking – “A sinking feeling”

• Hollow – “An empty, hollow ache”

• Cold – “A cold loneliness”

• Foggy – “A fog of sadness”

• Lost – “Feeling lost in sadness”

Second, we might look to some research in cognitive science explorations of the sadness experience. One study offered a dramatic visual presentation in 2013. As reported in Bodily maps of emotions, by Lauri Nummenmaa et al,[1] the researchers cued hundreds of subjects to access emotional experiences like happiness, sadness, anger, and others. To do so, they provided simple words, stories, movie clips, and facial expressions, and invited people to draw on an outline of a body to indicate places where they experienced increased versus decreased body activation. The results of this data were compiled into images like this comparison between Happiness and Sadness, where warmer yellows and reds (brighter) indicate increasing activation and cooler blues (darker) indicate decreasing activation.

Pulling this all together, we might say that we expect the virtual material experience of sadness to have the following characteristics:

• Located primarily in the chest, and secondarily in the throat and eyes, with a general deactivation in most of the body.

• Generally heavy, dark, and with a downward directionality to it, possibly with components of pain, emptiness, fog or disorientation.

Further, touching back to Ekman’s theory, we can say that while we expect some variability from one person to another, we expect a clearly discernible similarity in the configurations of virtual material properties that show up for different people mapping a feeling they each have named Sadness. We can add this to the components of our starting hypothesis:

• The experience of sadness should be similar among different people.

What do you think? Is this a reasonable place to start?

Beginning to Observe Sadness

In what follows, I will be offering a few examples from many years of mapping with myself and others (all identifying information has been removed). These examples are representative of what you will find if/when you decide to map similar feeling states.

Sadness #1

A kind of blue, maybe bluish green, dark thing in the pit of my stomach. A sense of resignation associated with it. Like a little doughy, glowing thing. It just sort of sits there and feels sad. Cold. It has inertia, so if I move around it sort of sloughs around. Sound of a sigh, with a half-sob, my voice.

For some reason I associate it with looking off to the side. Like it’s trying to find a way to not be itself, but it can’t, but it still looks. “Well, that’s that. This pretty much sucks.” It can even verge into despair and desolation, getting heavier and darker.

Sadness #2

In my heart. Intense heaviness, crushing inward like a black hole, about the size of a ball of pie crust, could mold it with two hands. Black, outer surface is indented as if molded by hand. A very dense clay, oily, like plasticine but pitch black. Intense cold. <Sobbing.> Much bigger, actually, like a basketball, extremely dense, extremely cold, intensely black as if you are peering into the maw of infinite sorrow. No sound. Steady gravity.

About all the pain — my parents’ & others’ as well as my own. There is too much pain, too much fear, too much grief, too much loss, too much devastation. Too much for any human to bear. I cannot bear it.

The first example seems to be somewhat in alignment with our expectations, although it’s definitely lower in the body than we might have expected. The second one also seems fairly consistent with our expectations. Both share a coldness and a doughy substance quality, but how do we make sense of the difference in location?

One curious question that might arise at this early stage: Is it possible that gender plays a role in our feeling experience? Might men tend to experience sadness in their chest and women in their lower abdomen? What other factors might explain this difference that has shown up between these two examples? One way to start answering questions like these: collect more observations!

Sadness #3

Coming from outside, energy folding in around my heart, coming around my whole head and upper body, coming from outside and coming to just exist inside me. Energy; neutral temp; white and blue and gray, transparent, wispy; a feeling of resignation, it comes in from the outside and folds in, from all sides. Sound of a sigh, my voice.

It’s a feeling of futility, spent energy, can’t sustain itself. It all comes collapsing back in. I have always had this incredible awareness of how finite life is. Not a fear of dying young, but even if I live for 90 or 100 years, it will end. This futility of existence.

OK, well, that was not what we were expecting, was it?

So Much for Our Hypothesis

With these three simple observations, we have shattered our hypothesis about the experience of sadness being similar among different people.

Not only that, but we also seem to have shattered our hypothesis about what virtual material properties correspond to the felt experience of sadness, and where they are likely to be located. The location can be in the chest, yes, but it can just as easily be found in the lower belly, or even outside the body! The color can be dark, yes, but it can also be “white and blue and gray, transparent.” And the substance can be heavy, yes, but it can also be “wispy.”

Of course, we’re only working with n = 3, so you might think we’re getting ahead of ourselves. So, just for the fun of it, let me toss in a few more drawings of Sadness to show you a wider spectrum of the diversity we find.

We have all sorts of configurations of virtual material properties here, all of which were named by the people experiencing them as Sadness. The one above on the bottom right is bright red, and its substance is rising. “Really?” you might wonder, “Sadness can be red? And moving upward?” Yes. And it can be hot. And substances can range from solid, liquid and gas all the way through to pure emptiness.

Oh my. This truly is astonishing, yes? I remember in the first months of leading other people through observing their own feeling states being completely flabbergasted at what showed up in other people. “You mean, your experience of sadness (anger, joy, fear, etc.) is 100% different from mine??” One thing this does very quickly is send you hurling towards that radical curiosity I talked about in chapter IS-10. We really have no idea what to expect, so it’s best to leave expectations at the door.

What We Are Left With

What do we do with this? At the moment, we have been sent scurrying back to square one. To move forward, it might be helpful to try to recast our hypothesis, to anticipate a different kind of pattern than the one we were expecting to find.

How about this as a new hypothesis that is consistent with our observations so far: Every person has a unique experience of what sadness is for them. For Jared, sadness corresponds to one virtual material property configuration, while Jamilla’s sadness is a very different configuration. And Jessica’s is yet another.

In our next chapter, we’ll take a look at how well this hypothesis holds up. Do individuals perhaps each have a unique “sadness signature”?

And again, a point of curiosity: If this is the case, might similarities or differences between feeling state signatures play a role in the “vibe” two people experience in relating? It’s an interesting question, eh? One that should send us scurrying toward more observations!

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[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1321664111

OK, it’s time to get serious about the science side of things. To do so, we will be applying our new practice of fieldwork mapping as presented in Fieldwork in Depth: Mapping. You might also wish to review the groundwork I’ve laid in the section, Introducing the Science. Here is some of what will guide our early efforts:

• We have recognized that this virtual materiality of the feeling experience represents virgin territory. We do not know what to expect, and have chosen to shed our existing maps before entering this new territory.

• We have established that the purpose of our science is to build usable maps for navigating the inner experience of life. Essential components of these maps include entities, relationships and contexts inferred from persistent patterns of experience. Our standard for map effectiveness lies in its reliability in guiding navigation sufficiently well to enable us to trust our map’s predictions about what our actions are likely to yield.

• We have recognized that our highest priority at this early stage of our science is observation. We must gather the raw data of subjective experience with discipline, precision and thoroughness in order to begin discerning patterns which might eventually form the components of our maps.

Our job at this point is simply to observe. At the same time, observing — by itself — requires us to have a working map in order to navigate the activity of observation. How do we know what counts as an observation? What exactly are we choosing to examine? We need to explicitly lay out a few points as our starting position so we don’t get mired in our own hidden assumptions.

Seeking the Thing-ness in Feeling

Maps, again, consist of entities, relationships and contexts. We’re going to try to keep things simple as we begin. Let’s quickly review these three map components:

• An entity is a persistent pattern of experience.

• A relationship is a predictable pattern of coordinated change linking two or more entities or relationships.

• A context is a larger, persistent pattern of experience which contains and supports the entities and relationships under examination.

The first entity we must establish in our inaugural map is that of a feeling state. We can define a feeling state as a specific feeling experience that occurs within a life context, over a contextually relevant time frame, and which can be discerned as uniquely different from other specific feeling experiences and assigned a unique name.

We can define feeling experience as having the following qualities:

• Not made of any of the following:

  • Ordinary sensory experience, including visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or other somatic sensation.

  • Ordinary thought experience, including mental imagery, memory or imagination.

• Existing within the direct experience of being which would remain if the above were to be removed from conscious awareness.

• Persistent or recurrent, with a sense of familiarity that enables us to attach a name to it and know in our experience what the name is attached to.

The second entity we must establish in our launch map is virtual materiality. Virtual materiality involves the observational experience of virtual material properties that correspond with the inner experiences of feeling. If we look in detail, we can break down virtual materiality into nearly infinite sub-components of specific virtual material properties. The larger categories include location, substance and color, and the micro-categories would include things like hardness, weight, and luminosity.

For the purposes of our observation methodology, we shall treat the combination of sub-components in any given observation as a whole, and we shall establish the first key relationship in our map as that between a unique configuration of virtual material properties and the associated unique feeling state.

For the purposes of our observation methodology, we will begin with an assumption that a specific configuration of virtual material properties corresponds directly to a specific feeling state and the name it is given. That is, if our observation yields a specific set of properties, then the relationship between those properties and the feeling state that generated their observation is one to one. If the properties change, the properties no longer correspond to that feeling state. If the feeling state changes, it no longer corresponds to its original configuration of properties.

Note: I offer this strong relationship between feeling experience and virtual material properties as a foundational presupposition for this stage in your own journey into this science. A truly new science must begin somewhere, and the science of psychotopology began with my own subjective perception of this relationship. By holding this as a starting map, I experienced leaps forward in what I was able to observe and accomplish in this inner world of feeling, and over the course of three decades of many thousands of observations in myself and many others, this foundation has become ever stronger.

So: The central entity is the unique feeling experience. The second, related entity is a set of virtual material properties corresponding to the given feeling experience. The primary “relationship” is between the unique feeling experience and the unique set of virtual material properties which correspond to it. We can say, in essence, that the virtual material properties are equivalent to the feeling experience, that the feeling experience is made of its virtual material properties.

Using the symbol “☰” to represent equivalence, we can elegantly write our first relationship as follows.

Feeling_A ☰ VM-properties_A

As soon as we establish this equivalence as a “thing,” we are struck with a new requirement. We must address the serious question: Will our virtual material property observations be legitimate? As in, are they reproducible? Are they accurate? Do they correspond to some “reality” about which we are interested?

Let’s explore this for a moment before we move on.

Bringing Discipline to Our First Efforts

As I prepare to write this section, I realize I need to share a bit more background. What I am about to present to you comes across with far greater confidence and clarity than what I was able to access back in the early days of this work.

In the early days, after I had developed the basic fieldwork questions and I was reaching here and there for opportunities to try it out on whoever I could wrangle into volunteering, I was flying by the seat of my pants. There didn’t seem much in the way, no apparent dangers, no reason not to simply dive in and try it with every opportunity that presented itself. It was a messy and irregular approach, to be sure, and certainly not conducted in the way of anything resembling a rigorous science.

Nevertheless, the territory I was mapping behaved in ways consistent enough for me to start learning my way around. Over time, I gained skill in recognizing the juicy spaces in which we were mapping something potent, and discerning those contrasting spaces where we were poking around at something that seemed not really to exist, or where our attempts simply did not connect with something that felt real.

In the course of a year or two of mapping scores of states in myself and working with probably a dozen or two volunteers, some for many hours, things began to take more tangible shape. And in the decades since then, that vague early territory has become steadily more firm and reliable in its congruence with my understanding.

What I am trying to say here is that after long consideration, I don’t think it makes sense for me to start you off where I started. This territory contrasts so much with our expectations that for me, there was no way around that first year of thrashing around. Although I could start things at a more rudimentary level and truly build from the absolute ground up, for me that would feel tedious, and it would take so much longer for us to get where I want us to arrive. It’s possible I may change my mind and decide to build this in the future, but for now, I prefer to provide a smooth on-ramp to make it easier for you to get the benefits of this work more quickly.

To that end, I will offer a more direct path to what I have learned about the mapping process itself and about how we can make sure that our observations are accurate and valid. In what follows, I will describe a number of ways we can confirm or disconfirm our observations, making sure that they are fundamentally reliable.

