IS-1: A New Science of Being
Bringing Disciplined Observation to the Study of Subjective Experience
Introducing the Science, Chapter 1
The science of psychotopology began with a simple experiment that yielded jarringly unexpected results. The experiment emerged from a curiosity about how we commonly speak about the experience of feeling. Often when we describe how we feel or how we imagine someone else feels, we use metaphors of materiality. We talk about having a heavy or light heart, feeling shattered, walking on air, carrying a heavy burden, being all wound up, acting hard-headed, glowing with pride, being frozen in fear, seething with anger, radiating confidence, bursting with happiness, an electricity of attraction, or some kind of swirling or leaping or collapsing inside of ourselves.
Why is that? What if these turns of phrase are not just poetic metaphors? What if they point to something more real?
Out of this curiosity, I brought my attention to a familiar feeling of depression that had a definite weight to it. Its dominant sensation was that of a gravity pulling downward through my chest. I wondered what would happen if I deliberately reversed the gravity, and on a lark, flipped it to lift upward instead.
Instantly, my mood shifted. Instead of depressed, I felt downright cheerful, which was startling, to say the least. Over the previous 15 years, I had searched for relief from bipolar disorder by working through the baggage of my childhood, healing old traumas, reconfiguring old beliefs, on and on and on. In this moment, I experienced a relief that came easily with no such effort. A shift in something that should have been irrelevant directly altered my mood. This strange result conflicted with all my expectations accumulated through studying psych sciences and engaging for many years with various inner practices. How did this happen? What did it mean?
Virtual Materiality: The Proto-Language of Being
I decided to explore further. Over the next few weeks, I developed a series of questions to invite attention to the inner experience of specific feeling states, comparing the actual feeling experience to elements of materiality including location, substance, temperature, color, movement, force and sound. I tested these questions on myself and a few others.
The results were clear and strong. We had no trouble at all answering these questions. Not only that, but identifying these properties of materiality brought each feeling state into much more heightened awareness, with an unprecedented, vivid tangibility. It was like switching the lights on in a dark basement. We were blown away by the revelatory impact — seeing things so clearly which had previously been only a nebulous, indecipherable mess.
On reflection, the power of this method makes perfect sense. Every living one of us inhabits a body. This body inhabits a world, and both body and world are experienced as stuff — solids, liquids, gases, light and energy.
This body-in-the-world stuff carries properties, each with specific experiential qualities that enable us to distinguish one patch of stuff from another in order to navigate the requirements of staying alive. These properties include:
Location, size and shape of the patch occupied by one type of stuff, inside of which it exists, outside of which it does not.
Qualities of substance, including solid, liquid, gas, light, energy, along infinite spectrums of hardness, density, weight, texture, etc.
Temperature, including relative value and distribution within the substance.
Color, as well as transparency, luminosity, and more.
Movement, force, and pressure exhibited by this patch of stuff relative to the stuff (or the absence of stuff) that surrounds it.
Sound generated by or with the stuff.
This stuff of our body and our world constitutes the primary mediator of lived experience. We could call it a proto-language of being. We are all fluent in this proto-language, experiencing it deep within our flesh, our bones, and the energy that infuses them. We navigate this world of materiality moment to moment, from long before we are born until the moment when life departs. What better raw material for consciousness to use for constructing the foundation of our inner experience? (Read more about this in SO-5: How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense.)
Transforming the Nebulous into the Tangible Through Precise Observation
Applying the questions about virtual materiality to our experience of specific feeling states amplifies our capacity to perceive our own selves. We’re observing something that feels tangibly real, and this precise observation opens the door to much more profound self-understanding. Here is how one of my clients, I’ll call her Louise, described the experience.
The first feeling I mapped was fear of rejection. First I had to get the words right. “Fear of rejection” is an abstract phrase that could apply to just about anyone. It was not mine. What it really felt like was crumbling. I felt other people’s moods and shifts so acutely that a slight dismissal or an offhand remark could cause me to collapse inside. So I made the transition from the rather generic, possibly universal “fear of rejection” to the more personal “crumbling”.
First, I acknowledged and embraced this Crumbling, and let go of all my reasons for its existence. It made me excruciatingly uncomfortable. It is a strange thing to really feel an emotion. I always tend to cover them with specific thoughts or turn away and find distraction. But now I had to just sit and feel it.
