Notes
The section titled 'Process of Conceptualisation' is a condensed version that does not hold all observations. The following are disconnected ideas and observations that I find to be relevant but they are either off to some degree, or simply haven't yet made their way in the main body of text. I am doing so because any adjustment, ends up creating a cascade of adjustments that needs to be reflected downstream. Because this is time and energy consuming, which are limited, I am using this page as a place holder for observations and ideas I find relevant, but have not yet had the time or energy to develop or add them to the main text.
-------
Duration is the active maintenance of a distinction in the absence of the original contrast - systems that lose the capacity for active maintenance will lose Duration. - this would explain my inability to experience time for a good chunk of the decade.
_____
A thought doesn't make for reality, neither does a feeling but the integration movement between them is a solid coordinate
----
The dreams had already introduced the affective content of the contrast poles 12 years prior to the experience, activating the poles in my reality: Love/Fear; Self/Erasure-of-Self and God/Devil via Love/Fear and Self/Devil through the dreams. The dreams didn't introduce the Devil pole in isolation, but within a relational structure that implicitly carried its contrast pole - God. Devil as a concept has affective content only because God exists as its contrast. I couldn't register the Devil affectively without the God/Love/coherence pole as the thing Devil is set against. This implies that the contrast structure itself - not just one pole but the relational axis between them was being carried by the dreams prior to waking registration of either. The field wasn't tracking isolated affective content but the structural relation between the poles of an axis that was already there - outside of time, outside of linear cognition, outside of waking reality. The contrast structure preceded the experience that would activate it. This to me suggests that contrast isn't something human consciousness produces but something that consciousness tracks and navigates.
---
Self as prior and agentic
Because of this, during the aftermath of the spiritual emergence/archetypal encounter the lived texture of nearly one entire decade of my life had a linear, flat quality to it. I realised that orientation nearly collapsed in all domains of my life. I believe this to be the case, because during this time, I went to work where the days varied, there were occasional mild breaks in my life routine, and yet the lived texture of nearly one entire decade of my life remained monotonous. No real depth which registered as nearly flat. I think that aside from the suspended reality around A., the fact that part of the trauma involved core identity and core values, which implied I had a dimmed to non-existent felt sense of self, contributed. Core identity - Self as the gravitational center around which all axes organise, core identity isn't on the same level as self/other as the precondition for the self that navigates all axes including self/other. Core values - Love and Truth as the structural properties of the field that every consciousness participates in, with differing degrees of awareness and alignment.
Self must be prior and agentic and a good evidence for that is the pre-emergence moment when despite being faced with eternal damnation I couldn't bring myself to enact the required Self-erasure for supposed access to the Christian heaven. I felt that in pleasing the Christian god I had to enact Self erasure and my whole body contorted at the idea. Ironically my refusal to erase my Self, combined with allowing space for Other - God in this particular case - was a movement of Love and Truth held in relation which is what allowed for alignment with Reality. I still contort at the idea that I must self erase if I want to be a part of the field as I find many spiritual interpretations or even society who would be more comfortable with me having a different reality suggest. I usually think of this analogy: a cube has 6 facets, each facet is a square on its own. The cube cannot be a cube without all the facets, and the facets themselves are complete shapes on their own, but contribute to whole in the structure of the cube.
----
I was still able to function and perform routines, yet operated on autopilot, because the inner signal that normally anchors authorship and meaning was muted or inaccessible. This is what distinguished axes that remained available for navigation from those that collapsed. Consciousness didn't disappear, but contrast no longer held strongly enough for affect to organize and guide action. Because my collapse and trauma involved core identity and core values, and these axes carried higher structural load, the resulting disorientation propagated outward into other domains over time, leaving only low-stakes axes related to basic daily functioning available.
-----
Before the recognition "this is warm" there must already be a differential state between warmth and its absence. A state becomes experience only against its alternative. Consider continuity: if a continuous line simply exists without there being the possibility for it to be finite, broken, or bounded, "continuous" is not a quality it can even experience but merely what it is. Without the alternative of finitude, there can be no experience of continuity but only undifferentiated existence that cannot be registered as anything in particular.
I believe contrast isn't only how we recognise experience, but what makes experience navigable in reality - the capacity to orient, decide, and act. Without contrasting poles held in relation, there is no orientation (which way is forward?), there is no decision (this vs. that), no action (approach vs. withdraw), no coherent registration (this state vs other states). In my view, experience requires contrasting structure to exist.
---
I hadn't looked for, or considered a spiritual emergence being a part of my life. I then spent the following decade questioning it and going through every possibile alternative explanation only for my reality to keep asserting itself. I was faced with saying 'not that, but this' over and over. Aside from this, there was no expectation I had that could prime me for such an experience, quite the opposite, the experience arrived against the grain of my cognitive set, not with it.