Ensuring Our Observations Are Valid

As soon as we begin our fieldwork practice, we are faced with a disconnect between the tangible and vivid perception of virtual material properties and our common-sense, ordinary shared concepts about what we feel. We are likely to have never talked about sadness in terms of its location, substance, temperature, color, movement and other properties in our efforts to share our experience with another person, whether a friend, loved one, or therapist. So it feels unfamiliar.

This unfamiliarity, right from the beginning, supports our desire to make sure that what we are observing is real in some way. These virtual material images that arise when we engage the fieldwork questions are unexpected, and being so, are unlikely to be generated by our existing knowledge, understanding, or ways of thinking about feeling.

A second aspect of our experience that supports our desire for valid observations is the simple, subjective sense of “rightness” about what we observe. When we settle on the specific configuration of virtual material properties that feels strongly like it matches directly with our experience of the feeling state, we have very much more a sense of perception than one of fantasy, metaphor, or conceptual expression. Our observation “fits” our experience in a way that can only be assessed from within the experience itself, and which feels strongly validating for the data we collect.

A third way that we can confirm for ourselves that our observations are valid is to revisit the feeling state at a later time. Whether hours, days or weeks later, we can revisit the memory of the experience that best expresses or integrates with the feeling state in question and go through the mapping process all over again, from the beginning, without revisiting our original observations. Time and again, when we do this, we find the same virtual materiality configurations as the first time, validating our original observation and perhaps even adding more detail to it.

A fourth method we can use to confirm our observations is, again, at a later time, to use the virtual materiality descriptions to find our way back to our feeling experience using the raw materials of this location, that substance, etc. as signposts. When we do this with fidelity and find ourselves returning to what feels to be the very same feeling state that originally generated that virtual material description, we confirm our observations.

Finally, to confirm our observation even more strongly, we have the slider test. I spoke about this in FM-11: Pro Tips. The slider test works quite simply: we zoom in on one of our virtual material properties and directly “slide” the value of that property in one direction, then in the opposite direction. Altering substance weight, for example, should result in an adjustment to the actual feeling experience, directly and instantly. When we experience that adjustment, we have confirmed that our mapping value is accurate.

The slider test is greatly expanded when we engage fieldwork’s moving phase. In moving a state, we adjust the sliders all the way to an optimum value for every property, completely transforming the state in the process. This simply doesn’t work when we haven’t mapped it correctly in the first place.

One way we can easily fail to make an accurate observation is through employing more of an imagination function to constructing what we think the feeling should look like. It’s too much for me to describe at this point in our journey just how that works, but just know this. If the image that arises through the fieldwork questions has a very high level of detail that includes multiple types of feeling substance, multiple colors, or other diversity of raw materials, question its validity. A flat board with a message written on it, or a crown studded with multiple types of jewels, to take two examples, would be unlikely to emerge from accurate observations of virtual material properties of a single feeling state.

When such a complex image arises in the mapping process, I usually meet it with a question something like, “As you gaze upon that [complex thing], what is the feeling of that experience? And if you were to say that the actual, felt experience of looking at that is located in or around your body, where would you say that seems to be?” This often is enough to shift awareness from imagery to feeling.

Moving forward, as I take you through the various discoveries in the course of observing one state after another, rest assured that all of the examples I provide have been validated in one or more of these ways. At the same time, I encourage you to validate these emerging data patterns through your own mapping experience. Map lots of states. Invite your friends to join you in exploring their state maps as well. Compare and contrast the results of your own investigations with those I offer.

We’re in this together, first-person scientists of subjective experience. I look forward to rolling up our sleeves beside one another to share notes, cook up new questions, and stumble upon new discoveries as we expand the frontiers of psychotopology.

Curiosity About What Is to Come

We have established our primary foundation, the equivalence between the experience of a specific feeling state and the unique configuration of virtual material properties of that state experience. And we have established reasonable confidence that our observations will be accurate and valid. Now we can begin to contemplate what we expect to find as we begin our observations. We will lay that next stone for our foundation in the next chapter.

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The following two exercises are very powerful, and I thought I would include them as complements to the standard fieldwork mapping practice. The first is a simple application of mapping to the art of being present with a partner. Taking turns, we bring our awareness to highlight specific feeling states, first within ourselves, then in our partner.

Practicing this prioritization of feeling at the center of awareness changes the dynamic of our being together. We learn to sense into the greater presence and wisdom of feelingmind, and that brings us closer to both ourselves and one another.

The Being-With Practice

Sit across from or beside one another in whatever way feels most comfortable to you both. Take a moment to be quiet with one another and tune into yourselves.

One of you start. Complete the sentence,

Right now I am feeling… [name your feeling state].

Keep it brief.

As the fellow explorer, first acknowledge the feeling and confirm the name. Then ask the mapping questions, starting with,

If you were to say the actual, felt experience of this [name their feeling state] is located…

Do not take notes. Simply be present with the answers. Allow yourself to witness your partner’s feeling state as it takes its virtual material form. Perhaps you can “see” it, perhaps you can imagine what it might feel like. Allow yourself to be moved by what your partner shares.

When the mapping questions are complete, trade roles. The person who just finished mapping their state asks,

And right now, what are you feeling?

Follow up with the mapping questions only. Do not go into the belief questions for this practice.

Trade roles, back and forth, allowing yourself to be present with one another’s feeling, allowing yourself to be moved by one another. When you invite your partner to choose a feeling to map, clearly invite a “what else,” a different state from what has already been mapped, one that coexists with the others. Continue for as long as you wish. Avoid lapsing into story. Do not use the moving questions. Simply be present with what is. Simply be present with one another.

When you finish, you may want to talk about your experience. Share some shift or opening or discovery you noticed, and something you want to take away from your encounter.

Reflections

The Being-With Practice works well in short exchanges where you bring your attention to one or two feeling states each. It can help ground you in what is most real within yourself.

Even more powerful, though, is to sit in the practice for as long as an hour or more. There’s no rush. As the explorer, take your time to sense into the next feeling state, and really feel into the virtual material properties, one by one, as your partner asks the questions. In the facilitator role, give yourself space to fully take in your partner’s experience and allow it to influence your own.

You may find yourself drifting into thought, story and analysis from time to time. Again and again, bring yourself back into presence with your simple focus on feeling, answering the questions one at a time.

Over the course of a longer session, you will effectively gather the various parts of yourself that are active in your current mode of being. You will bring them together into the field of your awareness, providing the soil for mycelial connections to grow and strengthen.

As these various parts of yourself, held in their respective feeling state forms, are held in this shared field, both in your own awareness and in the awareness of your partner, what happens? And as you serve this witness role for your partner as well, holding the complexity and multiplicity of what resides inside of them, what happens? What shifts naturally begin to activate for you? For your partner? For you both?

Overall, what can you learn in this practice? What does your experience offer to your everyday habits of attention and activity? What do you want to bring with you into your ongoing, daily practice of living?

The North Star Practice

This second practice is an elegant way to invite a shift in a reactive feeling state you’ve mapped, without going into the full fieldwork moving process. I think of it as a direct way to reveal this particular part’s “north star,” its underlying most-highly-valued state and function, the touchstone against which it assesses your current position and orients you toward thriving.

I first learned the essential lever of this technique from Connirae Andreas of NLP Comprehensive in Boulder, Colorado back before fieldwork was born. Connirae’s process is called Core Transformation (see her book by that name), and the central tactic is extremely powerful. It is direct and simple, involving a recursive inquiry into what a specific part of you wants above all.

This is a great tool for gaining insight into those most difficult reactive states and nudging them toward engaging in the moving process, or otherwise helping them engage more effectively with whatever process you might be relying on for growth and integration.

1. Bring your attention to the reactive state, reviewing your notes and placing your awareness on the felt experience. Open yourself to this part of you, holding a curiosity about its deeper desire.

2. Ask this part of you, either out loud or internally to yourself, “What do you want?” Wait for whatever answer arises. Write the answer down in a way that is satisfying and feels true to this part of you. In whatever way feels authentic to you, thank this part of you for engaging with you and expressing its desire.

3. Ask this part of you, “If you were to have this [the previous answer], fully and completely, exactly the way you want it, what do you want through having [the previous answer], that is even more important to you?” Again, wait for whatever answer arises, write it down, and thank this part of you.

4. Repeat this same question, harvesting each successive answer in turn, until you arrive at some sort of insight or a felt shift in your state. Again, write your answer down, and thank this part of you. Name your new state, and map it if that would be helpful.

5. If at any point along the way, you notice another part (or parts) of yourself chiming in, “But…” “I can’t…” etc., make a note of this new voice and consider where it fits in the list of states you are working with.

6. If you intend to take this part through the fieldwork moving process, return your attention to the original, reactive state and begin again from there. If you have other intentions, incorporate the insights you have gained into your process.

I offer this as a just-in-case tactic to help you shift yourself out of more difficult states. I do advise you to make sure to take into consideration the other states/parts of you which are in relationship with this one, and make sure not to leave those behind. Actively cultivate growthful relationships among all the parts you have identified.

We’ll go into much more depth regarding how to manage that more complete process in Volume 2. For now, this plus the straightforward mapping process will get you quite far.

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As we begin our practice of fieldwork mapping, our intention is to hold the priority of creating a map of the unique inner territory of the explorer. We choose to honor the explorer’s subjective experience rather than attempting to leap into more universally objective observation or interpretation.

At this point in the development of our science, this choice serves both the explorer’s own needs and the ultimate requirements for a true science of subjective experience. For the explorer, we must recognize that the subjectivity barrier remains firmly in place. The explorer is spelunking through private caverns to which they and only they have access. Our priority must be to honor the reality of that subjective experience rather than attempt to force it into conforming with existing ideas and expectations about what that experience should look like.

For our science, we are traversing a threshold into a true frontier. Our priority must be, at this early stage, to simply observe… and observe… and observe, supporting discernible patterns to emerge over time without the infringement of biases from existing ideas. At least, we must seek to do this as much as we are humanly able.

Let’s take a look at some strategies for honoring this intention to support both the explorer and our science.

Honoring the Uniqueness of Every Inner World

If we were to bring the mindset of ordinary science into our fieldwork mapping observations, we would probably find ourselves struggling. If attention is our instrument, and fieldwork is our operating manual, we might expect that what we are observing are universal properties for emotions we all share. And we might expect that those properties are exactly the same for every person. A solid is a solid, right?

If we’re in a lab, for example, and we measure the viscosity of a specific oil at a specific temperature in Lab A, we expect the same viscosity reading when we conduct our measurement on the same type of oil at the same temperature in Lab B. So shouldn’t we be going for the most universally-shared definitions of what we mean by things like solid, liquid, gas and such?

As it turns out, the answer is no. Let me explain why.

First, we still do have the subjectivity barrier in place. We cannot assume that the experience of a hard solid for one person is the same as the experience of a hard solid for another person.

“But wait a second,” you say. “Now that we have a way to precisely observe inner experience, we should get to compare one person’s experience to another’s — to find out if my sadness is the same as your sadness, for example.”

Well, yeah, that’s kind of what I expected when I first started using this method. But let me be up front with you, and jump to one of the first discoveries this method reveals. To take your example of sadness, it turns out that my sadness is likely to be very different from your sadness. In fact, we will discover very soon that our labels for feeling, mood and emotion are blunt and crude when it comes to making comparisons to actual, inner, lived experience. When we start to map “sadness” across many people, we discover an infinite variety of forms.

What to do with that? We must enter every inner world with a reverence for its utter uniqueness, and a respect and support for the explorer’s access to that uniqueness.

Honoring the Variability of Inner Landscapes

As you will soon discover, inner landscapes vary greatly from one person to another. And that means that people will vary in their engagement with these questions and in the granularity of the answers they generate for specific questions.

For example, sound seems to be not as compelling a parameter for some people as for others. Yet even for a single person, mapping one state versus another can yield a different profile of what qualities stand out. For the person who seems not so sensitive to the dimension of sound, for example, one feeling state might carry a particularly dominant sound which is a central feature of that state’s mapping.

