Possibilities for Social Alchemy

Overcoming Barriers to Generative Social Change

For me, one of the most exciting benefits of psychotopology is the possibility of applying its principles toward catalyzing and facilitating generative social change. Psychotopology reveals a universal structure of being, and in doing so, provides the basis for designing practices that fundamentally shift our relationships to ourselves and one another towards being more nourishing to the life within us all.

Recently I have begun to experiment with designing such practices in the context of two small local groups starting up in the past couple of weeks. My partner, Spring Cheng, has been a key spark in getting both groups going, and has invited me to get involved from the beginning.

Both of these groups are exploring responses to the prevalent societal divisions today, recognizing that beneath these divisions lies a shared humanity that is being obscured and obstructed by the surface depictions of difference. One group began from a desire to create spaces within which to bridge differences across political positions. The other carries a wider lens centered on Spring’s choice of the term “social alchemy” to invite a next-generation response to patterns of societal conflict, injustice, oppression, and inequality that does not perpetuate the us/them, less-than/more-than, inside/outside, worthy/unworthy divisions that underlie the conflicts at their root.

Reflecting on Our Cultural Restrictions

This past week I was invited to hold the space as a facilitator for the two groups. Over the week before our meetings, I took some time to reflect on the key principles of psychotopology and ask myself how they might be brought into a facilitated group experience. Over a coming series of posts, I would like to discuss some of these possibilities with you and report on how things are going as I experiment with their application.

First, though, I would like to share some of my thoughts on the origins of the challenge we’re facing as a society. This will just be scratching the surface. Much of my perspective operates at a level beneath language, and this will be a first-pass attempt to put some of it into written words. There will be much that I leave out, and what I do say is likely to be rough around the edges. I commit to refining this over coming months as this ’stack grows, and I welcome your input (hint, hint, comments below).

Privileging Thought Over Feeling

One of the most powerful ways culture shapes our experience is by creating strong norms for how we are expected to use our powers of attention. In modern western culture, attention is guided toward thought above all, and to how we inhabit and express thoughts in the company of others. The stories we carry, the beliefs we hold, and the rational ways we enact, articulate and defend these as true, real, and important serve as the containers for all else. We see this tendency taken to an extreme in social media, where the ordinary restraints of embodiment are removed and people can engage this world of thought with few restrictions.

What’s missing here is a focus on feeling. Oh, yes, certainly people do feel strongly at times when they are focusing on their thoughts and their communications of those thoughts. Oh, yes, people do express themselves with strong emotion at times. That’s not what I’m talking about. The strong emotions that show up in our polarized politics, for example, get channeled through our stories and beliefs and our rational justifications for those. The focus goes to those words and what they say. We get triggered, and in our triggered state we shame, blame and justify, declaring these truths and those injustices. Rarely if ever do we turn our attention inward to what is actually going on inside of ourselves.

One of the central discoveries of psychotopology, on the other hand, is that rationality is not rational at all. The deeper experience of feeling completely and thoroughly constrains and shapes the thoughts we are able to hold. When our focus is upon our thoughts and the expressions of our thoughts, we are bound to the deeper logic of the underlying feeling structures, which no rational argument can modify.

(Over coming months I will be showing you these structures and how they operate. For now, I will leave things simple and ask you to trust me long enough to take in the science of psychotopology and the practice of fieldwork as it unfolds in my posts here.)

The Bondage of Screens

Modern technology amplifies this prejudice toward thought through its simulation of thought patterns in three-dimensional space. Our computers, laptops, tablets and phones lock our focused attention onto a space two feet in front of our face and pour simulations of all that exists into those screens. Thought typically occupies space, usually in front of our bodies, often in regions similar to those occupied by screens. Thought is executed through mental, multi-sensory images linked in sequence and through language to construct complex networks.

(Again, I have not posted enough of the foundation to support what I am telling you, so take this as an invitation to stay tuned as I continue to roll things out.)

Typically, our attention also finds its way into the spaces beyond our thought, into our perceptual fields that stretch through our bodies and into our environment. We gaze at a mountain in the distance, and our field of attention reaches deep into the space in front of us. We reflect on the feeling of awe at the surrounding landscape under the moonlit sky, and our awareness expands to fill a seemingly infinite space around and through our being. We notice a feeling of sadness about a recent loss, and our awareness drifts toward a heaviness in our chest.

When we’ve locked our attention to a screen, on the other hand, our field of attention remains fixated to that zone in front of our heads. The result is an even stricter enforcement of our cultural norm of prioritizing thought above all else.

