16 Comments
Sep 5Liked by Joe Shirley

Thank you Joe for articulating these challenges. I feel what you have laid out is contributing to the deep divide in the political conversations, and in intimate and family relationships. Power and sex/familial bonds are deeply entangled with our basic instincts, our internal hormonal environment, influencing our subjective experience in ways far beyond language can specify and control.

My experience of growing up in Chinese culture in pre-industrialized time taught me something very important in that regard. In ancient cultures, languages and communications are more oriented towards creating conditions for a group (family/clan/tribe) to experience an entrainment, not such as explicating, specifying and articulating as modern technical English. Therefore, poetry, stories, folklores, myth, spells, .... these forms of language are all "instruments" to direct the myriads of subjective experience to entrain into a resonance... Kind like a choir director.

As a child, due to the influence of the west and dominance of English, I was forced to learn using language in that cold, mechanical way, I was traumatized and my poetic heart was hurt. As an adult, for a long time I resisted using language in an ultra technical way. It was through Fieldwork and our relationship, my heart re-opened. As I continue on the journey of healing and growth, I discovered that when I accessed the deeper feeling (thanks to the hundreds of hours of fieldwork!), I was no longer afraid of the technical language. In fact, I can enfold the more specific and precise language to serve my poetic, artistic expression! What a gift and incredible healing medicine!

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Thank you, Spring! You speak to two themes that are central to this work. Let me try to articulate how I think of them in relation to what you have said. I’ll have to reach a bit farther into where this ’stack is going to speak to these ideas, but that’s OK.

First, our shared maps (“realities”) are more about experiencing and navigating our relationship and community worlds than they are about the direct relationship with the “real” world. We can think of these shared maps as what we refer to as culture. The way I see it, the primary purpose of culture is to shape our habits of attention in ways that support the thriving of the collective. Our western/English-language obsession with objectivity, truth, and “reality” can be usefully seen as also serving that function.

“Thriving” can take many forms. Currently in the west, thriving can be seen as primarily focused on maximum resource extraction. That worked for a little while to support the cultures embodying this, but it cannot be sustained at the global scale. In traditional China, in contrast, thriving was, as you say, prioritized a resonant entrainment, more in the direct, experiential realm than in that of the external, material one. (This is one of the reasons, I think that Chinese and other we-culture people seem to have an easier time accessing the direct experience of feeling. It is of feeling that this resonance is woven.)

Nevertheless, by latching onto our stories and calling them true — whether stories of objectivity and reality or those of the latest conspiracy theory revealed when you “do your own research” — we serve above all our connections with those we deem to be like us. This is one thing I think is really important to keep in mind in todays hyper-polarized political climate. Overall, our western culture elevation of materialism and objectivity has fractured the sense of belonging we all need to experience true thriving. Different communities grab as tightly as they can upon whatever shared maps they can to help heal that wound in whatever way works for them. We’ll need to honor that, in all directions, to move out of this fractured climate.

Overall, as you speak to so beautifully in your last paragraph, integration and wholeness come through working at the deep, foundational level of feeling. The inner structure of feeling governs (and is governed by) all the other structures in our lives, both somatic/physiological and cognitive/mental. There is no “but” — it’s all about the “and.” What is the relationship that serves an emergent, larger whole that includes these elements that seem to be in conflict with one another?

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Sep 8·edited Sep 8Liked by Joe Shirley

I am not sure why you would want to situate Subjective Experience (SE) in the framework of 'Science'. Science is reductive materialism, examining parts divorced from wholes, claiming the impossibility of 'objectivity' and 'repeatability', (except at the most crass and crude level). And it relies on only the five 'physical' senses (missing out 'higher' senses) for generating information that is then interpreted (somewhat vicariously) to make 'valid knowledge', {see the Sociology of Science (eg, see: "Science: The Very Idea", Steve Woolgar, 1988)}.

If you want to build a better mouse-trap, or put some people on the moon, science is great. But for the 'wholeness' of Subjective Experience, Science, for me, is the wrong 'vehicle' (if I can put it that way). The comment by Spring Cheng, that "poetry, stories, folklores, myth, spells," are more conducive to understanding SE is an interesting tack.

And if the desire to objectify the world gave us traditional Science, why can not the desire to 'subjectify' the world give us a different frame - of Subjectivity (equivalent in stature to Science) but in/on Subjectivity's own terms?