These differences among people, and among different states within the same person, can show up with any of the parameters we explore in mapping. Give plenty of space for these differences, and be OK with skimming over detail that’s just not there while indulging in great precision where that seems useful.

Let me take this one step further. As you engage further in fieldwork, you are going to find yourself being very surprised at times. Be prepared for that and check your expectations at the door. The interior world of any human being (that includes you) has ways of defying any preconceptions you might have.

I still remember a moment from the early days of this work, where I was facilitating someone mapping a state she called Anger. Well, I had mapped anger a few times by this point, and I had certain ideas about what it would probably look like. But when she began to describe these vibrating green boots on her feet, I was floored. WTF? Never could I have imagined that anger would look like this. For anyone. Yet, when the full mapping was complete, this state fit seamlessly with the other states she was mapping into a congruent whole. It made sense inside her unique world.

So as you get into this, even if you are mapping a state you think you have mapped before, stay open. There are more varieties of “sadness,” or “anger” or “fear” than there are people using those labels to name a feeling state. (I’ll share a sample series of different maps of sadness in SO-2: Surprising Results as We Begin.)

One thing you’ll discover if you map more than a dozen states is the magnificent diversity of experience within your own self. And if you facilitate this process for more than one or two other people, you’ll very likely find yourself in awe at the wondrous variety of inner styles. It’s beautiful to behold, so allow yourself to be fully open to whatever shows up. Attitudes of wonder and curiosity are your allies in this work.

Welcoming Whatever Shows Up

One general principle you can trust in the work is this. If it shows up in your session, it is most likely relevant to what the explorer is investigating. This is true whether you are working solo or facilitating a partner. So if you have entered the session with a focus on a particular state or states, and something comes up in the course of that session, then no matter how random or unrelated it seems, invite it into your inquiry.

One way this sort of thing will show up is in interactions between the explorer and the facilitator. In psychotherapy this is often called transference and/or counter-transference. In fieldwork it is an opportunity to excavate further relevant states and patterns.

So as the facilitator, if you notice something that catches your attention in the way the explorer interacts with you, make a note of it and call the explorer’s attention to it. Do so with encouragement, welcoming what is showing up, asking about what the explorer might be feeling that is feeding into that interaction. Ask about whether and how that feeling or this pattern shows up in the larger pattern you are exploring together. Invite the explorer to name the relevant feeling states and include them in the mapping process.

The entire fieldwork process will assist you in welcoming whatever shows up. When you are working the process, you are functioning as a neutral proxy for the explorer’s own agency. You are the faceless guide serving the intrepid leader as they conduct the epic exploration of their own inner landscape.

The same is true when you are facilitating your own process. Let’s say for example that when you sit down to map a state you’ve named Fear, you keep picking up your phone and getting lost in doom-scrolling. It will be useful for you to identify the state underlying your habit/impulse and to include that in your mapping work.

The Freedom and Responsibility of Facilitating

In partner work, this framework of relevance for everything that shows up is incredibly empowering to the facilitator. Never are you in a situation where you have to manage someone’s way of interacting with you by interpreting it one way or another and figuring out the best way to handle it.

You simply include it in the inquiry in the same way as any of the other states being examined, and very quickly whatever reaction the explorer may have had toward you is no longer about you at all. Both of you are engaging the behavior shoulder to shoulder, side by side, with curiosity and eagerness to discover what is really there.

At the same time, be honest about your own vulnerabilities. Even in your facilitator role, you are a human. As a human, you’ve got a lot going on inside, always. So while you may be doing a great job keeping the center of your awareness on your explorer partner and leaning into the structure of the fieldwork practice to support the process, you will benefit from noting any inner reactions of your own, to save them for your own work if that seems relevant. Opportunities abound for expanding your awareness of what’s inside.

Confirming Our Maps

We have been discussing the importance of prioritizing the actual, lived subjective experience in our fieldwork mapping observations. We have “checked our expectations at the door,” set aside our concepts and objectivity, and emphasized that the maps we are creating are one-off, unique representations of the unique terrain of the first-person explorer.

This raises an important question. In service to both the effectiveness of our work to benefit the explorer and the furtherance of our scientific data collection, how are we to validate the observations we make? How do we know that the virtual material properties identified as those of a specific feeling state are, in fact, accurate representations of something “real” in this supremely subjective world?

At this early point in our science, where we have not yet established any kind of objective triangulation of neural patterns, for example, with the data of our observations, we must rely exclusively upon our front-line, first-person explorer. The explorer’s experience of the link between virtual material properties and the actual experience of feeling must be our source of validation. As the explorer, here is what this can look like.

The Slider Test

After completing the mapping questions, in most cases you will have the intuitive sense that your observations are congruent with your feeling experience. It just fits, and imagining alternate values for everything from substance to color yields a swift and certain “no.”

But occasionally, you may have doubts. Fortunately, it is usually pretty straightforward to confirm your readings.

These virtual material properties you have observed carry a dynamic relationship with the feeling experience itself. At one level, we can say they are one and the same. We’ll talk about this in greater depth in the next section on the science, and we will leverage this relationship to the nth degree in fieldwork’s moving phase in Volume 2.

But here, as we finish mapping a state, we can apply this connection to confirming our observations. Here’s how:

1. Choose one of the properties that seems most intense to you. If none are intense, any will do.

2. Bring your awareness fully to that property while cultivating the full experience of the feeling state.

3. Deliberately shift the value of that property in one direction along a continuum of values. Then bring it back to its original value and shift it in the opposite direction. Then bring it back. Notice whether (and how) the actual experience of the feeling changes.

4. If the feeling does not seem to change at all, choose another property and repeat the shifting process. If it still does not change, choose yet another property and repeat.

Temperature is the property that is simplest, existing on a linear spectrum along which it is easy to adjust. With substance, you will find it easiest to make your adjustments along the gradient of a sub-property like hardness, heaviness, density, or thickness/viscosity. With color, a sub-property like brightness or vividness of hue will often provide an appropriate slider, and with properties of movement, force and pressure, simply shifting the intensity, speed, or frequency will serve well. Similarly for sound. Size is also an excellent parameter to adjust.

As you shift the values of your selected sub-properties, if the actual experience of the feeling changes, you have confirmed your data. This feeling experience = this part of you = this affect field (see Introducing Inner Fields in SO-11:Getting Real About Inner Experience), and the virtual material property you have collected accurately represents the field as it occupies your consciousness. Good job!

If you wish, go ahead and confirm other properties as well. It may be that some properties are relatively neutral in their role in the feeling experience for a particular state, and their value may not matter so much. But there may be multiple properties that can function as “drivers” for the feeling experience.

If your changes seem to do nothing to the actual feeling experience, simply return to the beginning of the mapping sequence and cycle through it again. And consider whether the name you have chosen actually points to a state experience, or whether you might need to adjust your approach. Some choices: identify a new state related to your first intention, provide a new name for what you’re intending to map, or simply set this one aside.

Managing State Intensity

One convenient benefit of this ability to shift the feeling experience by adjusting the virtual material properties is that we can deliberately reduce the intensity of a distressing state, giving yourself some immediate relief. To use the virtual material properties in this way, start making adjustments to those that seem most extreme. Make small adjustments at first — all you’re going for is a bit of relief, not complete transformation. That will come later in the moving phase.

Usually, the direction of change to bring relief is the one that’s intuitively obvious. For example, a feeling state that is extremely hot will probably benefit from cooling down a bit. One that is vibrating intensely will probably benefit from calming down a bit. A feeling state that is very heavy could probably use some lightening, and one that is very dark some brightening.

Once in a while, the obvious adjustment doesn’t relieve the distress. In that case, first try the opposite direction to alter that property. And if that doesn’t work, leave it as is and try another property. For most feeling states, just one or two properties will turn out to be drivers. Making adjustments to these will effect the greatest change to the feeling. Try making small changes to discover one of these drivers, and go with that one.

You may even wish to practice altering that property back and forth between one value and another, almost as if it is a slider on an electronic device. Slide to one end to experience the strongest distress, and slide to the other end to experience the greatest relief.

Paradoxically, when you intentionally intensify your state, you experience a kind of relief that seems to originate from your experience of being completely in charge of that experience. And of course, demonstrating your capacity to slide your experience in the other direction further confirms your relief. You have control of that slider at any time you need it.

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Now that we have covered fieldwork mapping in some depth and ventured into the territory of coexisting states, we are ready to take another step forward in the practice of our science. This step addresses a conundrum that has beset the study and theory of consciousness from the beginning:

Who or what is doing the “observing,” and what is its relationship to that which is observed?

This touches on the perennial homunculus problem, which arises when attempts to explain consciousness posit a smaller “self” or observer within the self, leading to a regress of observers observing observers. Philosophers and scientists have grappled with this for centuries, with modern frameworks tending toward distributed, emergent, and relational models.

Psychotopology fieldwork enables us to walk right into the heart of this mystery to illuminate something new about what’s really there.

Accessing the Witness Self

In order to answer the fieldwork mapping questions, we must access the feeling state directly, being able to feel what it feels like in the moment. At the same time, we must be able to step outside of the feeling state as if to observe it as an object separate from ourselves. The questions support us in doing this, but how? Again, who or what is doing the observing?

As we work our way through the series of questions, we practice a kind of alternating detachment from and immersion within the feeling state. We learn and practice a kind of freedom in our relationship to this feeling state. Over the course of engaging with the questions, and further, over the course of mapping several related feeling states, we develop a strong sense of being a witness to our own interior. For now, we will just call this the witness self.

Your strengthening relationship with this witness self is one of the benefits of fieldwork mapping. There is a clear difference between having a fusion versus a separation between our sense of self and a feeling state we are experiencing. In the first case, it feels like we ARE the feeling state, while in the second, we clearly HAVE the feeling state among other possessions within the whole of our experience.

Having access to such a witness position makes it much easier to engage with feeling states that might otherwise feel too intense to process. Accessing the witness can help keep you from falling into strong states and having difficulty getting back out again. Consciously developing a witness self can also support living with and observing strong patterns of thought, mood, and behavior. This can serve your process in many ways.

Becoming Aware of the Witness Self

In IS-9: Introducing the Structure of Attention, I described how our awareness functions as a field, occupying space while filtering and highlighting selective contents of consciousness available in that space. In my description, I described the experience of “operating” this field as if it were a lab instrument. What I refrained from addressing in depth, however, is this idea of the operator. If our field of awareness is an instrument, collecting observational data, who or what is operating it?

I held back on addressing this because we hadn’t advanced our work far enough for me to explicitly describe the complete structure of the attention function. Now that we’ve come a step closer, we can take a more thorough look at the witness experience.

One component of attention is the field of awareness. But there is very definitely another component that functions as the operator of that field. This is what I’m referring to as the witness.

Where We Are Looking From, Who We Are Looking As

The field of awareness hosts the zone of conscious experience to which we normally devote our attention. In all cases, whether in everyday life as we tell a story of what happened this morning or in the lab as the researcher collects data from a subject with wires coming off of their head, what is considered most important is the contents of our awareness. Here, we will open things up to include more of the complete attentional experience.

First, no matter whether we are gazing at a sunset or reminiscing about a delicious dinner with good friends last week, there is more going on than the simple contents of our awareness.

• First, of course, we are looking AT something. This is the primary, habitual focus, the “contents” of our awareness.

• Second, we are looking FROM somewhere.

• Third, we are looking AS someone.

The second and third components of this attentional structure are central to our experience of the whole. The second component, that of the where from which we are looking, I refer to as the point of witness. The third component, that of the who at the center of our experience, I refer to as the seat of witness.

The Point of Witness

Describing the point of witness will probably best be done by leading you through a couple of simple exercises. Some of you will be able to do both of these relatively easily, but others may have some difficulty. Try them both to get a sense of your own range of motion.