Guided by Joe’s questions, I closed my eyes to try to see if the feeling had a shape and a form and a color. It did. A loosely collected set of yellow particles that collapsed and crumbled within me. “Yellow?” I thought, “Wouldn’t gray or blue or black be more appropriate for this sinking feeling?” I sat with it. They were yellow. I shrugged. They really couldn’t and wouldn’t become any other color.
As I sat with the feeling I felt the particles collapsing. As they collapsed I felt the familiar sinking feeling but this time it was different. The feeling existed on its own without a specific incident to attach it to. All I had was the feeling deep inside me. My core felt very heavy and I was intensely aware of the weight of gravity pulling me down into the chair.
I emerged from the emotion feeling disoriented and shaky. I felt deflated and sad but I also felt a deep sense of understanding for myself. I drew the image. Seeing the image allowed me to objectify the emotion. It no longer felt frightening and elusive and overwhelming. Giving the feeling form moved it from something vague to something tangible.
Once I identified the feeling, its words came through with striking clarity. “You shouldn’t have put yourself out there, you should have kept it all closer.” These were my words coming from a level of my conscious mind I had never heard before. Through life, being rather um… sensitive… I had constructed an instant awareness of the slightest shift in social acceptance, and I protected myself from further hurt by closing up, pulling back, surrounding my self with the protective wall.
This may have protected me from a deeper feeling of social rejection, but it wasn’t helping my social life, or my life as a freelance writer. It just wasn’t helping anymore.
Being able to observe the experience of feeling with this level of precision is unprecedented. Turn the light on in this dark basement of feeling, and you quickly make some surprising observations.
There’s a “thing-ness” to feeling. In attending to the virtual material properties of the experience of a specific feeling state, it takes on a tangible, distinctly objective presence in our awareness, and differentiates itself clearly from other states (SO-1: The Crucial Role of Observation).
Ordinary language obscures actual feeling experience. We discover a surprising diversity of virtual material properties across different individuals mapping the same named emotion (SO-2: Surprising Results as We Begin).
Feeling experience is diverse, even within the same person. It turns out that when a given emotional state is experienced in different contexts over time by the same person, the experience of that state can vary widely (SO-3: A New Hypothesis).
The experience of feeling is different from somatic sensation. Our virtual material feeling experiences frequently extend far beyond the boundaries of the physical body, challenging the dominant theories that feeling is fundamentally a somatic process confined to physiological systems (SO-4: Challenges to the Assumed Somatic Basis for Feeling).
The virtual materiality of feeling echoes that of body schema and embodied cognition. Our observations suggest that our brain’s capacity to model extended embodiment may underlie our ability to experience feeling states (SO-5: How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense).
Feeling states arise in coexisting plurality, interacting in dynamic patterns. The distinct tangibility of our virtual material feeling experiences reveals that feeling forms intricate, multi-faceted structures within us (SO-6: Multiple Coexisting Feeling States).
All conscious experience is grounded in feeling. By turning our awareness toward the ever-present, felt sense of being, we find that virtual materiality extends beyond conventional emotions to include experiences like identity, awareness, or conceptual states (SO-7: The Feeling in Every Conscious Experience).
Even the experience of self — the observer itself — is grounded in feeling. By turning the light of observation back upon the observing self, we discover that the witness experience itself has virtual material properties and is amenable to observation through our lens of virtual materiality (SO-8: The “I” Who Observes).
Spiritual experiences can also be observed. Our rigorous observation uncovers transcendent experiences which correspond closely with states described in various spiritual traditions (SO-9: Observing Transcendent Experiences).
Human suffering is vast and complex. Our observations pull back the veil on the profound depths of human suffering underlying many aspects of personality and behavior, while suggesting this suffering is normal but not natural to human experience (SO-10: The Hidden Hell of Our Lives).
Very early in the process, after these first discoveries emerging from this work, I interpreted these unexpected results as breaking new ground. What exactly was revealing itself here? Fortunately, the method I had stumbled upon gave me the power to do much more than passively observe.
The Power of the Shift
My first experiment of shifting the gravity of my depression from downward to upward indicated right away that accessing this proto-language of virtual materiality confers massive power. Once you map the properties of a feeling state, you can directly interact with those properties to change them. You can make the temperature warmer or cooler, for example, or the substance harder or softer. When you do, the actual experience of the feeling changes instantly. Not only that, the thoughts associated with that feeling state also change in ways congruent with the shift in feeling. Instantly.
Here’s what Louise had to say about shifting her experience of Crumbling.
