We are all pioneers on a mysterious frontier, every one of us. Nothing, ever, has presented such a challenge to us humans than to understand our own interior world. Nothing. Ever. I would guess we’ve been working on it ever since we started building this language tool I’m using here, and possibly even before that.
The crux of the challenge is the barrier between our own inner world and that of everyone else. I cannot access your experience, you cannot access mine. In the external world, it’s relatively easy to point to a rock, for example, have your companion pick up the rock and say the word “obsidian,” and trust that both of you are referencing the same object. But even this can get tricky, to be honest, given that we each experience the rock through — and only through — our inner experience. Even if we get all geeky and take that rock back to the lab, run a bunch of numbers on it, and confirm that yup, it’s obsidian, the only access we have to the lab, the instruments, and the numbers is through our inner experience. There’s really no getting around it.
We are generally able to ignore that, though, because the external world is consistent enough that when we externalize our experience and pretend we’re operating with objectivity, we can get away with it. It’s relatively straightforward to teach an apprentice how to run the band saw, for example, or to triangulate observational data on cell division, confirming that the same thing happens in the Boston lab as was observed in San Diego. We can work our way around the idiosyncracies in how each person involved does in fact experience the tools, the protocols, and the analysis differently if we maintain those protocols with high standards.
But when we start to get curious about the actual inner experience of what it is like to be a human — and to be this human versus that human — we run into this barrier. I call it the subjectivity barrier: we are unable to observe any other person’s subjective experience. Which means we are ultimately utterly alone in trying to understand our own experience well enough to navigate it with pure mastery.
We have approached this challenge through many different angles. Take the many forms of art, for example. What is a piece of music but an expression of that mystery, an attempt to bring it into the space we share with others, to experience it together, to at the very least have a sense that we are not completely alone in what we experience? What is a painting or a sculpture or a novel but an attempt to land that ineffability into a tangible form that transcends the moment and connects through time?
Take ritual, for another example, along with the mythology and imagery that inform any specific example you might choose. What is ritual but a collective tapping into the mystery, an attempt to make sense of it together, to weave story and action into a presence of a shared together, as a way to bring that mystery into palpable form, to see it in one another and feel it in the spaces between us?
Philosophy, too, has made its way into this project. Ever since we began attempting to weave our language into declarations of being, we have rewoven the tapestry countless times, each effort covering some small piece of the whole, none of them coming anywhere near close to plumbing the true depths in ways that might become portals into a lived understanding of these seemingly unreachable netherhoods within ourselves.
It’s a short step from here to making the case that all human activity is, in truth, an attempt to reckon with the mystery. Going for a hike? You seek the experience of some normally-closed chamber within yourself opening to the presence of the trees, the mountains, the clouds. Grabbing your friends to go to the football game? You seek the experience of having a collective focus, an alignment with community, a rising and falling of emotional tides shared among your group. Applying for a promotion at your job? You seek the experience of some unexpressed part of your inner world looking for a way out, for a space to carry itself into the world and be reflected back to you. Looking for someone to date, to be in relationship with, to marry? You seek the overt experience of whatever relationship is for you, as it lives within you, whether carrying tones of alignment and collaboration, or showing up more like dominance or submission, fusion or differentiation, conflict or avoidance. What lies within you seeks to be enacted in your external world in order to make itself more known to you.
In fact, we could easily say that no matter what human activity we might consider, it is all about the experience. And so far, the experience has been confined within the self, inexplicable, impossible to translate fully into words. And it has been impossible to confirm your experience’s alignment or compatibility with that of any other human through direct observation of their inner experience. We do our best through our stories, our perceptions and interpretations, our concepts, our attempts to make sense of it all and share that sensemaking with one another. We start this project very early in childhood and continue until the day we die. Nothing has ever been more important.
One Way In…
What about the contemplative traditions? What role have they played in this effort? Is there any human project that more explicitly seeks to enter this interior space and gain some semblance of mastery within it? The other day I spoke with a friend, Mason Ellis, who had recently completed a 10-day Vipassana retreat. He talked about the practice of prolonged observation of somatic sensation, beginning with three days focused exclusively on the breath before moving to more of a continuous scan throughout the entire body. This practice broke many of his habitual norms of how he tends to inhabit the domicile of his within.
