Important — please read first:
Over the past few months I have been experimenting with how AI might support my efforts here. It gets lonely writing about something nobody but myself knows much of anything about. No colleagues to chat with, no mentors to consult, no papers to scour for new insights. AI has filled a necessary void as a thinking partner and information source, but this particular experiment touches something more vulnerable in me.
A Leap of Faith
For me this is definitely stepping out on a limb. If you listen through to the end, you’ll hear me talk about what I wrestled with in creating this, but let me say something about it up front here.
I’ve been developing psychotopology for almost half my life. Thirty years plus. What I discovered almost certainly saved my life — I don’t know if I could have kept going without it. But almost as soon as I fell through the portal into this rich, complex architecture of inner experience built from the virtual materiality of feeling experience, I found myself outside the norms of how everyone else thinks about the mind and consciousness.
First, my life was already fringe when I made my first discovery. I had been bipolar for 15 years, made a living on the edge in a way that let me work on my own schedule only a few hours a week or so to make ends meet. My entire adult life had been a royal clusterfuck, and I had no connections, no network, no friends, no credibility, no status, no virtue flags of any kind. I was starting over at age 35 with nothing at all to show for that time. So a “career” in academia seemed out of the question.
So I dove into a fringe university where I could design my own degree, borrowed student loans to the hilt to make ends meet, and spent seven years poking around until I had an MA that meant very little to anyone in any position to actually help me with what I was working on.
Time and time again I would make an effort to capture my new paradigm in words and images, try to attract people who might become peers. I’d come up with new names, new terminology, new ways to talk about it. And I’d try those out for a while. Every time, it didn’t take long before it seemed like I was getting nowhere, and I’d throw out that version and start all over again.
My deepest need has been for thought partners. All this time, I’ve been on my own to figure things out, to make sense of how this inner topology works and how to work with it. I’ve also been my own primary laboratory, using my own inner terrain as a primary zone of exploration, but also validating my discoveries along the way by facilitating others’ experiences.
The people I’ve helped, though, their main motivation has been understandably just to stop hurting and get on with their lives. They’re not obsessive scientists in the same way I am. And they find it hard to tell their friends about their experience because, well, it’s hard to talk about when the dominant language prioritizes other dimensions of experience and slides feeling under the rug.
The startling reality for me is that the effort of trying to figure out how to talk about my discoveries in ways other people can easily understand has been — and continues to be — more difficult than making them in the first place. Infinitely so, it seems sometimes.
So anyway, it totally flipped me out to hear two “people” talk about my work as if they actually understood it somewhat, and were excited to be learning about it. Especially when these “people” sounded and acted like the kinds of people who occupy the podcast channels that everyone listens to, the kinds of people who have large audiences and “influence” others in how they think about things and what choices they make. It was totally fucking trippy.
A Grain of Salt
Over the past thirty years I have prioritized my investigator role. Curiosity drives me, and no matter how quickly my pace of discoveries has gone (from very slow to very fast), my attention always is drawn to, “What is that thing, over there, over that horizon?” Until this past year, I have been unable to unhook myself from that and prioritize capturing all I have learned in a form that others can digest.
Finally I was motivated to do this by my age, and by concerns that, because my mother has succumbed interminably to dementia, that could be my lot as well. I realized that I’m not getting any younger, that this project of articulating my discoveries is prodigious in scope, and that if I don’t get a move on it, I could die without having passed this knowledge on. The most important thing to me is to plant the seed of psychotopology in the ground of human understanding, no matter how fertile or barren that soil might be at the time.
That said, I really had no sense of just how massive this project is until recently. Laying out these concepts, practices and discoveries week by week, one stone at a time in this effort to build my foundation, has sobered me. I’ve written one post a week, averaging probably 3,000 words, since the end of June 2024. That’s over 30 posts, 90,000 words. And I’ve barely begun. It will take me at least through June 2025 just to establish the basics.
What I’m saying is that this AI (Google’s NotebookLM) didn’t have all that much to work with. So while its characters have done a great job with what I was able to give them, including all of the articles I’ve published here so far, they don’t fully “get” psychotopology yet. Don’t expect more than a surface understanding from their conversation. There’s a hell of a lot more that’s coming — more depth, more detail, more connections to all there is.
But even with that, it’s definitely worth a listen. So please, jump in and enjoy it.
If You Prefer Text
The Substack app made a transcript, and although it’s not perfect, it’s good enough for skimming and following along with the audio. To access it, click the “Transcript” button at the top of the text here. If you play the audio at the same time, the transcript for the section that’s playing will be highlighted, and you can skip around anywhere by just clicking on any part of the transcript.
Many of you, though, might prefer to see the text than listen to the audio. If so, I’ve posted a page with the edited, accurate transcript here:
A Few of the Articles Atlas and Aurora Mention:
In the course of their conversation, Atlas and Aurora touch on a number of things that have been published in the articles here. Below are links to a few of those.
The last of these gives an overview of my session with Susan. In coming weeks, I’ll be publishing a recording and transcript from that session to go through it in greater detail.
More to Come?
I can see this experiment going in a couple different directions. First, it might make sense for me to use this resource to make audio summaries of all my posts, zooming in on one post at a time and publishing them along with the post. Some people might appreciate that.
Moving further, though, I am drawn to the possibility of having real conversations with real people, and starting a real psychotopology podcast. That could be fun, I suppose, although honestly I am not the kind of person who ever listens to such material and I really do not want to get caught up in the technical details of producing it.
We’ll see. If you’d like to contribute to what emerges, please reach out in some way to let me know your thoughts and what you’d like to see/hear. Consider signing up for a free or paid subscription (see the Engage section for our live meetings).
And maybe help me connect with some folks who might want to be conversation partners.
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