Synthesis

Note: While I did have A.I. help, this is not written by A.I., and the em dashes are a punctuation element that I happen to have always loved.

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I would first like to mention that every part of my experience came in a context of skepticism of such experiences. While my experience can be framed as mystical, I don't like the words spirituality, or mysticism as I find them associated with misinformation, and distortions I don't feel aligned with. While the entirety of my story sounds insane, even to my ears, even today, looking for reason in the midst of a ridiculously insane experience was my coping mechanism. For this reason, please do not be fooled by the symbolism present in my experience, because that is only the expression of my consciousness filtered through the cultural context of my environment.

The essence of my experience: In 2015 I ended up having a spiritual experience during which I felt a connection to what I only knew how to label as God at the time. A short month later, I met A. - a man I had encountered before in two dreams I had experienced as nightmares. I grew up associating A. with the Devil symbolism due to the fear I experienced in these dreams. I had had the dreams years earlier: one at the age of 12, and the other at 17. I only met A. at 28 in 2015. The encounters were uncanny. Every detail of my dream reality matched what I experienced in person: the specific setting, the people present, the unfolding events, the conversations. The second time I met him resulted in a deeply traumatic experience unfolding in an existentially charged moment of my life. This resulted in a decade of observations as I navigated the aftermath of both the spiritual emergence, and core self fragmentation. The following is a brief synopsis of the insights I felt emerge from my experience with such extreme states of consciousness in close temporal proximity.

During my spiritual emergence experience I felt I could see and understand a structure. The best I was able to articulate it at that time was that I was seeing a relationship between environment, consciousness, and experiential outcomes. This, and what was blatant symbolism was the only language I had to articulate my experience.

Navigating my experience meant having to test its elements for stability since it was subjective, memory reliant and insane sounding. Doing so had me do some research into the different structural elements of my experience, memory and trauma psychology included.

The complexity and the concentration of otherworldly experiences kept me engaged and in a constant state of detailed self observation, both of my own self separately and in relation to outer reality. It took me a while to be able to see and understand my spiritual experience as an alignment with the structure of reality, to be able to articulate the reason for the presence of the symbolism in my experience and its meaning, or even have basic understanding of what consciousness is and isn't. I wasn't looking to understand consciousness per se, nor do I claim I do right now, but merely looking to explain and articulate my experience.

Aside from conceptually exploring the ethical dimensions and boundaries of the symbolism, a few years in, I also started trying to deconstruct every part I possibly could, my own self included. I say 'try' only because in the moment, I didn't feel I was successful. I was struggling. I was struggling to understand what a thought even was and what distinguishes it from a feeling. It may sound incredibly dumb to be unable to make such a distinction, but it was my lived experience at that time. Part of it was probably because I was looking for utmost precision. Another part was because my lived experience was being shaped by the dissociation I was left with after the traumatic event that followed the high-coherence state. I had yet to discover that distinguishing feelings from thoughts was a struggle because there were no feelings to contrast the contents of my mind to.

My spiritual emergence first made itself known through symbolic contrasts: Light and Dark, God and Devil, Love and Fear, Trust and Control. These oppositions introduced extreme contrast of which initially I believed belonged to the symbolic register of experience. I did not expect contrast itself, stripped of symbolism to persist as I was navigating the aftermath. Yet in the years that followed, particularly in the aftermath of dissociation and deconstruction, contrast re-surfaced in smaller and quieter ways. My dissociated state helped me see something fundamental: I could only recognise a feeling, a thought, or a state because it stood against something else. It gradually became something no longer represented by images or archetypes, but something that seemed to operate as a condition: the means by which feelings, thoughts, and states became distinguishable at all. The contrast between the memory of myself before the traumatic event, and the sensed state of complete inner nothingness turned contrast into a visible pattern in my consciousness, and it also brought a rough conceptual sketch of the structure into visibility for me.

