Preface to Volume 1
The Quiet Frontier of Feeling
I grew up classically White American, with immigrant ancestry and lineages of various struggles and compensations, my family carrying a driving focus for independence and self-sufficiency. Central to the ethic of this environment was the reinforcement of a distinct, unitary, congruent self that optimally reflected your family, your faith, and your career. This “citadel self,” as Tanya Luhrmann calls it, was both separate from and integrated with its social context in ways that were unacknowledged and potentially incompatible.
For example, as a young boy, I was expected to be both self-determined and to fit into expectations about what a boy was supposed to be. My father’s expectations were clear: be tough, be strong, don’t cry, follow his commands, do things the right way, etc. But my nature was very different. My high sensitivity, frail body, strong emotions and insatiable curiosity clashed directly with his projections. By the time I got to school, after too many glaring incongruities between his authoritative declarations and what I perceived to be the turbid emotional realities of our family and the world, I prioritized the “self-determined” side of things and took my citadel underground, making it more of a bunker instead.
My “bunker self” served me well enough to get through school and away from my family. I made sense of things with the help of books and my own perception, and kept myself distant from actual humans. Over time, I constructed a strong, outward-facing academic superiority that opened doors while keeping my intensely emotional inner reality deeply hidden.
For me, emotion was a portal to what was actually real, with all the other hand-waving serving as a convenient, functional mask that enabled me to fit in well enough to keep going. In high school, my most treasured moments were those I had to myself in nature. Fortunately, my parents’ drive for sovereignty led them to purchase a farm, and also fortunately, my father’s job as a police officer meant he often worked evening or overnight shifts, which gave me large-enough spaces free of his dominion to wander the woods and connect with something larger and more free than the human world that felt so cumbersome and anti-life.
Those moments gave me something to hold in a world that seemed so broken. Wandering through tall grass, among skittish deer and groundhogs, under the imponderable night sky, I felt connected to a world far more meaningful than Catholic scripture, high-school history or literature, or my father’s proclamations ever seemed to touch. In some moments, I channeled something much, much larger, at times chanting to the sky what seemed on the surface like meaningless syllables. I remember one in particular, “a-shun-tio,” that felt to me like the pure expression of a powerful presence flowing up through me from deep within the earth.
I lost access to those moments for a couple of years when I went off to the University of Pennsylvania, nailing my pre-med requirements in two years before winning a junior-year-abroad scholarship to Edinburgh, Scotland. There, I reconnected to this larger force to which I had access. I decided to devote this year to my own study and development, and to simply ignore the academic side of things. I read what I wanted to read, thought about what I wanted to think about, long excursions into philosophy, neuroscience, and esoteric spirituality. And I spent long nights alone, wandering the city and hiking Holyrood Park.
Arthur’s Seat was my alignment spot, toward the east overlooking the Firth of Forth, Norway and Denmark. Toward the west, Edinburgh sprawled beneath me with its vibes of history overlaid with the glittering lights of modernity. It was there that my deeper connection with the space of something larger split my world into two. Moments like these are sometimes given the label of “noetic,” referring to a kind of “download” or a sudden perception of the truth of all things.
For me, my experience was that of a supremely interconnected, alive, and intelligent universe. It was a felt sense more than anything else, and the biggest challenge was to attach words to it. What I came up with was a short phrase to describe the fundamental process of the universe as “the coagulation of consciousness.” I sensed consciousness as the fundamental reality, and all of what we see in the world of matter and energy emerging as a natural manifestation of that fundamental.
This was an extremely disruptive epiphany for me. As I said, it split my world into two: the surface world inhabited by all the humans around me and the deeper reality inhabited by my own center. From that point forward, I could no longer participate with integrity in the human world that was offered to me. I dropped out of college and roamed here and there, earning a barely-scraping-by living in whatever ways demanded the least effort, and I devoted myself to a deeper inquiry of this thing called life.
It wasn’t easy. My epiphany was too profound and too all-encompassing to find a home in existing teachings. Whether George Gurdjieff or Ken Wilber, Jesus or Buddha, Fritz Perls or Karl Jung, B.F. Skinner or Aaron Beck, The Sedona Method or The Course experiential deep-dives, none of these spoke strongly to my experience while honoring its wholeness without requiring overlays of what seemed to be extraneous conceptual or dogmatic baggage. I was on my own, scrambling and scratching, looking at things from this angle, then that one.
At the center of my sensing was the mystery of feeling itself. Why did people seem so separated from the reality of their inner world, and why did they create endless artificial substitutes for that reality? For me, something palpable lived in the liminal space beyond this concrete world, and I was convinced it was far more real than the stones and slurry of concrete itself.
In my explorations, I sought intensity, believing this was the way to pierce the veil. In my intensity, I carved a disrupted life path from ecstatic highs to despairing lows, and because my inner world was more real than the outer, it didn’t matter to me that jobs, apartments, relationships went careening in all directions. I was on a mission to understand — why are so many humans (including myself) struggling so desperately? — and I felt true to that mission despite the constant external chaos and internal suffering.
Eventually, fourteen years after returning from Edinburgh, a genuine illumination switched on. At first it was but a thin beam, yet bright enough to begin seeing something intriguingly new. And what was showing up was very definitely not what I expected.
The Science of Virtual Materiality
This thin beam of light shone forth from a few simple but perplexing questions asking my feeling experience to compare itself to the material world.
Where are you located?
What kind of substance do you resemble?
What temperature and color do you have?
