Our Emergent Future
Introducing the Interfield Framework
In the chaos of today’s collective landscape, there is no position, no perspective, no guide from which anyone is able to see the whole. And yet, people often act as though their point of view is all there is to know about the entirety of reality. They act with illusions of certainty, believing their beliefs are the truth and clinging to their truth with desperation in the face of the chaos. This tendency can be especially strong for people in positions of power.
This is a massive challenge, one with the potential to kill us all if it is not resolved. In what follows, I will introduce a simple but profound framework from which we might address this challenge.
At the heart of this framework are the discoveries of psychotopology. This is what I have begun sharing with you here over this past year and will continue sharing into the coming years, slowly, steadily, as I lay it all out for you as best I can.
Although I have barely begun to share those discoveries with you here, I feel compelled to leap forward to give you a glimpse of what is coming and why I feel so strongly about planting the seed of psychotopology in this world. This framework could perhaps be thought of more as a philosophy, perhaps. It is a way to hold the whole with greater capacity for embracing the mystery of the unknown, a way to inhabit a larger, more coherent and less fractured version of a lived reality.
I want to offer you this framework as I inhabit it, as it grows in me and as I grow in it, side by side with the discoveries that ground it. Through sharing it with you, I aspire to learn more about this framework for myself, and for it to grow more robust in its usefulness for you and for all of us. Once I get further underway with this effort, after finishing a little more of laying out the science and the practice, I will place my writing in a new section of this publication, perhaps entitled Our Emergent Future.
I am considering calling it Our Emergent Future to be clear about one thing: Our future touches every one of us, and is touched by every one of us. We each have a role and responsibility, first, in having created what is here, and second, in evolving what is becoming.
An Emerging Framework, a Framework of Emergence
What, then, is this framework I am proposing? I have been living this implicitly within myself for a long time, but have never really spelled it out before. Because of this, what I lay out below will inevitably be partial and incomplete.
In addition, this framework cannot exist within one person alone, so what I share with you here will be limited as well by the very small size of the existing community inhabiting it. What I am carrying into this emergence comes from my decades developing and inhabiting psychotopology and its introduction of the field dimension of consciousness and experience. I carry this in the context of collaborations with a few people in my circle.
One of those collaborations has stretched over the past 12 years with my partner, Spring Cheng, and our mutual exploration of this new way of inhabiting a shared life. Another two collaborations have arisen over the past year with a few people in our local community, exploring new ways of being together that bridge differences and cultivate emergent wisdom. I will be drawing on my experiences with all of these in the course of presenting this framework, but the scope of experience in enacting what this framework makes possible will be limited for now.
Which leaves the door wide open to invite your contributions. My intention is to keep this simple at the beginning. I offer it now to get things started, and will continue to refine it in coming months and years as it reveals more of itself to me, hopefully including through your engagement.
So, at the moment, this is what I offer.
A Very Brief Summary
First, above all: Any serious attempt to create a map for navigating both individual and collective realities must include a high-resolution, coherent and reliable portion of the map which covers the territory of subjective experience. Any map lacking this is and will be inherently incomplete and flawed, and using it to navigate will likely yield poor results. We are living these poor results in our chaotic world today.
The following map not only includes a portion which covers the territory of subjective experience, it places that portion at the center of the entire map. The felt experience of being is considered to be the foundation of our lived reality, and it is this lived reality for which our map is designed.
The Interfield Nature of Existence
Modern physics reveals that the most fundamental ground of all existence lies in its field nature. Whether in quantum field theory, general relativity, or anywhere between, fields give rise to the universe we inhabit. Even the vacuum, far from being empty, teems with energy and fluctuation, suggesting that fields are ever-present, shaping the fabric of existence. This interwoven, dynamic interplay between fields forms the substrate of all that we can observe.