Subjective Experience could be said to include Inspiration, Intuition, Imagination, Instinct, as well as Intellect, and also Will, Soul, and BodyMind (see Veronika Bond's Synchronosphy on Substack). These Faculties of Consciousness are of a worthy stature in themselves. An attempt to reduce them to 5-lower-senses-Science seems to me to not give the higher senses their due. Indeed, attempts to fit 'higher' into 'lower' usually results in some form of tyranny.

I have not read any of your previous postings, so I might have misunderstood what is your aim. Which is my essential question: what exactly do you want to achieve with your examination of Subjective Experience? And depending on your answer, why would the great effort required to fit it into The Scientific Paradigm be worthwhile?

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Sep 8·edited Sep 8Liked by Joe Shirley

Hi Joshua, nice to meet you here! I appreciate your comment and relate with it. Rediscovering the power of "poetry/story/myth/spell" has been the primary focus of my work. At the same time, I have benefited immensely from the science of psychotopology Joe has developed. Through it, I have rediscovered the power of these ancient arts that have been cut off from me in my lifetime.

However what Joe means by "science" is not so much the "reductive materialism, examining parts divorced from wholes". The science he talked about is a rigorous, systematic method of pure observation of the phenomenon of being. For me, it is the true Spirit of Science, which also lies at the core of Zen, Tao and other eastern esoteric practices. Today this Spirit is injured in western science, succumbing to capitalistic greed and colluded illusions. I appreciate Joe's efforts to heal this Spirit through psychotopology.  

When I got my PhD in Molecular Biology, I received rigorous training in the hall of science. I resented a large part of that experience. As so many of the scientific conducts were against my conscience (such as animal testing and excessive pharmaceutical intervention). However, one valuable gift I did receive is the rigorous method of observation and the true Spirit of Science. Today 99% of the scientific industry fails this Spirit. So many good-hearted and Earth-connected people turn away from it. In my heart, I grieve for it. I am grateful to Joe as he has rescued the baby out of a very dirty bathwater (very foul indeed!).   

On the flip side of the coin, the ancient arts forged through poetry/story/myth/spell, can also fall into misuse and corruption (such as black magic and superstition), if they are not being calibrated through rigorous testing and objective examination of our subjective, perceptual lens. 

My hypothesis is that the Soul of Subjective Arts and Objective Science need each other to heal and become whole. I have been testing it through my work in the last decade. In that regard, I am doing my field research as a scientist. 

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate the opportunity to share these discussions

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Thank you, Spring, for clarifying the all important difference between true science and reductionist science!

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I am all for True Science done in the True Spirit of observation (including self-observation - a similar process I guess, necessary to "Know Thyself"). I agree that 99% of today's current '$cience' fails the rigour of true enquiry, and science is now a corrupted institution. No process, especially when institutionalised, is immune from distortion and power-games - including poetry/story/myth/spell as you point out.

The answer to my question in my first comment probably lies in one of Joe's previous postings - what is the aim of his enquiry? and, why would a science of subjective experience help that aim? (originally I trained as an engineer, andsometimes I'm glad that things just work - I do not need always to know how they work).

You say you have 'have benefited immensely from the science of psychotopology' and I am intrigued to know if you can give me an example of something resolved.

My reason to comment originally was motivated by the subject - which my wife (Veronika Bond here on Substack) has (as a linguist and homoeopath) been investigating for 25+ years ... and I wondered if there could be any cross-fertilisation of ideas to mutual benefit. I am a poet, sculptor, weaver and maker of things, but of course I have journeyed alongside Veronika with many conversations on Subjective Experience, and how it can contribute to healing body and mind.

I look forward to Joe's next posting so I can get my head around it some more. Best regards, Josh.

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Sep 9Liked by Joe Shirley

Aah, Joshua, I am delighted by what you I have woven through your experience, being an engineer, and poet, sculptor, makers of things ... I am sure Joe can answer your question better about what the aim of his inquiry is.

For your question of an example of my statement about "benefiting from the science of psychotopology", I am writing a memoir/mythological biography trying to fully answer that question. It might take a few years for me to do that. But I wrote a short essay here: https://springcheng.com/p/rebirthing-the-lost-songs-of-ancestors This essay told the stories of a miraculous synchronicities. Basically, I had been singing songs in my private space for 9 years and one day the world met me with a movie that need exactly the songs I was singing. This is meaningful not just to me personally but also collectively (you have to read the essay to get the full picture.) The music I was making in my private space created a resonance field that called forth an external manifestation. In this essay, I didn't mention Joe's work as there is no room for it. But psychotopology plus my own work with I Ching together were the back engine of this experience. This is just one wave within a river of synchronicities that our life are immersed in. My commitment to life is to tend to this river of synchronicities and learn how to be a good steward.