1. Imagine a forest. First, see it as if on a movie screen in a theater. The point of view is that of a person walking through the forest. Next, enter the forest yourself, so that instead of being projected on a screen, it surrounds you as you walk through the trees. Next, imagine lying down and looking up at the sky through the forest canopy. Finally, separate from your own body and fly up above the forest to look down from a drone’s-eye view, seeing yourself lying on the forest floor.

2. Imagine a concert. Close your eyes and focus entirely on the sound. First, you are in the audience, surrounded by people, with the musicians on stage in front of you. Next, leave yourself in your seat as you send your center of hearing up on stage, listening to what the concert sounds like from the position of one of the musicians. Next, imagine you are in the basement beneath the concert hall, hearing the music through the structure of the building. Finally, you are completely outside the building, hearing it from outside along with rumbling traffic in the distance.

In both of these cases we are using imagination to gain a separation from the normal entrainment of our senses with the sensory tools of our body. When we see and hear things in everyday life, we tend to see and hear them from a position centered in our own head. In switching to an imaginary scene, we gain more freedom to move about to experience what it is like to “see” and “hear” from different points of view.

Now, in the process of mapping a feeling state, we will be activating a channel of perception that is not as entrained with our sensory apparatus. In exploring the virtual material properties of the state you are mapping, you will have significant freedom to move the place from which you are observing — your point of witness — to wherever it is most useful to observe from.

For some of the mapping questions, you will find it most useful to completely immerse your point of witness within the state space. Temperature is an example of a property that lends itself well to this orientation. For others, you will find it more useful to separate your point of witness from that feeling space and observe it from outside. Color is an example of a property that, for most people, seems to be most easily accessible from a point of view outside the state space.

The mapping questions support your doing this, and going through the mapping questions helps you establish a strong sense of agency in being able to experience this feeling state from different perspectives, or points of witness.

Let me note that my description of these structures is simplified. This should be good enough for you to get the gist of it, but a more detailed examination will have to wait until Volume 3.

Mapping the Seat of Witness

The best way into the experience of the seat of witness is to simply do the practice, as follows.

• Map two or three distinct feeling states.

• After finishing your second or third mapping, lead yourself through the following:

  As you have gone through the mapping process with these states, you have been able to switch your awareness from one state to the next while managing that process from outside of the states themselves. What would you call the part of yourself that is managing, observing, or witnessing? What part of you is doing the mapping process with these feeling states?

• Give that witness/observer part of you a name. (It could be anything from “My Witness Self” or “Observer” to “Me.”)

• Map this witness self, following the same mapping sequence you used with the other feeling states.

Your greatest ally in working with all kinds of inner material is your own capacity for witness observation. Being able to access a feeling state while situating your experience of self as an observer, outside of it, will get you through mapping even the most difficult states.

Fieldwork itself will develop a stronger witness awareness within you. Starting small and focusing on lower-intensity feeling states early on can give you the opportunity to more strongly develop this witness awareness by explicitly mapping it in this way. Once you have done so, you can use this map of your witness self to access this part of you clearly and strongly before you begin mapping in future sessions. Even more important, use it after each session to step clearly out of the mapping process.

If you find yourself at some point expanding your exploration into realms less common or familiar to you, or more deeply hidden from your everyday awareness, you may need to re-do this witness mapping process. The witness does not occupy a fixed location, but situates itself within different parts of you depending on what larger pattern is engaged relative to the context you’re inhabiting.

You’ll learn much more about the witness and how it works down the line. For now, this simple strategy should be enough to serve you as you move forward.

Pro Tip: Map the Witness of the Witness?

In order to map the witness self, you had to step outside of that as well. What would you name the witness of the witness? You can also map this.

You might think this would lend itself to endless iteration, hurling us back into the homunculus regression, but generally the third witness is as far as you will be able to go. Sometimes, that third witness is experienced as a profound universal consciousness kind of state. It’s worth exploring if you’re so inclined.

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One thing you will learn very quickly as you enter into mapping various feeling states is that no state lives alone. Our normal approaches to feeling obscure this, but when we bring fieldwork’s more precise approach to observing the actual experience of feeling, the muddiness of generic “anxious” and “sad” differentiates into discrete feeling objects, each with a distinct character and role to play in the whole experience of our selves.

In this chapter, I will present an outline of what this might look like for you, how to recognize it when it shows up, and how to bring greater discernment to your mapping practice. As we enter this territory, I’d like to introduce the term “excavation” to refer to the practice of bringing multiple related feeling states into awareness.

Choosing a Focus for Excavation

Your inner life is rich and complex, and as you reach beyond mapping only one state at a time, you’ll want to select a particular zone of interest. You might think of it as choosing what issue to work on. You might instead see it as a pattern of thought, mood, or behavior. You might draw a circle around a particular relationship in which you experience difficulty. Or you might be drawn to a particular mode of being in which you struggle, for example “working on a project,” “getting to sleep at night,” or “doing chores around the house.”

Don’t worry about being too specific. It’s better to go small at first. Trust that you will be able to follow the trail of feeling to identify related states. If you start with too large a focus, you may wind up casting too large a net and have difficulty wrangling things into manageable order.

What is most important in choosing your focus is that there is a congruent felt sense you are able to inhabit which fills the space of your issue or pattern. Think of it as a particular “way of being,” persona, mode or context which shapes a distinct experiential vibe. When you’re in it, you’re in it. When you are inhabiting a different way of being, your inner experience is also clearly different. It can be helpful to give this a name that will be your headline for the work on this group of states.

Telling the Story

Once you have chosen your focus, it can be helpful to tell the story of your experience in this context, inhabiting this way of being or persona. What is it like to be you, having this experience? What are your predominant streams of thought, salient emotions, and recurring behaviors? What stands out to you in your world? Who are the other characters in your story, both human and non-human? What are the other significant forces which exert their influence upon you?

Share this story with your facilitation partner if you’re working with someone. If you’re working solo, write your story as if you were telling it to another person. Capture the nuance of your inner experience as much as possible. What is it like to be you, having this experience? The more complete your notes are, the easier it will be to identify the patterns and name your states. Once you get the hang of this excavation process and where it leads, you will be able to simply survey your experience and go directly to harvesting the feeling states that mark the features of the pattern you’re exploring.

If you are facilitating someone else in their journey, do them the favor of capturing as best you can their exact words for key phrases and passages. It’s OK if you have to slow them down or even interrupt them at times to repeat a portion of the story so you can capture it in detail. When they stop talking, it gives them an opportunity to feel more deeply into the flow of things, and when you capture their words accurately, you will be able to share those back to them when you review to go deeper into identifying the states. They will appreciate it, and it will make it easier for them to do the work.

In capturing the story, you want to go deep into any given moment, and you also want to go broad across the timeline of a typical cycle through the story. Most issues people want to map involve recurring themes and episodes where the same sort of thing happens, again and again. Zoom into one cycle of the story. Use the climax or conflict as your easy entry point, but expand out from there. What happens before the blow-up? When do you know this is coming, and what is your experience then? What happens after the big event? How do you feel afterwards, what do you do, what are you thinking?

Different people will have different levels of access to the rich understory of any pattern. With some people, the story will gush forth with copious detail and color. Other people will benefit from patient, probing questions.

Identifying States in the Story

The purpose of reviewing your story is to identify key feeling states. At any point in its telling, you can choose to pause to identify and name states. I tend to do this as I go, pushing pause after a passage or burst in the story to lean in and notice what underlying feeling states hold the story experience together. In this activity I am zooming in first on the low-hanging fruit of common words of emotion, mood, interpretation, perception, and attitude. I am also listening into the characters, forces, and entities in the story world. Finally, I am paying close attention to nonverbal cues of physical gestures, reports of somatic and non-somatic sensations, posture, and vocal inflections.

A key concept here: All experience is anchored in feeling, and all language is tied to those underlying anchors. Absolutely any language telling the story of experience can be unpacked to identify the feeling states holding the scaffolding for the experience surveyed by the story. Give yourself permission to probe, to experiment, to inquire, to invite attention inward to identify those specific places inside which hold the unique states driving your story.

Inviting Coexisting States to Emerge

Our normal, habituated approach to feeling constrains our awareness. We most often expect feeling to be monolithic, a single state that is the complete feeling experience in any given moment. Even “mixed states” tend to be thought of more as a blended hybrid than the presence of two or more distinct, coexisting states.

Introducing an enhanced awareness of virtual material properties of feeling states changes this habit. Rather than framing the experience of feeling as a somatic sensation or a cognitive assessment, we open up to the nuance and complexity of its actual presence in our conscious awareness.

Welcoming Everything that Shows Up

The best way to support our expanding awareness of the complexity of the feeling experience is to welcome whatever shows up as we engage our practice of fieldwork. As we work our way through the development of our science, we shall discover two key principles that shape our experience.

First, all conscious experience is grounded in feeling. Let me say that again: all conscious experience is grounded in feeling. No matter what we may be experiencing, no matter how disembodied, abstract, or vacant, our experience can be attended to in such a way as to reveal a dimension of feeling that is inseparable from and essential to the lived experience. (See SO-7: The Feeling in Every Conscious Experience for more.)

Second, our experience is modular, multifaceted, and integrated as a whole. No matter what portion of our experience is being brought into our awareness, other components of that experience exist, and together the collection of these components constitutes the integrated, lived experience of a self. As other components of our experience rise into awareness, we can assume that these seemingly different components are connected.

Let’s take an example to illustrate. We are mapping a feeling state we have called Sadness. We keep finding ourselves getting lost in rumination, reliving an argument with a friend from earlier in the day. Rather than ignoring it and trying to keep pulling our attention back to mapping Sadness, we acknowledge this distraction by feeling into the memory and giving a name to the felt experience. We call it Angry, and we notice a feeling of Hurt under that. We add those to our list of states to map, and either return to mapping Sadness or turn our attention to one of the new states. These three states are very likely to be companions, co-creating a complex way of being that also includes other states as well.

A little bit later here, we will look at ways to confirm the connection between these two. For now, let me offer this list of possible experiences that might seem at first to be unrelated, but which, in the long run, as you become more comfortable with the fieldwork practice, can be included in the work you are doing.

• In solo work, pay attention to states and patterns that show up in the course of your exploration.

• In partner work, include states and patterns that show up in the dynamic of your interaction.

• Notice meta-states about the process itself. “This is hard.”

• Include meta-states about the self. “I suck at this kind of thing.”

• Consider exploring the actual experience of self. “Who is the ‘I’ who holds that judgment?” (We will go further into this “witness” experience in the next chapter.)

The Golden Question

As I’ve described, every feeling state inhabits a context including other state objects. These states anchor functions that coordinate their activity to generate the complete experience of self, and each one is intimately intertwined with one or more other states.

Because of this, one simple question carries a beautiful power for excavation:

What else are you feeling?

You can use variations on this question to link it to other specific, already identified states or certain contexts or memories. In general, though, we are inviting the field of attention to wander into the space surrounding any of the states already under the spotlight. You might be surprised at what shows up.

Excavating From Structural Clues

While mapping, you might find it very useful to treat feeling substances revealed in mapping as if they were real. Although in the mapping process we specify clearly that these feeling substances do not need to obey laws of physics, nevertheless they do tend to mirror many behaviors from the material and energetic world. Use your own somatosensory intuitions to notice possible locations and structures for feeling states that have not yet been mapped. Here are a few you might look for.

Pressure and Force Clues

If a state exhibits a force in a particular direction, it will often encounter resistance. Just like in the material world, if you push and there is no resistance, your push will become simply a movement or flow. If a feeling object is not moving, yet is experienced as having a force in a particular direction, inquire to see what might be meeting that force from the opposite direction.

In the case of pressure for something like a gas or liquid, inquire whether the pressure is inward or outward. If outward, it’s possible it is met by a containing substance. If inward, it might be the container for a different substance at its center. Probe a bit to find out by shining the field of attention into the space in which you suspect there may be another state object.