What struck me was that contrast became visible as a concept because it kept appearing in one form or another while navigating the aftermath. Differentiation seemed to arise from opposing states that allowed something to stand against something else. Meaning, recognition, and orientation did not precede contrast; they followed from it. The more closely I examined experience, both my own and experience more generally, the more I could observe contrast as ontologically prior to cognition and became able to see it as the fundamental process that makes anything distinguishable.

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, 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). From my perspective experience requires contrasting structure to exist.

Before the recognition "this is warm" there must already be a differential state between warmth and its absence. The field of reality itself is structured through contrast. 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.

These ideas eventually led to at least a partial articulation of the architecture of experience: how experience emerges not from isolated states, but from the tension between contrasting poles. Without contrasting poles in relation, there can be no registration, only a featureless continuum. Warmth IS warmth only if cold is possible. Safety IS safety only where danger remains available. Contrast doesn't only enable recognition of pre-existing states - contrast makes the states experientially distinct.

This understanding also brought into focus a part of my experience where despite having cognitive awareness of all possible contrasts, the experience itself was flat, and seemed to carry a monotonous, linear quality. A big part of my experience revolved around the nature of my connection with A., and understanding how he featured into and meant for my experience and existence. Due to his vagueness there was a long period of time during which I was aware of all possibilities which due to the nature of my experience involved extreme contrasts: A. as the vehicle for the Devil archetype, A. as the vehicle for the Self archetype, A. as the vehicle for the Love archetype. These implied extremely different affective states, and yet despite the fact that I had cognitive awareness of the possibilities, I found myself unable to feel as long as they remained mere possibilities.

What I eventually observed was that without knowing my position between the poles of the experiential axes involved, affect simply couldn't organise. Looking back, this lack of understanding had impacted my ability to orient in reality for nearly a decade, and only began resolving once I started pushing for and generating clarity. Had it not lasted for such a long time despite my constant efforts to resolve and find answers by myself, I wouldn't have observed that affect was closely tied to one's ability to orient in reality. Without clear information about where I actually stood, affect remained suspended.

I understood affect was essential into the structure of experience navigation during my spiritual emergence, but I lacked the ability to articulate its role and dynamic in the structure adequately. For a while all I could say was that its important to move through feelings, or that experience itself was defined by feelings and emotions, until I gave up on trying to incorporate it. Because the process wasn't linear and I moved through various attempts to explain it, affect eventually got lost in the amount of attempts to articulate its role. It was only while revising this material that I remembered affect had been present in the structure of experience from the beginning.

When I could finally start seeing where I stood, regardless of whether or not the feeling was painful, affect started returning. The more I could orient myself as to where I stood on any particular axis - loss vs gain, seen vs unseen, worth vs worthlessness, belonging vs exile, love vs fear, vitality vs exhaustion - the more that my access to feeling became possible again. This, in combination with my awareness that trauma itself only affected my relation with particular axes, revealed something structural to me: that affect isn't separate from knowing your position relative to the contrasting poles. When either fails experience becomes unworkable. Not just difficult, but structurally unnavigable.

Trauma and A.'s vagueness had disrupted my capacity to hold opposing poles in relation and affect marked the moments when that holding was restored, even partially. Because the trauma involved fragmentation of self the process of psychological integration became a need, and this was showing me that affect was the condition under which integration could occur.

I came to understand the active holding of contrasts in relation while maintaining clarity about where you stand among them as the process of Integration: the active navigation between the poles of contrast. I came to think of this capacity as a second requirement. It was not enough that poles existed. They had to be held together without one side erasing, or collapsing into the other for a coherent state to be maintained. When that holding was present, even faintly, I could stay in contact with what I felt, think about it, and act in a way that resembled myself. When it was absent, experience collapsed into numbness.

Integration is not a static state but an ongoing process - continuously sensing your position between the poles so that the experience remains navigable. When Integration holds, experience remains workable even when painful. I could feel grief because my position on the axis had become clearer (indifference, not care). I could feel anger because I knew my relation to the axis (injustice, not justice). It wasn't that the feelings weren't difficult, but that they became coherent - they had direction and could be moved with.

