A New Method for Observing Inner Experience
A New Method for Observing Inner Experience
The Proto-Language of Virtual Materiality
In the previous posts in The Science section, I hope I’ve provided a useful explanation of our current muddled murkiness when it comes to investigating inner experience. Constructing a science of subjectivity is a tall order!
But I hope I’ve also provided a clear vision of what might constitute an effective way forward. Namely, that we absolutely must come up with a method for observing inner experience with precision, repeatability, accuracy, reliability, disciplined methodology, triangulation between individuals, opportunity for engagement… all those things. Now, how do we do that?
I was able to solve this problem through two intersecting factors. The first was sheer luck, and the second was a capacity to harvest what luck brought me.
The Setup
So, a little backstory to set the stage here is appropriate. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (type 2, rapid cycling, DSM-IIIR) in 1987, and the diagnosis made sense to me. My life was a constant series of careening direction changes — relationships, jobs, living situations, business attempts — driven by intense cycles of high and low mood. I chose not to medicate myself either through psychiatric prescriptions or other substances, and continued to ride out my flights and dives raw and unprotected.
My stance was that something beyond current explanation was responsible for my experience, and that the best place for me to look for that something was in the experience itself. When I was riding high, I gave myself fully to the experience of the light. And when I was depressed, I gave myself fully to the experience of the darkness.
I sought out various tools and lenses by which to explore my inner experience, including the following and more:
Eriksonian Hypnosis
Gestalt Therapy
Virginia Satir’s work
Advanced Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) methods
Deep journaling
Self-hypnosis, including active regression to the origins of traumatic states
Endless contemplation, introspection, and reflection
Immersion in the natural world
By 1994, I had accumulated a great deal of familiarity with my inner territory. To some extent, I had acquired a bit more agency, and I was less at the mercy of the moods. But they still unquestionably drove the ebb and flow of my life.
The Experiment
The season was early summer, and I was depressed for no good reason I could discern. So I brought my attention yet again to my inner experience, to try yet another angle to find the mysterious something that drove my moods.
This time, I brought my attention fully to the actual, felt experience of the depression itself. Not the thoughts. Not my history. Not my somatic sensations. I brought myself directly to the nebulous experience I refer to in The Subtle Dimension of Feelingmind as feelingmind.
I didn’t call it that, of course. And my awareness of it was, as you might expect, quite vague. But something about the experience stood out to me quite distinctly.
I had the sense of a downward pull in the center of my chest. Not a weight, exactly, but a pull of some kind, like gravity pulling down from below. That’s the best I would have been able to describe it. Like I said, vague, but nevertheless distinct.
Now, for reasons having to do with then-recent explorations in NLP that I’ll describe another time, it occurred to me to wonder whether I could interact with that gravitational force. What would happen if I imagined the force reversing, and pushing upward instead of pulling downward? As was my nature and my habit by this point, I decided to give it a try, to see what might happen.
I didn’t expect much, honestly. In all I had learned about the brain and various methods for working with emotion, the general structure of intervention went like this:
Do something to change the substrate — the underlying cause of emotion — whether at the level of neurobiology through psychiatric medication (e.g. lithium), at the level of somatics through somehow regulating the nervous system (e.g. hiking in the forest), or at the level of memory, belief or thought through changing their ingrained patterns (e.g. reframing a memory or changing a belief). The idea goes that once the substrate is changed (in an appropriate way), the surface expression — the actual experience of the emotion — will change as a result.
There was nothing in all I had encountered to suggest that bringing one’s awareness directly to the raw experience of emotion, by itself, could possibly change that experience without relying on the other strategies to address its underlying causes. In bringing awareness to the emotion, you were merely perceiving a symptom caused by other forces. It would be like trying to cure your broken leg by overpainting the x-ray.
Flipping Depression on Its Head
Despite anticipating nothing much, having no idea what to expect, I did the thing. I locked my attention onto the downward gravitational pull, and I “imagined” it reversing direction. What happened in the next few minutes radically changed the course of my life.
Before the shift, I was morosely marooned on my couch, unable to muster motivation for much of anything. After the shift (which took all of two short minutes) I was out for a walk in my Kalispell, Montana neighborhood, enjoying the early summer sunshine, a breeze through the trees, the many chattering birds, and the promise of a coffee and pastry at the local café. I felt light-hearted and downright cheerful, for crying out loud!
Adjacent to my cheerfulness, however, was a deep disorientation. This dramatic effect should not have happened through the simple maneuver I conducted.
Should. Not. Have. Happened.