Bringing this disciplined focus to his experience of how he inhabits his body led to some profound discomforts, some of which led to some equally profound breakthroughs for him. Here’s how he talks about it on his recent Substack post:
In the technique, they teach you to observe the sensation and then look at if you feel any craving or aversion to it. By going deeper, you start to pick apart yourself and dig up the underlying complexes lying behind the sensations. You can get to the bottom of some deep shadowy shit if you follow this. What I found most important was that the mind-body connection actually coming together and forming a contact created a chemical explosion and the feeling of a circuit being grounded. This then allowed for a more expansive experience of feeling into myself. This was where the magic happened.
This is an example, one of many, of the different ways we might gain better access to what lies within ourselves. As you can see, there is a component of disciplined observation that begins the practice. Out of that arise new perceptions, new interpretations, new ways of encompassing what is there. Each of these traditions carries its own way in and its own way of making sense of what the individual practitioners tend to find.
Ah, but the individual practitioners, and what they tend to find, that’s where things get a little bit tricky. Again, we have a fundamental challenge to being able to convey one person’s inner experience to another. Mason provides a good example of this in the paragraph above. When you read “the mind-body connection actually coming together and forming a contact created a chemical explosion and the feeling of a circuit being grounded,” do you really know what he’s talking about? He writes well, and perhaps the metaphors resonate for you, but what, exactly, is his experience of “a circuit being grounded?” How does that compare to your experience of a grounded “circuit?” Are they the same? Different? How would you know for sure?
One thing that can often happen with contemplative practices of various kinds, not least of which is the Vipassana tradition Mason speaks about, is that people can wind up falling into very, very challenging territory. Take a look at this article and this one (non-paywalled), for example, telling stories of psychotic breaks and other crises that can show up when people try to go deep.
Given these difficulties and risks, teachers are presented with quite a challenge to succeeding in actually teaching. And so, workarounds proliferate. One of the workarounds is simple denial. Both of these articles detail how thoroughly the Vipassana tradition in America, for example, behaves as though no such problems exist.
Another workaround, with us for millennia, is storytelling. In more ancient and indigenous traditions, the story was porous enough, and alive enough, to support those who practiced in being with their own experience of the practice and trusting something beyond the words. There was more of a “vibe” to it, a sense of letting go and immersing oneself in a long-standing tradition of real people entering the real space of the mystery.
My partner Spring Cheng speaks of how ancient Chinese poetry carries this ability to open the doors to mystery without getting in the way, supporting the individual to notice the span of life within and around themselves, particularly in relationship with nature. Even without an explicit practice, this kind of openness to the not-knowing can lead people more deeply into that space within.
In her most recent post, A River of Love Across Twelve Centuries, Spring writes about this kind of poetry that builds on the metaphorical nature of Chinese characters and language:
The characters are often woven together through musicality, rhythm, and rhyme, rather than rigid grammatical structures, creating a dynamic interplay of meanings that opens up multiple possibilities for interpretation and invites the reader’s imagination and felt experience into the poem.
She brings this energy into her teaching, reaching for “the raw and wild form of Tao before Taoism” as she leads her workshops and classes in qigong, tai chi, psychodrama, music, and other doorways into the ineffable.
In the west, though, at least in modern times, storytelling can sway quickly into ideology, where the story becomes “true” and those who hold it become the authorities. Then it is declared that unless you understand what is true in the same way as the authorities, and unless you do the practice in the same way (exactly), and unless you get the same results and spout the same interpretations, you’re getting it wrong. It tends to justify the common act of saying the practitioner who suffers is simply doing it wrong. They need to try harder.
Ugh. This is what we get when we still don’t have good access to what lies inside all of us, and when we’re handicapped by inadequate language. And we’re handicapped by inadequate language because we can’t build good language when we don’t have good mutual access. Again, ugh.
Stepping Up? Uh… Maybe Not.
And then, over the past few centuries, we have science stepping in to take on this perennial challenge. It, too, has more-or-less acknowledged, at times at least, that the inner world of human experience is important for us to understand. However, it has not done such a great job of helping us understand it. Not yet, anyway.
Let’s just drill in here for a moment, shall we? Bottom line, what is required for a science to actually be a science? How does science work, when it works? I’ve written about this in Volume 1: Introducing the Science. Let me try to give a very concise summary as I understand this important human achievement.