Based on my observations Integration fails when the position on an axis of contrast becomes unclear, and experience doesn't just become uncomfortable, but structurally impossible to navigate. There is no sense of what's happening, where you are, or how to move in reality. This is what distinguished the axes that remained able to be integrated from those that collapsed. Same consciousness, but different capacities to orient, due to the poles blurring into each other, or lack of awareness of the position between the poles.

The way I now understand it is roughly like this: the experiential field exists as potential, but not yet articulated, where differentiation acts as a vector of movement within that field, creating contrast by bringing poles into view. Warmth becomes warmth only against the possibility of cold, safety only against the possibility of danger, continuity only against the possibility of rupture. Without that movement there is presence, but not experience in any meaningful sense.

It may seem like a leap in logic, to assume the field exists as potential, and yet this is what my high-coherence state seems to have shown me, as it felt like an alignment with a structure that existed prior to my awareness of its existence. It was also what gave me a sense of the shape of the structure, long before I was even able to articulate it as such. In its essence it felt like a recognition of how reality is organised at the level of consciousness itself.

In my view, a purely biological or psychological explanation could not account for the coherence I experienced, or the logic behind the patterns that led to it. The moment was surprising, and something I hadn't thought to look for - yet once experienced, it made complete sense of the experiential patterns I'd been living through my entire life. The only way I could describe it is that it felt like alignment with a structure that existed independently. And if I could align with something I didn't even know existed, to me this points toward consciousness being fundamental.

Through this process of observation, lived experience, and analysis I came to see that there are three fundamental principles at work in the structure and dynamic between consciousness, reality, and experience.

First, there is what I call Cohesion - a basic holding capacity that maintains the unity and continuity of the experiential field itself - what allows experience to persist as experience rather than dissolve into fragments. Second, there is Differentiation - operating as a forward vector of oscillating movement, a dynamic that creates contrast by bringing contrasting poles into view. And third, there is Integration, the ongoing process through which I believe Cohesion actively incorporates Differentiation into itself, keeping distinctions in workable relation so that Differentiation does not scatter into chaos and Cohesion does not regress into undifferentiated sameness. Together, these three principles form what I understand as the minimal architecture through which anything becomes experientially real.

After I had arrived at this particular terminology to describe the structure, I discovered that there may be some overlap behind my understanding of the structure and dynamic and the structure and dynamic of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Consciousness. While I couldn't say I am familiar with this model of consciousness, the overlap is likely due to the fact that both the structure I see and IIT treat consciousness as a system where integration is featured. There may be overlaps with other theories out there that I am not aware of. I, however, arrived at similar terminology, and concepts independently through personal observation, and my own logic. Where terminology overlaps (cohesion, differentiation, integration), it reflects convergence on fundamental structural dynamics and not derivation. The terms I chose map directly onto my lived experience: structural correspondents for dynamics that emerged during my spiritual emergence experience and principles I observed operating in human consciousness, at every scale - from internal experience to relational dynamics.

Attempting to sketch the structure and dynamic was a process. When I started, it started differently, not in its structure and logic, but in conceptualisation. I was still anchored in the concepts that emerged during my spiritual emergence - concepts that I find to be a valuable representation of the structural principles that organise experience at the level of human consciousness. These were principles that I could consistently observe playing out around me, and they were the building blocks from which my model emerged.

These principles weren't abstract to me. I loved them then, and I love them today, as ethical imperatives I value. I observed them in both myself and the world around me - both psychologically, and socially. I was treating them structurally at that point, so as to not flatten their complexity, but when I ended up observing what to me seemed like similarities of structure in the physical world - in physics, biology, chemistry, linguistics etc. - the initial terms started feeling like a mismatch. I don't have any in-depth knowledge in any of these domains, but I had good working knowledge to have observed how physical forms seemed to be structured in a similar manner as the structure I had observed in the structure of human consciousness. Something that holds, something that differentiates, and something that integrates.