My spiritual emergence kicked off with a somatic experience of invisible shackles breaking loose from my ankles and wrists, shackles I wasn't aware of having, prior to the experience, nor would I have considered that as a possibility in any way, shape or form. While in the moments prior to my spiritual emergence I had made an association between the tarot card the Devil which has a man and a woman shackled from the neck to a throne upon which sits the Devil, my association between fear and the Devil was purely metaphorical. Besides, the somatic experience of shackles breaking involved other parts of the body from the ones depicted in the card. Priming could not account for the somatic aspect of this part of my experience felt in the body as physical sensation, unexpected, and not sought after.
Both the somatic experience and my spiritual emergence as a whole registered as reality because they stood starkly against any other experience I had had throughout my life.
---
I would only realise how blurry my mind was, only after making progress. Getting closer to reality isn't a one and done thing, but a process. It is why in my writing so far, I say getting closer to reality, rather than knowing or aligning with reality. My spiritual emergence was one such alignment and i think all alignment with reality would likely be clocked as undeniably real regardless of the axis.
---
Trying to find relief from it all, I had even ended up trying therapy in the months before. I had grown more confident in the existence of my experience, but it usually took five sessions just to recount the story. The therapist-client dynamic was a hit-and-miss too depending on the counsellor. It wasn't that they didn't believe me, but it seemed like they didn't have the tools to truly grasp my experience and I was usually left feeling unheard and unseen. Only one of them recognised my spiritual experience for what it was. He even called it "an education in healing", something I hadn't quite thought of before, but our sessions began in an unconventional way which made trust difficult. I tolerated it for a while, because I liked our dynamic and I was desperate, but the trust issue deepened over time. I then had no energy left to start all over again with someone new, only to risking feeling unseen.
----
I would have to agree that psychology correctly identifies that trauma causes dissociative collapse when input overwhelms the system's capacity to integrate. What I'm interested in is what this reveals about the structure of experience. The fact that coherence can fail, that a self can literally lose the capacity to hold itself together, suggests that holding differentiation in relation isn't just a cognitive process but a fundamental requirement for experience to exist at all.
---
cognition as the articulating/differentiating function that leads to integration, where navigation is only coherent when affect and cognition are aligned. there was already affective content held in the poles, but they remained suspended and blurred into one another. I first had to push for differentiation, in order to differentiate the poles which helped affect settle. From that moment on, it was a process of doing my best to render correct structure upon that registration. This turned into a continuous movement, and process through which the signal became clearer and clearer. The registration of that signal became most observable during the post-crisis exhausation phase, and what I believe clinicians call nervous-system burnout where I could feel every possible orientation as having the ability to make or break my nervous system. I felt the movement towards coherence or incoherence in my nervous system. Depending on how I oriented - it literally felt as if the wrong turn could collapse my nervous system, so I would reorient until the signal I registered felt soothing to various degrees. This was almost moment to moment, and visible whenever I tried to structure affect via cognition - poor structure and implicitly navigation registered incoherence, with aligned structure and navigation registering coherence. Symbolically - my experience is a good representation of the movement from Dark to Light. My spiritual emergence was a state of coherence that registered as Light, with the following inversion of my reality turning Light to Dark. My consciousness remained in darkness, until I started to differentiate and use the registration of the coordinates between the poles to move towards the Light pole. Affect as the field's registration, and Cognition as navigator. A recursive movement where each navigation movement turns into a new signal that needs structuring again.
----
The poles of contrast were activated via the initial affective registration during the two times we met. One held the God/Self pole, the other the Devil/erasure pole. They were both equally intense in opposite directions. They, then remained suspended in that same exact state for nearly one entire decade.
The cognitive awareness of all possibilities wasn't prior to or independent of affect - it was the structuring movement of the initial affective registration. Affect came first through the two meetings, registering the full archetypal charge of the encounter. Then cognition did what cognition does - it structured that registration into the possible interpretations: Self archetype, Devil archetype, etc. The list of hypotheses was cognition's attempt to articulate what affect had already registered.
This means "cognitively aware of all possibilities" is slightly misleading as it stands because cognition wasn't operating independently, surveying abstract possibilities. Cognition was actually trying to structure an overwhelming affective registration that it couldn't resolve - because the very thing that needed to be differentiated for integration to happen remained deliberately ambiguous.
So the impossibility compounded. Affect registered first and intensely. Cognition tried to structure it but couldn't collapse the hypotheses because he withheld the data that would have allowed differentiation. So the initial affective registration remained unstructured, the cognitive structuring remained incomplete, and integration couldn't happen because neither affect nor cognition could complete their part of the movement.
"Cognitively aware of all possibilities" is true but it makes cognition sound active and self-sufficient when it was actually suspended mid-movement, unable to complete the structuring it had begun.