The act of fieldwork observation involves numerous intentional shifts in our attention. First, we shift the location of our “field of awareness” — the what/where we are attending to — to coincide with the location of the feeling state we wish to observe. Second, we may shift our “point of witness” — where we are observing from — to optimize our perspective, for example by “stepping out” or away from the state location to be able to observe the color of the state object. Third, we may shift our attentional filters — what perceptual channel we are bringing to the foreground — to highlight substance qualities versus temperature or other properties.
But we must also acknowledge a fourth variable in the observation practice. Who or what are we observing as? Fortunately, our instrument of observation is actually able to be turned upon itself. Simply by naming the experience of the observer, witness, or self who is doing the observing, we are able to enroll that specific experience in the process of mapping. We do this in the same way that we observe any other state, taking it through the same systematic approach to collecting our observational data. (See Cultivating a Witness Awareness).
This capacity to observe the observer opens up an exciting opportunity. First, how does this method of inner observation actually work? At this point, we don’t know much about the “how.” What exactly is going on, and what might we learn about it by turning fieldwork toward the observation process itself?
Second, the nature of the self — the lived experience of being an “I” — has been explored throughout all of human history, through spiritual traditions especially, but more recently through psychology and cognitive science. But these explorations have never had a rigorous method for directly exploring and documenting the actual experience. Instead, they have relied upon isolated adepts delving into the mysteries within and relying upon mythology, theory, indirect practices, and various kinds of abstractions and correlations in their efforts to describe that inner terrain. What might we learn by attending to the virtual material properties of the experience of self in ordinary people?
Let’s find out!
Mapping a Witness State
In the post, How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense, we viewed four states mapped by Hannah (not her real name). Here is their composite image.
After mapping these, I invited her to identify and map the “observer self” which had been the seat of witness from which she conducted her observations. She mapped the following witness state. (The “Core” state she refers to is a small bead located at the center of the molten ball in her chest in the drawing above.)
The Mediating Observer
This seems to be a connection between where my mind is and where my heart is.
Internal. Almost like there are two spheres, one behind my forehead, and one where the Core hangs out. They're about the size of tennis balls and there is a connection running directly from one to the other.
An energy, seems weighty in that it's important, but it doesn't feel heavy or dense. Neutral temperature. It's a very light blue, pale. And then there's kind of an electric current to it that moves on the outside, and that's a darker blue.
It's really pretty to look at. It moves like electricity, and it's almost hypnotizing to look at it. Sound like a pulsating power sound, about heart beat rate. Feels very even.
Even though it's alive and moving it seems very predictable. It feels stable. It seems like it wants to be methodical. It feels very even-tempered, interested in all of the aspects of feeling, instead of just recognizing what seems dominant at the time. It's like an illumination, like a light.
Everything is going to be heard. You can take it or leave it. You can drop the things that you don't want, but you need to find them first. It's a connection with an inner insight that hasn't been as clear before.
I'm not in any danger.
It's more than just an observer. Seems like it also facilitates. It has the ability to communicate between the states. It's a mediator.
This is fascinating, is it not? Where have we ever been given the opportunity to bring this high level of resolution to our observation of such a typically ineffable inner state?
Mapping the witness self raises a new question, though. When we are observing the witness self, where are we observing from? Who/what are we observing as? Are we on a slippery slope here, where we are in danger of sliding into an endless regression of nested homunculi?
Well, we have our prime tool for observation: fieldwork. Let’s find out!
Identifying and Mapping Three Levels of Witness
In what follows, I’m going to lead you through a series of observations made by Jerome that culminate in mapping three levels of witness states. We worked with a few states from Jerome in the last post, The Feeling in Every Conscious Experience as examples of tangible states anchoring more abstract components of being and thought. Jerome exhibits a high sophistication in his inner structures and a beautiful capacity for observing these structures, so this sequence provides a wonderfully detailed tour.
Panic
I think it's my head. Flat, kind of sticks out on both sides. Green, opaque. Fist size thickness, like a squished cylinder with axis right to left, squashed in the vertical dimension. Hard, like a plastic.
Some kind of energy coming up from below, encompassing it upwards. {See Obligation below.}
Very inert, a little below body temp. Shiny, reflective. It wants to move up but it's constrained in its motion on the top edge, so it's stationary.
At the top is like the boundary of my consciousness. There might be something beyond, but there's no access. It's a limit of where I can get in my consciousness.
Sound is like nails on a chalkboard screech, but muffled. Not hearing it directly, but almost on the periphery.
It's giving me a headache. It's very much head centered.
It's like a numbness, and an end. My sense is I want to not be here. I need to back up, or backing up is the only way out.
{My question: What is forward?} It feels like a hole in my memory {see below}. {My question: Related to “the boundary of consciousness”?} Yes. It feels like in that space is useful information that would help me get out of the situation, but I can't get to it. It's missing. It's a hole.
While mapping Obligation {see below}, noticed this almost is coming right out of my spine, so it's connected almost to some place beyond, with a stem in the center.