It should be no surprise, then, that the ground of conscious experience also exhibits a deeper, interconnected field dimension. Through psychotopology fieldwork, we discover that subjective experience arises from dynamic interactions between underling fields. Just as physical fields interact to produce the phenomena we perceive as matter and forces, subjective fields of feeling, thought and perception coalesce to form the structure of how it is that our phenomenal perception and experience actually arise.
By beginning an investigation of the interfield dynamics of subjective reality, we touch on the promise of one day discovering profound parallels between the inner and outer dimensions of reality. This invites a unified perspective, where the fundamental principles of interaction, emergence, and interconnection govern both the physical and subjective worlds, potentially bridging the gap between advanced physics and the exploration of consciousness.
The Natural Drive Toward Evolutionary Wholeness
All of this interfield existence — that of physics as well as that of consciousness — naturally manifests ever-greater order and wholeness through a series of three spontaneous, interwoven movements:
First, differentiation. What was once uniform spontaneously redistributes itself until some portion — some “thing” — differentiates from the rest, while the rest simultaneously becomes the something else, the “other”.
Second, integration. What was once separate engages in relationship with its other, forming a more complex whole that acts as a unit.
Third, participation. This more complex whole itself differentiates from what surrounds it, integrates with its other, and participates in a higher-order emergence of an even greater whole.
Think of the natural development of life, from organic molecules to single cells, coordinating into ever more complex organisms inhabiting ever more complex ecosystems. Think of the natural embryogenesis of a fertilized egg growing into a child. This process of differentiation, integration and participation has driven evolution from the beginning of time, and continues to do so today.
If we ignore the presence of this life force driving towards ever-greater order and ever-more-inclusive wholeness, the universe appears to naturally degrade from order into chaos. But this force is clearly real, and conscious experience is its most evident expression.
Built Into Conscious Experience
In psychotopology, we find these three functions within the field structure of subjective experience at a fundamental level. The very experience of being a self in the world is made of these three functions: the self, the other, and the context within which self and other engage in relationship.
What this means, essentially, is that this capacity is a part of our essential nature. At the most basic level of being, experienced directly through feeling, we have direct access to this interfield connection with ourselves, with one another, and with all that is.
This interfield connection weaves in and through our experience of full embodiment. By embodiment, I mean much more than the physical body. Yes, the somatic self is the nexus of intersection for the interfield as it inhabits our being, but our experience of the interfield extends far beyond the skin. The virtual materiality of feeling is one primary dimension of this experience, directly accessible and easy to develop through the practice of fieldwork. There is more, and we will come to that later. For now, this is enough to occupy our efforts at opening into this expanded self.
The natural position for this interfield experience of feeling is at the center of our awareness. Awareness catalyzes its natural functioning as a vessel through which the universe seeks ever-evolving degrees of order within ever-expanding contexts of wholeness. We are natural expressions of this evolutionary drive. When we ground our awareness in feeling, we find ourselves naturally growing, learning, developing, connecting and expanding who and how we are in the way we inhabit our experience of life.
Interrupted by Misdirection
Unfortunately for us in these times, the interfield experience of feeling has become displaced from the center of our awareness. In its place lives the substrate of classical rationality — the concepts, language and logic that drive our search for truth and objectivity.
Whether the script comes from a religious text or philosophical tome, an influencer explanation or self-help guide, the advice of a consultant or the diatribe of a politician, we place definitive words on high pedestals and cast feeling to the fringe. We fixate our attention on text, audio and video both in our environment and within our own minds, keeping the chatter moving constantly as we seek the next hit, the next trigger, the next promise of resolution at the pinnacle of truth. Meanwhile, feeling festers outside our awareness, sometimes piercing through only to be exiled once again.
Let me be clear. Rationality is a gift. Its purpose is simply the making of maps like this one — those entities, relationships and contexts that guide our navigation in the world. And its most recent evolution has been toward more efficient, comprehensive and reliable construction of these maps.
