The material “stuff” of the feeling mind
What color is your curiosity? Is it hard or soft? Warm or cool?
And how is it moving?
We are bodies.
Our minds are embodied minds.
All our experience is anchored in our embodiment.
From the beginning of life, we are material beings interacting with a material world. Encounters with solid, liquid, gas, light, color, warmth, movement, sound: these provide the raw substrate out of which we construct our awareness and understanding of self-in-the-world.
There is structure to this awareness, and it can be discerned and studied in vivid detail. By asking precise, sensory questions about the subjective experience of the felt sense, psychotopology reveals the rich complexity and elegance of our materially-derived minds. It turns out that even our most sublime sentiments and abstract concepts extend their roots into material origins.
The questions are simple:
- Where is the feeling located?
- What substance does it resemble?
- What is its temperature?
- What color is it?
- How is it moving?
- What sound does it make?
The answers people give, however, are endlessly diverse and fascinating to behold. For example:
Shame
- Located between shoulder blades, size of a fist.
- Solid, hard, rough texture, like a cluster of crystals.
- Cold.
- Deep, deep purple.
- Sound of a hissing snake.
- Beliefs: "I am wrong, and I can't help myself."
(You might find it interesting to compare this person's experience of a feeling called "shame" with this other person's very different experience of a feeling with the same name.)
Joy
We really shouldn’t be surprised to find this. We possess a sophisticated capacity to monitor through somatosensory representations our internal body states, posture and position in space, and even extensions of our body in the form of tools, companions, and surroundings.
Notice your internal state as you get up to address a group or lose something important to you. Tune into your musculature as you execute a jumping jack or reach to a high shelf. Pay attention to your proprioceptive projection as you swing a hammer or execute a crawl stroke in the pool. Attend to your felt sense of space and objects as you navigate your bedroom in the dark. Sink into the seamless merging of your body with that of a lover. All of these experiences provide examples of the myriad ways our somatosensory capacity feeds us rich and varied information – some received and some constructed – to orient our material bodies to our material worlds.
It makes sense that we should employ such functionality in service to feeling. This is primal consciousness, preceding in both evolutionary and developmental time the more complex manipulation of imagery and language that is cognition. This is our foundation. I cannot do it justice in this brief introduction, but I hope to demonstrate in other writing that we should expect any consciousness to be constructed in just this way.
Our somatosensory capacity is not just perceptive.
It is creative as well.
Imagine moving your hand through a pool of cool water. Now imagine the water is warm and very thick, like syrup. Go one step further and imagine this warm, thick syrup is very, very heavy like mercury, so that if you cup your hand and try to lift some out of the pool, you cannot do it, but if you leave your hand extended and lift straight out it comes easily.
Our capacity to both perceive and create somatosensory imagery is profound. And it is that capacity which gives rise to the endlessly diverse profusion of actual feeling state experiences we encounter in the course of our living. The diversity is far greater than our current language of feeling accounts for. And because somatosensory feeling is highly subjective, available to no one but ourselves, it is difficult for us to talk about feeling in ways that truly communicate to one another about our actual, felt experiences. We have no way to objectively corroborate our descriptions in the way we find so easy to do with visual, auditory, or even kinesthetic/tactile experiences. The explicit questioning technique of somatosensory imaging fills in this gap.
I discovered early on in my investigations that it is an easy matter to interact with the imagery that results from answering the somatosensory imaging questions, to change the image directly. When we do that, we find that the actual, felt experience of the feeling state changes as well. Eliciting the image serves as though we have created a handle on the feeling, and we are now able to manipulate it at will.
Within this diversity of feeling, we find a clear order.
When I first created this methodology, I expected it was a simple matter to “map” an uncomfortable feeling state using the questions, and “move” it to any other state I chose. This seemed like the holy grail of personal growth! Simply map a bad feeling, change the image until it felt better, and you were done.
I quickly discovered, however, that it wasn’t that easy. For one thing, feeling states started turning up in multiples. Every time I intended to map a single feeling state, I found instead interactive structures involving multiple “parts.” I was intrigued.
Even more intriguing was an early attempt to turn one distressed feeling state into a previously mapped positive one. It wouldn’t go.
When you do this mapping and moving, the effect is remarkable. You actually do feel the thing moving. And if you try to make it go somewhere that isn’t natural for it, it just doesn’t move. You can imagine it, but you don’t feel it.
The only way the moving works is to surrender to what the feeling itself seems to want, to move the image towards what feels good to that part. I could move the distressed feeling to its own positive state, and I could devolve the positive state into its own distress. But I could not cross over one to the other.
