Introducing the Science

Fieldwork Overview

Fieldwork in Depth: Mapping

The Science: Observation

Case Examples

Next post in this series coming in a few months.

This is the audio, transcript, and commentary for Part 3 of a single, self-contained demo session with Susan, a participant in a small training I conducted in early 2017. Make sure to take a look at Part 1 and Part 2 to give context for this one.

As before, I’ve provided two versions of the transcript. The first is generated by Substack, synced with the audio, and is verbatim. Click the transcript button above and use it to navigate through the session. A lightly edited, more readable version of the transcript is below, along with my comments to give you more info about what’s happening.

Here in Part 3, we will dive right into mapping Shame. And once again, as we do so, yet another part will reveal itself — the fourth and final feeling state mapped in this session.

(NOTE: Susan — not her real name — gave me her full permission to share her session with the public. I am immensely grateful for her offer.)

Let’s go!

Mapping Shame

J: All right, so, the Shame. If you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this Shame was located somewhere in or around your body, where would you say that seems to be?

S: Right in my solar plexus.

J: Ah hah.

S: And it's about the size of my fist.

J: OK. Great. And does it seem more like a solid, liquid, gas, light, energy…?

S: Well, just what I said, it seems like this little porcupine.

J: All right.

S: You know, so it's not solid like hard, but if you would think like a little porcupine body. It's soft, but there is substance to it.

J: Right. And with spikes.

S: Spikes, yes. It's totally, totally all the spikes.

J: In every direction.

S: Well, it's like if I were lying down, it's like it would be sitting on my solar plexus.

J: OK.

S: So, like its little feet and tummy would be next to my body, but everything, like if anybody was going to come close, they would only feel spikes.

J: Right. All right. And what temperature does little porcupine-y thing seem to be?

S: Just body temperature. It's like the same temperature as me.

J: Ah hah. And what color?

S: Gray. Whatever color porcupines are.

J: OK.

S: Kind of gray.

J: Kind of gray. A darker gray or lighter?

S: A little darker, like the dark gray spots in the fog…

J: Mm hm.

S: That color gray.

J: OK. And is it moving in any way?

S: Nope.

J: Any force or pressure?

S: Nope. Just sitting there.

J: And if you listen internally, do you notice any inner sound?

S: Kind of whimpering. Almost like a little pain…

J: Almost like a…?

S: Like if it had a stomach ache or something. You know? Just little whimpers of pain.

J: OK. Anything else to notice about what this feels like?

S: Well, like if its little feet had claws or toenails, it's like I can feel little, almost like little pricks.

J: So almost like little pricks. Where do you feel that?

S: On my tummy, where it's sitting.

J: OK. And from this place, from that feeling, what seems true, or real, or important to this part of you?

S: Well, just like when you do the drawing, it's going to be right under the edge of the steel plate, it feels like it's the “what's underneath.” Even though it's on the outside of my body, it feels like it's what's underneath everything else that's going on.

J: Ah. What's its intention or perspective or attitude or belief, about you, about the world, about love?

S: It really doesn't want to be noticed or discovered. That's all the prickliness, the quills. It's like, “Don't come close to me, don't notice me."

J: Mm hm. OK. Anything else?

S: That seems to be the main thing.

J: OK.

I’m going to guess that you never expected “shame” would look like this. One of the things you learn pretty quickly doing this practice is to lay down your expectations. The words we use to point to our most private feeling experience are inadequate and clumsy. Fieldwork maps, in contrast, help to bring out the actual, felt experience lying beneath those clumsy words.

Whether you are facilitating someone else or exploring your own interior, I can’t emphasize too strongly the importance of holding the primacy of direct experience over any common (or therapeutic) language interface to that experience. The mapping process provides a more direct translation of the feeling state as it is experienced than any culturally-shaped language we have available. Trust the maps. Hold the labels loosely. Every single person, and every single feeling state within each person, is utterly unique. Support the explorer (and yourself) in maintaining an open, curious attitude to what they will discover, and hold them in a space in which they are free to generate their own unique interpretations and understandings of their experience as it emerges into more tangible awareness.

The shape of this feeling state, with its defensive spikes pointing out toward anyone who might draw close, suggests to me there is another state to be found. Every feeling state has one single function. More complex patterns come into being through the interaction of multiple states, each carrying out its individual task. Defense is one function. What is necessary to defend is a separate function. Each of these will be anchored in its own unique feeling state. I’ve noted this to myself, and will bring Susan back to it soon to discover what else might be there.

Drawing Shame

J: All right. So I'm going to leave it on the same color gray. Does that make sense?

S: Yep.

J: All right. And I think I'll zoom in a little bit further. And let's just see where that No! comes to an end. So it's gotta be right there.

S: Yes, right there.

J: And I'm going to start with, just kind of draw the body a little bit. And then we'll put our spikes on it…

S: Yes…

J: And let me draw this over here… So it's going to be… About like that?

S: Yes.

J: OK. And then let's see if this make sense… Does this look spiky enough?

S: Yeah. Yeah.

J: I mean, I could do it a little bit differently, but this is probably OK, right?

S: Yes.

J: Lots of them.

S: Yes. Lots and lots of these little spikes. It's like if you put your hand anywhere close to it, you're going to encounter pokes.

J: Yeah. OK. How does that look?

S: That looks just right.

J: All right.

When I facilitate fieldwork, I use two computers: a desktop computer to track the notes and the emerging structure of the feeling states, and a tablet for drawing. When I work with someone in person, I just hand them the tablet and they draw the image themselves. In those cases, we’re generally not talking while they are drawing. I’m including these little exchanges because it seems to bring the conversation more alive on the page.

Identifying Love

J: So. Now I have one more question for you about the Shame.

S: Sure.

J: If you bring your attention to the body part of it, and just scan through the center, do you notice anything? Is it the same kind of substance all the way through the center, or is there something else in there?

S: What immediately I saw when you said like scanning through its body, so it's like the part inside the quills, the spikes…

J: Mm hm.

S: I mean there was almost like this little red valentine heart in there, that, you know, it's the same substance or like it's soft like the rest of the body, so it's not like hard, but there was very much this little, I mean literally, almost like a valentine heart inside it.

J: Uh huh. OK. So what would you like to call that?

S: And I would just say love.

J: OK.

S: It's Love.

Aha! Just as I suspected. The hidden state being protected by all those spikes is a vulnerable little thing called Love.

Notice the chuckles here and while mapping the porcupine Shame. It’s quite extraordinary in this process that people are often able to engage with quite distressing feeling states and maintain enough of a safe and stable witness perspective as to have a sense of humor about it all.

I’ll just say, though, that this is not always the case. Sometimes fieldwork will lead to very heavy, dark places. While the mapping process does provide a measure of separation, facing and entering these places can be exhausting, especially when you’re working on your own without a facilitator. We’ll talk later in the book about strategies for managing your work in these more challenging territories. Check to confirm.

Mapping and Drawing Love

J: So I'm going to take you through mapping the Love. OK? What size would you say, the size of a quarter or something like that?

S: Yeah. So it fits easily inside the little porcupine that's the size of my fist.

J: Mm hm.

S: Maybe the size of a dime. No. Let's see. No, a nickel.

J: OK.

S: So half way between a quarter and a dime. A nickel.

J: All right. And if you were to say it has qualities of substance, what does that seem to be?

S: I don't know quite how to answer that, but it's definitely warm and pulsing.

J: Ah hah. So warm and pulsing.

S: So it is like a muscle. Like if the body is just like soft, you know? Like if you pet a kitty's tummy or something, how it feels very soft? This has a little more tone to it. But it is like a muscle because it's pulsing.

J: And what's the color of it?

S: Oh, you know, Valentine red.

J: All right.

S: Or lipstick red, whatever that… red-red.

J: OK. And is it moving? It's pulsing…?

S: It's pulsing. It's really warm. Not like melting warm, but like if you put your hand near it you would feel the warmth. You wouldn't be burned. You know, it's not like scorching hot. But noticeably warm.

J: Right. And if you listen, do you notice any inner sound?

S: Um, a heartbeat sound. You know, kind of a “kathump, kathump, kathump.”

J: All right. So sound of a heartbeat.

S: Yeah.

J: Anything else to notice about what this feels like?

S: It wants to grow. I mean, it's very eager to expand.

J: OK. And what seems true, or real, or important to this part of you?

S: Just this compulsion, this compelling urge to expand, to get bigger and bigger. Like it's really important, and it feels trapped and it wants to break through.

J: OK. Let's draw it. So the red, we're talking serious red here.

S: Yeah, like the reddest red you've got.

J: How's that down in the corner here? That works?

S: That looks good.

J: OK. And let's zoom in a little bit. So on this side… I think we'll just do a dot, something about like so. Is that good?

S: It is. And I don't know if you have like symbols and you can actually make it be a heart shape, but the color and the position are absolutely right….

J: Like this?

S: Yes, yes. That's it… Um, I don't know if there's a way to show it in the drawing, but it's pulsing. That's a really important feature of it.

J: Yeah.

S: The other things are relatively static.

J: We could indicate that pretty easily. How about if we do this…

S: But this is really moving.

J: Yeah. Let's try this… If I do something like this…

S: Yes, yes.

J: How's that?

S: Yes.

J: OK. So any other thoughts?

S: Nope. I think that's totally it.

Susan’s mapping of Love reveals a bit more of the essential nature of fieldwork mapping. Notice how precise she gets about the size of this Love. It’s the size of a nickel, not a dime and not a quarter. That’s pretty darned precise.

How is this possible? Most of us have a common experience of feeling as vague and nebulous. But when we bring the new lens of virtual materiality to the task, we find ourselves bringing incredible precision to our discernment. (Some people like Susan do seem to have a higher resolution in their feeling perception than others.) In addition, we seem to be able to enter that virtual world and interact in order to gather even more detailed information, as when Susan describes the temperature, “If you put your hand near it you would feel the warmth. You wouldn’t be burned.” What’s going on here?

