Getting Real with Feeling

Chapters from the Published Volume 1 Manuscript

Jul 01, 2025

I’ve been developing psychotopology for three decades, and have made many attempts to capture its methods, discoveries and implications over those years. It’s so big, though, and so outside conventional realities that it’s hard to build bridges to span the gap.

But I’m well underway now. In June, 2024, I began posting here on Frontiers of Psychotopology, committing to a weekly post to start assembling the writing that would establish this work. It became clear that I would need to break things up into three phases, each phase with its own book.

The posts from the first year have gone into the first volume of this trilogy. It focuses on fieldwork mapping, going into the method in detail and examining the discoveries that emerge from applying it. I’ve archived those draft posts here:

Volume 1 Drafts Archive

Joe Shirley

Jul 21

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After compiling and editing these posts, making many revisions and refinements, I completed and published this first volume in June of 2025. Here’s my announcement post:

It’s Been a Year, and Now There’s a Book

Joe Shirley

Jun 25

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I updated quite a lot, building and refining the material into a more readable book as a whole. Because so much has changed, and because I need to take a step back to regroup and begin drafting Volume 2, I am taking the rest of 2025 to re-post the chapters as they took shape in the published book.

One chapter at a time, we will build this final manuscript. You can follow in the table of contents below.

My Recommendation

I seriously suggest that you purchase the book (see links in the announcement post), and use it as a complement to these posts. The book is great for reading wherever it’s most comfortable for you, and for breaking away from your screen. But the posts provide color images and audio to complement many portions of the book. Together, they offer the best way to immerse yourself in this new field dimension of subjective experience.