Aversion to Feeling

Our culture doesn’t stop with a promotion of thought as the be-all, end-all focus of every moment, though. It also teaches us an explicit aversion to feeling. As children, certain emotions and their expressions are treated as evidence of unwanted characteristics like inadequacy, weakness and lack of respect. Depending on gender, culture and context, fear, sadness, and anger can be strictly prohibited, met with shaming or punishment by both caretakers and peers. In contrast, other emotions and their expressions are celebrated and rewarded, again with nuanced differences depending on the social context.

The underlying assumption is that emotion is controllable, and that to fit in one must control one’s emotions toward appropriate, acceptable forms. No explicit instruction is ever given about how to do that, though. Some kids figure it out, others don’t. Those who succeed tend to arrive at a strategy that relies upon the control of attention. We can’t control what we feel, so we set up boundaries in our awareness to make sure we just don’t go near any of the prohibited zones. As a result, we wall off large parts of our interior worlds and confine ourselves to those spaces which can more easily fit the requirements we’re given.

We take this further in our attempts to do serious work, or address serious issues. In our culture, we hold that anything important must draw a boundary outside of which all emotional material must remain. In all our important meetings, we maintain the illusion that feeling has no role and that our attention must remain fixed upon the rational, analytic, logical and mathematical realities and truths. Anything else is mere sentiment and must be banished from the office.

Even our approaches to studying emotion and feeling are bound by this prejudice. What matters in research is that we choose to interact only with elements from which it is possible to extract numerical measurements and analyze our data through careful statistical methods. We make sure to stick to what is possible to be measured without acknowledging that our measuring technologies are crude in comparison to what we profess to be studying. We concoct theoretical constructions to support our approach, pushing ourselves relentlessly to the limits of reductionism. Above all, we make sure to avoid any contamination from our own inner experience as we conduct our research, lest we introduce confounding biases and muddy the waters. Given our privileging of objectivity over subjectivity, this is the only way to proceed. (Read more about this in Building Good Maps.)

The Limits of Our Methods

Over recent years, fortunately, there has been significant movement toward honoring people’s feelings and emotions, especially in certain more progressive circles of people working on the front lines of societal change and healing. Whether working directly with those suffering mentally and emotionally, or addressing the societal inequities which often contribute the most to such suffering, these people have recognized the importance of making space for the expression and processing of emotion. This is heading in the right direction, but it can be very challenging to carry out the intention.

Two factors contribute to this challenge. The first factor is a consequence of the problem itself — a culture which suppresses feeling creates people who carry very, very intense pockets of agony, terror, rage, and other intolerable states within them. The experience of being invited into this territory is often one of encountering great danger. This makes entering the realm of feeling and emotion quite risky.

The second factor is our rudimentary understanding of emotion and our inadequate tools for working with it. Yes, we have learned a great deal about the physiological role of the body and the brain in hosting and generating emotional responses. But I call this out as “rudimentary” and “inadequate” because, as I pointed out above, the current state of the art in working with these things has not incorporated a functional science of actual conscious experience.

Psychotopology reveals an immense gap in our collective understanding, and sheds light on the reasons for our struggles. But at the moment, this work remains hidden under the radar, outside the halls of academia and the labs of industrial psych. In the absence of such a science in the mainstream, those at the front lines of working with people who suffer are left to nibble at the edges of people’s actual experience, pulling overly mechanistic strings to try to stabilize the mysterious disruptions within us.

The Need for Safe Spaces

A consequence of this undeveloped state of the art is that people in the professions of therapy, social work, organizational work, and other forms of facilitating inner and communal processing have all encountered situations where the people they were helping went into intense emotions too far, too fast. This kind of situation can be scary for everyone, and understandably embeds an attitude of vigilant caution into those who hold these supportive roles. This creates a high level of attention toward creating “safe spaces” for all manner of conversation and processing at all levels.

The message this sends, though, is that emotion is dangerous, that feeling intense inner states can lead to unmanageable vortexes with potentially catastrophic consequences. This contributes, then, to the cultural feedback teaching us that because feeling can only happen in certain safe contexts, the best practice is to avoid feeling in everyday life, with the everyday people in your life. Only professionals are equipped to handle such intensity. But of course, access to these professionals is extremely limited for most people.

At the moment, our capacity to make a significant-enough difference is limited by our lack of understanding of inner experience and its interface with both outer behaviors and the mechanisms of our body. We make do by controlling the contexts as much as possible and using the limited tools we have. But wow, it’s exhausting, and things can go off the rails at any time. Meanwhile, as a whole, our culture seems to keep trending toward greater and greater forces of conflict, disruption and widespread suffering. What can we do?

