Old Home Page Introduction

To the reader:

This content on this site is for the most part an exploration of the structures of consciousness, reality, experience and their dynamic as they emerged from a set of anomalous experiences that broke me, and fundamentally altered my understanding and my perception of their nature. It is an account of lived experience, articulated as clearly as I could, and mapped out conceptually to the best of my ability.

The site holds a series of observations, my lived experience and how I came to glimpse into what I now describe as a structural organisational logic behind consciousness, and its dynamic with reality, and experience.

The content argues from lived experience that consciousness, reality and experience have an intrinsic structure and dynamic: a differentiated cohesive field that articulates and integrates over time.

The intellectual exercise has been a joy from the start, but its articulation came as a consequence of my need to survive after a phenomenon that is well documented in transpersonal psychology as spiritual emergence - a state of high-coherence in consciousness, which was followed by textbook Jungian archetypal activation and encounter that resulted in core fragmentation of my being. The traumatic event impacted core identity, core values and sat on multiple existentially charged axes of experience. From a state of high integration and high-coherence with reality, I found myself in a state of near complete incoherence with it a short month later.

It all led to the analysis of an entire decade of observations on my navigation of the aftermath. It was only after a decade, after I managed to sufficiently integrate the experience and trauma that I was able to unpack the different parts of the dynamic and their relation. In this sense, the content on this site is both map and medicine in my need to find purpose for something that affected me and my life deeply.

While this is a schematic synthesis, I see consciousness, reality and experience as distinct, yet inseparable: Consciousness as the fundamental experiential field - the medium itself - Cohesion. Reality as the structured totality consciousness can experience - Differentiation/Articulation. Experience as consciousness' registration of reality - Integration. The nature of Reality, Consciousness, Experience as fundamentally coherent.

After arriving at this structure and dynamic: Cohesion, Differentiation, Integration I discovered there is partial convergence between the structure and dynamic I observed and that of computational models of consciousness, like IIT. It, however, departs from these models by treating cohesion (relation) as a structural co-constituive condition that alongside differentiation enables, and cannot be provided by Integration.

My understanding of consciousness is largely experiential, as I am not formally trained in any of the domains I touch upon. I started from no or little conceptual knowledge of systems theory, philosophy or computational models of consciousness. While I am aware that in part my observations have been ideas philosophy and science previously engaged with in one form or another, I arrived at this structure and dynamic through my own analysis of my own lived experience. Because for the past decade I've been in survival mode, I only engaged in minimal study and research to see if I can corroborate my observations with already existing work and science. This is, however, not meant to be a dissertation.

I consider the vast majority of the content on the site to be a rough sketch and a work in progress, and is therefore an approximation, albeit an approximation I am quite confident in. I believe the substance beneath the approximation is there, and I am quite confident the contours of the map as they already stand are there. I believe that the structure and dynamic of consciousness as I understand them are perfectly visible for whomever is willing to track them. This being said, I do not claim my perspective to be exhaustive, but only that I think the whole of it provides a comprehensive view of my perspective as it stands today, and as it emerged from my experience.

I choose to place the section 'Process of Conceptualisation' at the top, because I believe it provides the map and guide through which the structure of my experience can be seen and understood. The rest of the site is the account of my lived experience serving as the primary data from which my observations emerged - 'Primary Material', and my attempts at a somewhat structured articulation of the architecture - the Sketch Models that were a part of my process. I advise the reader to go through the short glossary I put together for orientation. The structure of the site is intended in this order, because I believe the ordering allows the reader to extract the most out of it.

I am still integrating, and calibrating and the site is a living document of that. Some of the language across the site reflects different moments in that process.

Regardless of your personal opinions, and worldview I ask of you to please proceed holding in mind that there is a human being behind my words.