After identifying this first, intense feeling state, we shifted it. I began by looking at the color. What color did it most want to be? Yellow. The color stayed the same. I was disappointed. I tried to make it a new color but it stayed stubbornly yellow.
I moved on. Particles swirling and sinking moved into a solid pillar in my center. I felt it. It felt warm. Like the warmth of stone in the sun. It felt solid under my hand, but like an energy that takes the form of a solid, with a pulse all the way through it, heartbeat-speed, with a warm, humming sound like a beehive or something. It seemed like the pulse would change and adjust depending on circumstances. It felt good.
I was surprised at the tenacious clarity of each part of the feeling. I tried making it cooler but it didn’t feel right. The temperature was very specific. Warmer than body temperature but not hot. The color, too. I tried making it lighter, then darker. It would shift reluctantly, and immediately I would start to lose track of the good feeling. I brought it back to the state where it felt best. I tried changing the shape. It wouldn’t budge.
As I allowed everything to return to its perfect state, a feeling of strength, calm and confidence flooded over me. It felt right.
A few thoughts/beliefs that came with this new feeling: A sense of forward movement, a reaching out into full experience and true understanding and awareness, fully awake, aware and receptive without fear of threat. “It’s OK,” a safe state of just being. I called it Core Strength.
Overall, the experience of shifting Crumbling to Core Strength left me stunned. It moved so quickly, and the feeling of relief and lightness was sweeping and overwhelming.
This power to interact with the feeling state by deliberately changing the virtual material properties of which it is made enables us not only to transform distress into resourcefulness, but to truly experiment. What do we discover through these transformations? A lot.
One of the most important discoveries reveals a modular structure to consciousness. This client’s experience of Crumbling transforming to Core Strength is an example of a range of motion for one specific module, or part. It has one and only one ideal state that optimizes its function in the context of other parts. We won’t dig fully into this here in Volume 1, but I’ll give you instructions for how to explore it for yourself. And hang tight for Volume 2 where I will lay out all this and much more for you.
To provide a glimpse into what’s coming, though, let me share this illustration of Louise’s flowchart illustrating the relationships between Crumbling and the other states she mapped related to it.
In short, we are complex! And working our way through the transformation of such networks yields profound shifts in life-long patterns. Here is how she described her experience a few months after completing her work with me:
“As the weeks pass I realize increasingly that many of the ways I used to feel or react are simply gone. Once I went through the whole process, I felt rather raw and unformed.
“Now, slowly I am beginning to recreate myself as I always knew I could be, confident, happy, focused and self-aware without being self-conscious. As I find more energy to take care of my emotional self, I have more energy for other people. I have more energy to take care of my physical body, my career, my finances and my surroundings.
“I feel like I have been freed from a heavy burden that I carried for years though I had only limited awareness of it. It’s not so much that I am a different person now, but rather I am the same person without all the issues.”
The Raw Data of Direct Experience
Louise’s experience is a great example of what is possible in this new science. Somehow, now, I must give you entrance to its methods and discoveries. Optimally, I should be able to lay things out for you in a logical order, starting with the science and methods you already know and building upon it into this new domain.
Alas! This was not an incremental science. There was no linear path I followed. My process was one of complete and total immersion in this new world, taking it all in at once, as much as I could comprehend in any given moment, and trying to make sense of it all as a whole. Then wiping the slate as clean as I could and starting over when some bit of that raw data resisted my sense-making, when some tributary of new information insisted upon joining the river of my research. And once again, immersing myself in this new, larger stream, taking it all in and making a new effort to comprehend the whole, to make sense of where it was carrying me.
All along the way, I tested my methods and models by applying them to my own inner experience and by inviting others to explore along with me. Both avenues were essential for developing the work.
In retrospect, I believe it was crucial that I was no expert — in anything, really. My identity had no attachments to existing frameworks. A normal person from academia, an experienced psychotherapist, or a practitioner of one of the many spiritual practices would have been drawn to interpret that anomalous experience from the baseline of their expertise, and there probably would have been plenty of ways to interpret it.
Because I was free of these attachments, I was free to take on a framework that interpreted my experience as evidence of something utterly unknown. My curiosity was in charge as I chose to step across the threshold into what seemed to me to be a new frontier. In doing so, I stepped away from trying to fit what I was observing and experiencing into existing models, and married myself to the raw data of direct experience as my primary teacher and guide.