The Inside of Potential Containers

On occasion you will map a feeling object which seems inert, rigid, contracting, or otherwise somewhat resistant to change. These objects can sometimes hide other feeling states within them. In these cases, sometimes that external feeling state is all we are aware of because it is doing such a great job of blocking our attention to what is at its center.

We can check for these hidden inner states simply by using the field of awareness as a scanner.

Bring your awareness all the way into and through the center of this [feeling state]. What do you notice there? Does it seem to be the same [feeling substance] all the way through, or is there something different in the center?

If it does seem there is something different, check to see if there is a clear differentiation between one substance and the next. Different substances and colors give the clearest indication of differentiation between the two. If the outer segues gradually into the inner with no clear demarcation, it may actually be experienced as the same feeling substance under different conditions, for example higher pressure, at the center. In that case it is most likely to be the same feeling state object.

If they are clearly of different substances, identify and name the new feeling state at the center and take it through the full mapping process.

If you have some question about it, just ask. “Does this seem to be a different feeling, or does it seem more like it is the same part of you?” Most often this will clarify things. If you have one feeling object hiding and containing another, most likely they will be clearly experienced as having opposing intentions. Roll with that and map the second state.

(I’ve just introduced the concept of a “part” of you. Hold it lightly for now, in whatever way feels most intuitively to make sense for you. We will go further into the modular nature of conscious experience in Volume 2.)

Containers are more common than you might imagine. Very often when we go into the source of a tension or anxiety we will identify a container. And for very high-energy, high-stress configurations we can even find complex containers running several layers deep.

Sources and Destinations for Flows

Oftentimes you will map a state experienced as a flowing substance. In these cases make sure to trace the source and destination of the flow. If you identify a closed-loop circulation, then no worries. It’s a single state. But occasionally you will notice the flow seems to be coming from or going to a separate, different feeling object. In these cases, make sure to identify and map that extra state.

Excavating from Belief Statements

Another excellent way to excavate related states is through a simple practice of articulating general belief statements. As I’ve described, feeling anchors all conscious experience, and groups of feeling states tend to coexist beneath often complex networks of beliefs. Here is a way to follow the chain in order to identify multiple related states.

Start by reviewing the name you have given to the context you are exploring, along with the story you have told about that context. Zoom in somewhere close to the center of your general experience of this and make a statement of declaration of what seems true, real or important to you as you inhabit this context, this story, this feeling space. Start with whatever is most obvious, and frame it as a simple truth statement in whatever form that makes sense to you. If your statement is “A,” then you should be able to say, “A is true.”

Then, you have two ways to follow up:

• Make your statement, “A,” and add the word “because…” afterward. Notice what comes to mind and capture that new statement.

• Make your statement, “A,” and add the word “therefore…” afterward. Notice what comes to mind and capture that new statement.

Make sure to go in both directions from any strong belief, noticing what follows “because…” and what might follow differently from “therefore…” Continue making and capturing new belief statements and following up with “because…” or “therefore…” to link to related statements until you start going in circles.

Once you have sketched your network of beliefs, review in a similar way to reviewing your story, looking for charged words and concepts to identify underlying feeling states. Name unique states and add them to your list.

Confirming Coexisting States

Once you have a list of identified states, it’s good practice to review the list looking for duplicates or potential links to new states. A name like “Guarding Against Evil” will most likely turn out to have the two components “Guarding” and “Evil” as opposing states expressing two distinct parts. Names that seem to point in the same direction, for example “Distress” and “Upset,” may turn out to reference the same feeling state. Confirm whether this is true by simply asking whether the actual, felt experience of Distress is the same as that for Upset. If so, choose one of the two names or find another that captures the feeling state even better.

If they do not seem to be the same state, you might want to confirm whether they are the same part or not. Do this by attempting to hold the two distinct states in awareness at the same time. If that is possible, maintain them as two distinct states on your list and treat them as distinct but related parts.

If you are not able to hold both in your awareness at the same time, they may or may not be distinct parts. Sometimes a single part will have more than one common feeling expression, each arising in a different context. To confirm whether this is the case requires testing whether you can directly move either state to become the other. (We’ve touched on how to do that in FO-1: Fieldwork Quick Start, the moving section, and we will look at the Slider Test later in FM-11: Pro Tips. But for more robust testing, we will have to wait until we get into the fieldwork moving practice in depth in Volume 2.)

In other cases, two states that are unable to be held in awareness simultaneously may belong to different sets. We haven’t built our science far enough to even ask that question at this point. For now, simply treat them as separate and distinct as you map them, but maintain an open curiosity about what their relationship might be.

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We have almost arrived. In our last chapter, FM-7, Color, Movement, Sound and More, we finished capturing our observations of the virtual material properties of our feeling state experience. In this chapter, we will wrap things up by surveying the thoughts and beliefs connected to this state.

Ready? Say the feeling state name to yourself to bring your focus to it, and continue taking detailed notes as you go.

General Beliefs and Thoughts

Every feeling state we map is an anchor for a particular component of our total conscious activity. We will get into this broader architecture eventually, but we’ll lay some of the groundwork for it here. This is the point in the mapping process where we turn our attention to the dimension of thoughts as they live in relationship to the feeling state we have been observing.

The purpose of the belief questions is twofold. First, eliciting belief statements serves as a record of your starting point. Most of the time when you are mapping a feeling state, it’s because there is an element of suffering involved and you are intending to shift it to a more resourceful state. Because the belief statements tie the feeling state to meaningful context, they can be helpful later in recalling just how distressing this state used to be. And that can add appreciation and continued motivation for the journey back to wholeness. Quite often you’ll look back and wonder how on earth you could have thought that way. I love those moments.

Another function of the belief questions has to do with the more advanced skills for mapping and moving all nine feeling states in a set. (We’ll get to that in Volume 2.) In brief, belief statements operate in the realm of thought, and thought is the connective tissue linking one feeling state to the next. A statement arising from one feeling state often demonstrates a link pointing to another feeling state that has not yet been identified. Following the trail of belief statements is one way to seek out the full configuration of feeling states.

For now, in the basic mapping practice, hold the purpose of the belief questions as a useful record of the meaning and context for the feeling state you’re mapping.

Asking About Belief

Our goal is to invite stream-of-thought statements arising naturally from the place of the feeling state we’ve mapped. As before, either fill in the feeling state name for the marker phrase, or just read it as is.

How would you capture in words what seems most true, or real, or important, from the perspective of this [feeling state]?

As with the other mapping questions, the phrasing plays a key role. Let’s take a look through the various components of the question sentence.

“How would you capture in words” invites us to access something that may not exist in language as its native form, and to use words to “capture” it for the record. An alternative phrasing is, “How would you express in words…”

What follows, “…what seems most true, real, or important…” invites us to probe into the heart of things, but to do so lightly, capturing what “seems” to hold that central status while acknowledging that the way things are held may or may not correspond to some larger or more objective standard.

The final phrase, “from the perspective of this [feeling state],” invites us to hold that what comes forth in this inquiry is the unique point of view held by or from this specific feeling state, not necessarily held by any of the rest of the whole self. This provides the freedom to string together statements that other parts of the self may not agree with.

What we’re going for here are simple statements that seem, from the perspective of the feeling state being mapped, to be so true as to be obvious, hardly worth stating out loud because they are so implicitly assumed. Statements at this level are gold for revealing the role this feeling state plays in the whole pattern under inquiry. (We’ll go further into patterns in the next chapter, and much more deeply in Volume 2.)

Sometimes you might draw a blank with such an open-ended prompt. If so, use the following possible sentence stems as prompts.

How might you complete the sentence:

I am, or I’m not…
I can, or can’t…
I have, or don’t have…
I need, or don’t need…
I want, or don’t want…
I should, or shouldn’t…
I have to, or don’t have to…

If it seems appropriate and useful, invite a substitution of “you,” “they,” “it” or “the world” for the initial “I.” If at any time you draw a blank with these more specific prompts, don’t push it. Move on. Sometimes you are working with a feeling state that took shape before language and has been suppressed ever since. It may never have developed a mature linguistic connection with other states in the form of articulated beliefs.

Pro Tip: Considering Point of View

When inviting statements of belief, you have the option to choose the broader perspective of “yourself” having or possessing or experiencing the feeling state, or the more narrow perspective of the feeling state speaking as itself, giving its unique slant on life. Let’s take a hypothetical feeling state, “withdrawn,” as an example.

A statement from the perspective of the full self having the feeling state as just one component of experience might sound like this: “I don’t want to get involved. I would rather keep to myself.” A complementary statement from the perspective of the feeling state speaking as the self might sound like this: “I want to keep you safe. You’ve been hurt before in situations like this.” In this case, “you” refers to the whole person while “I” refers to the feeling state which is protecting them by withdrawing.

I would recommend just going with what feels most natural at first. But as you get the hang of this, consider choosing to go with the feeling state speaking from its own perspective. Especially as you map multiple feeling states, hearing distinctly from each part playing its role within the whole pattern can lead to terrific self insight.

At first, this feeling-state perspective might seem more difficult to sustain. Or it can seem strange to have these parts speaking as if they were sub-personalities. Reassure yourself that this is natural, that all of us have these sub-parts of ourselves interacting with each other to create our experience. Bottom line, though: allow yourself to generate statements from either perspective. It’s all good.

When you have one to three clear statements capturing the general thoughts arising from the feeling state, you’ve done enough to move on. On the other hand, if more thoughts are naturally arising and you’re finding yourself wanting to capture them, go for it. Sometimes these loquacious parts can be treasure troves of insight.

Noticing an Inner Voice

As you go through the process of capturing statements of belief, you might notice that the phrases and sentences arise as if spoken within yourself. These inner voices can lead to further insight. Take a look at some of these qualities in particular.

• Voice: Is the inner voice your own or someone else’s? If it’s not yours, what gender is it? What age? Is it someone you know? Is there just one voice, or are there more than one?

• Attitude: Tone of voice and any meaning conveyed by tone; this can sometimes be a pointer to other feeling states.

• Words spoken: These can be quite significant, often things like judgments, chastisement, laments. Record verbatim what you hear.

• Vocal qualities: Rate, pitch, intonation, inflection, loudness (these are usually important to note only when they seem particularly significant, not so important to ask about).

Well, that wraps it up for our mapping inquiry. Take a look through your notes, fill in any gaps, make any updates to get your notes faithful to your inner experience. Now it’s time to draw.

Drawing Your Feeling State

In a similar way to that of answering the questions, drawing functions as a kind of interactive dialog between your observing self and the parts of you being observed. You’re testing things out, whether it be the color of the pencil you’re choosing to draw your feeling state or the precise location along the terrain of your body outline. Often, you will discover new things in the process of drawing.

Because drawing is an opportunity for greater clarity and depth in your observation, I encourage you to go all in. If you’re in a hurry or just less attracted to the drawing experience, it’s just fine if you go with the simplest solution possible and just sketch a rough body outline and pencil in your feeling state. At least do that. But you’ll get a lot more out of it if you set yourself up with colored pencils or other art materials, or use a digital app, either on your phone or a tablet. Whatever you’re most comfortable with.

If you’d like some body outlines to use in your drawings, make sure to visit the FO-1: Fieldwork Quick Start chapter for links to download either PNGs to insert into your app or a PDF with templates you can print.

Whether or not you have colors or an art tablet to use, go for being both creative and precise in your drawing. Try to capture the feeling state as you described it. This is your visual representation of the feeling state you are mapping, and it will serve as a literal map to assist you to returning to this state, whether to prepare for moving it or to understand it more thoroughly.

One advantage of going with a digital solution is the opportunity to use layers to draw separate but coexisting feeling states and then combine them into a composite drawing that shows their relationships. You’ll see a few of those composite drawings in coming chapters, and I can say it’s very satisfying to put those together.