I believe this represents an opportunity for a more advanced cognitive neuroscience to investigate, maybe now, maybe a number of years in the future. For now, I like to think of it like this:

When we enter consciousness as an infant and even before we are born, our first awareness is drenched in and infused with materiality. At first we experience the liquid and solid environment of the uterus and our own bodies lying undifferentiated (to us) within it. Then birth, and the sharp boundaries that emerge between skin and air, skin and skin, milk and tongue, and all the myriad substances surrounding and encompassing us.

This direct apprehension of materiality is our first consciousness, and I believe remains the foundation for all our consciousness. Our brains have the capacity to perceive this surrounding materiality and to map our own bodies quite precisely in relation to it. Further, we have the capacity to extend our own body map to include a toy or hammer in our hands as if it were an extension of our embodied selves. We adjust our sense of inertia, momentum, center of gravity and other properties to incorporate a jug of milk, a hula hoop, a kid sister on our shoulders, and to move as if we were one with the extension.

I believe this capacity is employed in generating our feeling sense. A self-aware, conscious agent requires certain fundamental functions to be handled if it is to succeed in navigating the world. It must differentiate self from other, for example. It must manage the differences between the array of possible actions, the current state or motivation, a desired outcome, and ongoing guidance of specific actions chosen, with a responsive feedback about the results of those actions in the world.

In fieldwork, (and this is jumping quite far ahead in our journey, but so be it), we see these functions clearly represented in the qualities and behavior of specific feeling states. Or more specifically, we see patterns show up again and again in which feeling states anchor these functions. It is as if the virtually generated “things” of feeling states become anchors for these cognitive functions.

(Ah, there is so much to share with you here! Forgive me for jumping ahead.)

OK, so back to the dialog. At the end, Susan clearly indicates that the Love has a strong motivation to expand. My assessment is that the Love has a natural impulse to grow and expand, but is contained by the Shame. Apparently, for the Shame in its current state, an expanded Love would be intolerable. Perhaps at some point in the past, Susan’s loving led to something painful, and in order to avoid that pain it seems important to keep the Love confined. (We’ll learn more about this in Susan’s reflections a month after the session.) Most likely, then, we can consider the Shame to be the pivot for this cluster of four states. I suspect we’ll probably start the moving process there after we draw Love.

Before we move on, let's look at all four of these images overlaid upon one another so you can see the structural relationships. This kind of tight interconnection is what we can expect when mapping related feeling states.

What’s Next

Later this year, I will be laying out full instructions for the fieldwork moving practice. When that is complete, I’ll come back to finish Susan’s session with the recording and transcript of our working through moving each of these four parts to their ideal states, and we’ll look at the impact of this session on Susan’s life experience a month or two later.

For now, I hope you’re getting a more clear idea of just what we’re getting ourselves into here. Fieldwork mapping takes us into a new territory unlike any we have encountered. In coming weeks, I will be laying out the first steps in the science of what is revealed by this precise observation of the virtual material properties that form our experience of feeling.

Please do let me know your thoughts and questions in the comments, and feel free to reach out for more involved conversation if you like. And do subscribe if you haven’t already!

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Next post in this series (coming): #3, Mapping Shame

This is the audio, transcript, and commentary for Part 2 of a single, self-contained demo session with Susan, a participant in a small training I conducted in early 2017. Make sure to take a look at Part 1 to give context for this one.

As before, I’ve provided two versions of the transcript. The first is generated by Substack, synced with the audio, and is verbatim. Click the transcript button above and use it to navigate through the session. A lightly edited, more readable version of the transcript is below, along with my comments to give you more info about what’s happening.

Here, we will pick up with the Fearful Fear that revealed itself while we were mapping the No! state. We’ll map that, and as we do, another part will reveal itself.

(NOTE: Susan — not her real name — gave me her full permission to share her session with the public. I am immensely grateful for her offer.)

Let’s go!

Mapping Fearful Fear

J: So let’s go back to the Fearful Fear. If you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this is located somewhere in or around your body, where would you say that seems to be?

S: It actually seems to be, like from my heart, maybe like the upper third of my chest. Like if the steel plate starts in the middle of my chest, this starts in the upper third. And it actually goes all the way up to my jaw. So some of it is protected by the steel plate, and some of it is not.

J: OK. And what's the depth of it? Behind the steel plate, how far back does this Fearful Fear go?

S: Well I'm assuming if my body were sliced vertically, probably about to the middle, wherever the back of my heart is physically located. It goes that deep, like heart deep.

J: Got it. And if you were to say the actual, felt experience of this has qualities of substance, does it seem more like a solid…

S: Like a fog.

J: Like a fog, OK. And this fog, does it seem thick or thin, heavy or light?

S: Thick… and hm… It's like it's patchy, so parts of it are heavy but parts of it seem very light. So kind of like overall it's light, but there are patches of heaviness.

J: OK. And what temperature would you say this fog seems to be?

S: Definitely cold. Not freezing. Maybe like 40s, 40 degrees, like when you walk outside and you say, “Oh! I should have worn a sweater.” But not shivery.

J: Uh huh.

S: But definitely noticeably cold.

J: And what color would you say it seems to be?

S: The heavy parts are dark gray, and the overall color is a light gray.

J: OK.

S: Like it's not white, but it's just kind of a dingy color.

J: OK, so sort of a grayish.

S: Yeah.

J: OK. And is this fog, does it seem to be moving in any way? Any kind of swirl or flow, or pulse or vibration?

S: Not swirling, and not pulse and vibration, but it is kind of moving, like maybe back and forth like this.

J: So sort of a drifting back and forth?

S: Yeah, drifting, that's a great word.

J: OK, back and forth to the right and left, yeah?

S: Yes.

J: And if you listen internally, do you notice any inner sound?

S: It's like a soft crying, not sobbing.

J: More like whimpering?

S: Not whimpering, not moaning. Gosh I don't seem to think of…

J: Well, “a soft, crying sound” is probably close enough.

S: Yeah.

J: OK. Anything else you want to notice about what this feels like?

S: Well, the whole time I've been talking about it, the word “shy” keeps coming up for me. Almost like it wants to hide or not be seen or not be noticed. And almost like a little feeling of shame.

J: Mmmmm. So from this place, what seems true, or real, or important?

S: It seems like it really would like to go.

J: “Go” meaning…?

S: Dissipate.

J: Uh huh.

S: It doesn't really want to be here. It just is.

J: Ah huh. Any sense of why it's here?

S: It seems like it was just a really bad day, like a bad weather day, but just like a bad day and it just came up and then it didn't know how to leave.

J: Ah hah. OK.

S: Kind of like if smog came in and it got trapped in a valley, and short of there being a big wind storm or a really fierce rain or something that would dissipate it, it's just kind of stuck there.

J: All right.

Notice how precise Susan gets in describing her feeling state. She gives a specific temperature, quibbles about the color, is very clear about the patchy density of the fog, and describes with a gesture exactly how it moves. The gesture also indicates how integrated the experience of feeling is with our ever-present experience of embodiment. We experience ourselves, before anything else, as material bodies in a material world, and this pervasive materiality infuses our every moment.

Also notice how Susan mentions a hint of “almost like a little feeling of shame” as she summarizes her experience of the fog. As a facilitator, I am constantly alert for hints like this one which often point to further feeling states connected to the one in focus. Feeling exists as constellations of interrelated states, and fieldwork mapping activates a sensitivity to the nuances of our inner experience, supporting us in bringing the full network of distinct states into tangible awareness.

Identifying Shame

J: So you mentioned something like a little feeling of shame. I wonder if that word points to something else that's connected to this, or if the shame is an attribute of the fog itself.

S: The shame seems to be that it would leave if it knew how but it doesn't. Not a shame that it appeared, but that it was meant to be temporary, and it somehow got trapped. You know? It was really just like a bad weather day. Really, really it was meant that the next morning, you wake up and there's sunshine.

J: Right.

S: But somehow that didn't happen. And then it didn't happen and it didn't happen, and here it is.

J: Yeah. OK. So there's some shame about this existing here, about this being here. It's sort of a…

S: And that it never meant to stay. The shame is, it was like, yeah, it was a real feeling when it occurred, like the fear was real in the moment, maybe even appropriate, but then whatever triggered it, it was over.

J: Right.

S: But it's still here.

J: Right. OK. So does it make sense for us to add the feeling Shame to the list of states that are relevant here?

S: Yeah.

J: OK.

First I ask a clarifying question, inviting Susan to compare her felt experience of the label “shame” to the already mapped fog of Fearful Fear. Her reply expresses a relationship between the shame and the Fearful Fear in which the shame seems to be a reaction to the Fearful Fear’s failure to dissipate. If shame is a response to the Fearful Fear, it is different from it, and so I confirm the name and add it to the list of states we are exploring.

Drawing No!

J: Let's start with the No! So the color of No! is going to be a silvery metallic. Right?

S: Yes.

J: And the thickness of that steel plate is, half an inch, an inch…?

S: No more than a half an inch I would say.

J: Yeah. OK.

S: I mean it's stainless steel, after all. It doesn't take a lot of it.

J: Right, exactly. So I think I'll just use this…

S: So it's actually out in front of the body.

J: OK.

S: So it's barely… yeah, there you go. Like that.

J: OK. Is that about the right size, and is it curved a little bit the way I've made it, or is it…

S: Ah, no, it's straight.

J: OK.

S: Yeah, that's right.

J: All right. And then the front view is going to be…

S: So just start at the collar bone, so you can see where the collar bone is there.

J: Uh huh.