The switch to cohesion, differentiation and integration happened organically, as I was already using them as descriptions for the principles I had established as defining coherent reality in human consciousness. These principles used to be Love and Truth. The nature of Love, as I observed it, was cohesive in essence - it binds, holds, includes. Truth was differentiating - it reveals, clarifies, distinguishes. Integration was what maintained their relation. These were the principles from which the map started. These symbols emerged from my experience of what I now understand as a high-coherence state of consciousness; symbols that to me were suggestive for how the structure was organised.

I remained observant throughout the years, as I was trying to understand the mechanism precisely. I watched how these principles shaped both social and individual realities. I had yet to be able to articulate a structure, and my attempts to do so came out of necessity for psychological integration. From there on I couldn't help, but observe reality as the Integration of Love and Truth, and Consciousness as the organising medium through which that integration can occur.

So, for a good while it was simply Love as the force that binds without erasing, integrates what truth reveals, cohesive, compassionate, sitting at the intersection of Self and Other. Truth as the revealing that clarifies without distorting, whose nature is the imperative to establish exact congruence between a structure and its perception, actively resisting any ambiguity that would compromise clarity.

And this is how Love as an Ontological Force and Principle became an Ontological Cohesive Force, and Truth the Vector of Articulation, became the Structural Vector of Differentiation. I've included that earlier attempt of articulation in a separate section.

The shift from Love to Cohesion isn't merely semantic, but a move from describing what the force does in human experience to naming what it is structurally. Love-as-binding captures how Cohesion feels and operates at the level of human consciousness, but "love" carries connotations of intention, emotion, preference, qualities that cannot scale at the level of physical reality. Cohesion, by contrast, names the bare structural principle: the force that maintains unity and continuity across differentiation, whether in human bonds, atomic structure, or the persistence of experiential fields themselves. It's not that love was wrong, it's that love is what Cohesion expresses through human consciousness.

Similarly, Truth-as-revealing accurately describes Differentiation's operation in epistemic contexts, the drive toward exact correspondence between structure and perception. But truth implies propositional content, correctness, knowledge, all of which presuppose minds making claims. Differentiation names the prior structural dynamic: the vector that creates contrast, brings distinctions into view, makes anything perceptible at all. Truth is what happens when Differentiation operates through cognitive systems oriented toward accurate representation. The terminology shift allows the principles to scale down to physical reality (where "love" and "truth" would be metaphorical) while preserving their structural identity with what I observed in consciousness.

I kept mentioning the spiritual emergence experience, and I think those of you who are reading this have at least a vague idea of what I mean by it. I think the most accurate description of that experience is a high-coherence state of consciousness.

I wasn't a particularly spiritual person throughout my life, and I saw myself as an agnostic. I was open, because I felt that anything else would be intellectually dishonest, but I remained skeptical. So when what I now understand as a high-coherence state occurred in 2015, it was entirely unexpected and unforeseen. It, however, left me feeling as if I understood how the universe works. While this was the case, my vocabulary had narrowed to almost nothing - Love, Fear, Truth, Light, God - the only words I knew to articulate what I'd perceived. There was nothing even remotely religious or dogmatic in the understanding that emerged from my experience, but my language was filtered through the symbolism I acquired by virtue of the culture I had grown up in.

Spiritual emergences are well documented in transpersonal psychology, and based on my observations the only thing that distinguished mine from other experiences of the same nature is solely the cultural filter. I did a lot of comparing and contrasting in my need to understand the truth and reasoning behind my experience. I met many people whose experiences seemed to be the same in texture to mine, mostly of the Kundalini type. The understanding seemed to converge among all of us, even if we used somewhat different language. The most reasonable conclusion I can draw based on my observations is that what people call God/The Divine/Source is simply an alignment with the structure of reality.

To me it seems that many spiritual traditions describe dynamics similar to what I now observe as Cohesion and Differentiation, though they use different language. In Taoism, the concept of Tao represents an underlying unity that holds all things, while yin and yang describe the complementary forces of distinction and relation that arise within it. Hindu philosophy speaks of Brahman as the ultimate unified reality, with maya as the principle that creates apparent distinction and multiplicity within that oneness. Both spiritual philosophies describe a fundamental wholeness that expresses itself through contrasting dynamics held in continuous relation.