But it did happen, and so easily and quickly, with no reliance whatsoever upon any of the high-effort strategies I had relied upon in the past. I had made no changes to my neurochemistry. No changes to the regulation of my nervous system. No changes to my thoughts. None.
Instead, I had directly changed the experience of the feeling itself, and with that, it seemed that everything else changed as a result, including my brain, my body, and my thoughts. WTF?!
I have a very high need for things to make sense to me, and this simply did not make sense. So I ran screaming for the hills. Honestly, I pushed this experience the hell out of my mind and got busy with other things, avoiding it for at least a couple of weeks. I didn’t want to face what it might mean if this thing had actually happened the way it seemed to have happened.
Why not? I had invested thousands of dollars at this point in various kinds of workshops and trainings, and thousands of hours in focused, intense work on myself, following the overall super-strategy of manipulating the various, named causes to get the emotional effects I wanted. I had given it all I had, and my identity had shaped itself largely around this effort.
If this thing had actually happened, that I flipped my depression on its head through some imaginary slight of hand, I might have to face that the foundation of my whole self was made of sand. That was intolerably uncomfortable.
For a while.
The Curiosity Driver
Fortunately, within me was a force greater than my need for comfort. My need to make sense of things rises higher than any other, even in such an all-encompassing context as this. Although it felt intolerable to face the possibility that my identity and life energy over the previous seven years was built on sand, it felt even more intolerable for such a provocatively disruptive experience to have occurred without further investigation. I absolutely needed to know more.
Two weeks later, I tip-toed back to the crime scene to see what I might discern. Here’s what I knew about what had happened.
I had turned my full awareness to the actual inner experience of a feeling state or emotion, not the thoughts or sensations.
I had noticed something about my experience that resembled a downward pull like gravity.
I had interacted with that “gravity” in such a way as to actually reverse it.
In reversing the experience of gravity, I flipped my depression at the same time.
The key seemed to me to lie in step #2, identifying a very specific quality of the feeling state experience. What was it about this “gravity” that made it so potent? What other related qualities might I be able to discern in such a feeling state experience?
Over the following few weeks, over and over, I diligently turned my full awareness to focus on my actual, “nebulous,” inner experience of being, feeling, emotion, mood and such. In each exploration I prodded and poked in search of other kinds of qualities that might reveal themselves. Over time, through a kind of relentless search, I managed to surface the following characteristics, or properties, of these feeling state experiences.
Location, size and shape
Substance properties including solid, liquid, gas, light and energy
Temperature
Color and other properties of appearance
Movement, force and pressure
As these properties made themselves known to me, I applied them to developing very direct questions inviting myself to discern the precise values for each of these categories of properties for a specific feeling state. For example, in exploring the property of substance, I might ask the following:
If you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this feeling of (frustration, e.g.) had qualities of substance, would you say that it feels more like a solid, a liquid, a gas, some kind of light or energy, or something else?
Then, in response to a sense that the feeling experience resembled a solid, I might follow up with this:
Would you say that this solid is hard or soft, heavy or light, more or less dense?
In this way, I was able to hone in on very precise values for each of the properties, following the general movement toward, let’s say for example, “hard, heavy, and more dense” to ask about whether or how it might resemble some substance in the world.
(I’ll share more about the structure of this and other questions in my posts about the fieldwork practice.)
In directing these questions to my own awareness, I found that my experience of the feeling state into which I inquired emerged as if out of a dark cloud into full illumination, with tangible and precise clarity. It was as if I could “see” some part of myself for the first time. And yet, it also seemed very familiar, more of an, “Of course, I know you.” More of a validation than a revelation.
Because of my dramatic shift in that first experience with the gravitational depression, I also insisted on continuing to experiment with interaction. For a feeling state that showed up as a hard, heavy solid, for example, I tried changing it to a viscous liquid or even an amorphous gas. Each time I did so, the actual feeling experience responded immediately.
Some directions in which I moved a feeling state led to my experience of that state being more enjoyable, and others less so. There definitely seemed to be a kind of compass, where some values of the categorical properties of the perceived state felt good, and others not so much. And it seemed as though any state I “mapped” could be improved in some way.
Now, at this point I had not yet donned the white coat of science. My priorities were two-fold. First, I wanted relief from the suffering and disruption of my moods. And this new method seemed very, very interesting, to say the least. It pointed to the possibility of having ultimate agency over my felt sense of self, being able to choose in any moment how to feel, to quickly transform any negative states into positive and find an optimal thread of mood and emotion to support whatever I wanted to do, however I wanted to be.
