Who Is This Joe Shirley Guy?

A Little Bit About the Founder of Psychotopology

Hiking a beautiful trail here in the Pacific Northwest.

The fields of mental health, cognitive psychology and related areas of study and practice are understandably well-guarded, and appropriate credentials are key to validating one’s credibility.

However, let me be up front with you. I have exactly zero relevant credentials. I have not undergone training in psychotherapy, cognitive science, counseling or even coaching. If you rely on those kinds of credentials to trust what someone says about the nature of your inner world, this may not be the place for you. If, instead, your touchstone for truth about your inner experience is your own, actual inner experience, then please do come along.

Starting From the Outside

In developing my life’s work, I started in a different place than many, and took a different path than most. First key difference: due to the conditions of my upbringing, by the time I reached adulthood I was firmly lodged in a strong distrust of all authority. I questioned everything. Never have I had a mentor or teacher who I admired and accepted as my guide. Unfortunate and quite lonely for me, but true, and this set the conditions for what was to come.

Nevertheless, as I set off to college, I was relatively committed to the conventional view of what life was about. I earned a full ride to the University of Pennsylvania, where I escalated my ambitions from engineering to neuroscience and completed my pre-med requirements in just two years. Then, on a junior year abroad in Edinburgh Scotland, I found myself catapulted to the outside of the ordinary.

In exploring deep states of meditation, I experienced a profound noetic union with the all-that-is, a direct experience of consciousness as the central substrate of all existence. There are no words to capture it, but it became the fundamental ground of my life. From this new perspective, I could no longer buy into the competitive, consumerist, rationalist life of my career path, and I stepped aside. Into what, I had no idea. There was no one around me who could relate, and I could find no reference to what I had experienced.

What followed was a period of wandering — dropping out of school, reading voraciously, trying out various spiritual and psychological tangents, going from one job to the next, one apartment to the next, one relationship to the next. I would rise to reconnect with the core truth of my soul and plunge into the darkness of being unable to share that with others.

In 1987, I read the book, Moodswing, by Ronald Fieve, and found it described my life quite well. I decided to consult a psychiatrist and he confirmed that very definitely I fit the criteria for the bipolar disorder diagnosis. But I had studied enough neuroscience in college to recognize the weakness of the diagnostic category and its recommendations for treatment. I didn’t trust it. I stepped away from my lithium prescription and never looked back.

There was no question that something needed to change. My life was a mess at that time in my late 20s. But I sensed the possibility of learning something about the structure of my inner world that would free me from the driving pulse of the mood cycles. From that point forward, working around the needs to make a living and all the rest, that was my primary focus.

Cracking the Code

It took me seven years, some hints picked up from an alternative psychology called NLP, and a lot of experimentation before I got lucky. My first breakthrough came from a random experiment that gave unexpectedly powerful results, resulting in my directly and instantly shifting a feeling of depression to one of cheerfulness. This out-of-the-box experiment (I refer to it in my inaugural post and my introduction to the science, and will explicate further in later posts) gave me a hint about the proto-language of virtual materiality that constitutes raw feeling experience.

Less than a year later, after developing a full suite of questions to more fully elicit these virtual material properties of the feeling experience and learning to work with groups of interrelated states, I permanently shed the intense mood cycles. This was a profound transition, an experience confirming that my investigation was yielding significant and important results.

Digging in for the Long Haul

From that point forward, I devoted myself to further deepening and developing what I had discovered, and have spent the rest of my life in service to these discoveries. I went back to school in part to gain a degree, but also to give myself the opportunity and space to more fully develop my independent research.

My perception was that there was no place in academia that would support me in my investigations, especially because I had not even completed a bachelors degree. I believed it would have taken me a long time, and jumping through a lot of extraneous hoops, to earn that kind of support. Of course, it may have been possible I could have found just the right program, just the right advisor who would have been open to such an innovation. But at that time I was still burdened by my distrust of authority, so even if I had encountered such an opportunity, I probably would not have been open to it.

Instead, I chose Antioch University Seattle because it offered plenty of flexibility and support for my independent explorations. The program I was drawn to combined systems science with design practice, providing the perfect container, from my perspective, for true innovation. I deliberately avoided going into psychology, psychotherapy, neuroscience, or anything related, because I felt it was important to give myself full rein to explore and investigate, and to respond to what I was discovering without the encumbrances of needing to fit my work into a pre-existing framework.

From the Ground Up, and the Inside Out

In essence, I was starting from scratch, looking at the raw data of actual, inner, subjective experience, using my new instrument of observation which enabled me to examine the field dimension of experience, and building my models from the ground up. Over the years, I conducted all kinds of experiments in working with myself, facilitating others individually and in groups, interweaving fieldwork into other forms of facilitation and practice, and more.