In contemplative Christian mysticism, particularly in figures like Meister Eckhart, God is described as both the ground of being (what holds everything in existence) and as truth that reveals itself through creation. The divine is understood not as external authority but as the sustaining presence within which all experience unfolds. Islamic Sufism similarly describes Allah as both the hidden (al-Batin) and the manifest (al-Zahir) - the underlying unity and the differentiated expression held as one reality. I don't see these as metaphors for my model, but I am considering that they may be tracking the same structural dynamics through different cultural and linguistic filters. Different individuals from different cultures and geographic locations observing the same patterned structure through different lenses, and using culturally relevant language to articulate it.

Nowadays, I look at my spiritual experience as differentiation operating at the level of cultural and symbolic understanding of the structure of reality. It wasn't something done to me. It emerged from specific choices I'd made in the moments before: choosing clarity over comfortable illusion, choosing to honor my own truth, choosing self-integrity over the paralysing grip of inherited fear. I positioned myself in existential alignment with reality by refusing to distort what I was experiencing, and by refusing to abandon myself. The high-coherence state was the natural result of that existential positioning.

It turned love and truth from Christian moral teachings into structural principles revealing the architecture beneath. The words were already there, in the symbolism I'd inherited, but the experience helped me see through the dogma and understand what they actually were. I look at it as differentiating my understanding into countless distinct pieces - beliefs, assumptions, conditioning I'd always believed didn't affect me - all separated out. I could suddenly see each piece clearly, but now I had to understand how to stitch them back together into a structure that made sense and could be articulated.

The experience felt light and clarifying. I'd just integrated fragments of my life that hadn't made sense before - my relationship with spirituality and dogma, dreams I had had throughout my life. That integration brought a sense of weightlessness with it. When I tried to describe love and truth as I experienced them, I felt I couldn't separate them. In my newly acquired perception, Love required truth to function, and truth had to operate with care. They worked together, and each seemed necessary for the other.

After, distortions became easier to spot - when people's words didn't match their felt presence, when social performances masked something else. I didn't fully grasp this tilt, even if looking back now, I think it should have been obvious. An alignment with reality's structure could only make departures from it become more visible, because truth and reality are bound to one another. I was still steeped in the cultural layers my experience came through, and I hadn't yet connected the dots.

Up to this point, what emerged for me was mostly a spatial and relational structure, a way to understand how experience holds together and differentiates within a given moment. The principles of love and truth, later reframed as Cohesion and Differentiation, helped me make sense of why some encounters or events deepened coherence and others shattered it.

Alongside these relational patterns I had observed, there were other experiences I had, experiences that didn't fit linear time. It were these experiences that shattered reality as I understood it until then, and led to an existential crisis over my spiritual identity.

In 2010, I dreamed specific details of a situation I'd live four years later - specific conversations, new accommodation I had just moved into, even the appearance of my Facebook feed during Russia's invasion of Crimea. I'd recounted the dream to someone the next day, which helped me verify the timeline. When the moment arrived in 2014, I had to google images of Facebook's 2010 interface to test whether my memory was accurate. It was. This dream had shown me not just one timeline but three variations of the same events, suggesting probable trajectories rather than fixed fate. You can find the full account in the section relating to my spiritual emergence.

After my spiritual emergence, and in light of these experiences with precognition, I naturally started contemplating on the nature of time. To date, I have had three dreams that I can reasonably label as precognitive, all of which are documented on this site. Over the years, as I was looking at the relationships between my dreams and waking reality, I began noticing interesting correlations. I observed how the emotional patterns in the reality I experienced in these dreams matched the emotional patterns of the reality I was experiencing in my awake moments before having them.

