Getting Real About Inner Experience
Wrapping Up This Phase, Getting Ready for What’s Next — Number 11 in the Observation Series
Previous post in this series:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!