S: And then down to just… up slightly… yeah, right there. And if you were to color it in… yeah.

J: OK. So, that is No!.

For the drawing, I am sharing my screen with Susan and drawing on a tablet with the program ArtRage. I’m starting with a template outline of a human body, and adding the illustration of the feeling state according to Susan’s description and her in-the-moment guidance as we draw it together.

Drawing a feeling state is often a discovery process of its own. When the fieldwork explorer begins to visually see the explicit representation of the state, they will sometimes discover it feels different than what they originally described. If you are facilitating someone and taking notes for them, you’ll want to update your notes with the revised state description after the drawing is complete.

Now I want to call your attention to something unexpected here. Notice that the steel plate of No! lies completely outside Susan’s body. Our common assumptions about “emotion” include the understanding that emotions are strongly somatic, generated by the nervous system in response to threats and opportunities. Our common language about emotions, our science of emotions, our methods of therapy, all orient toward emotion as a phenomenon contained by the body, plus our cognitive engagement with that physiological response.

I don’t want to take you too far into this just yet, but it’s important that I introduce the idea that the feeling we are working with here is not emotion. This map of No! is clear evidence of that. fieldwork maps of states extending beyond the body is actually quite common as we shall see.

Drawing Fearful Fear

J: And then the Fear… I think… I'll leave this here so that we can draw the Fear behind the plate. And we're looking at, this is not metallic, but this has got gray, darker and lighter.

S: And if you were to drop a line from my ear, down through my elbow, that's about how deep it goes. Like from there to the front.

J: Right. OK. But it starts a little higher?

S: Yes. Up, right underneath my chin.

J: And would you say it's a…

S: Yeah, like that. … And then just a little further toward my back, like one more row of color. Yeah.

J: All right. And then, should we add some darker ones?

S: Yeah.

J: Does that seem…?

S: Yep, that seems just right.

J: And how much of this dark color?

S: Just about what you're doing. You're on the right track. Yeah. That's enough.

J: All right. This is the Fearful Fear. Excellent.

Because Susan has a well-developed sense of feeling, her drawings stay true to her original map descriptions. This drawing is simply about visually capturing what she has already discerned in the mapping process.

Drawing a feeling state provides a reinforcement of the detachment of one’s identity from the feeling. When you can see it in front of you, represented on an outline of (your) body, it becomes more difficult to experience yourself AS the feeling. You naturally find yourself inhabiting a perspective that the feeling is something you have, rather than something you are. This in itself is strongly therapeutic in many cases.

Let’s revisit the idea of feeling being different from emotion. In emotion, various external and internal perceptual signals stimulate the emotional systems of the brain and body to produce a physiological state that prepares the body for an appropriate response. The body has one emotional state, possibly generated by more than one emotional circuit but being forced to integrate as one state by the singular nature of the body as a whole.

In mapping No! and Fearful Fear, we see in contrast two distinct and different states. This is further evidence that in working with the actual, felt experience of feeling, we are engaging something very different from the body’s emotional circuitry. Keep that in mind as we proceed. What we currently understand about emotion does not map well to what we discover in our investigations of actual feeling states as we experience them.

Exploring Shame

J: First of all, let me ask, while we were drawing (Fearful Fear), did you discover anything else significant?

S: Noticing the Shame, I don't think I knew that. I think that was a discovery that there was some Shame. And in particular that the Shame was that there was a good reason this all showed up, but then the reason was done with, and it could have gone away but it just didn't know how.

J: Yeah?

S: If I were to describe it, it feels like this little porcupine. But all curled up, where it's just all spikes, you know?

J: Hm.

S: And that actually feels like it's the feeling that's at the heart of it. It's like, if I weren't ashamed, the Fear would go away, which means there wouldn't be the need for the steel plate. And the Shame is almost like, it's like I brought on myself this not being able to receive love. (I don't know, I'm not saying this very well.)

J: What it sounds like is that the Shame is what grounds the interpretation that it's not OK to receive love.

S: Yeah, yeah.

J: You haven't been able to figure out how to let this Fear go…

S: Yeah. And it's almost like I don't deserve to, like if I created all this nonsense, and I don't know how to get rid of it, well…! You know: of course I can't receive love, and why should I be able to, having done all this silly stuff. You know?

J: Yeah. OK.

I had originally been on track with Susan to move the two states No! and Fearful Fear. As this was a demonstration session, I hadn’t intended to go more deeply than these two. But Susan was surprised by her discovery of the Shame and wanted to explore it. As she poked around at it, it become clear that the Shame served to anchor the whole set of feelings in place. The Shame seemed to be holding the Fearful Fear in place, which in turn seemed to be holding the No! in place.

We often find these kinds of chains of control in feeling states. When I am conducting a limited session where my client’s intention is to get the maximum benefit in the shortest time, my goal is to quickly identify what I call the “pivot” state around which the entire pattern set revolves. Releasing the pivot often clears the way for a natural release of the full pattern. In this case, it’s clear that the best results will happen if we include the Shame in our list of states to complete.

What’s Next

In the next post, we’ll dig into mapping Susan’s Shame. As we do, we will discover a fourth state lying hidden inside. What do you anticipate?

Let me know your thoughts and questions in the comments. And do subscribe if you haven’t already!

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This is the audio, transcript, and commentary for Part 1 of a single, self-contained demo session with Susan, a participant in a small training I conducted in early 2017.

I’ve provided two versions of the transcript. The first is generated by Substack, synced with the audio, and is verbatim. Click the transcript button above and use it to navigate through the session.

A lightly edited, more readable version of the transcript is below. This one has my comments interspersed throughout in italics to give you more information about what’s happening in the session, using what shows up to illustrate the method and what it reveals about the territory of feeling.

(NOTE: Susan — not her real name — gave me her full permission to share her session with the public. I am immensely grateful for her offer.)

We’re working remotely by video conferencing. My intention is to give her a complete experience of mapping and moving several feeling states and to demonstrate the basics of the fieldwork process.

As you follow this, you might imagine yourself in either my role, Susan’s role, or both. You’ll see an example of how to facilitate fieldwork sessions as well as what it is like to undergo the fieldwork process.

A note about the audio: The sound quality is not that great, and there are many pauses as I take notes and do the drawings in going through the process. I’ve decided to leave the recording mostly as-is rather than remove the silences to give you a real idea of the pacing of the actual session.

The first three of these audio-plus-transcript posts will cover our experience of mapping four states. We’ll wait until after I present the full fieldwork moving instructions in a few months before proceeding to the second half of the session. The full map-and-move, though, will look like this when all states are drawn:

I generally take my notes in MindManager, which offers a good visual interface for organizing the states. Here’s what the final mindmap looked like:

And here is a PDF file with my notes, exported from MindManager:

Susan Session

507KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Enough with the preliminaries — let’s get started!

Identifying No!

Susan: I think something that's really up for me right now in general is receiving, allowing myself to receive. And specifically to receive love.

Joe: That sounds like a great place to work. So what do you experience in situations where you're not allowing yourself to receive love?

Susan: It's a noticing, like somewhere inside my physical body there's a barrier or boundary, like the love can’t come in. I can feel it around the outside of me. And I can even feel it on my skin, on the outside of my body, but as it approaches, and I would say maybe as it approaches my heart, there just seems to be a boundary. So that my heart… when I'm loving, when I'm sending love out, or opening my heart to someone else like in terms of connecting with them, I can feel my heart open. But when I think, “Oh, there's just this wave of love coming my way, and it would be so delicious to take it in,” it seems to stop. Like to not go fully in.

Joe: Right.

Susan: And it's almost like there's a fear, if I really took it all the way in, I might just explode with love or something. You know? It would be more than my system can handle.

J: OK.

S: I mean, I'm just seeing that right now, that behind that barrier is I think a fear that it would just be too much.

J: So do you have any experience of what “too much” can feel like for you?

S: It feels like a loss of control. Like it's more than I can control or contain. (These things are occurring to me as I'm speaking to you.) So it's…

J: So the feeling of loss of control…

S: Yeah.

J: Let's zoom in there. What would you call that feeling, the anticipation of what it feels like to lose control, to have more than you can contain or control?

S: Again it feels very scary. I mean, like there's some fear, like what's gonna happen?

J: So what would you like to call that fear?

S: Just, “no.” I mean, I notice when you asked me what I would like to call it, I wanted to do this. {gestures with arms blocking chest}

J: OK. Would it make sense to give it the name, “No"?

S: Yes.

J: OK. Does it need an exclamation point after it?

S: Yes.

J: All right then.

In this first few minutes, my goal is to help Susan identify and name a single feeling state for us to map. She has identified something she is calling No! but there also seems to be an indication of something else that could be called “fear,” as if the “barrier” is the No! and as she says, “behind that barrier is I think a fear that it would just be too much.”

I want to call your attention to the way in which I’m encouraging her to call her feeling states by whatever name she finds most useful. We shall see that the standard vocabulary for feeling and emotion is far too limited to capture the immense diversity of actual feeling experience, and it’s important to honor the uniqueness of each person’s experience of every feeling state in this way.

At this early stage, we’re not sure whether the No! is the fear, or the fear is a separate state related to the No! I suspect they are two different states, but that’s OK. I don’t need to know right now. For now we’re ready to map the first named feeling state, and we’ll discover more through the mapping.

Mapping No!

J: Now I'm going to lead you through a series of questions to help you describe what No! actually feels like. Just be open to whatever comes up, whatever shows up for you as an answer to the question, and test out: does that seem like it's true for you in your experience. And don't get too hung up on whether it's a right answer or not. It's just feeling your way into something that captures your experience as best as we can. All right? {susan nods “yes."}

So when you put your attention on this fear, this feeling of No!, if you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this is located somewhere in or around your body, where would you say that seems to be?