At some point, I’ll provide more involved instructions for drawing, whether with digital apps or on paper, including ways to deal with certain challenges like drawing a white state on white paper, for example. If that’s something you’d like to see sooner rather than later, let me know.

Again, the most important opportunity in drawing is to stay open to discovery as you draw. Whether it is fine-tuning the state you’re mapping or noticing one or more new states related to this one, you’ll find it serves the process well. Good luck.

Final Review: Any Changes?

Finally, now is a good time to go back through your notes and make any adjustments needed. Sync up your notes with new things you noticed in going through the questions, digging into thoughts and beliefs, and drawing. And take a look to see if there are any strong hints of yet-unmapped states connected to the state you’ve mapped here.

How much time you spend making sure your notes are aligned with your experience will depend on your own propensities for detail and the purpose you’re bringing to mapping this particular state. If you’ve got limited time and it’s important to blast through a set of interconnected states, go for it. You can trust that even the most basic notes, along with the fact of the states’ interconnections, will very likely enable you to return to this part of you when you wish.

On the other hand, if you’re wanting to be as disciplined as possible in studying some experiential phenomenon, take whatever time it takes to get it right. As I’ve said, this is a new opportunity to build a new class of science, and we do need to bring some rigor to that effort.

Where We’ve Arrived, and What Is Yet to Come

Well, that covers the essentials of the fieldwork mapping practice. I hope you were able to make your way through easily enough, and that you have successfully mapped (or are in the process of mapping, or anticipating doing so) one or more feeling states.

In the next chapter in this mapping series, FM-9: Identifying and Mapping Multiple States, we will learn more about how to work with our inner personal diversity. Then, in chapter FM-10: Cultivating a Witness Awareness, we will learn how to support our observation practice through identifying and mapping the witness experience more explicitly. In chapter FM-11: Pro Tips we will go just a little bit deeper into how best to support the observation process within a more scientific frame, using the slider test to validate that we are capturing what is actually there in this proto-language realm of virtual materiality. Plus we will use that same slider function to gain the ability to manage the intensity of our states when that serves us. Finally, in FM-12: The Being-With and North Star Practices we will learn two ways to expand our mapping practice. First, we will discover how to use fieldwork mapping to cultivate a state of profound presence with another person in the Being-With Practice. Then, we will learn the North Star Practice, a powerful method by which to transform a challenging state and find the essential truth at its core.

In the section to come, The Science: Observation, we will apply our fieldwork practice to the investigation of this new territory of the virtual materiality of feeling states. In doing so, we will truly launch our new science. We will discover characteristics of feeling experience that strongly suggest that the experience of feeling is significantly different from what we have come to believe in our common knowledge, our therapeutic practices, and our mainstream sciences.

In Volume 2, we will come back to learn what we need to know about how to use fieldwork to “move” already-mapped states. Doing so greatly expands our powers of investigation, and what we will discover gets our science more fully underway, as you will see.

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In this chapter, we will continue with our fieldwork mapping questions, taking close observations of color, movement, sound, and other properties. Continue from where you left off with the temperature question, FM-6: Substance Qualities and Temperature. Say the feeling state name to yourself to bring your focus to it, and continue taking detailed notes as you go.

Color and Appearance

Let’s turn our attention to what this feeling state might look like if you were able to step outside and look at it, as if it were an object separate from you.

Take a moment to reconnect with the information you’ve gathered so far. Place your field of awareness into and/or around the region of your feeling state, and notice again its qualities of substance and temperature. Now we will inquire into what this feeling state might look like if you were able to see its visual appearance.

If you were to say that this [feeling substance] has color, what color or colors would you say it seems to be?

This is a straightforward question that builds on the platform we’ve built with the previous questions, using no further unique phrasing except to specify “…color or colors…” to allow for the possibility of the feeling substance having two or more different colors.

If you do find your feeling state carrying more than one color, inquire into the relationship between/among these colors. Are they distinct with clear boundaries, or do they blend into one another? Is there a regular pattern, or are they more randomly distributed?

Pay attention in this case to whether the distinct colors might correspond to distinctly different substances and/or temperatures. If so, this might turn out to require slightly more advanced mapping technique. Consider treating the distinct quality zones as being distinct feeling states, each with its own, unique qualities and contributions to your inner experience. In this case, go through the mapping questions completely with each distinct component you’ve identified.

Pro Tip: Testing with Contrast

If we think of the sensory imagery centers of the brain as our instrument, it is as if we are trying different imagery settings and monitoring the instrument signal for a match. We are in fact “making it up” as we go, keeping track of what imagery feels like it “fits,” and adjusting for optimization. It’s a little like playing the childhood game “hot and cold” where a toy is hidden and the hider calls out temperature readings indicating how close the seeker is to the treasure. The seeker’s best strategy is to move around a lot at the beginning to get a quick temperature map of the territory, then to zoom in on the “hot spot.”

We can also use this technique to help us confirm any of our map parameters. When we are first getting used to this new skill, it is natural to question the images we get. “Where did that come from?” is a common exclamation. If you think maybe a feeling state has a certain imagery quality, but you’re not sure, ask a specific question about the opposite qualities.

For example, if you have a sense of the feeling state being blue, but maybe you’re baffled because you thought rationally that the anger you’re mapping should be red, “try on” some other colors. Ask yourself, “Is it possible that it’s red,” imagine the feeling substance being red, and check whether this matches the felt sense of what you’re mapping.

Most of the time when you do this, you will get a very clear “No.” When you do, then going back to your first impression of blue will seem much more fitting, and in fact it will often carry a subtle meaning that informs your experience of the state. It’s a great way to let yourself know you’re on track.

Additional Qualities of Appearance

In addition to identifying the raw color value, the hue, it can be helpful to notice additional qualities of appearance. I almost always ask about transparency:

And would you say it seems more transparent, translucent, or opaque?

• Transparent: Can see detail through it, although the colors may be tinted; like some tea or other clear drinks, or tinted glasses.

• Translucent: Light shines through but objects are not visible; like frosted glass, clouds, and lamp shades.

• Opaque: No light or visibility can be seen through the object; like an iron rod, ceramic plate, or wooden bowl.

As before, we can drill down into further levels of detail, but for the purposes of our mapping it’s best to find a balance. We want to capture the qualities most relevant to the felt experience of the feeling state. These can include the following:

• Luminosity: Does this feeling object glow, shine, or radiate light in any way?

• Reflectivity: Does the surface of this feeling object appear shiny, dull, or significant in some other way?

• Saturation or Value: (This is for color geeks.) Does this feeling object have a significant color saturation, either seeming very intense or very flat or pastel in color? Or does the color seem significantly bright or dark?

Finally, as always, it can be helpful to offer a more generic prompt.

What other qualities of appearance do you notice in your experience of this feeling state?

As you might imagine, color is perhaps the most useful quality when drawing the visual image of the feeling state. When you engage your materials or device for drawing you may find your discernment grows finer. Again, this has to do with the relative ease of saying “yes” or “no” to specific values over generating them out of nothing. If you have a large set of colored pencils, for example, you may agonize over exactly which shade of turquoise to pick, and find yourself mixing colors to get just the right effect. For now, just capture the general description of the appearance in your notes.

Movement, Force, and Pressure

With this next question, we maintain our field of awareness upon the substance qualities of the feeling state, and turn our attention to ways in which this substance seems to be moving — or not.

If you were to say the actual, felt experience of this [feeling substance] is moving in any way, would you say it seems to be flowing… or pulsing… or vibrating… moving in some other way… or does it seem to be perfectly still?

Properties of movement, force and pressure vary greatly. The possibilities are at least as wide as those in the physical world of solids, liquids and gases. As with the other properties, only go into as much detail as seems useful to help the explorer experience a strong connection between the image and the feeling state.

Here are a few types of movement to consider, (not an exhaustive list): flowing, pulsing, vibrating, radiating, waves or ripples, whole-object movement through space, or perfect stillness. And within these types of movement we find various qualities, including the following:

• Direction: Linear, circulating, inward or outward, expanding or contracting

• Intensity: Volume, speed, frequency, or amplitude

Force or Pressure

Usually it is best to ask about force or pressure separately, after assessing movement qualities. This is because what you learn from examining movement will often suggest a likely configuration for force or pressure. Continue with the following simple prompt:

And do you notice any force or pressure?

If force or pressure is evident, inquire further into its direction and magnitude. For example, a gas identified as having the quality of pressure could be experienced as compressing inward on itself or pushing outward from its center. This directionality could be significant for next steps in the work. For example, the direction of a force or pressure could point to another feeling state object interacting with the first (see FM-9: Identifying and Mapping Multiple States). It could also indicate potential opportunities for how to create a powerful shift in the moving phase of the process, to be covered in Volume 2.

Variability

Finally, it can be helpful to explicitly ask for elements of variability along all the components of this property.

Are these qualities of movement, force or pressure steady, rhythmic, or random in any way?

Capture your observations in your notes, and let’s move to the final explicit mapping question.

Sound

In observing a feeling state’s properties of sound, we take a little bit less focused approach. Inner sound often does accompany the experience of specific feeling states, but it does not necessarily seem to originate within the space of the affect field (see Introducing Inner Fields in SO-11:Getting Real About Inner Experience) itself. Sound can seem to come from inside the mapped state space, outside of it, or somewhere more difficult to locate.

No worries. Most of the time, sound serves as more of a support to the other properties than a central feature of its own, so all we need for supporting the mapping process is to take an open-ended approach.

With your attention on the felt experience of this [feeling state], when you listen internally, do you notice any inner sound?

In answering this inquiry, it can help to open the field of awareness wider. As described, sound often arises along with a feeling state, but may not be as strongly or directly connected with the identified location.

For some people, sound is a natural element of their feeling state imagery. For others, sound rarely shows up. For many, answering the questions about substance and color seems like discovering properties that were already in place, while sound qualities may seem to fall more in the category of “making it up.”

If you are among those who do not find sounds springing spontaneously to mind, let it go. In mapping, we are only interested in identifying elements that feel right, that fit.

I generally find that an overview of sound qualities is usually sufficient to be useful in the moving phase. I’ll wait until after we find the ideal state to fully enhance and enrich the sound experience. But if sound stands out in mapping, take a moment to note its qualities in a little more depth. Here are some qualities I’ve found most useful in working with sound.

• General source: vocal, natural, machine, electronic, that sort of thing.

• Variability: steady, rhythmic, random, or other.

• And a few other possible sound qualities that can be useful at times:

  • General sound qualities: pitch, amplitude, rhythm, tone.

  • Single or multiple sounds.

  • Musical qualities: instrumental, vocal, choral, natural, melodic.

The Special Case of Silence

If the explorer states there is no sound, confirm by asking. There is a difference. Silence can be “deafening” or otherwise carry great meaning.

If there seems to be no sound, is it more the case that there is no sound of any kind, or is there in fact the presence of a distinct silence?

When you have completed a general description of the sound qualities of the feeling state imagery, it’s time for one last check before moving on.

Other Possible Qualities

For a very few people, vivid sensations of taste and/or smell might accompany their experiences of specific feeling states. Ask a casual question the first few times you map a state to see if taste and/or smell might be an important channel to observe.

As you feel into this experience of your [feeling state], do you notice any taste or smell that seem to be important components of your experience?

If so, capture as much as seems important to the explorer about what is there. If not, after a few states, it’s probably OK to leave this out.

Brief Review

As we wrap up the explicit mapping process, now is a good time to review. Often, in moving through the question sequence, an observation later in the sequence may reveal previously hidden details from an earlier question. Sometimes answering a question about color, for example, can lead to a clarification about substance.

As you wrap up, look over your notes, reflect on what you have mapped, and notice if anything needs to be adjusted in your description of the virtual material properties of this state experience.

Is there anything else you want to notice about how this [feeling state] actually feels before you move on? Are there any adjustments you would like to make to your notes?