I also want to say that my relationship with psychotopology is held within the container of my relationship with Joe. That is the inter-subjective nature of a lot of the works in this realm.

Appreciating your curiosity and inquiry. I know Veronika's work and read her substack all the time. I appreciate the resonance between our work. I am very delighted to have this interaction with both of you!

Warm regards,

Spring

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Sep 9·edited Sep 9Author

Great — awesome questions and commentary, Joshua (and Spring), thank you! You point directly at the heart of where all this is going. I only wish I could get there a bit more quickly. For now, though, let me respond to the issues you have raised, and give a few links to past posts and hints toward future ones.

First, I’ve described how I hold science as a subset of the universal human activity of making and using inner maps of experience in Maps Within Maps (https://frontiers.psychotopology.com/p/maps-within-maps). I go further into the structure of that activity in Building Good Maps (https://frontiers.psychotopology.com/p/building-good-maps) and name three specific compromises the institution of science has made in service to its goals.

The current institution of science (I love your way of calling out its being co-opted by the drive for profit in $cience!) is an expression of our current cultural framework. As I mentioned in my response to Spring, the shared stories we hold serve more to give us a common context than to purely name or access what might be called reality. Our current western story about the existence of an objective, true reality is simply one of the most common of our collectively shared maps, and it serves to enable the coordination of our activity.

Perhaps there is no good and bad to it, it is more of an evolutionary experiment which seemed to go very well for a little while but is clearly facing its longer-term toxic limitations at this time. We’re heading downhill, fast.

Even so, I feel it is important to recognized that the institution of science is inhabited by actual humans, each of whom has chosen to take on this role as a way to participate in a larger story, to find belonging and meaning in their life’s activity. Even in the worst case, when they see the faults of the existing system, yet exploit these faults for their own selfish gain, for example, they do so out of a perception and belief that this is the best route for them toward whatever version of fulfillment toward which they are able to aspire. Sad for them, sad for the rest of us, but understandable from the point of view of being them.

As for my aim/intention/aspiration, I have to say this project emerged on its own. In posts over the next three weeks, I will be providing a little more background to this story. First I’ll describe what I call feelingmind, the first place toward which psychotopology turns its investigatory lens. Then I’ll build more of the idea of this more open, living science by describing the general flow of how discoveries are made, and thus how new maps and parts of maps come into being. In the third upcoming post, I’ll be describing my first, unplanned excursion into this new territory of feelingmind using a new tool for observation, and making the case for this new method offering a possible way forward for a new, living science of inner experience.

To summarize in a different way, in 1994 I found myself suddenly plunged into a freaky, unexplainable new inner territory through a random confluence of forces, and I was forced to make sense of my experience. In that process, being human and having reasonable capacity for sensemaking, I found myself enacting the fundamental principles of a living science. Once I started getting a handle on what I had discovered, I continued on this path to further develop the method and explore the territory.

Another reason for making explicit this implicit flow of discovery and sensemaking is to redefine science in a way that is more alive and responsive to all of experience. (Let me rant here for a bit.) I want to call out the dead science that currently pretends to be the ultimate arbiter of reality while doing a really terrible job of providing useful maps for people for navigating their own inner realms. Instead, what current brain and psychological science has been doing for the past century may actually be making things worse. The current epidemic of “mental health issues” is in many ways, I believe, a direct consequence of the actions of this dead science, which all the while has professed to be improving people’s lives. (OK, rant finished. I’ll have a lot more to say about all this, but probably not until next year after I establish more of the ground for me to stand on in saying these things.)

So. Partly what I aspire to do is to present a more sensible science that can actually be used to improve people’s actual lives, while actually doing science with much greater fidelity to the deepest principles of the activity. As you say, there is good reason to question using science as it is currently practiced and professed as the vehicle to travel through a true investigation of subjective experience. But there is good reason, I think, to do science one better, to show how it could have been done from the beginning if it had not been hijacked by things like ego and profit, and to issue a siren call to young people feeling called to science as a vocation, who see through the institutional monster that has kidnapped science and killed its vitality, to invite new people to start over, to reinvent what is possible in a true effort to enter the space of mystery within ourselves and to produce far more powerful maps enabling us to traverse this mystery with greater mastery than ever before.

Oh, my goodness, look what I have done! It is late, and it would take me far too long to reduce this to a more appropriate comment size. Please forgive my circuitous rambling, and please trust that upcoming posts themselves will be a bit more properly trimmed. And thank you so very much for your input. I really appreciate it!