S: Heart level, starting mid chest, just below my heart, up probably to my jaw. So through my throat.

J: OK. So mid-chest, just below your heart, up probably to your jaw. So all the way through your throat. Is it just the front part of your chest, or does it go all the way through to your shoulder blades?

S: No. Just on the front.

J: And in that region, if you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this has qualities of substance, would you say that it seems more like a solid, or a liquid, or a gas, or some kind of light or energy, or something else?

S: Solid. Definitely solid.

J: OK. And hard or soft?

S: Hard.

J: Heavy or light?

S: Heavy.

J: OK. Anything else to notice about the substance quality? Does it resemble anything from the material world?

S: Well it feels like a steel plate.

J: OK.

J: What temperature would you say this steel plate seems to be?

S: Slightly cooler than body temperature. Like not freezing cold, but I experience it as cool compared to my body temperature.

J: OK. And if you were to say that this feeling, this felt experience, this substance, this steel plate has color, what color would you say it is?

S: It's silver, I mean like stainless steel color.

J: So the color of stainless steel. And would you say it's opaque then, like steel, you wouldn't be able to see through it at all?

S: Yes. It's definitely opaque.

J: OK. And is it shiny like stainless steel then?

S: Yes.

J: OK. And is this stainless steel plate moving in any way?

S: No.

J: So it’s perfectly still, no pulse or vibration?

S: Nope.

J: Any force or pressure that you notice?

S: Yeah, a little. I mean, I'm sitting up, so it's not like it's weighing on me, keeping me from breathing. But it is as if it's pressed solidly against me.

J: OK.

S: So I'm very aware of but I'm not feeling crushed by it.

J: OK. And if you listen internally, do you notice any inner sound that arises with this feeling?

S: Kind of a hum, like mmmmmmmmmmm.

J: OK. What note is that?

S: It is kind of a low tone.

J: A low tone, yeah.

S: And more a minor key than a major key.

J: All right. Is there anything else you want to notice about what this feels like?

S: Well it feels like it covers my chest up to my collar bone, so like from my collarbone to my jaw, my neck and throat, I feel like a little upward pressure. You know, like if someone were, like if I press on my chest, then there's kind of a pressure up in my body.

J: OK. Got it. So the actual steel plate doesn't come up to your jaw, but…

S: No. Just to my collar bone.

J: But then there's the experience of something pushing up.

S: Yeah.

In this portion of the session, we map the first feeling state. I introduce the mapping process by giving Susan full latitude to explore, letting her know there are no “right” answers to the questions I’ll be asking and putting the responsibility on her to find the best ways to capture her experience. My primary job is to guide her attention; her job is to report what she finds. Along the way I’m also taking detailed notes to support her reflection and integration of our work after the session.

Susan is a bodyworker, and has studied a couple of somatic therapy methods as well, so she finds it easy and natural to answer the fieldwork questions. She is able to place her attention on her inner, felt experience of No! and quickly report back about its qualities. Some people will have an easier time than others, and I’ll be sharing later in the book how to help support someone learning this skill for the first time. Check to confirm.

The questions themselves follow a standard form in this mapping. I’ve found that most often, things flow most smoothly when attention is led through the feeling experience in this order:

• Location, size and shape.

• Substance, including the possibilities of solid, liquid, gas, light, energy, or other.

• Temperature.

• Color and transparency.

• Movement, force and pressure.

• Sound.

(In the example of substance, providing a list of options makes it easier for the explorer to say “no” to specific qualities and notice which one fits best. It’s a little harder when the question is left wide open. We’ll notice later, though, that Susan doesn’t need this careful guidance.)

At the end of this section, we see that the force of the steel plate pushing inward on her chest is eliciting a responding sensation of something behind the plate pushing upward. These kinds of interactions between feeling state forms are common, and in this example, I choose to explore that upward pressure in her chest.

Identifying Fearful Fear

J: What would you say that is, that's being pushed up? What's your experience of what's behind the plate?

S: It sounds weird but it feels like the metal plate is kind of pushing on the fear, like the fear is rising up in my throat.

J: Ahh.

S: So, like, “Oohhhhhh!” Kind of a panicked, “Whoaaaaaaah,” like that.

J: OK. So it's like the fear is actually behind the No!.

S: Yes.

J: Ah hah. OK.

S: It's like the No! is to protect, almost, (that sounds weird too, but), to protect the fear.

J: Right. And what would you like to call the fear? Do you want to call it “fear” or something else?

S: Actually, it's like Fearful Fear.

J: Ah.

S: Which is kind of funny, but it seems to be what's true.

J: OK. Great. You can call feelings anything you want. So Fearful Fear is a great name. I'm going to suggest that we go ahead and map Fearful Fear, because we will find that No! probably isn't going to want to move as long as that fear is there. Right?

S: Right, because it's the protector.

J: Exactly.

S: It's not going to go anywhere as long as there's something to protect.

J: Right.

Here we see clearly how the No! and the Fearful Fear coexist and interact. These are two distinct feeling states that are simultaneously present. Susan’s awareness of the actual, felt experience of this interaction provides insight into the meaning of the feelings.

Completing No!

J: So, the No! – come back to the steel plate. We'll map the Fearful Fear in a second. If you were to capture in words what seems true, or real, or important to that steel plate, what would you say?

S: Well it feels very responsible, like it's got a very important job to do, and it really needs to do it well. So a big feeling of responsibility.

J: Right. OK. Anything else that comes to mind that you want to notice about this No! feeling?

S: Well I notice it also has a feeling of competence, like it's up to the job.

J: Ah hah. Great. So it's a competent protector.

S: Yes.

J: OK.

Here we are inviting this specific feeling state to express its perspective. By inviting this expression, we have an opportunity to learn more about the nature of this feeling state, what it is trying to accomplish, and what other feeling states might be interacting with it.

It’s important that we welcome whatever the expression is, honoring the No! exactly where it is. In doing so, this part of Susan is invited to lean into the process, to trust where we’re going. (In this case, the No! is expressing something that might be conventionally considered a positive sentiment or function. But as a facilitator I want to remain positive in receiving an expression even if it might seem to be “negative” in conventional terms.)

What’s Next

In the next post, we will dig into mapping the new feeling state that revealed itself, the one Susan named Fearful Fear. What do you anticipate?

Let me know your thoughts and questions in the comments!

Previous post in this series:

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 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, 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.

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 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 moving process will get you quite far.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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This is the story of three sessions in which Gail transforms a core terror that was keeping her from pursuing her dreams. In the first session, she enters her inner space to get an idea of what’s there and create some first steps toward possibility. In the second, she transforms the terror into what she describes as a “bridge to a higher power,” and begins to change the direction of her life toward becoming a filmmaker. In the third session, she addresses a lingering anxiety that arose as she was nearing success.

The interview was recorded about eight months after the work was done, and she discusses how her life has changed. Here is the full, 14-minute audio.

I’ve broken this into three sections below, each dealing with the effects of one of the three sessions, each with a complete transcript.

Session One

I came out of this session feeling very differently and … absolutely positive that the life ahead of me could be as amazing as I wanted it to be.

Gail (not her real name): Our first session, when you tried to explain to me what your work was, you said, It's really hard to explain in words because it's dealing with feelings or the feeling body. And that the best way for me to understand it would be to experience it.

So I met with you and had a session and… what was so amazing about your work is that — the first time that I did it — is that it completely went right to what I call the right brain, the creative mind, which is so different from like psychoanalysis that I've been to in the past, which is all, just like your past and your history and like what happened in your life to shape you where you are now and you have to kind of go back through all these facts that are just like stored in your brain.

And it seems like it was such a drudgery to do that, and anytime I felt like I needed to deal with an issue or something that was limiting me in my life or an emotion that felt really scary or something, the thought of going to regular therapy, again, was just, like, too much. Just, I don't want to do it, I don't want to go back there, I don't want to go back to those places and talk about the same old things. And, so I was looking for a new approach to dealing with my emotions and stuff that were coming up in my life.

I think the first time I had a session with you, I was, had already been out of my marriage was already separated, but there was a lot of stuff that needed to be cleaned up and addressed.

And so when, when I met with you and… going right to those areas of feeling and imagery and expression, it addressed everything right now, like, my state of being now. Which is really where the work needed to be done. It doesn't need to be done in the past, it needs to be done right here.

And so, I really appreciated that, and I felt that was very powerful, because dealing in now meant that we could like, change things now or shift things now. And that was my experience.

It's, to me it's really simple because we all want to feel empowered and joyful and alive and positive and all those things. And so I felt my, my first experience with you was very much that. I was able to go into where I was at the time, which if I remember correctly, was kind of hopeless with what I was feeling, and that some of the dreams that I had for myself were not possible, that I was a failure in some way for my marriage and being a single mom and, and moving this new path in my life. And so I had these fears that some of the dreams that I still had from before I was married were maybe not possible.

And I came out of this session feeling very differently and very very, I don't want to say hopeful, but just absolutely positive that, that the life ahead of me could be as amazing as I wanted it to be.

Joe: And this was about a year ago, right?

Gail: No, this was longer.

Joe: I think it was December of last year.

Gail: Oh, wow, OK.

Joe: Yeah.

Gail: So that’s when we started, yeah.

Joe: So it seems longer because so much has happened.

Gail: So much, yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Joe: And we only met for, I think, like an hour and a half.

Gail: Yeah, I think initially, the first session…

Joe: You were fast!

Gail: Well, and what I liked too, is that you had like the pencils and markers there, so I could draw as part of the work. You had just pencil and paper so I could write. And then, or I could not do any of it. And I, I really appreciated that because yeah, I like that, because I could see how there could be times where there, It's hard to find the words for a feeling, but you could draw it and access it that way.