I will be writing about my approach to science at some point soon, but will say here that I feel very good about how I approached this work and very excited about the results it has produced. When you fully understand what psychotopology delivers, I think you will appreciate the need for starting completely from outside the existing systems of academic and industrial research.

I’m Placing My Trust in You

Honestly, I am way out on a limb here from one perspective. I have no place to stand among the institutions and status structures of society. I have no professional network to speak of. This three decades of developing psychotopology have been spent as an isolated outsider, a renegade, a maverick from the perspective of societal norms.

But that’s OK. I am confident that what I have produced stands strongly on its own. Our human experience is constructed in a particular way that psychotopology reveals to us and to which it gives us direct access. Anyone who is relatively comfortable traversing inner realms will be able to confirm what I have found, and many will find themselves compelled to apply these new discoveries to support and expand their own work with both themselves and others.

I encourage you to dip in and test the discoveries of psychotopology, piece by piece, through your own experience, as I share each building block, as together we build this new science from the inside out. To do this, you will not need a lab, or expensive instruments, or statistics. Just yourself and a willingness to explore. You will need to be willing to experiment with new ways of seeing and feeling, and to be open to seeing and feeling things you have never seen or felt before. In other words, you will need to be willing to enter a space of the unknown.

Push the Edges

If this speaks to you, I ask you to do the following in order to establish the credibility and trust you deserve to have in me. Examine what I share, and try it out in your own inner experience. See what you find, and how well it matches what I am telling you. Push the edges a bit and see where that takes you. Compare and contrast with what you already know (or think you know) about the world of inner experience. From that place, and from that place only, ask yourself if what you have found justifies your trust.

One more thing. I encourage you to interact with me here. Jump in and post a comment or two. Sign up for a paid subscription and show up for the live Engage meetings. Challenge what I am presenting you, question it, disagree with it. And see how I respond. Let’s find out together whether a) psychotopology deserves your attention, and b) I deserve your trust. I feel excited by the possibilities for these kinds of conversations, because I find them lively, full of energy, and rich with possibilities for further insights and perspectives that serve the whole. I look forward to engaging with you, no matter what your current perspective, no matter what your background, no matter where you are coming from.

Thank you for being here!

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To honor the norm of spelling out more details about one’s background, I offer this short but more conventional summary.

Joe Shirley, MA

Education

• 1999–2002: Antioch University Seattle, Whole Systems Design Program. Awarded an MA in Whole Systems Design with a focus in Facilitating Transformative Learning Processes in June 2002.

• 1998: California Institute of Integral Studies, Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness Program, PhD track. Studies with Brian Swimme and others.

• 1996–1997: Antioch University Seattle, BA Completion Program. Awarded a BA in Natural Sciences and Consciousness Studies in December 1997.

• 1982-1992: Neuro-Linguistic Programming training, including Practitioner Certification (Joe Yeager & Linda Summer), Master Practitioner Certification (NLP Comprehensive), and Design Human Engineering Certification (Richard Bandler).

• 1980–1984: Various fits and starts, attempting to complete my degree at Penn while unsuccessfully dealing with my mood swings. Finally dropped out with more credits than I needed, but lacking a few key engineering courses for which I had lost all interest.

• 1979–1980: University of Edinburgh, Scotland. My junior year abroad, funded by a scholarship from the Andrew Mutch Foundation in Philadelphia. Credit-wise, this was a throwaway year as I chose to pursue independent studies rather than stay enrolled in the formal programs available to me. The insights that eventually led to this work came to me during this time.

• 1977–1979: University of Pennsylvania, pre-med, bioengineering. Completed my medical school prerequisites with flying colors by the end of my sophomore year.

Professional Experiences

• 1994 to Present: Independent investigator of the inner, subjective experience of feeling, mood, and emotion. Developer of psychotopology and the fieldwork method. Leader of trainings and facilitator of group experiences and individual sessions in fieldwork.

• 1999 to Present: Facilitation of group processes of various kinds focused on development of group coherence, creativity, and generative collaboration. From 2015 to the present, co-founder of Resonance Path Institute with my partner, Spring Cheng, to focus on delivering this work.

• Long-Ago Work: Advertising copywriter, graphic designer, research assistant, product developer, counselor.

Other Explorations

• 2018 to Present: Playback Theater. Performing and practicing with Playback Theater Northwest in Seattle and currently with Echoes of the Heart in Bellingham.

• 1987 to 2023: Improvisational Dance. Various workshops, retreats, and performances. Studied with Manfred Fischbeck, Karl Frost, Tonya Lockyer, John Dixon, many others. Performed with Group Motion, Ausdruckstanz in Philadelphia and Jonas Radvik and JKLM Studio / Sea-Bus Dance Collective in Seattle.

• 1991–1994: Acting. Performed in several community theater productions in Whitefish, Montana.

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