Second, I had started dabbling in these particular experiments in part to serve a passion I had for theatre performance. I had become very curious about how some people are able to captivate and entrance an audience while others seem merely to be bodies moving on a stage. This new discovery promised to contribute to a goal of “choreographing” the movement of emotionally potent spaces on stage and throughout the theater. The fine-tuned control that seemed possible through this proto-language offered a golden opportunity.
Looking back on this from my perspective today, I shake my head with compassion for myself. I had no freakin’ idea what I was getting myself into, and how far it would take me into frontier land, away from the familiar commons shared by everyone else, into realms both terrifying and liberating, both isolating and meaningful beyond compare.
Further into the Discovery Process
How was I to make sense of all of this? I had absolutely no idea what I was encountering. It had no place within my existing frameworks of knowledge and understanding, and none with any other frameworks I was familiar with, whether scientific, therapeutic, theatrical or spiritual.
But it was very clear there was indeed a “something” here. Yes, it corresponded to no existing entities or relationships in my existing maps. But yes, also, it was showing up with a consistency in the pattern of observational data that demanded to be reckoned with.
As I described in Maps Within Maps, we operate according to the more fundamental principles out of which science is built, even without the white coat. So, even though I was not treating this as research, I needed to confirm at least one thing — that I was not going down a meaningless rabbit hole of my own making.
In other words, did my observations have validity, or were they idiosyncratic, personal hallucinations? If I saw a flying saucer in the sky, my first impulse would be to grab someone else and point wildly skyward — would they see it too?
Immediately, I grabbed the first couple of people I could think of, two teenage brothers with whom I was doing some theater work. With the intention of helping them access feeling states and amplify them for stage performance, I ran them through my new questions.
In my seat-of-the-pants, first-pass effort at constructing a new map that included this mysterious new territory, this triangulation with other observers confirmed my suspicions. They had an easy time answering my questions, and their answers transformed their experience of specific feeling states from nebulous to clear and tangible. Plus, it was just as easy for them to interact with the properties of the states to change them directly.
So, no, I wasn’t crazy. This really was a thing.
My next project was simple: I had to learn more. My new map needed observational data, and lots of it. I had to observe, observe, observe, gathering as much direct experience as I could in order to discern salient patterns. What were the entities and relationships in this territory, and how could I capture those and assemble them into a useful map?
A Unique Nexus of Factors
As I mentioned earlier, and as I think you may be able to see in the story I’ve told so far, I got lucky. Already, I was walking a very unusual path in my exploration of what I called emotional landscapes on stage. What I learned in that exploration gave me the seed for my experiment that afternoon when I turned depression upside down. (I will have more to share about this at some point.)
The luck goes much further. As you will see over the coming months in my presentation of the fullness of psychotopology and the practice of fieldwork, as well as in your own exploration of it (I hope), it is very unusual for a state to respond that dramatically to a very small shift in just one of its properties.
My focus on that specific property of that specific experience of depression set me up for that first experiment to take full control of my attention. I simply could not ignore such a dramatic shift, regardless of the very strong forces that would have preferred me to stay on a more familiar path. If the response had been more of what turns out to be normal, I could easily have ignored it and stayed on track with what I already believed about these things.
I also described how I was optimally positioned to harvest the product of this good fortune. Three factors contributed to this capacity.
First, because of my previous experiments in theatre, not only did I stumble into a new method to observe the actual inner experience of feeling with unprecedented fidelity, I simultaneously gained the ability to directly manipulate this experience, setting up an essential experimental tool by which to test my observations.
Second, my employment at the time was as a freelance advertising copywriter. It was something I could do easily, putting very little effort into the amount of work needed to pay my bills. I had plenty of time and freedom on my hands to devote to this new gift I’d been given.
Finally, I had no allegiance to any position of status, any particular practice, or any theoretical paradigm. I had nothing whatsoever to lose, socially, in turning my attention to something altogether outside the existing maps. I could freely enter the space of this mystery with no practical cost to me.
This combination of factors set up a very, very unique opportunity for me, and the absence of any one of these factors would have meant this would never have taken off. For this, I am immensely grateful.
Coming Up Next: Instructions for You to Try It Out Yourself
Next week I intend to post a concise how-to introduction to the fieldwork practice. I want you to be able to walk along with me on this journey of developing the science of psychotopology. Keep an eye out for that!
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Reflections
Here’s your chance to influence how I move forward by adding your reflections in the comments below.
How does this post land for you?
What in you feels like it is being spoken to in this post?
What questions are you left with? What are you most curious about?
What feedback would you like to offer me, in service to my being able to share this new work with you and the world?
What feedback could you offer toward improving my writing of this post?
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Thank you.
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