Obligation
Obligation is the moment when you go from being empowered to feeling trapped. It’s when internal needs have been neglected. This is like an external force is denying you your needs.
Feels soft and persistent, but constant and malicious. Soft is the material quality. An energy coming up from below Panic {see above} and encompassing it, pushing it against Hole {see below}.
Coming through my neck, almost like a spinal column alignment, from just outside my mid-back, behind me. Panic almost is coming right out of my spine, so it's connected almost to some place beyond, with a stem in the center. This is coming up around that stem, around the plastic form of Panic, and then is gone, disappears like a vapor.
Like a gas vapor, feels like a gas. I think it might be a little bit uncomfortably hot. Color is hard to tell, translucent so the green is showing through, maybe magenta. Actually more of a yellow, a puce yellow. Flowing up from the stem, engulfing the Panic, and it's mottled, like there is some turbulence. No sound.
Everything is focused on pushing that Panic. I can't see around the Panic from the perspective of this Obligation. I could shift views between seeing myself from the third person to that of Obligation, from which I'm seeing the bottom of the Panic and I'm trying to get around it.
Mapping the Panic, I felt right at the edge of the Hole in My Memory, but from this, I have more perspective, I don't feel as close to the hole, but I'm still headed that direction.
In drawing, found that magenta actually seems more accurate.
Hole in My Memory
From mapping Panic: At the top is like the boundary of my consciousness. There might be something beyond, but there's no access. It's a limit of where I can get in my consciousness. It feels like in that space is useful information that would help me get out of the situation, but I can't get to it. It's missing. It's a hole.
This is bizarre, giving me physiological effects. I open my eyes, have a slight headache, and it's very disorienting.
{My question: OK to map?} It's liking being back out. It got pretty intense. Yes, OK to map.
Seems to be in the very top of my head, just under my skull, but it's enormous, goes way above. Like a big, graphite sphere. Maybe the size of a house.
Trying to come at it from being the Panic and being pushed into this. In that regard, does not feel like it has a finite edge. More like a high density liquid, buoyant, pushes back but with a tiny little give. The graphite is completely non-reflective, almost an absence of color. Feels like a brain freeze, but it's not showing a temperature right now.
It has a gravity. It's hard to tell whether I'm being pushed against it or drawn to it. I think I'm being pushed against it by an outward force. Something in it is swirling like currents, like the way the globe has currents. Maybe it's spinning but that's on a magnitude (too big, really slow) I can't experience. The globe is large, but I'm not on it. If anything, it would be scraping past me, in a slow kind of way.
I may be on one of the axes, and it's twisting, and that's the slow movement. Coming up through that same axis that the stem of the Panic is on. Seems to be moving right to left perceived from in front of it; subtle. There's like a sound of no sound, like when you listen to a shell. It's heavy.
It's like nothingness. There's actually an active destruction. If I was to push beyond that surface that's keeping me out, I would lose it, all my memory or consciousness would dissolve.
The three states above were mapped in November, during a period of time in which Jerome was doing deep, extensive work with me. We revisited them in February and raised the question of the witness. The following three states were an explicit and detailed observation of Jerome’s witness experience in this context.
The Thinker
It's the place I go when I'm trying to solve a problem. "If I could just map every facet of this, I could find the right solution." Which is when I push up against the Hole in My Memory. It's that relationship.
Right behind my eyes, maybe the center of my forehead, just behind it. Rigid substance. I'm getting a cube, like a crystal, lots of faceted edges, kind of square-ish, size of a golf ball. Smooth surfaces, fractal edges. Brown, opaque. Hot. It's totally fixed, unmoving. It exerts a pressure forward from behind my forehead. Sound like high voltage power lines.
Strange, I can either be inside of it, looking through it, or looking at it as an object. When I'm inside of it, it's like I am it.
It's cut off from other senses. So even if I open my eyes I'm not paying attention to what they're seeing. There's kind of a singular focus on the problem. I often occupy this place when I'm trying to calculate the tip at a restaurant. Like, this is a complicated problem to solve, and I have to cut off all external contacts to get this done.
Awareness of Self
{After mapping The Thinker, inquiring about the observer/witness who conducted that observation.} As the observer of this: When I'm looking at it from the outside, it is just this inert thing. I guess it's putting pressure, but it's kind of just sitting there, motionless. "What's that doing?"
This seems to be embodied. When I'm inside The Thinker, I can't interact with Expressive Awareness, or Integrity, or Creative Expression {other related states}. Don't have access to any of those. When I'm outside, I can see everything together.
It's almost at the back of my head, to the right. It feels as wide as the back of my head, just to the inside of my head. Substance is like a down pillow. Room temp, warm. A cream color, opaque. No movement/force. Sound of a single violin. I can imagine any different number of melodies. The particular tune I settled on is a bit sad. (Not sure if that's congruent with the feeling itself, or particular just to the violin sound.)
The violin solo is in Sheharazade, Symphony Fantastique. Wandering minor note solo. It feels a little sad and lonely in the solo bit, but then it's answered by this larger string section with warmer strings coming in and receiving it. Then it's this grand, rich crescendo. But the beginning solo part is what is attached to this place.
