IS-5: The Subtle Dimension of Feelingmind

Reaching Toward the Essence of Being

What exactly is this experience of being you? One of the attempts to define consciousness refers to it as “what it is like to be” something. Famously proposed by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, if there is something it is like to be a bat, that something is the consciousness of the bat.

Psychotopology starts in this ineffable something, the “what it is like to be” you. How does it get that start? What is this essential something, and how is it possible to access it in a way that makes a science possible?

As you will see, psychotopology fieldwork starts by aiming our attention toward the actual experience of feeling. Let me be clear about what I mean by “feeling,” because it’s a bit different from the norm.

I use the word feeling to refer to this most essential component of what it is like to be you — the actual, felt experience of being, present in every moment. To help make the distinction clear between this and the many other ways the word feeling is used, I often refer to this component of our experience as feelingmind. The experience of feelingmind offers our most direct path into the field dimension at the heart of psychotopology.

Most of us have been trained to focus our attention on everything but this essential presence. So it might help to take a quick tour of what feelingmind is not.

What Feelingmind Is Not

Let’s start with our senses, of course — everything from the visual perception of this text to the sounds of our environment and the feel of our body with its weight pressing down, wherever we are. This, obviously, is not feelingmind.

Now, let us turn our attention with more sensitive awareness to what is going on in our bodies. A stirring here, a tension there, a weight or an openness or a pulsing. Many people have trained themselves to be very aware of what their body is experiencing, and have come to take this somatic information as the experience of feeling. But this, too, is not feelingmind.

We might turn our attention similarly to our thoughts. Perhaps we might notice a background monologue, a memory, an image or a sound, a linkage between this and that through logic or language or pattern. Some people look here for the subtle interpretations of experience, the value judgments or the ratings as pleasant or unpleasant, for example, as evidence of feeling. But again, this is not feelingmind.

In the ideas of many, these modalities encompass the entire experience of being. But is that really all there is? If we stripped all of this away, every type of inner and outer sensory experience along with all cognitive operations upon those, would we really be left with absolutely nothing? Let’s find out.

Tuning into Feelingmind: A Brief Meditation

The following exercise will lead you gently through an imagined experience of dropping away each of the perception and inner activity streams we’ve examined — the visual, auditory and somatic, including thought activity and the sensations of our body. Once these have been set aside, you will have the opportunity to notice what, if anything, remains.

You will have the most potent experience if you begin by bringing your awareness to some specific feeling before you begin. Take a moment to identify some feeling, mood, or emotion (they’re all good-enough words to point in the general direction) inside yourself, and give it a name.

Perhaps you might name the feeling that sits within you as a residual after some emotional experience earlier today, or one that comes frequently as a kind of theme that visits you on many days. Or you could choose to simply name the felt experience of being you in this moment. Any name will do, as long as it resonates at some level, and you can feel it in this moment. Even something simple like “Me” or “Here and Now” will do the trick, as long as it connects you to a distinct felt sense. Maybe take a moment to write down your name for the feeling you’ve chosen.

You will also have the best experience if you make sure to place yourself in a distraction-free environment and make yourself good and comfortable before you begin.

Take a moment after reading what follows to close your eyes and take this on, and lead yourself through the stages I’ve laid out. Online, I’ve also provided a brief audio meditation to lead you through it, in case you prefer that (see link below).

As you begin, make yourself comfortable, and focus for a moment on the feeling state you named. Notice what it feels like to be you, experiencing this feeling.

Now close your eyes, and take that a step further and imagine shutting down or setting aside all of your vision, external and internal, including your visual imagination and visual memory. All goes dark.

Now imagine shutting down or setting aside your hearing as well, tuning out all the sounds around you and turning off your internal auditory activity including imagination, memory, and self talk. All goes quiet.

Now imagine shutting down or setting aside all of the sensations of your body, including those on the outside of your body — sensations of touch, pressure, and temperature on your skin — as well as your more subtle sensations from the inside of your body — your belly, your chest, your muscles. All goes empty.

All visual, auditory and somatic sensation, gone.

All thought, imagination and memory, gone.

Now, what do you notice? What remains? Do you still have some form of being, some kind of “me” inside?

If you bring your awareness now to the feeling state you named before beginning this exercise, what do you notice? Can you identify an actual, felt experience of this feeling, different from body sensation, located somewhere in the space in or around your body? Where would you say that is? And what size and shape does it seem to occupy?

(See original post for audio.)

Noticing What Remains

OK, what do you notice? Do you find that you are able to become aware of a… well… a something? It may be somewhat nebulous at this point, but are you able to confirm for yourself that there is, in fact, something there which is not made of the other standard contents of your conscious experience?

If so, you have just taken the first step into psychotopology fieldwork. This is feelingmind, the place to which we bring a refined precision to engaging our deepest inner experience. (If this did not work for you, please bear with me. We may need to take a different route to get you there, but I’ll do all I can to help you in the coming section, Fieldwork in Depth: Mapping.)