Oh, and yes, I also anticipate some great conversations with Veronika — coming soon, I hope!

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Thank you for a considered reply. A New Authentic Science (which is very necessary) might be along the lines of Goethean Science, where Subjective Experience is taken as the ONLY form of valid knowledge; there is nothing else. (Veronika has written about this - not sure where at this point).

I think it is also worth pointing out that traditional materialist Science discredited itself by its own methodology about 100 years ago, (with the advent of quantum theory) but science as an institution does not seem to have realised the implications of its own discovery and is still banging on in the old mode - and I agree, the damage, especially to mental health, is huge.

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Having worked with subjective experience for the past 25+ years, I think this is the key sentence here: "Above all, we require a new method for observing subjective experience with greater fidelity, a method that enables us to get around the language filter to reveal more of what lies inside."

see also my chapter on 'Subjective Experience as a Living Source of Knowledge' https://veronikabondsynchronosophy.substack.com/p/the-heartwood-of-synchronosophy-part-b9a

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Oh, I'm looking forward to sharing the next few posts with you in this the Science series, Veronika, especially the third one where I go into detail about my discovery of the new observational method and the "subjective" phenomenon upon which it is focused. My goodness, especially after skimming through your chapter and the comments. So much resonance!! Thank you, thank you!

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I get the impression that your research and discoveries tie in very well with Goethean Science (and also with Raoul Francé, an Austro-Hungarian scientist who is virtually unknown outside the German speaking world because hardly any of his work has been translated). Both have clearly stated that subjective experience is the only reliable basis for true science!

Meanwhile, Eugene Gendlin (philosophy of the implicit) and others have pointed to the importance of language and naming the subjective experience. That the subjectively chosen words can not be generalised (or objectified) should go without saying, but it does nothing to diminish the truth of the word for the experiencer.

{This does not mean that language is the only possible representation of SE... of course. My elder daughter, who is an artist and process worker, preferably uses movement, drawing and sound. My younger daughter, an art therapist, uses painting, sculpting, and representation through constellations.}

I have found that subjective experience is always true, it cannot be argued with (or falsified) precisely because it is subjective. The connection and deeper understanding between people does not depend on the labels, whether they rely on language or other symbols, but on the authenticity of the experience.

When working with people I have often been surprised by the words they choose for their experience. But every time someone finds the right word/s (for them) for their experience, there is an instant palpable sense of relief, which anyone can witness (e.g. when working in a group).

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Thank you, Veronika. Yes, I got the sense from your chapter on ‘Subjective Experience as a Living Source of Knowledge' that there are some strong echoes with Goethe and Francé. I so appreciate that you keep adding opportunities for me to gradually shed the sense that I have been working in a vacuum. Gendlin, too. I would have appreciated an opportunity to talk with him, but never attained any level of visibility that would have enabled that by the time he passed.

What you speak to about the inadequacy of language to package subjective experience with generalizable fidelity is at the heart of the challenge of developing something that functions as a useful, living science. The sense of relief you name when someone succeeds in finding personal language that expresses, for them, something essential about their inner experience, is one of the great values of many forms of therapy and processing.

What psychotopology introduces takes this one step farther. As you will see in a few weeks (I also talk about it briefly in the intro post, Frontiers of Psychotopology), fieldwork enables access to a kind of proto-language that provides liberating specificity to our ability to articulate what we feel while also enabling us to begin to discern more universal patterns throughout all our experience within and among ourselves. That’s where things get really exciting.

You also speak to the experience of “connection and deeper understanding between people.” Yes, yes, it is far more accessible to us when we can let go of our attachment to labels and ground our awareness in the authenticity of presence with one another. Down the line, I will be sharing more about what I call the field dimension of conscious experience, which includes our more subtle felt experiences of occupying the space in and around our bodies. Discovering this reveals a great deal about how the experience of connection actually works, how our attachment to the realm of thought gets in the way, and how we can cultivate it more fruitfully.

I really want to just jump right into all of this, but I know I’ve got to lay things out more systematically first.

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I totally understand, and will continue to follow along for the ride 🚣🏻

your (our) work is paradigmshifting. 🪂 It takes as long as it takes.

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Sep 10Liked by Joe Shirley

Fascinating! The barriers and filters abound, and yet humans still find ways to love, feel seen and heard, reflect one another… it’s a wonder! And makes me appreciate other biochemical factors at play that go far beyond language to build bridges of connection.

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Kimberly, I so appreciate your perspective. (Not just here, but also on Unfixed -- been reading for a while, now.) Thank you for adding your illumination to this conversation, it brightens my day!

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