All that’s necessary here is a quick invitation to mark any background discoveries you may have made while working through the question sequence. Make any changes or updates to your notes before moving on to the questions about thoughts and beliefs.

Pro Tip: A Note About Mental Imagery

At times, as the explorer you may find yourself encountering very specific and detailed images. You might describe a feeling as a “squirrel in my belly, eating a walnut” or “like autumn leaves swirling all around me, each leaf shaped like a heart, with the word ‘love’ written in blue at the center of the leaf.”

When you find this level of detail, question it. You want to confirm that the “actual, felt experience” corresponds to the substance, color, etc. When there is a surplus of vivid detail, it is sometimes because you have lapsed into using metaphoric, thought-based imagery instead of tracking the actual, inner sensations of the feeling state. If you suspect this, try the following question to confirm, substituting a brief reference to the imagery in question for the marker phrase in brackets:

Now as you allow yourself to fully experience this [mental imagery], notice the feeling that arises with that imagery. Paying attention to the experience of this feeling, if you were to say the actual, felt experience of the feeling itself is located somewhere in or around your body, where would you say that is?

Usually, this is enough to shift the explorer’s attention to the direct feelingmind experience, and you’ll be able to properly map the feeling state.

Differentiating Discrete Properties

If this does not yield a more tangible experience of feeling that accompanies the image, another approach is to treat the image as actual virtual material properties. Then, separate discretely different properties and look into the experiences of each.

For example, if you’re working with an explicit image of a ripe peach, bring awareness to the pit versus the flesh, and treat these as possibly separate states. Ask about the properties of each as different from the other, and invite a further differentiation of feeling by asking how they might be differently named. Confirm each by adjusting the properties of their substances to see if the actual felt experience changes as well (see The Slider Test in FM-11: Pro Tips).

Rolling With It

If the detailed, metaphoric image persists, and it resonates with the felt experience, roll with it. Complete the mapping.

For one thing, for some people, this level of detail may be normal. I’ve run into a few. And even if what is happening is a substitution of thought-based imagery for the felt sense, if our ultimate goal is to shift the state, moving a mental image can often lead to similar breakthroughs as working directly with the virtual material properties of the feeling state. (Why and how that works is a more advanced topic I may cover in Volumes 2 & 3.)

Over time, with the experience of mapping many states, most people will learn to discern the difference between an explicit image and the observation of the virtual material properties of an affect field. For serious application to a scientific investigation, we will want to choose first-person explorers with enough experience to easily make this assessment. For those on a journey of personal growth and inner exploration, it’s not a critical issue, and the learning will be valuable no matter how accurate the observations might be.

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In this chapter, we will move into the next two fieldwork mapping questions — about substance qualities and temperature. Continue from where you left off with the location question, FM-5: First Impressions — Plus Location, Size and Shape. Pay particular attention to your felt sense of the feeling state you are mapping. Say the feeling state name to yourself to bring your focus to it, and continue taking detailed notes as you go.

Substance Qualities

With this next question we will examine the region within the shape you’ve identified in the previous question about location to learn more about your inner experience of this feeling state. You have overlaid your field of awareness with this region to prepare to collect more detailed and precise information about your experience of the affect field generating your feeling experience.

With this question, we will invite a comparison to substance qualities similar to those of the material world we inhabit. In observing these qualities of substance, our experience of this feeling state will become more vivid and tangible to us. It will take on more of a status of a distinct entity rather than a nebulous abstraction. This new quality of being a “something” gives us simultaneously more separation from it and more connection with it. It takes on a presence within our experience and opens up the capacity for us to conduct a higher quality interaction with it. This will serve us very well as we continue into our mapping process and beyond.

Asking the Question

Ready? As before, run through the question briefly. Then we’ll break down the new language structures before inviting you to take on the question in earnest.

Inside this region, if you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this [feeling state] has qualities of substance, would you say it seems more like a solid… a liquid… a gas… some kind of light… or energy… or something else?

Here, the language “Inside this region…” directs our attention at the outset to the region just identified with the location/size/shape question. Then it follows the standard track we’ve established as central to all of our questions in FM-4: Question Structures for Directing the Field of Awareness.

The new elements setting our filter to highlight substance qualities come in the latter half of the sequence, especially with the list of suggested substances, “solid… liquid… a gas… some kind of light… or energy.” As we explored briefly in determining the shape of the region occupied by the feeling state, it is often much easier to compare discrete properties to the felt sense in order to elicit an easy yes or no answer.

This list of substance properties functions as a series of micro-filters, inquiring about whether, when we apply this filter or the next one, we get a “reading” from our instrument of attention. The best delivery of this question allows some time between each suggestion for a confirmation or disconfirmation to arise. A simple pause of a second or two is usually sufficient.

Finally, after facilitating our sequence of micro-filters, we open things up by concluding the question with, “…or something else?” In this way we are avoiding the suggestion that the list covers all the options, and inviting ourselves to really let go and notice the actual qualities that emerge.

This is important. Although we are referencing properties of the material world in our question, the substance qualities of feeling states do not necessarily obey the laws of physics. It is perfectly natural to experience a feeling state as a “solid gas” or “liquid light,” for example.

Going into Details

Once you have identified the general category of substance, inquire a little further into the details of the substance qualities. Getting specific about a feeling substance’s characteristics provides you with even more tangible vividness. Try to strike a balance between expediency and thoroughness. Identifying every last detail can become tedious. Your goal is to generate enough detail to become clearly aware of the feeling state and to create a workable sensory image corresponding to that state.

Here’s a simple, general approach that can work most of the time:

Does this [feeling substance] seem hard or soft, heavy or light, more or less dense, thick or thin? What finer details do you notice about the qualities of substance of your experience of this [feeling state]?

Following are specific details useful to inquire about for solids, liquids and gases. Use these as suggestions, choosing ones you perceive as most relevant for the particular feeling state you are mapping. Again, I find it useful to place these inquiries into a question in this form, with a simple binary comparison:

Would you say this [feeling substance] seems (more) [A or B]?

An example variation of this would be, “Does this gas seem thick or thin?” Sometimes I will string together a few binary options in a row, and capture whatever stands out. “Would you say this gas seems heavy or light… thick or thin… more or less dense?”

Solids

• Heavy / light

• Hard / soft — (like metal or stone versus putty or foam)

• More / less dense

• (If soft): Resilient / malleable — (like a rubber ball versus putty)

• (If hard): Rigid / brittle / bendable

• What is the texture of the surface (e.g., smooth vs. rough)?

Liquids

• Thick / thin – (like paint versus water)

• Heavy / light

• More / less dense

Gases

• Thick / thin

• Heavy / light

• Moist / dry

• More / less dense

Other Substances

Other kinds of substances you might encounter include the following. This list is not exhaustive, and you are likely to encounter other qualities of substance. Be open and supportive of whatever your experience indicates. And again, no need to obey laws of physics or conform to the nomenclature of the material world.

• Plasma — Something between a liquid and a gas, or between a gas and energy.

• Gel — Something between a solid and a liquid, like jello or toothpaste.

• Electricity — Often with a buzzing quality.

• Energy — Pure energy in whatever way you understand that. Energy is often a catch-all to define a substance quality that does not seem to quite fit any of the other categories. It can be helpful to inquire into other substance qualities the energy may carry such as density, weight, and viscosity.

• Light — No substance exactly, but with a presence all the same; similar to energy.

• Emptiness — A void with a distinct and present absence of substance.

• Multi-dimensional space — A region within which the normal laws of substance do not apply, and where space takes on a different dimension and infinity can fit within an area as small as a grapefruit.

• Particles — Perhaps moving through space, perhaps clustered in clumps or solid shapes, perhaps behaving like a quantity of sand or dust.

• Pieces, aggregates, combinations — Chunks, pieces, sometimes uniform, sometimes in combination with other substances. It’s possible a state like this turns out to actually be two or more intermixed states.

Often, the best way to describe a solid is through analogy: it is “like” something else. See if you can come up with a direct comparison with a material you are familiar with.

Nudging with Micro-Filters

If you are having difficulty getting started with identifying the fundamental substance quality, it can help to begin with a few micro-filters. For example, while directing your attention into the space of the feeling state, ask whether the state seems to be heavy or light, hard or soft, thick or thin, more or less dense. These four distinctions in particular can be quite helpful in moving toward clarity about the substance.

Once you are satisfied you have adequately identified the important qualities of substance for this feeling state and captured your discoveries in your notes, you are ready to move on to ask about temperature. Before we do though, let us take a moment to reflect on this experience so far.

Commentary: Substance Inside and Outside

For most people, the idea that feeling can be perceived as having qualities resembling substance comes as a complete surprise. Yet this link can be found many places in how we talk about ourselves. Think about the difference between “hard-hearted” and “soft-hearted,” for example. Or the difference between “heavy-hearted” and “light-hearted.” When you come across these phrases, they mean something because you can find a way to relate to that sort of inner experience.

Why should it be otherwise? As every one of us emerged into conscious presence in the world, as we first became aware of ourselves and our surroundings, what filled our awareness was the materiality of embodiment. Hard/soft, warm/cool, rough/smooth, heavy/light: our first distinctions, even before we opened our eyes. We are beings inhabiting a material body surrounded by a material world, and this is what our consciousness grounded itself in as it fired up at the very beginning of our lives.

In addition, the idea that we might generate virtual material experiences for ourselves is not new. For example, I have used a hammer quite a lot in my life. It is very easy for me now to imagine a hammer in my hand, and to feel its heft and balance as I move my arm. It is easy for me to remember the sensation of the wind on the water and how to move my body and the sail of a boat to dance with that wind. It is easy for me to step into a particular dance move, to experience it virtually as if I was using my body in just that way.

People regularly use mental rehearsal to advance their skills in sports and the arts, and this rehearsal requires high quality virtual materials to simulate the actual, embodied experience of interacting with real objects and substances. This is already a field of study in psychology under the term body schema. It is a very short distance between these things we take for granted and a natural, intuitive, and mostly unconscious use of virtually-constructed materials as the basis for our experience of feelingmind.

That is one possibility, anyway. There are others requiring a bit more expansion of concepts, and we’ll leave those be for now. But hopefully I’ve given you something to think about as we continue on our journey. We’ll go more deeply into this in SO-5: How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense.

Temperature

The next question is a simple one. We’ve already identified the region occupied by the feeling state, along with its apparent substance qualities. From here it is an easy switch to filter for temperature, and since temperature is generally a single point on a linear scale, it’s pretty straightforward to identify. Consider substituting the name for the feeling substance identified above for the marker phrase in brackets below, or just read it as is. Either way tends to be effective.

If you were to say this [feeling substance] has a temperature, what temperature would you say that seems to be?

Sometimes temperature is fairly obvious, especially when it falls into one extreme or the other. At other times, though, it can help to add a more precise prompt. Something along the lines of, “Does this [feeling substance] seem to be warmer or cooler, or does it seem perfectly neutral?” If the neutral temperature seems accurate, clarify by asking if it is more like room temperature or body temperature.

For some people, temperature is a high-fidelity quality. If you are one of these, you may find yourself able to give a very precise degree reading of your feeling substance. For other people a rough comparison to something experiential tends to do the trick. “Like a cool breeze on a summer day,” or, “like hot tea after it’s been sitting for a few minutes.”

Occasionally you will map something with an extreme temperature that is difficult to identify. The predominant quality is one of numbing or burning, the way you might experience with either extreme hot or cold. Just make a note of this, and be open to the possibility that it could be either extreme hot or cold, neither hot nor cold, or both somehow. Find whatever designation makes the most sense to you.

From time to time you will encounter temperature that is different in different locations within the specific feeling substance, or which fluctuates. Make a note of these variabilities. Finally, occasionally temperature will seem not to apply to a particular feeling state, even after checking for a neutral temperature quality. That’s OK. Just move on to the next question about color and appearance.