So that was my first experience.

Joe: So, and then what happened after that?

Gail: Oh, okay. So what I, the biggest thing that I remember pulling out of the first experience was we actually created in the session, we created new feelings for me and I remember like giving them names and like, an identity.

So I had this list, I came home with this list and I remember looking at it for the next couple of weeks. And that I like just seeing that these feelings were always here and they were always possible and by naming them and giving them an identity, I could go to them right away. And I thought that was really cool.

And that, that process in itself, just being able to take that home and have those written out, began opening up more stuff for me. Because maybe one day I would look and you know, want to access one of those parts and, and it was there, but then like something else would come in and, and maybe, you know, make it not so easy to get there. And it was like, okay, let me take note of that because it's something I need to work with Joe. Because there's so many layers to really getting at the source of who we are.

And so it was that first process, I think actually was more an opening to seeing how many layers of crap, stuff, were blocking my joy from day to day, or from moment to moment, or the possibility of reaching that.

So that's really amazing to be able to see that.

Session 2

“I can't even remember what it feels like to have that space of that fear”

Joe: And then, we worked again…

Gail: Yeah, we did.

Joe: Like a month or two later.

Gail: My second session with you completely just blew off the lid of any kind of limitation that I would have in my life. And that session was dealing with all of the fear and… OK, so there was a lot of trauma in my life, regarding some abuse and stuff.

So, in my past, in regular therapy, I learned some coping skills on how to deal with maybe some anxieties that came out around it, and I analyzed all of it that happened, and why it happened and how, you know, I was able to kind of separate everything and see it, and understand that it wasn't my fault, and make sense of it in a way that it was somewhat manageable.

But there was a feeling that would pop up from time to time, an actual physical physiological reaction that was created during those times of abuse. And that was still not manageable for me. And it would come up at times when, you know, it was triggered by whatever. And that was something that totally paralyzed me in my life when it occurred.

And it was the scariest feeling I have ever experienced, and it's like my body would just get trapped in that terror. And that was what we addressed in the second session. And when going into that, instead of trying to manage it, it like, your technique took me into it and asked it what it needed to heal.

Why was it still there? And what did it need? Or what did I need? Or whatever the process is, but the feeling was given a chance to be completely transformed.

And that's what we did. And that particular moment when we transformed that feeling was, I totally remember, that it was like, I just created a bridge to a higher power that some people would call God or whatever.

I don't use the word God, but higher power, source, whatever that created us, me here. And it, was a just a total bridge to that, that, “Wow, that this is on the other side of that fear, is this amazing unconditional love and safety. And just everything is okay.” And to this day, it's been a year, but I haven't, I can't even remember what it feels like to have that space of that fear and that paralyzing feeling, like I couldn't even get there. I don't, I just, I don't feel like it's even possible to go there. It was there. It was a part of me, but it's… the other is so much more powerful. And that was the biggest stepping stone for me to where I'm headed now. I truly believe that that was the biggest limitation that I've had in my entire life that kept me stuck in patterns and not really accessing who I really am.

Joe: So where are you headed now?

Gail: So, it's very exciting. I am headed… I'm now a budding film director and producer and writer. That is really where I've always wanted to go since I was a little kid. And although I took lots of little steps to get there, there was always something that would just knock me down.

And there was no way I could do it. I couldn't, no way. I couldn't, “I can't do that. I can't live up to that. That's… absolutely not.”

Now it's like, “Well, yeah, of course, absolutely. That's just who I am. I mean, this is so stupid. Like, why wouldn't I do that?” So there's, that's really cool.

And everything else is just like, I don't know. Everything else is just falling into place around that.

Session 3

“From that day on, I’ve been resting easy and in excitement about my project and my future.”

Joe: So then the third time we worked was you were having a nightmare or something.

Gail: Yeah. So the 3rd time was another real biggie because I had, I was experiencing this was as I chose to move forward as a filmmaker again. And I started working on my project, this short film that I wrote. And, so I started taking the steps to pull everybody together for that and and get the project rolling. And literally, at night, when I would lay down to go to sleep, I would get, like, stricken with this incredible anxiety.

And all of these reasons and stories in my own head, kinda like voices in a way, that were telling me, “You can't do this. It's not gonna work. You're not important enough. Nobody's gonna take you seriously. You're not talented enough. Who do you think you are? I mean, you're just, you know… ”

And and it was like the mental experience that I have is, like, just I felt like I was sitting in my bed one night, and these, like, demonic hands, like, were just, like, reaching out and grabbing me. Like, that's what it felt like. These like, “No! You can't do it! You can't do it!”

And then I was, but I was kinda like this (curling up, protecting head with arms), you know, and I didn't wanna hear them. But the emotions that came up inside of me were… It was just fear because I didn't know where to go. I didn't… Here they were trying to grab me, and if I, like, peeked out, they would get me.

And we we did some work on on that feeling. And that I can't remember the things at the moment that we identified, but the result was incredible. And from that day on, I've been resting easy and in excitement about my project and my future, and, and it's done, pretty much. I mean, we're editing, but, like, the all the stuff that I was afraid of that I thought I couldn't do, is done.

And and I think, it's done. And I think the biggest piece of it is that before that moment, I was still hiding myself from the world a little bit. Like, I was very I was very particular about who I would tell that I was doing this project. And because I thought, well, I kinda chose who would believe in me and who wouldn't.

And then after our session, it was like, well, it doesn't matter who believes in me and who doesn't, this is who I am. This is just who I am. It'd be it's like, it would be like taking my body and trying to turn it into something other than it is. Now everybody in my life, in the world, knows me as a budding film director, and that's the way it should be.

That's really cool. So, yeah, that was… and I've not had another anxiety attack around that. Around anything, actually.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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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 article 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 the 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 the 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 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 a primarily emotion-centered phenomenon.

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.

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

• The seeming connections between states of suffering with past experiences 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 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, 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 get nowhere 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 we have no standing basis for such interpretation, and in our initial observations, we do not find 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 described as a topographic descriptions — the contents of our observations, the configurations themselves — to what are better termed topological descriptions. We will be discovering clear functional relationships between the entities underlying virtual materiality, and a clear architecture of those relationships. 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 in this series, 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, gravitational, and quantum fields we find in physics. In this specific case within psychotopology, we will refer to these experiential spaces of feeling states as affect fields. (We will encounter a different type of field, complementary to the affect field, at a later time.)

Let me acknowledge that this is a bold and radical 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 so, so much 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 (psychodynamic/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 an externalized phenomenon.

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 “radical curiosity” proposed at the beginning of this series.

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.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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In an earlier post, Multiple Coexisting Feeling States, we explored the discovery that feeling states co-occur in groups of several or more. As we practice fieldwork mapping, this discovery nudges us toward asking, “What else are you feeling?” The results can be profoundly sobering, offering a more realistic view of the immense scale of human suffering.

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 uncovered, oftentimes when we stumble into such pain it sucks us into excruciating and inescapable vortexes of darkness. So of course we avoid it with all the canny personal and communal 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 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 one of 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.

We have not yet fully toured the moving practice in the sequence of articles here, so we do not officially have the tools and skills necessary to safely conduct an investigation like the following. 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 four hours’ work in total, immediately following which they were cleared through the moving practice.

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

In what follows, I take you for a journey through one of the chambers in my own netherworld. 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 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 (taking turns identifying and briefly mapping whatever we’re feeling). I identified and mapped two distinct states that I called Cringe and Hurt.

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 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:

Plus, 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:

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.

I mapped these two states, Bombardment and Overwhelm.

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 and the not-yet-mapped Core Fear) 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.

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.

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 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-sking 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.

My Small Life

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.

The Buried Group: Beserker

This set of states included three I shared in How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense: Trapped, Trap and No Way Out. The full set also included Hurt (a different form from the one in the set above), Get Away, Hate plus an out-of-control phase of it 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 — otherwise, who knows? It felt like this was the kind of inner hell that, for a few, reaches a breaking point and turns into outward violence. This is what the composite drawing looked like:

I was grateful to shift it within a few days. At some point in future posts, 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 what is needed to liberate that gift unto the world.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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We learned in our most recent post, The “I” Who Observes, how fieldwork enables us to observe the actual experience of self. In this post, we will move further into realms previously considered ineffable, bringing fieldwork to the task of observing what can perhaps most usefully be referred to as spiritual or transcendent experiences.

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 post, 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.

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 posts.

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 either inside or outside the body, or is located infinitely, everywhere. Let’s look at some examples of each of these.

(In the image caption, I have also provided the name of the state which was originally mapped, which when moved naturally became the source state. I have more to say about this at the end of the post.)

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

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.

Lion Heart

(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.

Power Core

(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.

Point of Total Awareness

(From Louise. This one was shared in the earlier post, Challenges to the Assumed Somatic Basis for Feeling.) 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 being radiating luminosity and understanding, awareness.

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

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.

Wu Wei

(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.

Bigger than Happy

(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.

Infinite Self

(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.

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

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.

Be Peace

(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.

Joyful Zest

(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.

The Infinite Universe

(From Louise. This one was shared in the earlier post, [[Science Observation 4 Not Somatic]].) 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 shape-able. 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.

Connections to Spiritual and Esoteric Traditions

I am no expert in spiritual or esoteric traditions, yet the parallels here are too strong to ignore. To draw the parallels (and preserve my focus on delivering this series on scientific observation), 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 the above, making comparisons with spiritual and esoteric traditions.