I have great awareness. From this place I can see my whole body, I can see in all directions. But it's a bit lonely.
{My question: Name for this?} Maybe Self Awareness. Awareness of Self maybe would be a less traveled phrase.
Embodied Presence
{After mapping The Thinker and Awareness of Self inquiring about the observer of these.} All around my body, at about two or three feet out. I can switch, be in the Awareness of Self place, looking out at this third witness. Or I can switch to this third witness and be looking back. The places where this witness looks from are limited to the upper hemisphere.
It's everything in my body, a liquid that fills my entire body. Warm. Water consistency, has weight to it. Orange, translucent. Slow drift of little particles. I don't know if this is becoming a trope of mine, but there are little multi-colored granules floating around. Gurgle-y, healthy biological sounds like when you're digesting something.
It's a very comfortable place to be. Very much in the moment. I can't embody this feeling and go or think about anything that is not here and now. {The topic of a restaurant meal came up. I asked something about the experience at the end of the meal.} I'd be aware of being full and a little tired, feel myself absorbing the nutrients from the meal. (Didn't even think about the tip. Doesn't even matter.)
{My question: Name?} Embodied Presence.
It feels good to imagine being in this place in a restaurant, at peace with the whole sustenance thing. So often for me a restaurant is anxiety producing, needing to figure out the bill, worried about eating something that will make me sick. Nice to imagine a positive experience, nurturing, sustaining.
In drawing this, it’s primarily filling the body rather than being on the outside of it.
Generally, when we turn the light of observation back onto the observer itself, we can go three levels like Jerome did. Taking our observation farther seems much more difficult. But still, three levels of the witness self — what does that mean? What are we actually observing here?
New Questions, New Possibilities
The fact that we are able to actually observe the observer may not have seemed possible before we actually attempted it. Now that we have done so, the door is open to ask some much bigger questions and attempt to relate our observations to many other frameworks.
For example, modern psychological and cognitive frameworks increasingly recognize that the self is not a singular entity but a dynamic multiplicity of interacting parts. Theories such as Hubert Hermans’ Dialogical Self propose that identity consists of shifting internal voices, while Internal Family Systems (IFS) describes distinct “parts" with their own roles and motivations. Cognitive science further suggests that self-experience emerges from hierarchical predictive models, shifting global workspaces of consciousness, or the oscillating activity of the Default Mode Network. While these models offer compelling explanations for why multiple self-states arise, they remain indirect — they theorize about inner experience but lack a methodology for systematically observing and mapping it as it is actually lived.
Similarly, spiritual traditions across cultures have long described the self as layered, multiple, or evolving, offering models such as Hinduism’s koshas, Buddhism’s skandhas, Sufism’s seven nafs, and Kabbalah’s soul levels. Many of these teachings recognize distinct modes of selfhood — whether as shifting mental aggregates, progressive spiritual refinements, or inner voices that guide or obstruct realization. Yet, while these traditions offer profound insights, they rely on philosophical, mystical, or metaphorical explanations rather than precise, systematic methods for directly observing self-experience. Without a structured approach to mapping these inner states in real time, their descriptions remain speculative, often requiring faith in abstract principles rather than grounded phenomenological inquiry.
Fieldwork provides a disciplined, first-person method for investigating the discrete, material-like qualities of self-experience. We are now able to systematically observe, describe, and experiment with self-states, mapping how they appear in felt space, where they exist, how they interact, and whether they correspond to—or diverge from—existing theoretical frameworks and spiritual traditions.
This marks the first steps toward a rigorous science of subjective experience, one that does not merely speculate about the nature of self but observes it with precision. Unlike modern science, which lacks the tools to truly see the self, or spiritual traditions, which rely on metaphor and doctrine, psychotopology remains open-ended and exploratory, allowing for deep engagement with inner experience while remaining unattached to any fixed ideology. In doing so, it may have the capacity to bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and empirical discovery, offering a truly experiential science of self that is available to anyone willing to look within.
In next week’s post, we will look even more closely at experiences that resonate with other aspects of spiritual traditions.
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!
This is truly fascinating, Joe! I think (?) feel, sense, intuit, trust 😊 that you are onto something big here
“When I'm inside The Thinker, I can't interact with Expressive Awareness, or Integrity, or Creative Expression. Don't have access to any of those. When I'm outside, I can see everything together.”
The understanding and expertise about and with the 'Self' (Awareness of Self!) you have developed ~ through subjective experience in real life, rather than philosophical theories ~ are (imho) a big clue to the puzzle.
This is truly fascinating, Joe! I think (?) feel, sense, intuit, trust 😊 that you are onto something big here
“When I'm inside The Thinker, I can't interact with Expressive Awareness, or Integrity, or Creative Expression. Don't have access to any of those. When I'm outside, I can see everything together.”
The understanding and expertise about and with the 'Self' (Awareness of Self!) you have developed ~ through subjective experience in real life, rather than philosophical theories ~ are (imho) a big clue to the puzzle.
Exciting stuff 🙏 💗 ✨