Catalysts for Change: Two Key Principles

In future posts in this section, I will share practices which apply the principles and discoveries of psychotopology to catalyzing generative change in our relationships and communities. Most of these practices will ground themselves in the following two principles.

• Feeling at the Center

• Trust in Feeling’s Wisdom

Let’s take a brief look at the origins of each of these and what happens when they join together in how we show up with others.

Feeling at the Center

When we bring focused, disciplined awareness to our actual conscious experience through psychotopology fieldwork, we discover feeling at the center of our being. Every activity, every impulse, every thought, intuition, response, adaptation, fantasy — all of it — is grounded in the experience of being. Even our sense of being a self, having an identity, and the pure perception of observing our lived experience is grounded in an actual felt sense.

Feeling is foundational, more at the root of our conscious experience than somatics and thought. It is not a result of, or a response to thought and perception, but a producer and shaper of the tones of thought and perception. It is not a summary harvest of the body’s physiological states but an interactive co-shaper of somatic activation. And it is not a thing in itself, not an activation of a neural circuit, for example, but an expression of a deeper thing.

This deeper thing can be thought of as a part of the self. And we have many parts. When we bring disciplined awareness to the actual inner experience of feeling we discover a multiplicity of coexisting feeling states constituting our total experience of being a self-in-the-world in any given moment. In every moment, a family of these parts of the self is in conversation with one another, each expressing though experiences of distinct feeling states, each contributing to a collaborative weaving of thought and activity.

All of this exists to guide us through the complexities of life. But our cultural obsession with thought undermines this guidance. By simply shifting our awareness to the experience of feeling, we can begin to reclaim our natural inner wisdom. In coming posts, we will explore various ways to effectively enact this shift.

Trust in Feeling’s Wisdom

Powerful guidance operates within a reference frame. It has access to a compass, a north star, a set of landmarks.

Psychotopology reveals that feeling offers these gifts. Fieldwork emerged from the discovery that the experience of feeling is encoded in the proto-language of virtual materiality. Every feeling experience is hosted in discrete spaces in and around the body in the forms of substance, temperature, movement and more.

Bringing our awareness to these inherent properties of the feeling experience, we discover that feeling has a built-in compass. That compass is activated with awareness itself, and its operation is facilitated by the simple invitation, “What do you want?” If we focus on substance, for example, we find that every specific feeling state will have its own unique preference for what kind of substance it wants to be experienced as.

In fieldwork, we bring our attention systematically to the set of virtual material properties, inviting each in turn to shift toward its ideal. As the feeling state shifts, and eventually arrives at the ideal characteristics for all of its properties, it reveals the deeper identity of that part of the self. Its ideal state is its inbuilt north star.

When functioning naturally, the parts of the self all work together. Each has access to its north star, its true function in the whole of the self. Each communicates its current relationship to that ideal function through how its feeling state is expressed in the moment. When we are drifting from our optimum functioning, we feel something uncomfortable. Our attention goes to the discomfort, we discover what is out of alignment, and we make a correction.

When our attention is bound to thought instead, though, these corrections are interrupted. We act from places of distress and reactivity, and compound the problem. The different parts intensify their distressing states and the self as a whole drifts into dysfunction.

Simply bringing our awareness back to feeling at the center of our being begins to restore our natural functioning. Explicitly inviting ourselves to trust feeling’s guidance supports and nourishes this inner wisdom. Nothing is more important.

Becoming Catalysts

When we practice and embody these two principles, we become catalysts of regenerative emergence for the social world around us. Simply maintaining a conscious awareness of feeling within ourselves brings a tangible presence into the space we inhabit. Others feel this presence, and it influences them to bring awareness to their own presence in turn. I will have much more to share about how we can intentionally cultivate this catalyst capacity in ourselves and others.

Even more exciting, though, is what becomes possible when we build community around these simple principles. The community becomes a catalyst in the larger ecosystem of communities. People who come in contact with members of this community experience its presence, and the life force within them responds with affirmation. They recognize something is different here than the norm, and the difference is attractive to them. The community grows and becomes a force for change.

The change that emerges from such a catalyst community is not one built on communication of a vision, execution of a plan, or other stock strategies for change in our thought-bound culture. From the embodiment of the principles of our deep inner wisdom arises an emergent change. We honestly cannot know what shape it will take, and we serve this transformation best when we hold outcomes lightly, with reverence for the mystery of life’s unfolding.

This is the vision of social alchemy. Please stay connected to learn more.

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?

Comments are open to all, and I do hope you will consider also subscribing so we can stay in the loop with one another as this evolves.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for sharing your thoughts in the comments below. I look forward to meeting you soon.

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