This suggested that feeling was not this loosey-goosey, secondary function, but rather a very specific attribute of some deeper entity. I chose to call these entities parts for want of a better name, and dove wholeheartedly into an investigation of their nature. It took me the better part of 15 years to fully understand what I was seeing in this work, and the following is merely the briefest sketch.
- Consciousness is modular. A discrete, 9-part structure creates the experience of being-in-the-world. A separate, 3-part structure creates the experience of the witnessing self.
- Each part, or module, has its own distinct identity. This identity is defined by a unique function which does not change over time. In carrying out its function, each module is free to express through an infinite range of feeling states.
- In the nine-part system, three modules are devoted to creating our experience of what is inside of us, three to what is outside of us, and three to the broadest context within which the inside and outside interact. I call these the inside, outside, and context orientations.
- Within each triad, one module is devoted to holding our knowledge of what is possible, one to our knowledge of what is currently true, and the last to our orientation toward action in our environment. I call these the source, presence, and guidance functions.
- The full, nine-part set of modules constitutes a tightly-integrated system. The unit functions as a whole. It maintains its own equilibrium.
This elegant architecture reveals new principles for understanding the human experience and promoting personal, organizational, and communal flourishing.
- The purpose of feeling is to maintain harmony of the person with the environment. When there is balance between inside, outside, and context, we experience ourselves as whole. When some event disrupts that wholeness, we feel distress in some form appropriate to the disruption. The distress calls attention to itself and motivates action to correct the disharmony.
- When we are prevented from attending to distressing feelings or acting upon them, we can be thrown into persistent unbalance. The signal goes unaddressed, the entire system rearranges itself around the distressing feeling states, and very often the system gets locked into a disrupted pattern. When compromised and held outside of full awareness, a system can perpetuate a dysfunctional pattern for many decades.
- The primary factor perpetuating a system in dysfunction is a failure to bring attention to the full set of distressed feeling states. Even psychotherapy often fails to facilitate timely change because of the inability to identify the full set of nine parts involved in a given pattern. Even a single module remaining outside of awareness and locked into a distressed state can control the entire system.
- Disrupted systems can be restored to normal functioning very quickly. Release of a system is promoted through three steps.
- The first step is to embrace all feeling, to bring attention to the full set of nine distressed feeling states.
- The second is to invite each module to remember its original, or ideal state, as way to return to wholeness.
- The third step is to embody the insights and changes suggested by the ideal states.
- These three steps follow a natural sequence, and when done systematically, full release and transformation of long-standing patterns of dysfunctional mood, thought, and behavior occur easily and quickly.
- In the examples above, the feeling of shame shifted easily and naturally into the feeling of joy, (it takes just a few minutes). This was one of nine transformations this client completed to accelerate her career, which had been paralyzed by fear and shame around making even the simplest of mistakes.
This work has broad implications that affect every one of us.
Current cultural practices of child-rearing, education, entertainment, management, worship, and other pervasive influences guarantee a populace in persistently extreme emotional distress. Our culture is founded on a command-and-control approach to life. It is grounded in a fallen-from-grace perspective on human frailty. We analyze, identify right vs. wrong, and control what we deem wrong so we get more of what we deem right.
This approach guarantees that every one of us becomes split from our own authentic, necessary, functional distress signals. We have become nations full of feeling-mind cripples. And because our cognitive mind is no longer well integrated with our feeling mind, and our feeling mind is so distressed as to be functionally broken, we are not living in natural, embodied sanity. We are crazy. Disembodied. Unfeeling. Dangerous to ourselves, to one another, and to the planet.
If we work together, we can recover our collective sanity.
While the job of recovering full functioning in any adult who has carried a lifetime of suppressed distress can be daunting, psychotopology provides clear guidelines for making sure future generations do not suffer in the same way. The work suggests that many of our most fundamental assumptions about human nature are misguided. Revisions to these assumptions combined with effective methods derived from the tools of this new science should lead to rapid progress. I believe it is possible that many of us alive today will see a world in which violence, mental illness, oppression, war, economic disparity, and other injustices will drop to levels never seen in modern times.
I intend to do all I can to promote this outcome. I would like your help. Here is what you can do.
1. Read everything you can here. I consider this website the proving ground for the contents of my books. (There are several in preparation.) Ask me to add you to the site membership so you can post comments and contribute to a conversation we can all learn from. (I don’t allow anonymous posts because I refuse to spend one minute of my time policing for spammers. Please understand, and if you are interested in public dialog with me, make a commitment and let me add you to the site membership. I will also publish links of active members’ websites. Thanks.)