Their chronology was one of the most striking aspects. In 2010, I dreamt details of a situation that unfolded in March 2015. A dream from around 1998 corresponded to what I call event no. 2, in April 2015. A 2003 dream corresponded to event no. 1, also in April 2015. Events 1 and 2 were two facets of the same new circumstance in my life. This suggested to me that my consciousness was navigating time by emotional patterns rather than by chronological order.

Precognition is often rendered as paranormal, but after plenty of analysis of my own experience I now understand it as pattern recognition - projections of probable progressions of emotional patterns. All of this resulted in another idea. As I kept mapping, this led me to consider that time itself may be a differentiation in consciousness that preserves the continuity of experiential patterns.

As I write this, I cannot help but think of a figure that seems to consistently appear onto my social media feed lately: Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). She wrote stories that map uncannily onto our present, decades before it unfolded. Given her literary work, it seems clear that she was attuned to patterns in social, political and ecological life, and able to follow their trajectories with unusual clarity. To me, her accuracy suggests a refined sensitivity to structure, a capacity to perceive where a reality already in motion is likely to go.

The following emerged in collaboration with Gemini A.I. It's a condensed articulation of the architecture as I understand it and what Gemini called a 'manifesto.' I've expanded on each section elsewhere, but this serves as an overview. The articulation of the structure of reality as I see it remains a sketch, and the following represents the most coherent synthesis I can offer right now:

I. The Fundamental Axiom (Source and Unity)

Premise 1: Metaphysical Monism Consciousness is the ultimate medium and Source of existence; it is the Experiential Field that is all there is. Reality and experience are not separate substances, but differentiated expressions within a single ontological field.

Premise 2: Non-Emergence Matter, mind, and emotion are not origins of consciousness, but are differentiated forms of experience articulated within this single, continuous Source. The experiential field is expressed structurally across all forms.

II. The Ontological Principles (Laws of Cohesion)

Premise 3: The Law of Persistence: The universe is governed by the Ontological Principle of Cohesion, which acts as the universal sustaining law of persistence. Coherence is not imposed, but is realized through motion and the continuous process of Integration.

Premise 4: The Law of Distinction: Differentiation is the inherent movement and primal law of distinction that creates contrast. This movement is the structural imperative that determines the very possibility of local patterning and makes coherence perceptible (registrable). Contrast is therefore ontologically prior to cognition.

III. The Structural Axiom (Local Articulation)

Pemise 5: Embodiment Embodiment not as descent into matter, but as the local achievement of Cohesion—the stabilization of the Experiential Field into various degrees of perceptible order. It is the successful Integration of differentiations, actualizing potential experience into a singular, persistent pattern.

Premise 6: Structural Determinism The mode of experience expressed by any embodiment is determined solely by its structural resolution (internal structural density), ensuring that self-registration is appropriate for its form. The evolutionary cascade is a progression of increasingly integrated expressions.

IV. The Temporal Axiom (Time is Internal)

This axiom defines time not as an external container, but as an internal, functional mode of Consciousness.

Premise 7: Time as Articulated Coherence Time is not an external dimension through which experience moves, but a mode of patterned coherence articulated within consciousness. It is the way Integration holds patterned differences together across intervals. Temporal depth is the layered structural result of recurring differentiations.

Premise 8: Non-Linearity of Experience The experiential field organizes itself by pattern, not by calendar (chronological order). Experience is bound by coherence, allowing differentiations to relate across intervals even if their physical expressions do not occur in linear sequence.

V. The Symbolic Axiom (Structural Coherence)

This axiom defines Symbolism not as a cultural invention but as an inevitable structural consequence of deepening coherence.

Premise 9: Symbols as Stabilized Differentiation A symbol is a stable differentiation within affect that has achieved sufficient coherence through repeated engagement and survival relevance to externalize consistently. Symbols emerge from the structure of experience itself, long before language, as primordial distinctions (e.g., light/dark, warm/cold).
Premise 10: Analogy and Resonance The ability to recognize relational similarities across different situations is achieved not by abstraction, but by resonance—a structural echo that occurs when a new configuration corresponds to a previously stabilized pattern. This resonance capacity is the structural precursor to analogy and conceptual thought.