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OK, let’s get this show on the road. In this chapter, we will dig into the first two fieldwork mapping questions. As we begin, let’s quickly review what we’re doing here and make sure we’re getting the most out of the fieldwork practice.

• First, we take charge of our sophisticated attention apparatus for the purposes of observing our actual feeling experience. (Read IS-9: Introducing the Structure of Attention.)

• In doing so, we seek to direct our field of awareness into the more subtle dimension of feelingmind. (Read IS-5: The Subtle Dimension of Feelingmind.)

• To help us do that, we observe feelingmind experience through a series of carefully structured questions. (Read FM-4: Question Structures for Directing the Field of Awareness.)

• These questions guide us to collect information about the virtual material properties of our feeling experience. (Read IS-8: A New Method for Observing Inner Experience.)

In conducting these observations, we step into the role of a pioneering, first-person scientist of subjective experience. In taking on this new role with these new tools, we gain greater agency in navigating our own inner world.

Ready? Return to the experience and/or context you have selected, paying particular attention to your felt sense of the feeling state you have chosen to map. Say the feeling state name to yourself to bring your focus to it, and write it down at the beginning of your notes. (Reminder: audio and other resources are available at frontiers.psychotopology.com/p/fieldwork-quick-start.)

Starting with Your First Impression

The First Impression question provides an opportunity for you to begin turning your field of awareness toward the feeling state. It’s not so important what comes out of this question, only that you make an attempt to answer it, and through that attempt you become more aware of the actual felt experience of the feeling state. Substitute the name of the feeling state you’ve chosen to map for the marker phrase in brackets.

Describe in general terms, in a sentence or two, what it feels like to be you experiencing this [feeling state], as if you were telling a good friend.

Start to sink into the actual feeling of that, the way it feels to you in and around your body. Imagine how you would describe this inner experience to a friend. How would you tell your friend what it’s like to have this feeling? What happens in your body? What happens in your mind? What kinds of things does it make you do (or want to do)?

Jot down some of these things in your notes. This will become your 30,000-foot map of the territory that includes this feeling state.

Location, Size and Shape

Take yourself through the following question briefly, just to get the general sense of it. Then we’ll break down the language and you can run through it once more in earnest.

If you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this [feeling state] is located somewhere in or around your body, where would you say that seems to be?

Let’s break this question down. First, as we covered in the previous chapter, FM-4, that described the structure of our questions, the phrase, “If you were to say…” invites you to open up, relax, and just take your best guess at the answer to this question. There is no right answer. We’re not requiring you to go on the record here, but “if” you were going to say this feeling might be located somewhere, what might you say?

To reinforce this giving permission to take your best guess, we finish the question with, “…where would you say that seems to be?” Here we are not requiring you to be definitive, we are allowing for the possibility that appearances might be different from some underlying reality, and we are saying that we are actually interested in those appearances above all. So go ahead and take a shot at naming those.

Inside this container of permission, we have two more key phrases. The first, “…the actual, felt experience of this…” directs your attention once again to a real, in the moment, direct experience, inviting a felt-sense kind of filter to be in the foreground of your attention scan. The tail end, “…of this [feeling state]…” anchors you back to the feeling state you named at the outset of our process.

“…in or around your body…”

The next key phrase is unique to this question, and is very important, “…located somewhere in or around your body.”

You will discover in the course of exploring fieldwork that the discrete states of feelingmind are not necessarily confined to the space of the physical body. The actual experience of feeling states often extends outside the body, and on occasion can be found to exist entirely separate from the body. The phrase, “…in or around…” gives explicit direction to cast your scan beyond the boundary of your body if that turns out to be necessary or helpful.

Go ahead and run through the question again, allowing the language of the question to direct your attention in ways that can surface an answer that feels accurate for you.

Focusing on Feelingmind

Keep in mind once again that we are paying attention to the channel of awareness beneath sensation and beneath thought. We want to step beyond our ruminations and interpretations connected to this feeling, and to allow the somatic sensations to fall away.

The “feeling state” we are referring to is something beyond body sensation. While it exists in space relative to the space of the body, it is not confined to the body and has no direct connection with the physical sensations of breathing, heartbeat, digestion, muscle tension, etc.

You may find it helpful to close your eyes, and to eliminate the various sensory channels from your attention, one at a time. Release visual images. Release sounds. Release kinesthetic and tactile sensations. Notice that without those primary senses, and even without thought, you are still conscious. What is left is feelingmind. (See IS-5: The Subtle Dimension of Feelingmind for a more extensive facilitation of this exploration.) This is what you are mapping.

You are looking to identify a space in or around your body which the feeling you have named seems to occupy, at least to a greater extent than it occupies the rest of the infinite space of reality you inhabit. This will be a space which seems more “alive” or more “present” with the essence of this feeling.

Extra Help

In some cases, for some of you, answering this question for the first time may feel like fumbling in the dark. That’s OK. The following sections provide some extra assistance to help you guide that field of awareness in ways that hopefully support you in locating your feeling state experience.

Systematic Scanning

If you are finding it difficult to identify a specific location, give this a try: do a deliberate, systematic scan of your body and the space around it until you find the desired presence. Start at your feet. Substitute the name of your feeling state for the marker phrase in brackets. Ask the following:

Does any part of the actual, felt experience of this [feeling state] exist in your feet or legs?

As you take in the direction of this and the following questions, consciously place your field of awareness in the region specified by the question. Confirm yes or no. Whether yes or no, move up systematically through the following specified locations:

• “feet or legs”

• “hips or pelvis”

• “waist or abdomen”

• “chest or back”

• “shoulders or arms”

• “neck or head”

If it feels important, modify one or more of these to zoom in or out until you find the location.

Special Case: Outside the Body

Occasionally you will be mapping a feeling state that cannot be located anywhere in the body. If you still come up empty after your scan, use the same question structure to inquire into the spaces around your body.

• “Does any part of the actual, felt experience of this [feeling state] exist in the area in front of your body?”

• If no, continue with, “behind your body,”

• “to the left side of your body,”

• “to the right side of your body,”

• “above your body,” and

• “below your body.”

In most cases of a feeling state being located outside the boundary of the body, it is actually making contact with the skin, often penetrating the skin into the body to a certain depth. Very occasionally, a feeling is entirely dissociated, and may be as far as several feet from the body. This is rare, but entirely possible.

Special Case: Whole Body

Sometimes we may be mapping a feeling state experienced as filling the entire body space. If that seems to be the case, confirm with finer-resolution questions:

• Does this [feeling state] fill your whole body?

• Is there any part of your body which does not have this [feeling state] in it?

• Does this [feeling state] extend outside your body, beyond any part of your skin?

The feeling state could occupy the full body and beyond, extend outside the body a few millimeters on all sides, or as far as many feet or farther in specific locations and directions. Or it could occupy the full body but stop just inside the boundary of the skin by a few millimeters or more.

Special Case: Everywhere

As we will see when we get into moving feeling states to their ideal expression, some states will expand infinitely. These are often experienced as what may be referred to in other traditions as unity consciousness, divine mind, infinite presence, and other designations. In psychotopology, these are a standard part of the structures we uncover, one type of function within the nine that comprises the experience of self.

It’s unusual for us to map one of these states right away, but certainly possible. So be open to it if you find yourself heading in this direction with the experience of the feeling state you’re mapping. In a state like this, the location might be described as inside and around the body, extending infinitely in all directions.

Special Case: Multiple Locations

On occasion, you might find yourself noticing that multiple locations seem to hold an active presence as you scan for your feeling state. Sometimes this can be a single feeling state that extends through several parts of the body. At other times, though, you may be picking up two or more distinct feeling states which have come into awareness at once. To help bring clarity to your experience, ask the following questions:

Are [ location A ] and [ location B ] distinct and separate regions, or does one extend or merge into the space of the other?

Do the feeling states at [ location A ] and [ location B ] seem like they are two areas of the same feeling state, sharing similar qualities or essence, or is it possible they are two distinctly different feeling states?

If you identify that these seem to be two or more distinct states, ask which location seems more important to work with. Check in to see if that location corresponds to the feeling state name you chose to map. If not, come up with a more suitable name for the new feeling state before proceeding. Either way, make sure to note the other locations for future mapping.

Double Checking If Necessary

If after this thorough scan you have still not discovered the location of the state you have named, go back to your memory and notes, and explore alternative feeling states, or alternative names for the same feeling state, searching for something that seems strong enough to invite a successful identification. You want to work with a feeling state that feels palpable, tangible, perhaps something that actually affects your body sensations because of the relative intensity of emotional activation.

Identifying Size and Shape

Hopefully, you’ve landed on where your feeling state seems to be located. Let’s complete the location scan by getting more precise.

And in this location, what size and shape does this [feeling state] seem to occupy?

With this follow-up question, we are inviting your attention to zoom in and specify how big and what shape is the space occupied by the feeling state you’ve located. If it seems difficult to identify the size, offer some comparison objects. It is often much easier to answer a yes or no question asking about a specific size than to arrive at the correct size out of nothing. Start with a comparison object about the size of a loaf of bread, and work your way up or down from there depending on whether the state seems smaller or larger.

Is the actual, felt experience of this [feeling state] smaller, or larger, than [an egg, a loaf of bread, a watermelon, etc.]?

In the case of a whole-body feeling, you will want to find out specifically where the feeling ends.

Does this [feeling state] stop precisely at your skin, or does it stop somewhere beneath your skin or extend beyond your skin, outside your physical body?

If stopping before or extending beyond the skin, ask how far.

If you have difficulty identifying the shape of the feeling state, look for hints in how you have described the location and size so far, and expand upon those. Also imagine how you might describe it to someone else, and pay attention to spontaneous physical gestures that might arise. Gestures are wonderful indicators for location, size, and shape. (Keep this in mind when you facilitate this process for someone else.)

Does this “square” feeling state seem flat, or more like a cube?

Does this “round” feeling state seem spherical like a ball, flat like a dinner plate, more extended like a cylinder, or something else?

Be prepared to elicit some unusual shapes. Anything is possible in the form and structure of the felt sense. Some possibilities to be aware of include the following:

• Hollow objects — These may include spheres, cubes, ovoids, cylinders and other shapes. Other forms may be inside these or they may be empty.

• Doorways, gateways, and extra dimensions — Doorways or gateways can be of any size or orientation, and seem to open or connect to “other dimensions,” other people, or some experience of energy. Extra dimensions show up when a feeling-state object which seems to occupy a specific space relative to your body also seems to occupy a different space, perhaps much larger, when examined from inside the shape. If this kind of idea or perception arises for you, don’t worry for now about trying to understand it. Simply accept that these perceptions correspond to some aspect of your feeling experience that is important, and use whatever words seem most useful to refer to the experience.

• Multi-part shapes — These are sometimes connected and sometimes not. If you continue the questioning process and discover that they have different properties, then you are probably working with two different feeling states and should probably do the complete mapping process with each. If they have highly similar or identical properties, they are more likely to be apparently separated forms of the same feeling state.

Make sure to also notice things like the orientation of the shape relative to the body. For example, is a flat round disk oriented vertically, and if so is it parallel or perpendicular with the side-to-side plane of the body? Or is it oriented horizontally as if lying on a table, or sitting at some other angle?

How much detail?

Feelingmind perception can be very sensitive in some people, allowing for a level of detail that can be surprising. For others, answers to these and other questions may have a much lower resolution at first. At both ends of the spectrum and everywhere in between, working through these questions will strengthen your feelingmind awareness with many benefits.

If you are one of those with high sensitivity, don’t take too much time to get overly specific. The overall gist of the state will be sufficient to get the results of the work.

If you are one with a lower sensitivity, no worries. Many times, shape will become more clear after some of the other questions, and when you draw the feeling state later on.

Make a few notes to record what you’ve discovered, and when you have a pretty good description, it’s time to move on to substance and temperature, which we will cover in the next chapter.

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