What Science Is, and How It Works
Science is a subset of a universal human activity: making maps to navigate life. As I spoke about in the beginning of this piece, the central human challenge is the experience of life itself. Life is limitless in scope and complexity, and it requires us to make sense of it in ways that enable us to navigate that scope and complexity effectively enough to thrive. This sense-making involves the design of maps for navigating the experience of life in specific contexts to serve specific intentions.
A context can vary in dimension (e.g. physical, agricultural, social, others), location (e.g. soil, ocean, family, others), scale (micro to macro), and perhaps other frames.
A map is constructed of entities and relationships derived from patterns observed in the relevant dimension, location and scale.
Entities are comprised of patterns that persist in maintaining selected properties over time while relationships are comprised of patterns of changes in selected properties between specific entities.
Neither entities nor relationships are fixed, immutable, or “true.” Entities are built of relationships, relationships are built of entities, and either can turn into, encompass, or differentiate from the other — it’s all relative.
All maps are partial and provisional, and their value to any person comes through their effectiveness in enabling them to navigate the context in fulfillment of the desired intention.
Thriving is optimally served by maps that are in a continuous process of calibration and redesign. Life is fluid and ever-changing, and maps must be updated in order to persist in enabling effective navigation.
Explicit maps include those we call “maps,” for example the maps our phones use to help us get from here to there. Other obvious examples include the recipe we use for baking our favorite cake and the score we use to play our favorite song.
Implicit maps include those habits we develop over time in order to “get by” in the world. These are countless and vary for each of us, sensitive to our unique contexts, capacities and intentions, all designed either consciously or unconsciously to optimize our thriving, or at least to minimize our suffering and risk. These habits encompass everything from behavior and speech to more hidden scripts of how we place our attention and what inner experiences we tend to feed versus starve. All of these are maps for navigating our experience of life, and we are using them in every moment of every day. No explicit map can function without the support of the user’s implicit maps.
So how does science relate to this universal human activity of making maps? Quite simply, science seeks to design maps that exhibit greater reliability across wider scopes of context and intention. That’s it, in a nutshell.
This was pretty straightforward when it came to classical physics. The observation necessary to discern patterns was easy to undertake. Just drop two balls of different weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for example, and boom, you’ve got an observation about the speed of things falling having nothing to do with their mass. Who knew?
The early days of biology offered some pretty satisfying opportunities as well. Just shape a hunk of glass with some curves to magnify what’s under it, put a couple of those together to magnify even more, and boom, you’ve got an observation about these weird critters swimming around in a few drops of murky pond water. WTF?! Entities, relationships and maps, oh my!
The foundation, the place where all of this begins, is with observation. We really should type that with a capital O, as in, “Observation,” because most of the time we put a lot of effort into making sure that what we observe can also be reliably observed by others. We do that by narrowing the window of our context, controlling our conditions to the finest degree. You can’t just drop a cannon ball and a feather from the top of the tower and expect them to land at the same time. And if you get really precise in your measurements, you can’t drop a six-inch block that weighs half an ounce and one that weighs two pounds from that tower and have them land at the same time either. Air plays a role here, so if you want to narrow your observation to the pure force of gravity on falling objects, you’d better create a vacuum to make sure the air isn’t interfering.
So: “capital O” Observation is at the center of “good” science. There’s no getting around it. And because we can really fine-tune our control of conditions in the physical world, our observations can get more and more refined, allowing us to discern finer and finer patterns revealing more consistent entities and relationships, enabling us to design more and more reliable and universal maps. We’ve used these maps to do things like fly to the moon and build electric cars.
But What About…?
Oh. Wait a second. There’s another factor here. Let’s not forget that every “scientist” is, first and foremost, a human being. Funneling money into moon landings, or setting up a company to manufacture electric cars to the tune of becoming a trillionaire, these give us a couple of examples of how things can start getting a little weird. Other examples might include the creation of nuclear weapons and the awarding of ultra-status prizes to those who make the big “discoveries.”
When science succeeds in creating maps reliable enough to call them “laws of physics,” for one thing, it sets up the illusion that an “objective” reality exists, and that it is more “true” and “real” than any other reality. And when that objective “truth” can be applied in ways that bring power, status and wealth to those who apply it, well… that sets up some huge forces to warp our “understanding.”
Let’s cut to the chase: it’s just humans being human, all the way down. Ego, bias and all that. Now let’s bring that sobriety to the work of a science trying to make sense of human inner experience. What do we get?