2. Apply these discoveries in your own life. Ideas take root when we experience their impact directly. There is no way you can fully understand the potential impact of this work without personally experiencing the transformation of your own somatosensory modules and the liberation that follows. To make this easier, please consider taking me up on my very generous offer for a 1-Hour Call.
3. Help me get this work published in academic circles. These discoveries represent an unprecedented opportunity for the right university researchers. I have developed the work completely free of institutional ties and have conducted my research by the seat of my pants. There’s no way I can publish in a reputable journal without the proper institutional support, (for example, I would most likely require IRB approval to submit data collected from any subjects). I would like to act as a consultant to scientists who see the opportunity here to make a name for themselves, and see the importance of making this work available to a wide scientific audience. I can see major opportunities for application at least in cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. What I have written here is but a fraction of what I know and understand, so if you are a researcher, please allow me to collaborate with you in designing studies which will yield the most fruitful results.
4. Hire me to work with you. I’ve been operating on a shoestring for a long time. This work is my passion and my purpose, and I have devoted myself to developing it at the expense of my short term financial well-being. I intend to provide all the information you might need to do the work with yourself, or to facilitate a friend or colleague in doing the work. But please consider hiring me directly. Fact is, I’m the preeminent psychotopology expert in the entire world. (Of course. I’m the only one at the moment. Hopefully to be joined soon by others.)
5. Tell people about it. Yes. Spread the word. Tell your friends, readers, colleagues, associates, tweet-buddies, Facebook friends, and everybody you meet in the street. Send everyone you know right here. This is a groundbreaking discovery, and you will be honored as a bleeding-edge, early adopting trendsetter when you pass the word through your network.
6. Introduce me to key influencers in the media, academia, mental health, and elsewhere. People with influence are going to want to see this coming and be able to take advantage of the opportunities it offers. Help us both with an introduction.
7. Connect me to people with integrity in psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. I’m appalled by what passes for care in mental health these days. Money has pushed aside the prime directive of the medical profession: First do no harm. Instead, the profit motive combines with the very real difficulty of actually helping people with mental illness, to sweep every possible mental and emotional challenge into the category of medicable pathology. However, I believe psychotopology offers an unprecedented opportunity to tighten research, to discover with far higher precision just how the mind works. I think with the proper application of effort and intention, this new field could initiate a revolution in psychiatry, and lead to more appropriate diagnosis and treatment of true, physiologically caused mental illness along with more suitable interventions for those who are merely out of balance.
8. Make a donation to support this work. I’ve accumulated enormous debt in developing this work and have lived like a pauper for fifteen years in order to bring it forward. I know times are tough for everyone right now, but please consider making a generous donation to support my continuing efforts. I hope to bring in others to help me with the business side of things and to begin making trainings available to professionals, but these things require capital. Thank you in advance!
A final thought
Psychotopology does nothing I can see to solve the hard problem of consciousness. And it says nothing about the absolute nature of the mind or of anything like a soul or spirit. What psychotopology does is illuminate the actual, felt experience of being human. It gives us a map of the territory so we can be far more proficient in navigating our own inner landscape. Similarly, it enables us to be more effective in designing collective environments and practices which support full human flourishing.
The mysteries of life, the ultimate meaning, remain fully obscured. I have been very deliberate and painstaking in avoiding interpretations of my discoveries that stray beyond the verifiable evidence. This is a stripped down paradigm derived from the most fundamental, reproducible data of direct experience.
That said, there are certain interpretations that are difficult to avoid, which bear upon the project of creating a sustainable civilization. The work says nothing about the existence of life after death, but it does say that during life, we are best served by embracing all feeling, inviting its positive intent, and acting in ways that facilitate that intent.
Many current ideologies, cultural practices, and social principles directly thwart this recommendation. Over coming months and years, I intend to be bold in naming these and explaining how specifically they undermine the best interests of both the individual and the community.
There have been times when I have smacked myself on the forehead (figuratively) and shouted to the sky, demanding to know why it has taken so long for humankind to learn about these simple characteristics of feeling. Why did I not have this information available to me as a child, as a teen, as a young adult? Why did I have to sacrifice decades of my life first in search of this, then in development of it? I have felt gobsmacked by the fact of the entire edifice of human endeavor, and particularly a full century of psychological research, overlooking something so absurdly under our noses as to make mockery of the cliché itself.
Today I have made peace with that, and I am simply grateful to have the opportunity to be the guy who says of this work, “Hey! Look what I found.”
Thank you in advance for your support, your help, and your contribution in whatever way you choose to make it. Please let me know how I can support you in learning this work, making it your own, and taking it in directions meaningful and exciting to you.