Over the unfolding of this volume and more, I will be making the case that the channels I have described above comprise the periphery of our conscious experience, and that something far more profound, elegant, and wise lies at our core. This core of feelingmind can be described, perhaps, as the ineffable presence of being within us all. It is easily available to our awareness, but we have trained ourselves through lifetimes of practice to restrict our habits of attention to the bright shiny bits at the periphery.

Yet this core is ever-present, always fully involved in every aspect of our inner experience. When we brush up against this core, as inevitably we do, we often use words like feeling, mood, or emotion to refer to it, while being very unclear about what we mean, or what we are pointing to. It remains nebulous, inchoate, inarticulable.

Back to the Subjectivity Barrier

We assume, I think, that this is simply the nature of feeling. There seems to be no farther to go beyond the nebulous. But in my previous chapter, IS‑4: Our Biggest Obstacles to an Inner Science, I describe how the subjectivity barrier combines with the language filter to make it damned near impossible for us to gain any kind of shared map of this inner territory.

Without any shared map, without any clear language by which to navigate this territory, we’re all left completely on our own to grope around blindly. And in recent centuries, we have built a (Western) culture which has all but given up on the project. Instead, we have focused our energies primarily on territories possible to more effectively triangulate and map — the external, physical world, and to a lesser extent, the world of thought which can be expressed and articulated through language, math and symbol.

Now it is true that some people manage to do reasonably well in navigating the realm of feeling despite the lack of support from shared maps. Somehow they preserve their access to the experience of feeling and resist the pull toward restricting their attention to the more objective realms. I am one of these people, and my refusal to submit my experience of feeling to the domination of rationality and objectivity fueled the effort that eventually yielded psychotopology.

It is also true that many non-western cultures preserve much better access to feeling. These are invariably cultures that have not bought into the belief that objectivity is a higher state of being than direct, subjective experience. These cultures tend to be more collective in form, and often have a more thriving connection to nature as well. Nourishing connections to nature and to one another requires nourishing one’s own connection to self through feeling. This connection to self through feeling is the biggest casualty of the western way, especially now that technology has become so masterful at promoting this bondage to thought, language, image, and the illusions of truth and objectivity, all in service to the profit machine.

The Ineffable Presence of Being

The overwhelming tide of objectification is costing us dearly. What can be objectified becomes “real” in our minds, while what cannot be triangulated, measured, or otherwise made object dissolves into evanescence. The derogatory overtones of “not real” and “untrustworthy” that often attach themselves to the word “subjective” expose this underlying trend. Our attention is fully captured by bright, shiny bits everywhere, and scurries from any contact with the ineffable.

The ineffable. Yes, that. Nebulous, subtle, mysterious. Not possible to put into words, numbers, or symbols, and so fading into the background.

How do we reclaim the ineffable presence at the heart of our being? We’ve got two options, more or less. The first, of course, is to carve out more space for mystery and to encourage ourselves to spend a bit more time there. Many people attempt this, but it’s not easy to do amidst the flood of objectivity culture. Dropping out to become a hermit is one way to succeed, but not many have the privilege to do so.

An alternative option is to wade into the zone of ineffability with the tools of science. Perhaps we can apply science’s power of disciplined inquiry and leverage its ability to discern, investigate, and extract discrete entities, patterns and relationships from a previously undifferentiated mass.

This has not succeeded in the past because of the subjectivity barrier. Quite simply, it is impossible (as far as we know) for any person to directly observe any other person’s subjective experience. Observing inner, subjective experience can only be done in the first person. To achieve objectivity, any first-person experience must somehow be brought into third-person comparison with other first-person experiences.

But ask someone about their inner experience, whether directly through language or indirectly through surveys, scales, button clicks and what have you, and you face the utter idiosyncrasy of interior subjectivity. Your “data” is intractably laden with personal imagery, personal experience, and personal meaning. All of this is overlaid with an obscuring vagueness (the language filter), making it very difficult to triangulate with that of any other person. We can sometimes extract certain patterns, it is true, but these tend to be culturally bound and can trend all the way to irrelevant triviality.

How do we overcome this?

An Open Door

As I described in the opening of this chapter, the contents of conscious experience as we currently understand it include the following:

• Your external sensory perception through vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste.

• The more subtle somatic experiences of your body including temperature, pressure, your heartbeat, the state of your digestion, the tension of your muscles, your proprioceptive awareness of positioning, and the signals we refer to as interoception spread throughout your viscera.

• Your thoughts, memories, or imagination including language, logic, story and image, spanning visual, auditory, kinesthetic and other internal channels.

But the ineffable something we’re reaching for lies outside of these three channels. The pure essence of being, the “me-ness” experiencing these streams of content — this is made of something else, is it not?

Again, we have struggled and striven to reach into this nebulous space for thousands of years. But here we are, no closer to understanding, no closer to mastery, it seems, as suffering and conflict escalate without end. How do we do this differently, here and now?

The secret lies in turning the immense power of our attention in a direction to which we are unaccustomed, a direction which yields completely unexpected results. The next chapter, IS-6, outlines the keys to scientific discovery; IS-7: My Approach to Science describes my own unique style of investigation; and in IS-8: A New Method for Observing Inner Experience, I describe my discovery of the breakthrough method for observing inner experience that launches the science of psychotopology.