However. It achieved this step forward in part by restricting its zone of operation to that which was more amenable to a rational approach from the start: the simple physical world. By narrowing its focus it was able to optimize its practice, and our sciences of the material world leapt forward in ways that catapulted us into new orders of security, predictability and efficiency in all sorts of ways.
We took this success as feedback on the original framing and clung to that framing long past its usefulness. Today, despite boundless sophistication of our sciences and ways of thinking, we find ourselves hobbled, stumbling along and bashing our heads into walls at every turn. Our collective activities are destroying our own home, and our rabid beliefs divide us into intractable factions with hatred shooting in all directions.
Why? Where have things gone wrong?
Hijacked by an Incomplete Rationality
Very simply, by continuing to commit our rationality to a world in which subjective experience is exiled, we cut ourselves off from the essential life force of our feeling souls. We have become zombies, literally and apocalyptically.
When we lose access to our natural experience of the interfield, we pay a devastating price. Unable to feel our fundamental belonging within the whole of existence, we scramble to fill this void through various compensations:
Addiction in its many forms (substances, technology, work, etc.)
Desperate pursuit of external validation through status, wealth, or the illusions of identity or freedom
Emotional numbness and dissociation
Exploitation of others and nature
Conflict arising from perceived separation
Our displaced feeling function fails to access our natural drive toward wholeness and creates the experience of separation instead. This separation becomes the alternate drive, seeking resolution through pushing against the perceived other with ever greater force.
Separation on the inside generates opposition on the outside. If we see any other person as “other” without simultaneously engaging with the integration with that person into a larger whole which includes us both, we do not see that person at all. We see only a projection of the separation within ourselves.
Further, if a person is not able to see the humanity in all people, placing that person in a position of leadership in any community will lead to a compounding of separation and a destruction of wholeness within that community and across the boundaries between communities. Opposition propagates opposition.
In such chaos, we are thrown in a vicious loop back to our concepts, seeking the reassurance of truth, clinging desperately to our linguistically formulaic beliefs in order to protect ourselves from the intolerable pain within.
Restoring Feeling to Its Natural Position at the Center
The shift we need is both simple and profoundly ambitious. Our modern habits of attention lock us into the froth on top of the waves — the words and images, concepts and logic, rules and analyses. We focus on all that is not feeling.
Which, in a world that privileges rationality, makes sense. By the time we have arrived at any contentious moment, we have accumulated massive backlogs of unprocessed feeling bound into structures of compensation and protection to prevent the eruption of intolerable pain. With all of the “responsibility” and demands on our packed-full lives, we have no space to give ourselves the luxury of actually feeling any of it. The risk is too great. We could instantly be sucked into feeling-too-much, a vortex from which it might be very difficult to escape in time to regain our necessary distance and productivity.
But risk we must, if we are to have any hope of unhooking ourselves from the lemming-train. Re-centering feeling is the only path available for restoring our natural relationship to the interfield connection and its spontaneous drive toward wholeness, toward life, toward all we have lost. Re-centering feeling is our access to the waves beneath the froth, and to the deep currents driving all of life.
Fortunately, we have many ways to open ourselves to this path, ranging from subtle micro-steps to giant leaps, available to any of us, no matter how compromised we have become. The truth is, interfield connection is always present within us, and it takes far more effort to prevent our return to it than to surrender to its welcoming embrace.
Over coming articles in this anticipated Emergent Future section, I will be sharing further descriptions and applications of this interfield map as well as more detailed instructions and invitations for how to reconnect with the field dimension that lives as the foundation of our very being. And of course, the fieldwork practice itself can be the most potent way to begin.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this first article is a reach for the moment, an attempt to paint a picture of what is coming. It is a sketch only, and it may take a while for me to flesh it out alongside the rest of what I am delivering here. Nevertheless, I invite your engagement in whatever form you feel inspired to offer it. The opportunities are bountiful in times of disruption such as this.
Reflections
Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!