The transcendent states described above align with several well-documented 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 feeling substance located at specific points within the body. This closely 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 strongly echoes teachings in Sufi mysticism (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 energy 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 the caption beneath each image), 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 later posts, we will 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 in coming months 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.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the surface of the surface here, but I’ll leave you with this. Psychotopology makes 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. The possibilities are truly breathtaking.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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The act of fieldwork observation involves numerous intentional shifts in our attention. First, we shift the location of our “field of awareness” — the what/where we are attending to — to coincide with the location of the feeling state we wish to observe. Second, we may shift our “point of witness” — where we are observing from — to optimize our perspective, for example by “stepping out” or away from the state location to be able to observe the color of the state object. Third, we may shift our attentional filters — what perceptual channel we are bringing to the foreground — to highlight substance qualities versus temperature or other properties.

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 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 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 post, How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense, we viewed four states mapped by Hannah (not her real name). 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 above.)

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 heart beat 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 a connection with 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, where we are in danger of sliding into an endless regression of nested homunculi?

Well, we have our prime tool for observation: fieldwork. 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 post, 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 beautiful capacity for observing these structures, so this sequence provides a wonderfully detailed tour.

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 of where I can get in my consciousness.

Sound is like nails on a chalkboard screech, but muffled. Not hearing it directly, but almost on the periphery.

It's giving me a headache. It's very much head centered.

It's like a numbness, and an end. My sense is 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 of consciousness”?} Yes. 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.

While mapping Obligation {see below}, noticed this almost is coming right out of my spine, so it's connected almost to some place beyond, with a stem in the center.

---

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 almost is coming right out of my spine, so it's connected almost to some place beyond, with a stem in the center. This is coming up around that stem, around the plastic form of Panic, and then is gone, disappears like a vapor.

Like a gas vapor, feels like a gas. I think it might be a little bit uncomfortably hot. Color is hard to tell, translucent so the green is showing through, maybe magenta. Actually more of a yellow, a puce yellow. Flowing up from the stem, engulfing the Panic, and it's mottled, like there is some turbulence. No sound.

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, but from this, I have more perspective, I don't feel as close to the hole, but I'm still headed that direction.

In drawing, found that magenta actually seems more accurate.

---

Hole in My Memory

From mapping Panic: 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.

Trying to come at it from being the Panic and being pushed into this. In that regard, 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 that the stem of the Panic is on. Seems to be moving right to left perceived from in front of it; subtle. There's like 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

It's 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 up against the Hole in My Memory. 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's almost at the back of my head, to the right. 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. (Not sure if that's congruent with the feeling itself, or particular just to the violin sound.)

The violin solo is in Sheharazade, Symphony 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. Awareness of Self maybe would be a less traveled phrase.

---

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 place, looking out at this third witness. Or I can switch to this third witness and be looking back. The places where this witness looks from are 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 when you're digesting something.

It's 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.)

{My question: 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 farther 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 many other frameworks.

For example, modern psychological and cognitive frameworks increasingly recognize that the self is not a singular entity but a dynamic multiplicity of interacting parts. Theories such as Hubert Hermans’ Dialogical Self propose that identity consists of shifting internal voices, while Internal Family Systems (IFS) describes distinct “parts" with their own roles and motivations. Cognitive science further suggests that self-experience emerges from hierarchical predictive models, shifting global workspaces of consciousness, or the oscillating activity of the Default Mode Network. While these models offer compelling explanations for why multiple self-states arise, they remain indirect — they theorize about inner experience but lack a methodology for systematically observing and mapping it as it is actually lived.

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. Yet, while these traditions offer profound insights, they rely on philosophical, mystical, or metaphorical explanations rather than 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. Unlike modern science, which lacks the tools to truly see the self, or spiritual traditions, which rely on metaphor and doctrine, psychotopology remains open-ended and exploratory, allowing for deep engagement with inner experience while remaining unattached to any fixed ideology. In doing so, it may have 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.

In next week’s post, we will look even more closely at experiences that resonate with other aspects of spiritual traditions.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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Two posts ago, in How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense, I shared a trio of my own feeling states (from 2012) that illustrate a phenomenon I would like to explore here in this post. These three states were an example of multiple coexisting states like those described last week in Multiple Coexisting States. The image above illustrates the three states in composite.

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 Observation Series but in other writing to come 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 “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 necessarily 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 where this is fixed to.

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 little 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. Not getting a 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.”}

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. The 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.

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 a little bit. 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. {Touching it was a discovery that resulted in a shift.} 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.

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 the post exploring the failed hypothesis of the “sadness signature.” We will see a full set of states from Rebecca in another post to come.

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.

(There's a similar energy down my back and on the undersides of my arms as a result of engaging it. I don't know if I trust Higher Self. I don't know if it's something real and good or grandiosity.)

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.

First inquiry for this: Lonely.

I think I want to avoid being lonely. This is a way to avoid feeling anything.

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.

One from Sam

This example is from Sam, other states from whom we saw in the most recent [[Science Observation 6 Multiples]] post.

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 white 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.

And One from Me

I thought I’d include this one because it’s a great example of something that represents something “not me,” yet it has 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.

• 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;”

  • Everyone one of these are also distinct, tangible feeling objects.

• 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’ll 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.

Make sure to catch next week’s post, where we’ll 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.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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Over the last few posts, we have established that the actual experience of feeling is far more complex than our existing models can account for. In the most recent post, How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense, I shared a few examples of states to illustrate the gap between our expectations of a somatic origin for feeling experience with the observations we make into the virtual material dimension.

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.

Contemporary advancements challenge this view, recognizing that emotional multiplicity is a common, if underappreciated, aspect of human experience. 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 our 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 in coming months. Let’s take a look at another example.

The doorway to our next example of multiplicity showed up in the post 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 of the state:

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.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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.

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 the connections between them.

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.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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 Luther. 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.

Thoughts/Beliefs: Memory: I was really destructive with my sexual energy in my late teens for a short period of time, before this took full form. Even before that… it's kind of disturbing when even my mom's friends were hot for me… this is why the fury comes up at my mother.

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 leach 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.)

Today, this came up in conjunction with Furious. 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.

It can change its size, because sometimes it's not doing its tightening up capping thing; sometimes it's just disparate particles, waiting until they need to do their job and contract into their rubber cap-ness. When capped, no movement. I just feel it fused with my tissues. No sound.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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 moving across nothingness.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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 post in this series, 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.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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We arrive in this world as material beings embedded in material surroundings. From the time of our first awakening into infancy (and even before we are born), we find ourselves immersed in stuff and qualities of stuff. As we learn about the world and about our bodies-in-the-world, our senses are saturated with experiences of solids, liquids, gases, light and energy with all their myriad properties.

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 the 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 more familiar to you. Can you sense the extension to your body, its weight, the rigidity of the handle and the spring of the bristles against the floor? Can you sense just how you would move your body with this extension in order to accomplish a goal of clearing the dust from the corner of a room?

What Neuroscience Has to Say

According to neuroscience, your brain incorporates your tool into its model of your body. 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 experience the felt 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 and the machine.

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.

I remember becoming more saliently aware of this while taking organic chemistry as a pre-med sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. Most of my peers seemed to approach this class primarily as a memorization exercise. I found myself able to feel into the molecular structures more intuitively, structurally, spatially, in ways that enabled me to understand the dynamics of the chemicals and reactions more directly. I didn’t need to rely as much on memorization to follow the formulas, and did reasonably well in the course without attending class or reading much of the text until the last few days before the final (crunch time!). This aptitude has served me well over my life, including very definitely in the development of psychotopology.

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 living.

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

What do you think?

I’ll leave you with a few more feeling state observations to motivate your curiosity about all of this.

A Few Examples to Contemplate

The following examples are from a single fieldwork session with one woman, Hannah (not her real name). 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, it's like they're pushing my shoulders down. Filaments are lighter material, wispy. (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. If it went outside, it would be like taking out an organ, not supposed to be there. But it's nonliving, it's just a structure. 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).

The pipe is an anchor, this weight that keeps things down that I don't want to surface. But it also weighs me down.

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 she 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. It's 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. But the intensity is coming from the center, from the core of this thing.

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. It wants 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 defined 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; eight inch irregular ovoid; hard/firm like an organ that is sick with some kind of cancerous growth; appearance of a raw organ, red, white, meat colors with some strange yellow/green also; peristaltic-like, misshapen movement, writhing, contorting, undulating – slow; bigger and more movement = more intense; feverishly hot; sound of constant tone of anxiety, vocal, not my voice, neither male nor female, like a deranged child.

Hard to find words. “Help me." But no point asking for help. I'm fucked. We're all fucked.

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 / created 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, immoveable; 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.

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 post, we will further examine this phenomenon.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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In our exploration so far, we have taken the first steps toward a rigorous science of subjective experience by establishing a working map establishing feeling states as inextricably coupled with their corresponding virtual material properties (The Crucial Role of Observation). We have tested key assumptions, beginning with the idea that a given emotion — such as sadness — might present a stable and universal signature across individuals. That hypothesis was quickly overturned (Surprising Results as We Begin).

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 post, 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—strategies that treat feeling as something to be managed, modulated, manipulated rather than explored.

However, as our fieldwork observations have already demonstrated, the actual experience of emotion 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 other posts including the Frontiers of Psychotopology intro post and Revisiting Louise’s Transformation. 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 actually turn our attention inward in such a way as to actually see what’s 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 the next two posts.

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.

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, a part of me but completely outside of myself, 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 a voice, “a part of me but completely outside of myself, 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 feel 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, different textures, 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, out in front, with a chaotic presentation that is very clearly not a somatic sensation of any form.

The Infinite Universe

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 shape-able. 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.

The most remarkable quality of this state is the way it “goes out infinitely.” Let me say that again for emphasis: “infinitely.” There is no current scientific model of the mind and emotions that has anything to say in response to this actual, observed and recorded inner experience.

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 having the hutzpah to call it real science instead of overtly acknowledging its tentative basis.