I have thought in the past that I could somehow reproduce the stream of my discovery for others. But I am realizing now that is most likely impossible. All the things are connected to all the other things, every single element influencing everything else. There is no good way for me to lead you step by step through the discovery process. The phrase “You can’t get there from here” comes to mind, where “here” is where we are all starting from. There’s no way I could have arrived here, where I am, if I had stayed in any way faithful to existing frameworks.
Another thing is, this work changes you, and in changing you, it changes the work itself. The very idea of science and how it is supposed to be conducted is baked into our inner structures of being, and as we liberate those inner structures, the ideas we hold transform. The place I stand today is very different from where I began. Everything looks different from here. There is no way for me to recapitulate my own journey, and even if I did, your journey will need to be different.
Building on a New Foundation
Instead of following a linear progression, I will be offering facets as I lay out this new science. Each facet will be its own small world. In the beginning, the facets may seem to stand alone, unsupported. But as I proceed, the facets will begin to assemble themselves — I hope — into a very clear structure in which each facet has a strong relationship to all of the others.
Doing things this way gives me a certain freedom. I will go back and forth between sharing distinct discoveries of the inner topology of being and discussing the overall philosophical and scientific framework that emerges as a result of these discoveries. Interwoven with this will be instructions on using the tools which make these discoveries possible. I am not going to pretend to be an academic, and so except for the occasional reference, I will not be making the extraordinary effort it would require for me to link what I say to words others have written. That task will be best left to others more knowledgeable than myself. Perhaps in the future, after the foundation is established, and with the help of you and others who can ask the questions that enable us to link to other theories, experiments, teachings, and more.
Here, we will start fresh, building instead upon the raw data of direct, conscious experience. In order for you to make sense of what I share here, you will absolutely need to do the inner work. Without it, what I share is not likely to make sense. This work hangs together in its own new world, and even when some of these facets may reflect something from the world of the familiar, the whole most definitely does not.
Interconnections from the Inside Out
That said, every facet I share will indeed reflect other people’s work both currently and throughout history. We are all human, and as such, every one of us holds within ourselves the inner structures revealed by psychotopology. Those who have pioneered new ways of thinking or working have been enacting some aspect of that inner topology, and of course you will see many resonances. At the same time, I believe it will be helpful to immerse yourself in this world for a time, to really get what it reveals and how that touches other features in our human world.
To serve this, again, I very highly recommend that as you follow this assembly of facets of the science of psychotopology, that you also immerse yourself in the practice of fieldwork. As I mentioned, the ideas, concepts, beliefs and frameworks we hold, any one of us, are shaped congruently with the structures we hold inside of ourselves. Most of those structures are distorted away from their full, natural functioning because of the ways of our culture and its separation from this inner field dimension of conscious experience.
Every one of us has suffered as a result of this separation, and every one of us holds as a result some distortion in our worldview, no matter how intelligent we may be or how persistently we have pursued an accurate understanding of the world. You will discover the most if you also give yourself to the fieldwork practice of identifying those places held in distortion and releasing them back into aliveness. As you do this, your thinking will naturally evolve in ways neither you nor I would be able to predict from where we stand today.
This evolution of understanding introduced by the new science of psychotopology is also very much a work in progress, and it will remain so for quite some time into the future. At the moment, I stand at the farthest extent of this frontier. As you and others enter this new land from your own positions, many of you will bring insights from other work, other philosophies, other experiences. As you immerse yourself in the world opened by psychotopology, you too will begin to experience and understand our human reality differently, each of you from your own unique perspective. Together, as we share our insights with one another, a new, collective understanding will emerge and continue to evolve.
I want to say very clearly that I do not hold all the answers, nor do I ever expect to. This work is a way of engaging with a dimension of reality that has eluded us to this point, and our fresh engagement with this dimension has a long future ahead of it. I cannot predict where psychotopology will lead us, only that as we engage with one another in cooperative collaboration, new skills will coalesce and new revelations will make themselves available to our awareness. This is what excites me the most about this work, and this is what I hope will attract you to join me here.
Thank you Joe for this clear and intriguing intro into the new field of Psychotopology.
You say, "Here, we will start fresh, building instead upon the raw data of direct, conscious experience."
I totally understand that not having any prior academic or psycho-whatever attachments and/or experiences are a huge bonus and a precondition for discovering a new path... a whole new world, I might say. The 'old frameworks' are based and built on keeping us within their boundaries and trapped in preconceptions... so YES I agree wholeheartedly.
and
"In order for you to make sense of what I share here, you will absolutely need to do the inner work."
Absolutely essential! I'm excited and looking forward to experimenting with the practice of psychotopology. with much love and best wishes xx