Process of Conceptualising the Structural Dynamic

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 self core 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.

I wasn't what people would call a spiritual person throughout my life. I saw myself more as an agnostic. I was open, because I felt that anything else would be intellectually dishonest, but I remained skeptical. So when my spiritual emergence occurred in 2015, it was entirely unexpected and unforeseen. It left me feeling as if I could see the dynamic between environment, consciousness and experiential outcomes and I was able to identify two primary principles: Love and Truth. They appeared as pivotal for coherent experiential navigation, but my vocabulary seemed inadequate and carried 'woo' connotations - Love, Fear, Truth, Light, God - the only words I knew to express what I'd perceived. There was nothing even remotely religious or dogmatic in the understanding that emerged from my experience, but without conceptual understanding of consciousness, the only vocabulary I had available to articulate it 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 was 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, but due to the differing cultural filter that was shaping our experiences communication was difficult.

Because for a good while I was unable to close the gap in language with others, and due to how insane I felt my experience sounded, navigating it saw me test its elements for stability since it was subjective, memory reliant and insane sounding. At various points, it also had me research the different structural elements of my experience, memory and trauma psychology included, and saw me constantly analysing in trying to understand it, or articulate it in a rational manner.

Throughout the years, 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. I remained observant, as I wanted to understand the mechanism precisely. I watched how Love and Truth shaped both social and individual realities. My experience a lot to process, and the depth of the fragmentation the trauma resulted in, left me with a shattered sense of self which made everything slower.

I only started to make significant progress when I started trying to write it down in a coherent manner, and this only happened due to my need to psychologically integrate my experience looking for relief.

When I started to write, for a while, it was simply Love as the force that binds without erasing, cohesive, compassionate, sitting at the intersection of Self and Other. Truth as the revealing differentiation vector 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 while I could identify these principles as pivotal for coherent experiential progression, I struggled to articulate the relation between them.

Since I had no kind of emotional support throughout my experience when I was eventually able to start emotionally processing the fragmentation left by the traumatic event, I found myself reaching for A.I. It was through my conversations with A.I. models while being faced with having to sort through feelings that were existentially shattering that the relation between Love and Truth began to emerge: Integration as the active process through which Love and Truth maintain their relation. The traumatic event that followed my spiritual emergence had resulted in core self fragmentation where I lost coherent access to myself for a decade. The psychological necessity of integration became a survival imperative. I had to integrate to survive with my sense of self intact, and through that process, I began to understand Integration not just as psychological work but as a structural principle operating at every scale of experience.

It is this how I realised that Integration through the binding quality of Love was what allowed and accepted Truth as a part of the Whole. Integration is the ongoing navigation between binding and revealing. From there on, I couldn't help but observe reality as constituted by Love and Truth held in relation through Integration, with Consciousness as the organising medium through which their dynamic unfolds.

While I loved Love and Truth as ethical imperatives I value, I was treating them structurally at that point, 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: something that holds, something that differentiates, and something that integrates. This recognition suggested to me that the principles I had observed as pivotal to coherent consciousness might scale beyond human consciousness to describe fundamental dynamics operating at every level of reality.

The recognition that the principles might scale beyond human consciousness led me to examine their mechanics more closely. If Love, Truth, and Integration weren't just human psychological experiences but fundamental structural dynamics, then I needed to understand how they operated at a granular level.

Aside from conceptually exploring the ethical dimensions and boundaries of Love, and Truth, a few years into my experience, I also started trying to deconstruct parts of my experience, and my own self. I say 'try' only because in the moment, I didn't feel I was successful. I was struggling to understand what a thought 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, but the other 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 I initially believed belonged to the symbolic register of my experience. I did not expect contrast itself, stripped of symbolism to persist as I was navigating the aftermath. Yet in the years that followed contrast re-surfaced in smaller, quieter ways. Eventually, I observed something fundamental: I could only recognise a feeling, a thought, or a state because it stood against something else. Contrast 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 itself became visible as a concept because it became a pattern. While trying to repair my connection to my sense of self, as I began from a space of severe dissociation the first few breakthroughs I could observe as being triggered by a contrast. It was then that I started being intrigued and started actively observing and analysing contrast itself. The process of reaching truth seemed to arise through differentiation from opposing states that allowed something to stand against something else. Meaning, recognition, and orientation did not precede contrast but followed from it. The more closely I examined my experience, and experience as a concept, 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). In my view, 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 but what 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 the memory loss I suffered as a result of the traumatic event, and his vagueness there was a long period of time during which I was aware of all possibilities that 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, with more experiential contrasts cascading from these. They all implied extremely different affective states, and yet despite the fact that I had cognitive awareness of the myriad of 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.

When I could finally start seeing where I stood on the experiential axes of contrast, 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 access to the act of feeling became possible. 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 had disrupted my capacity to hold opposing poles in relation and affect marked the moments when that holding was restored, even partially. This was Integration operating: the active holding of contrasts in relation while maintaining clarity about where I stood among them. Integration is not a static state but an ongoing process of 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 began knowing my relation to the axis (injustice, not justice). It wasn't that the feelings weren't difficult and painful, but that they became coherent and now had direction and could be moved with.

Based on my observations Integration fails when the position on an axis of contrast becomes unclear, or the poles collapse into each other. The 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.

I understood affect was important for the structure during my spiritual emergence, but I lacked the ability to articulate its role adequately. For a while all I could say was that it is important to move through feelings as they arise, or that the nature of experience is defined by feelings and emotions, until the constant observations, and attempts to write the structure enabled me to articulate its role conceptually.