An Example of the Box

I want to share an excerpt from an email I received from Bonnita Roy a couple years ago. Bonnita is one of many people currently promoting this idea that wisdom comes through the body, and designing conceptual systems that train awareness to point away from feelingmind toward somatic sensation. This email announced an upcoming course she was offering, the first module of which was called Affect and Emotion. Here is how she articulated this offering:

“You will learn more about

• “That affects come directly from our animal nature and course through the body through the very same neuro-dynamic streams, utilizing the very-same electro-chemical systems

• “The particular emotional tone that becomes associated with each affect stream is conditioned by your early childhood relations

• “That many so-called embodiment teachers do not / can not make the distinction between affective processes in the body and thought- narrative content that creates the emotional valence

• “The difference between affect and dispositional states, and the wisdom practices that have maximum effect on dispositional states.

• “You will identify your particular affective resonance and rhythms, and

• “See that there is a direct path from the contracted states to the fully awakened states of the affect streams.”

She sets herself apart from other “so-called embodiment teachers” because she is taking a tack more aligned with Lisa Feldman-Barrett, in which the somatic channel is primary and the cognitive interpretation shapes that primary channel into more nuanced “dispositional states.”

This completely bypasses the actual, lived experience of feelingmind. It’s just not here, not accounted for. Everything is reduced to the body (“neuro-dynamic streams” and “electro-chemical systems”) and the thinking (“thought-narrative content”).

What’s Coming Next

Over the next few posts, I will share more fieldwork observations of what people actually experience on the inside, revealing more about how fantastically wondrous this inner world actually is, especially in comparison to our currently limited view on it.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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In the previous post in this series, Surprising Results as We Begin, we entered the initial observation phase of our science after hypothesizing that the experience of sadness might be universal in the way people experience its virtual material properties. Very quickly, within the first three states we mapped in three different people, we discovered a significant disparity in how the experience of what was named Sadness showed up for people. After nine more brief examples confirmed this diversity, our first hypothesis found itself hurled into the trash bin.

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 proposed 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 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 a period of about six months.

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

Our first observation came in July, exploring overall issue she named, “What’s Wrong with Me?” The essence of this issue centered on the experience of not being liked, or at least a deep belief that she is not like. 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

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.

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 totally alone. Nobody could ever love me. People near me are potential sources of making it worse. Keep them away, stay away from people, because they'll just say or do something to further reveal the truth, which is that I'm unlovable or unworthy or that I don't matter. 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.

The states that Rebecca named as part of this pattern included Armored, Deeply Worthless, and Irritation. Among them was one she named 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 three observations yielded very different configurations of the feeling experience’s 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 is no outlier among humans. While she has her gifts and challenges, she seems to be fairly “normal” when it comes to experiencing feeling, mood and emotion. So if such a sadness signature does not show up in Rebecca, 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, anchored in different earlier stages of my life, oriented toward different functions and portions of my inner 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 that much about the larger contexts for these.

Abject Sadness

Sad/Hopeless

Sadness

Grief/Sorrow, in the Context of Authority / 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 me.

Grief/Sorrow

Very heavy in my chest, my heart, quite large, a good foot in diameter or so, hard solid, resilient like rubber; black/opaque/dull; warm; a very slight pulsing variation in the intensity of the weight of it, corresponding with an expansion and contraction in size, not so much a pushing out or pulling in as just the amount of stuff gets more or less, and more is heavier, 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.

Sadness, in the Context of Shouldn’t Be Here (2009)

The next example I offer you comes from Sadness #2 in the previous post in this series, [[Science Observation 2-Difference|Conducting Our First Observations]]. I mapped this in 2009, in the context of a pervasive issue I called Shouldn’t Be Here. Again, here’s a brief summary of its properties:

Sadness

In my heart. Intense heaviness, crushing inward like a black hole. Like a ball of pie crust, a very dense clay, oily, like plasticine but pitch black. Intense cold. Intensely black as if you are peering into the maw of infinite sorrow. No sound. Steady gravity.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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.

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

Sets the overall tone for Unless. 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, only force/pressure/weight/gravity.

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

Demoralized Sadness, in the Context of Unless (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, somewhat flattened in the plane of the body. My head wants to hang forward in alignment with its bend. Nearly black; a very dark, neutral gray, opaque. A resilient solid, 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, no fluctuation.

I give up. There's no point in trying. The job is too vast, the resistance too strong. Nothing will change in my lifetime, or in any time frame within which I could possibly have influence. It doesn't matter what I've done so far. It won't 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 in a larger context that I called Homeless in the Apocalypse.

Pervasive Sadness

A sense of grief at how long I've persisted with my work without any acknowledgement, and no sense that it would ever come to something.

Whole body, as if it is made of clay, dark gray-brown color. The gray is more cool, as if this clay has fine charcoal dust mixed through it. Not moist, but it behaves as though soft like moist clay, holding its shape fairly well but with a sagging. About 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 does not belong to me. 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 above all for there to somehow 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 the Context of 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 ten 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 post 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 post, 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.

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology” to email me directly). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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We began this series in the last post, The Crucial Role of Observation, by establishing our initial map of the territory we wish to observe — a strong relationship between each unique feeling state and an equally unique and corresponding configuration of virtual material properties. Using the symbol “☰” to represent equivalence, we captured that equivalence in the following equation, representing that we are holding this as a clearly-defined map by which we will guide the navigation of our observations.

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.

• The unexpected novelty of observing virtual material properties as the substrate of the feeling experience.

• The subjective experience of “rightness” or “fit” between the observed virtual material properties and the feeling experience itself.

• The consistency of properties for a specific feeling state when observed freshly at a later time.

• The ability to re-activate a specific feeling state using the recorded virtual material properties observed at an earlier time.

• The ability to confirm observed properties for a specific feeling state using the slider test.

• The caution held for complex configurations of virtual material properties, especially when matching some real-life material object or other pattern.

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. To assist in our first efforts, 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 can bring our hypothesis into 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 VM 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 quite a few that are very common. A bit of ChatGPT research yields the following list:

• 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"

• Gloomy – “A gloomy mood"

• Cold – “A cold loneliness"

• Foggy – “Lost in 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, 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 the following comparison between Happiness and Sadness, where warmer yellows and reds indicate increasing activation and cooler blues 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 much lower likelihood of being located in the hips or limbs.

• 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 probably say that while we expect some variability from one person to another, we expect a clearly discernable similarity in the configurations of virtual material properties that shows 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. Please do explore your own territory and invite others to do the same.

Sadness #1

Description: 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.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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.

This first example seems to be somewhat in alignment with our expectations, although it’s definitely lower in the body than we might have expected. Let’s continue and look at another example.

Sadness #2

Description: 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.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.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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.

This one also seems fairly consistent with our expectations. Although quite different from the first in location, 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?

Another question that might arise: Given the differences like these between how different people experience the same emotion, do we get along better with people whose experience is more similar to our own?

Whoa! What a wild thought!

One way to start answering questions like these: collect more observations!

Sadness #3

Description: 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.

Thoughts/Beliefs: 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 (especially the third), we have shattered our hypothesis about the experience of sadness being similar among different people. Shattered.

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. Again, shattered.

• Location can be in the chest, yes, but it can just as easily be found in the lower belly, or even outside the body!

• Color can be dark, yes, but it can also be “white and blue and gray, transparent.”

• 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 throw in a few more drawings of other people’s maps 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. “Really?” you might wonder, “Sadness can be red?” Yes, and its movement can also be rising upward. 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 my last post. 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 post, 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!

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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Next post in this series:

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 The Practice. You might also wish to review the groundwork I’ve laid for The Science (The Beginning of a New Science is a good summary) including the latest post, Radical Curiosity. 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 useable maps for navigating the 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 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.

• 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 “recreate” our feeling experience out of its raw materials of this location, that substance, etc. When we do this with fidelity and find ourselves restoring what feels to us 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 the Fieldwork Mapping Series, #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 Patterns

Now that 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 some assurance that our observations will be accurate and valid, 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 post. Stay tuned!

Reflections

Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!

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Photo by Alexey Ruban on Unsplash

This post builds on a previous one here in The Science: Principles to Guide Our Early Observations. Some of this might seem slightly redundant, but this framing is crucial to what we're undertaking.

Fieldwork introduces a new mode of observation which makes visible a realm previously impossible to investigate. By opening the door to the virtual material properties of feeling experience, we gain access to this new realm. In walking through this door, we enter a new frontier, and we literally have no idea what we will find. Because of this, it is imperative that we check our expectations at the door and enter with high levels of openness — a radical curiosity — and maintain this throughout our investigations.

In this effort, the front-row scientist is the first-person explorer who engages in the immediate, direct discernment of what is being observed. The facilitator (if there is one) functions more like a lab assistant, supporting the explorer in operating the instrument of observation and recording the data.

Whether you enter this territory as a solo explorer or with a facilitator, the following attitudes and frameworks will prove essential.

The Question of What Is Real

Perhaps the most prominent assumption built into the practice of science is that we are seeking to learn about something we refer to as objective reality. Ultimately, though, we do not simply want to build abstract knowledge. We want to learn how to engage with reality in ways that are reliably useful.

This priority becomes even more important in pursuing a science of subjective experience. In my posts Maps Within Maps and Building Better Maps, I suggest that we need to release our grip on the idea of a fixed, objective "reality" from which we want to construct knowledge. Instead, we need to acknowledge that our “reality" is in fact the domain of subjective experience, which includes “knowledge" and everything else in our lives. Our experience is what is most real in this science.

Experience-as-reality immediately frees us from the requirement to maintain an objective separation from our object of study. To study subjective experience, we must acknowledge that we are 100% immersed in it. Always! And in that acknowledgement, we gain permission to step into the center of our investigation.