The bottom line is that currently, no science that tries to understand the mind from any direction does a good job of observing… well… the mind. It’s a very strange state of affairs. All sciences have typically begun with investigating some new territory to which a new means of observation provides access. Telescopes launched astronomy and microscopes opened the door to cellular biology, to use some mundane examples. But those who wished to study the mind were stymied in the early days of psychology and neuroscience, and could never find a reliable method for actually observing actual conscious experience.
Now, as I was describing, all of science is handicapped by the subjectivity barrier, and we find ways to work around it by designing careful protocols, applying precision to language and data, plus bringing in layers of redundancy and replication. But we have not been able to do that with subjective experience, particularly with regard to precision.
As a result, those in this profession have fallen back on various compensations to try to preserve the semblance of legitimacy. These have amounted pretty much to hand-waving, storytelling, and hyped correlations. For the first, “Let’s observe behavior and declare inner experience not to exist” is a great example. For the second, “Let’s come up with a good theory and interpret everything from that lens (and ignore everything that doesn’t fit).” For the third, “Let’s observe neural activity because, well, obviously that’s what causes ‘consciousness,’ right?”
I won’t bother to speak to the first approach because while it’s not entirely gone, it has faded somewhat into history. The second approach is alive and well, with the result being that we have an uncountable number of theories, some of which function OK in narrow contexts, none of which does the complete job. And the neural correlation approach is still trying to keep itself alive today.
Let’s take a quick look at that last one. The idea is, if you can get really precise in observing the brain while humans are doing the human thing, you can see patterns in brain functionality that correlate with patterns in conscious experience. The problem with the correlation approach is that you need to bring equal precision to both ends of your correlation chain. Unless you can actually observe conscious experience with the kind of systematic, disciplined precision that enables reliability and replicability across observations, you will never determine how changes in the experiential domain “correlate” with the changes you’re observing in the brain. You’re just kidding yourself. Seriously, forget about it.
Let me give you a couple links to articles by the neuroscientist Erik Hoel, who gets this and speaks eloquently, without hesitation, about it.
In summary: at this point in the history of the sciences of the mind, we are firmly in the muck of still-trying-to-figure-this-shit-out, and we are going nowhere fast.
But We’ve Tried! Haven’t We?
Don’t get me wrong here. Many earnest, smart people have given their all to this project. Many have known and acknowledged the need to find a way to cross that subjectivity barrier well enough to wake the science up. Phenomenology is one area of effort, and more recently a subset of this called neuro-phenomenology has done its best to provide this bridge. Another direction of effort has been the collection of so-called pristine experience through asking people to notice their raw experience and report on it when prompted at random times throughout the day.
Why haven’t these approaches yielded the results we need? Why are they still peripheral to most scientific efforts to understand the inner world?
Let me be up front here. The reason why we’re still struggling is not a failure of effort or skill or anything else. The reason we’re still thrashing around is because we’ve been looking in the wrong direction, at the wrong thing.
Here’s what’s going on. The most natural thing to try to observe when we are seeking to examine inner experience is the contents of what is there. Contents. What are you thinking about? What are you feeling? What are you noticing, perceiving, or blocking out? What are you saying to yourself? What are you hearing in your mind? What are you imagining? Etc. etc. etc. forever and ever and ever.
There is no end to the abundance, complexity and diversity of the contents of our consciousness. No end. Everyone is a little different, some more different than others. And the patterns are extremely difficult to discern in any way that turns out to be reliable, reproducible, or precise enough for creating meaningful or effective maps.
Honestly, we cannot blame those in history who abandoned the project and turned their attention toward other things like behavior and neural activity that could be observed with discipline and precision. I honestly don’t think there has been any direct way to figure this out from where we’ve been standing.
But what else is there? Here’s where things get interesting. Are you ready?
Contents vs. Structure
When we are situated within our own selves (and when are we not?), our prime focus is on the contents of our experience. It is by focusing on our thoughts, perceptions, sensations, memories, imagined possibilities, and all the rest of the contents within ourselves that we navigate through life. Those contents are important! They’re everything! Without them, we are empty, lost and powerless.
So of course that is what we have been trying to observe when we’ve looked into ourselves in curiosity to learn more about what’s there. And it’s what we’ve invited others to observe when we’ve wanted to compare one person’s interior to another’s in our quest to discern those essential patterns that will enable us to make some useful maps. Of course! What else is there?