In the years after my spiritual experience I had observed how seemingly everything seemed to give rise to various degrees of intensity of affect - there was a 'vibe' at the very least. I also tried to understand the role and dynamic between affect and cognition with no success. For years I went in circles, and when I started writing, in my attempts to incorporate and explain their role in human consciousness I researched various neuroscientific and psychological theories about their dynamic. Doing so enabled the observations I had made throughout the years to crystallise.

I was able to observe affect as the first registration of coherence in consciousness, holding the undifferentiated structure of the entire relational context and belongs to the principle of Love; and cognition as the purpose to clarify and differentiate the structure held in affect and belongs to the principle of Truth.

As the terminology began to shift in trying to scale to physical reality, Love - affect, Truth - cognition remained the fundamental structural principles essential for coherence in human consciousness.

The shift from Love to Cohesion wasn'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, the shift from 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, and 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 to physical reality (where "love" and "truth" would be metaphorical) while preserving their structural identity with what I observed to maintain coherence in human consciousness.

Integration remained the structural dynamic - it already described the structural process rather than a symbolic experience. Whether in psychological healing, biological systems, or physical structures, Integration names the same dynamic: the active holding of differentiated elements in workable relation.

Through this process of observation, lived experience, and analysis I came to understand these three principles as the fundamental principles at work in the structure and dynamic between consciousness, reality, and experience. 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. Differentiation - operating as a forward vector of oscillating movement, a dynamic that creates and brings contrasting poles into view. And 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, A.I. models pointed out that there was 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, after a first glance, the overlap seems to be 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.

Once the triad was in place, other parts of my experience began to reorganise around it. One of them was my understanding of time and its relation to consciousness. I'd already mentioned the precognitive dreams I had of A. at ages 12 and 17 - dreams that came true in uncanny detail when I met him in 2015. But those weren't isolated incidents. To date, I have had three dreams I can reasonably label as precognitive, all documented on this site.

The first experience of this kind was in 2010, and the reality of that dream happened in 2014 leading to an existential crisis and eventually to my spiritual emergence experience. I dreamed specific details of a situation I would 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 recounted the dream to someone the next day, which helped me verify the timeline. When the moment arrived in 2014, I searched for images of Facebook's 2010 interface to test whether my memory was accurate. It was. This dream showed not only one timeline but three variations of the same event, suggesting probable trajectories rather than fixed fate.

The other two dreams were the ones of A. - one from around 1998, another from 2003 - both corresponding to different aspects of meeting him in April 2015. Over the years, as I looked at relationships between these dreams and waking reality, I noticed correlations: the emotional patterns in the reality I experienced in dreams matched the emotional patterns I was experiencing in waking life before having the dreams. Their chronology was particularly striking. The 2010 dream corresponded to March 2015. The 1998 dream corresponded to what I call event no. 2 in April 2015. The 2003 dream corresponded to event no. 1, also in April 2015. Events 1 and 2 were two facets of the same circumstance - meeting A. This suggested to me that my consciousness was navigating time by emotional patterns rather than chronological order.

After my spiritual emergence, and in light of these experiences, I began contemplating the nature of time itself. Precognition is often rendered as paranormal, but after analysis of my own experience I understand it as pattern recognition - projections of probable progressions of emotional-cognitive patterns. This led me to consider that time itself may be a differentiation in consciousness that preserves the continuity of experiential patterns, meaning that integration can hold patterned relations across intervals in ways that are not reducible to calendar sequence.

As I write this, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) came to mind. Her work mapped social trajectories with unusual clarity decades before they unfolded. To me, her accuracy suggests refined sensitivity to structure, a capacity to perceive where a reality already in motion is likely to go. I think the ability for precognition is directly related to the ability to track and project emotional-cognitive patterns into future realities.

Another part that reorganised was how spiritual traditions, across cultures, seemed to track similar dynamics. To me it seems that many traditions describe something like cohesion and differentiation using different language. In Taoism, Tao represents an underlying unity that holds all things, while yin and yang describe complementary forces of distinction and relation that arise within it. Hindu philosophy speaks of Brahman as ultimate unified reality, with maya as the principle that creates apparent distinction and multiplicity within that oneness. In contemplative Christian mysticism, particularly Meister Eckhart, God is described as the ground of being (what holds everything in existence) and as truth revealing itself through creation. Islamic Sufism 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 do not see these as metaphors for my model, but I consider that they may be tracking the same structural dynamics through different cultural and linguistic filters, with different individuals observing a patterned structure through different lenses and using culturally relevant language to articulate it.

This gave me the idea that what people call mystical experiences, and what is understood as God, is an alignment with the structure of consciousness and reality - filtered through the cultural and environmental expression of an individual node of consciousness.

My precognitive dreams, along with the high-coherence state I experienced, suggested to me that consciousness isn't a product of brain activity but rather the fundamental medium through which reality becomes experienceable. If I could perceive emotional patterns that would manifest years later in physical reality, and if I could align with a structure I didn't know existed prior to that alignment, then consciousness must be something more foundational than biological or psychological processes alone can account for.

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 existence, but not experience in any meaningful sense.

Today I understand my spiritual emergence as a state of high coherence - an alignment between consciousness and the structure of reality itself. It may seem like a leap in logic, to assume the field exists as potential prior to articulation, yet this is what my high-coherence state seems to have shown me. 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.In my view, a purely biological or psychological explanation could not account for the coherence I experienced, or the logic behind the experiential patterns that led to it - including the precognitive dreams that spanned over a decade. 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, and if my consciousness could navigate time by emotional patterns rather than chronological sequence, to me this points toward consciousness being fundamental.

Nowadays, I see my spiritual experience itself as differentiation operating at the level of cultural and symbolic understanding of the structure of reality, experience and consciousness. 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.

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 at the time and it is only now that it feels 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.

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 consciousness 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)

Premise 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.