Strange, right? Why would you ask this about something as ineffable as feeling? The thing is, though, when I asked these questions, I got very definitive, tangible answers. And it felt as though answering those questions was tantamount to switching on a light and seeing something distinctly present that had previously been hiding in darkness. I wasn’t just making it up, and I couldn’t on a whim just decide to change my answers. No. To take one example, a specific feeling of frustration might have been very definitely solid, heavy and hard like a stone, very warm and dark red, located in my solar plexus. And not something different.
I shared this flashlight with others, and they, too, were able to see these tangible forms emerging from the darkness within themselves. Gradually, as I used this light to observe more feeling states over time, the beam opened wider. More than one of these virtual material feeling objects would reveal themselves at once, coexisting, often interacting.
In this expansion of my awareness to include the multiplicity of my inner feeling experience, my life trajectory settled down. Intensity no longer attracted me, and instead I became fascinated with the subtle nuance of inner complexity. Less than a year after gaining access to this light, I completely dropped my past tendency for intense emotional swings and settled into my life as an independent investigator of this new realm.
I am here to share what I have discovered in the thirty years since then. Exploring this inner realm of virtual materiality has indeed led me to a profound and satisfying response to the question that has driven me. The question of why it is that we modern humans are so pervasively disturbed and so thoroughly separated from the reality within ourselves has become very clear. The answer to this lies in this realm of feeling, as I suspected. But beyond my expectations, the answer is both far more complex and far more simple than I ever could have imagined.
The coming three volumes of Frontiers of Psychotopology will lay out the depth and complexity of what I have discovered. This work is utterly congruent with my original epiphany at the top of Arthur’s Seat. And it takes me farther than I imagined it was possible to go into a fine-grained explication of exactly how this “coagulation of consciousness” actually manifests in our own experience.
This Volume 1 will provide the simple gateway for you to begin your own explorations. Here you will learn how to switch on the light and observe your own inner terrain. In doing so, you will begin to get a glimpse of just how imponderably deep is the hole in which we humans have buried ourselves, and how much work it is likely to take for us to dig our way back out.
The path to waking up may be simple, but doing so will very definitely not be easy. We have a formidable job ahead of us. The magnitude of what we face, though, is perhaps its greatest gift to us. In entering into the virtual material reality of feeling, we are given access to the full scope of human suffering. In stepping forward into this suffering, we realize that this is not a job for us as individuals, each of us digging our own way out of our own private hole. We must do this together. And not only must we do it together, but we must do so in the spirit of curiosity and awe. We honestly do not — can not — know what a future world of thriving will look like. We must approach our journey with wonder, taking one small step at a time as we make sense of what reveals itself, and discover, together, what is possible and how to bring that possibility into fullness.
Wholeness Through and Through
Perhaps the most profound inner shift I have experienced in the course of my journey has been the dissolving of my harsh judgment toward what I had previously named as “wrong.” Yes, something has long been out of balance when seen from the outside, as I experienced it as a child and throughout my life. Our rational objectivity, with its privileging of rules, principles, analysis, words, definitions and logic, is out of sync with the foundational wisdom of feeling that precedes and supports it.
But rather than see one group of people as propagating this distortion through what seems like malice, selfishness or ignorance, and another group suffering from the imposition of that, I see something far more whole. The wholeness has always been present, and has never departed.
What I see now instead is how behaviors of dominance and control emerge naturally from deep wounds, and how those deep wounds are desperately trying to make themselves known, to attract the healing power of awareness back to encompass and hold them. This is how the system within ourselves naturally functions: pain signals awareness to hold a larger frame, and through holding that larger frame to re-integrate the separation that has inserted itself into the smaller frame.
This is how wholeness works — a process of differentiation, in which separation arises, followed by integration, in which the separated parts engage in a larger contextual frame to form a more encompassing whole. Psychotopology reveals that this engine of evolution is built into the structure of our inner architecture, and every separation is an invitation for a reintegration in a larger context. Even in what seems like brokenness, wholeness is constantly present, working its way through the system top to bottom, inside to outside. This process is what we call life, and it is working us at the level of our personal individuality while simultaneously finding its resonant expression at the level of our collective, in the context of the planet as a vibrant, complete being.
I need to cut myself short here because to continue would require writing Volumes 2 & 3. There will be time for that later. For now, let me get back on track and just say that the fieldwork mapping covered here in Volume 1 is a very practical tool to support the re-integration within and among ourselves, at all levels, and psychotopology provides a coherent explanation for why this is crucially important, as you will see.
Honoring Your Own Path
I suspect you share with me the intuition that something is off in the gap between your own core human experience and our shared explanations for that experience. Reaching back as far as our earliest mythologies, humans have sought to name, frame, and navigate the inner life. Our philosophies, religions, healing traditions, and now our modern psychologies are all expressions of this ancient human impulse: to understand the terrain of meaning, suffering, transformation, and joy.
If you are reading this, chances are that you too have spent years — or decades — walking such paths. Perhaps you have studied psychotherapy, somatics, meditation, energy work, embodiment practices, systems theory, trauma resolution, or shadow work. You may have devoted time, training, and your deepest attention to learning how to navigate the inner world — both your own and others’.
This book honors that effort. It is written for you. I hope it offers a new capacity to illuminate and enhance all you have given to your own journey.
As you read and explore, you may find yourself challenged. You may find yourself surprised. But if you stay with it, you may also begin to see your own experience with unprecedented clarity. You may begin to feel the profound, quiet empowerment that comes from perceiving what has always been just below the surface. And you may begin to experience what I and many others have: a profound sense of homecoming, ease, and empowerment born not from someone else's map, but from the rediscovery of your own.
Let this book be the beginning of this rediscovery for you. And let this science — still in its infancy — become, very soon, something far larger than what I alone can carry.
Welcome to the frontier.
Let us begin.
~ Joe Shirley
Bellingham, WA
April, 2025