Well, as it turns out, a hell of a lot. And what is there in that “else” turns out to be way more interesting than the infinitely branching skeins of contents, and much less disposed to strangle us in tangled webs going nowhere. What else is inside of us is structure. Form. Topology.
We have never considered this because we have never known even how to ask the right questions. What the hell is structure when it comes to consciousness? And how in the world would we be able to even surmise its existence, embedded as we are deep within the infinitely complex landscape of contents — our own and everyone else’s?
The fact is that our habitual ways of trying to observe inner experience amount to studying the bubbles on top of the froth on top of the waves sloshing on the beach when what we really are wanting to understand are the deepest thermohaline currents at the bottom of the ocean.
I’ve told my own story elsewhere, in Volume 1-IS-8: A New Method for Observing Inner Experience, about being thrown suddenly into the deep end. And wow, the water was damned cold, and it woke me up to something completely new. This structure thing.
I’ve been spelunking down here ever since, for the past thirty-plus years. And I’ve wondered why it takes so much effort to get others to join me. After writing this piece, I’m finally starting to get an idea of what makes it so difficult. This really does require a leap out of old habits that have been with us for millennia.
I made the leap because I got really lucky. It wasn’t a deliberate leap, exactly. More like an accidental, clumsy fall.
That first plunge hit me really hard. I interacted with something structural that had nothing to do with the contents of my experience, and as a result those contents radically shifted in seconds. Fortunately, I was predisposed to be able to take this in because my primary mode of thinking was actually structural rather than logical or verbal. Something about this just felt right in a way I had been searching for my entire life.
The entirety of this Substack including Volume 1 of Frontiers and the coming Volumes 2 and 3 do the work of unpacking my discoveries. So I’m not going to try to spell out what I mean by “structure” right here in this piece. Look around. It’s all through my work.
An Intentionally Provocative Invitation
So. For those who are attempting to finally get a true science of the mind started, whether your focus is neural, behavioral, or anywhere in between, please consider adding the ability to actually observe what it is you are claiming to study.
This will require your subjects to learn a very high-level skill. Operating our instrument of awareness to capture useful observations revealing the depth and complexity of inner experience by focusing on the structure could be compared to operating an electron microscope. You wouldn’t expect a toddler to capture any useful EM images for your research, now, would you? But that’s essentially what we do when we sit college sophomores in front of a screen and ask them to respond to prompts.
We in this modern culture have become prolifically skilled at surrendering our attention, giving up control of it entirely or chaining it into narrow habits. We are absolutely pathetic (!) when it comes to being able to intentionally direct our attention in ways that enable precise and disciplined observation of what lies within ourselves. We are toddlers when it comes to this, every one of us, even (especially?) those who claim to be advancing the sciences of the mind. Toddlers who don’t even have the faintest concept that such a thing as structure even exists, much less even a vague hunch that structure is far more important to the functioning of conscious experience than the contents that have captured our attention through the ages.
It’s time to grow up, y’all. Are you ready to face this? Willing? Able?
Now, an opportunity…: Take a moment to notice your experience right now. If you are feeling something in response to my comparison of scientists to toddlers, and my challenge to “grow up,” please consider getting curious about the structure of what you are feeling. Do this no matter what that is, whether annoyance or excitement, or anything in between or beyond.
Then, jump over to the Try It! section of this Substack and go through the fieldwork process. Identify and name what you are feeling. Map it. Move it. Then, take a moment to reflect: What is the “it” that you just mapped and moved? Let me know what you notice. Simply asking that question after doing the work is the beginning of being able to discern the difference between contents and structure.
Next Steps…
If this rocks your boat, or if it’s got you curious but you’re not quite sure how to proceed, feel free to reach out to me. And keep an eye out for next week’s post. It’ll be a bit of a splash, where I lay out some of the basic topological structure. It’s premature, and I really should wait until I’ve published more of the science side of things, though, so maybe it’ll make your head spin.
That’s OK. Spinning heads are good. Even if I only reach one person who can begin to comprehend what I’m laying out here, and who can become a solid ally in this, it’s worth it. I need to start being a bit more bold in laying out what I’ve got to contribute.
If this does stir something in you, if something in you resonates and says, “there’s something important here,” please do whatever you can to share it with others who can appreciate it. The more eyes on this work, the better.
I'm a friend of Mason as well, he's told me about you and this was a great intro to your work. Thanks!