One Facet at a Time

Introducing the Science of Psychotopology

Image by fettabernett from Pixabay (cropped)

The science of psychotopology began with a simple experiment that yielded jarringly unexpected results. I describe this in the intro to my first post, Frontiers of Psychotopology. By directly reversing a sense of downward gravity in a feeling of depression, I became cheerful in a matter of seconds. No working with beliefs, no attention to somatic sensation, no processing traumatic memories, nothing of the sort. 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.

Moving beyond that first experiment, I quickly developed a series of questions revealing what I call the virtual materiality dimension of feeling experience, including location, substance, temperature and other precise qualities. Using this new method, which I now call fieldwork, the more I engaged the actual experience of feeling, the more significant this mismatch between expectations and observations seemed to become.

My intention in The Science section is to present the observations revealed by fieldwork along with my attempts to make sense of them.

The Freedom of No Attachments

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 am grateful to have had the courage (possibly more accurately labeled audacity or even grandiosity) to trust my own ability to make sense of what I was discovering. Honestly, I didn’t have much of a choice, being an outsider with no credentials or affiliations, no network or rolodex to turn to. And I had never encountered anything like it in my studies to that point. As far as I could tell, I was on my own. There was nobody to reach out to, and no way forward but through.

The Power of Starting from Scratch

I conducted my science in a manner very different from the norm. I did not start with existing principles or theories, did not refer to previous protocols or interpretations, made reference to no studies or texts. It was as if I was conducting this science at the very beginning of science itself, centuries ago, with nothing to build upon, no shoulders to stand on, no mentors to guide me. I turned my back on the entire history of psychological and other sciences because the world I had entered seemed invisible from those places.

And yet. At the same time, I knew something about the basic practice of science, had done the prerequisites for medical school and had intended to become a neuroscientist and researcher of consciousness before dropping out of college years previously. And I had a definite respect for the process of trying to make sense of a new world.

I conducted myself as a solo pioneer, thoroughly exploring and attempting to make maps of the terrain. Over and over again, shifting to this perspective and that, taking steps back, starting all over. Cycles upon cycles of designing and redesigning both my methods of inquiry and my models of what I was discovering.

The Necessity of Immersion

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.

I have thought in the past that I could somehow reproduce the stream of 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, 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. 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.

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. My work hangs together in its own new world, and even when some of these facets may reflect something from outside this world, the whole most definitely does not.

My commitment is to share these discoveries as a whole, integrated with the new perspectives that emerge with them, without attempting to link them to other work at this time. In the future, I will attempt to draw many connections to other work, hopefully drawing upon conversations with you and others who are asking the questions that enable us to link other work with this. But psychotopology is built upon a new foundation, so we will not be starting with those connections.

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, you too will begin to experience and understand our human reality differently, and as we share our insights with one another, a shared understanding will 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 together, 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.

What’s Here

What’s Coming

Over coming months (and years), I intend to release one or more The Science posts per month, interweaving with posts for the Fieldwork section and others. Some of those to come will touch on the following themes. (I will add links to these as they are posted.)

• Reality as maps, and science as map design: A useful way of thinking about science and experience. (See Maps Within Maps and Building Good Maps.)

• The challenge of the subjectivity barrier in undertaking a science of subjective experience. (See Our Biggest Obstacles to an Inner Science.)

• Principles for investigating subjective experience.

• Observing the feeling experience: What exactly are we doing with fieldwork mapping?

• Unexpected results in our observation: Ways the actual experience of feeling breaks with our expectations.

• Multiple states: Examples of how multiple feeling states coexist, and the kinds of relationships that show up.

• The nature of knowledge: A different way to think about what we know.

• The nature of language: Where language lives in the inner topology.

• Variety in individual experience: Examples of the wide diversity of actual experience within existing monolithic categories.

• My first experiment: How the door opened for me.

• The transcendent whole: The deepest foundation of this work.

• Direct interaction with feeling: Looking at the experience of moving a state with fieldwork, and what this opens up.

• Ideal states: What it means that any feeling state can be moved, and that every state has its own ideal.

• Types of ideal states: A fundamental typology of ideal states, with questions about what this means.

• States as expressions of modules: The thingness that underlies feeling.

• The difference between structure and content in consciousness, and why it matters.

• Ideal as the identity of a module: What it means that a module has an ideal state.

• Source parts.

• Presence parts.

• Guidance parts.

• The full set of nine: The matrix of three triads of modules that comprises the experience of a self-in-the-world.

• The field nature of conscious experience.

  • Feeling states as affect fields.

  • Thought imagery channels — visual, auditory, somatic.

  • Thought connections — links between VAS images.

  • Types of thought connections — equivalence, sequence, causation.

  • The role of language in thought.

  • VAS imagery fields.

  • Conjunction of imagery fields and affect fields in each module.

  • Connections within a module vs. between modules.

• Witness modules and the 3-level witness experience.

• Sets of sets: The emergence of triads of sets, or constellations — three sets that work together in universal ways.

• Tri-constellations: How three constellations inhabit the same level.

• Nine levels: The full psychotopology architecture.

This is a lot, yes! I intend to get us started with a high-level, multi-post summary of much of it, so you won’t have to wait three years to get a glance at the whole scope of things. Then we’ll dig into the nitty gritty, facet by facet by facet.

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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One last note. I’d love for you to thoughtfully spread the word about Frontiers of Psychotopology. For example, reach out to someone you think would appreciate this, and tell them why. Alternatively, here on Substack, feel free to share with your beloved subscribers.