The only access to subjective experience is in the first person. At the moment, the subjectivity barrier is firmly in place and there is no way around this. There must be a first-person investigator, either solo or with a facilitator holding the structure.

This approach sweeps us into a swirl of questions: How do we observe from within the experience? What portion of our experience do we observe? How do we avoid altering the experience itself through our attempt to observe it? How do we know that what we are “observing" is “real" and not something we're “making up"? How do we include “making things up” in the domain of what we are studying — it belongs there, right?

These questions can lead to paralysis. Fortunately, psychotopology fieldwork provides a direct path forward.

Fieldwork Mapping as the Beginning

When we approach subjective experience, we might wonder: Should we observe our thoughts? Perceptions? Somatic sensations? Feelings? And how do we track this ever-changing, nebulous inner experience?

Some researchers have turned to disciplines like meditation to reduce subjective experience's squirrely nature by using trained subjects. But what they examine still falls into standard buckets of thought, perception, sensation, or general feeling categories, often defined more by brain activity on instruments than by rigorous explication of the actual experience.

Psychotopology addresses this challenge by focusing our awareness on a portion of subjective experience which has previously evaded precise observation — that of the most subtle experience of being, manifested in the proto-language of virtual materiality. We enter directly into the “what it is like to be" that lives at the center of conscious experience.

The Advantages of Observing Feeling

The experience of fieldwork feels both novel and familiar. The novelty comes in translating feeling experience into a highly detailed description built from the proto-language of virtual materiality. While this overlap has shown up in limited contexts, it remains an unfamiliar way to conceptualize what we feel.

This novelty makes it less likely we'll be swept into collective, shared meaning-making. It enables the explorer to simply report observations without fitting them into existing categories. Describing frustration as having qualities of a dark, hot solid that vibrates with high tension seems just as valid as describing it as a vividly glowing liquid sloshing in a pit. There are no value judgments attached, no interpretations, no imposition of societal norms. The data is relatively free of cultural obfuscation.

At the same time, the experience of materiality is a universal constant among living beings. My experience of a hard solid is likely similar to yours. This allows us to share data among observers with greater reliability.

As we bring discerning awareness to feeling experience and surface its properties, something feels “right" about it. It feels more like observation than interpretation or imaginary construction. There's an experience of validation that accompanies answering these questions, creating an affirmative reward that motivates the explorer.

Additionally, feeling experience itself tends to remain relatively stable as we engage with it. When we name a feeling state, we identify something with persistent existence. Often, a state we explore has been a familiar occupant of our interior life for years, if not decades. When we bring our awareness to it for mapping, it tends to hold still as we examine it.

Not only does it remain stationary during observation, but we can often return to it hours, days, or months later and find the same properties in place. This consistency offers a much more stable terrain for mapping and trusting our maps.

We also have the "slider test" for validation: If we doubt our observation, we can manipulate the virtual material properties. If I make a solid harder or softer and nothing changes in my feeling experience, I probably need to revisit my mapping. If the feeling experience adjusts with the changing properties and I can reset it to recover the original feeling, I can be more confident in my observation's accuracy.

These factors help both explorer and scientist gain confidence in the data's accuracy and relevance, making it easier to build a science upon such a stable base. We can bring fieldwork practice to our investigations with rigor and discipline, with strong hope that this standard of application might yield true discovery.

How to Hold a High Standard for Your Mapping

In what follows, I want to offer guidelines for conducting fieldwork mapping successfully, whether working alone or with a partner, for personal growth or scientific investigation.

Setting Aside Our Existing Maps

In engaging with our experience, we often turn to existing ideas about inner reality. Here are a few simplified examples that might arise with anxiety:

• Freudian: “That's your unresolved Oedipal complex resurfacing."

• CBT: “Your anxiety stems from a negative belief that needs re-framing."

• Somatic Experiencing: “That's your nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode."

• Attachment Theory: “This feeling is your anxious attachment style kicking in."

• Psychiatric/Medical Model: “It's your neurotransmitters being out of balance."

• Mindfulness-Based Approaches: “You're clinging to your thoughts instead of observing them non-judgmentally."

These reifications are normal features of the maps we create to navigate experience. We need entities and relationships to construct our maps, and we extract those from experiential patterns.

The subjectivity barrier has made extracting these entities and relationships much more difficult in inner realms than in the physical realm. This has led to an endless proliferation of maps over millennia, exploding in diversity as we make ever more intensive efforts to make sense of our inner mysteries.

Any of these maps can be valuable for someone making sense of a nebulous inner world, especially within a relationship of trust with a therapist or friend. Nevertheless, as we commit to developing a true science of inner experience, we must set these maps aside as much as possible and enter fieldwork with nothing but fresh curiosity.

Honoring Subjectivity

As we enter fieldwork, we must bring absolute respect and deference to the explorer's subjective experience. We want to avoid allowing existing concepts to shape perceptions and interpretations.

Our observations should be as pure as possible, carrying an absolute beginner's mind into this new territory. We don't know what we'll observe each time we enter, and we want our observational data to be as faithful as possible to the inner experiences we're observing.

Most importantly, within ourselves and with everyone for whom we facilitate fieldwork, we must enter the space of observation with respect for whatever shows up. We affirm its existence, confirm our observation of it, and support it in fully entering into awareness. In doing so, we honor subjective experience as the frontier of reality we've chosen to enter.

Shedding the Standard Scientific Frame

Our goal in this science of subjective experience is to map the territory of our actual, conscious, lived inner worlds. When coming from materialist sciences, we might want to jump right into making universal maps that apply to every conscious human.

One approach might be mapping a specific feeling state—say sadness—across many people. We might expect some distribution of virtual material properties, but that those properties would aggregate to suggest sadness being a particular substance, temperature, and color. We'd expect joy to have different properties, anger yet others.

We might anticipate these virtual material properties plugging into the body's machinery—high temperature stimulating certain hormones, substance vibration triggering specific brain patterns—through which we could learn about emotional structures and interventions.

If you notice this impulse, simply notice it. As we engage with fieldwork, be open to these expectations being challenged. Hold them lightly.

Not Knowing What to Expect

We want to return to the breakthrough of being able to observe feeling experience's virtual materiality. This is momentous, and we simply do not know what we'll find.

This is virgin territory, and when entering such territory in any science, we must proceed with humility. This is especially true here because we're entering the most precious, sacred realm possible—the most interior, vulnerable places within human experience. In doing so, we carry profound responsibility. Whether that explorer is ourselves or someone we're facilitating, we must enter in the spirit of service.

Our tool, fieldwork mapping, enables us to enter this previously inaccessible space and bring vivid awareness to its shapes and features. Our goal must simply be to support the explorer in using this tool to observe and create maps of their own private inner terrain. In every session, we must bring respect and humility, enfolded in this attitude of service.

We are serving the explorer in making a personal, unique map of their own personal, unique inner terrain. As we begin our science, that is all. And as you will see, that is enough.

Our Long-Term Intention

Entering an unknown frontier is a long-standing human practice. We enter new territory and produce maps to help navigate it. To produce a map, we make copious observations and discern patterns that form entities and relationships. When done well, these become integrated into a reliable, consistent, useful map, and our frontier gradually transitions into the familiar. We master the frontier.

That's what we're up to here. Over time, as we accumulate observational data from many individual, personalized maps of inner realities, we will begin to notice connecting patterns that help us make sense of the universal features of this inner realm.

What turns out to be most important in the emergence of these new, more universal maps will be a new distinction in what we observe. Traditional approaches have focused on collecting information about experience's contents: What is the person seeing or hearing? What are they thinking? What memory is being called to mind?

Our new approach prioritizes structure rather than contents. For now, we'll avoid over-interpreting what we observe. We're going to take our time. Eventually, we'll begin to notice patterns we could never have expected. These patterns will reveal a previously hidden structure to conscious experience, an underlying, universal architecture.

That's all I can say for now. Just know that we're embarking on an extraordinary journey. To get started, we must absolutely let go of our expectations and bring our full presence and commitment to investigating the actual, lived experience of feeling deep within ourselves.

Reflections

How does this post land for you? Do you find yourself motivated to engage as a fellow explorer? What questions do you have?

And of course, if you would like to keep up with this series and beyond, please do subscribe. And consider signing up for a paid subscription to participate in live Engage conversations, where you'll be able to get your questions answered and more.

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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 discernable 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 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 farther. 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 a later post in The Science.)

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 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 Science section, and we will leverage this relationship to the nth degree in fieldwork’s moving phase.

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. If you still do not notice a change in your feeling experience, consider starting over to take this feeling state through the mapping process all over again, from the beginning.

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.

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, 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.

Reflections

In the course of this series on fieldwork mapping, I would like to ask for your feedback about how well you are able to put these instructions to work. Where do you struggle, what comes easily, and what suggestions do you have for improving how this series supports you and others in doing the mapping? Thank you!

And of course, if you have not yet subscribed and would like make sure to keep up with this series and beyond, please do subscribe. Consider signing up for a paid subscription to participate in the live Engage meetings, where you’ll be able to get your questions answered and more.

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Now that we have covered the fieldwork mapping process in some depth, and ventured into the territory of coexisting states, we are ready to take another significant 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 increasingly favoring distributed, emergent, and relational models.

Psychotopology fieldwork enables us to walk right into the heart of this mystery to illuminate 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.

First: Becoming Aware of the Witness Self

In 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, 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 latent question 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.

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.

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.

Mapping the Seat of Witness

Again, 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 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. Often, that third witness is experienced as a profound universal consciousness kind of state. It’s worth exploring if you’re so inclined.

Reflections

In the course of this series on fieldwork mapping, I would like to ask for your feedback about how well you are able to put these instructions to work. Where do you struggle, what comes easily, and what suggestions do you have for improving how this series supports you and others in doing the mapping? Thank you!

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