Buddhists deserve credit for the best map, but the territory was never theirs. Zerfas makes the case well and I won’t rehash it.

Stephen Zerfas

Jhanas Are Human, Not Buddhist

One of the most important things that’s ever happened to me was by accident…

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2 months ago · 169 likes · 39 comments · Stephen Zerfas

But I don’t think he probes deeply enough to overcome an implicitly individualist frame. What if the solitary meditator accessing jhana is not discovering something new but recovering something much older?

The Fore Boys

In the 1960s, the anthropologist E. Richard Sorenson documented what he later dubbed Preconquest Consciousness among uncontacted peoples in highland New Guinea. Among the southern Fore, he found a mode of distributed, somatic, pre-verbal attunement that operated below symbolic thought.

At the risk of drawing a big conclusion from a single anecdote, Sorenson’s description of a hunting trip by some adolescent boys shouted “this is where jhana comes from” at me. He describes their rapport intensifying into “a ceaseless, spirited, individualistic input into a unified at-oneness,” a phrase he calls self-contradictory in English, and takes as evidence of the cognitive gap between their world and ours.

The story goes that a boy named Agaso, about thirteen, spots a cuscus in a tree but only has inferior arrows. Without a word, the sharpest arrow in the group moves into his hand so fast Sorenson can’t see where it came from. Simultaneously, another boy begins pulling a branch aside to clear the shot — synchronized to the exact speed of Agaso’s draw, clearing by millimeters at the moment the bow is fully drawn, slow enough not to startle the animal. A third boy begins climbing the tree a fraction of a second before the bowstring releases, grabbing the wounded cuscus before it can recover.

Then it gets playful. One boy rides a branch down to dangle the cuscus in Agaso’s startled face. The startle transforms into ecstasy shared by all. They roast everything together, and as night falls, they drop off to sleep “entangled in what can only be described as a contagiously subdued rapture coalescence.”

Rapture as the Reward Signal for Collective Coherence

Zerfas describes the first jhana as “a self-sustaining pleasure that doesn’t require thought to maintain.” The later jhanas: “the meditator is pulled into a place where they no longer ‘do’ anything.”

The Fore boys’ hunt follows the same arc. Intense coordinated effort, then the threshold where effort reverses: the arrow arrives unsolicited, the branch clears without instruction. Trying gives way to being moved. Then the quiet spreading rapture that sustains itself. Nobody is doing a spiritual practice. They are doing the thing small-band humans evolved to do together, and the jhanic phenomenology arises as a natural consequence.

The free energy principle offers a formalization. When multiple agents are tightly coupled; when I predict your movements, you predict mine, and our model of the shared environment is accurate, prediction error plummets in the collective. Each agent’s generative model extends to include the others, and the whole system settles into a state where almost nothing is surprising. The arrow arrives because Agaso’s model already predicts it will. The branch clears because Karako’s model already includes Agaso’s trajectory.

What does minimal prediction error feel like from the inside? Absence of surprise; of effortful modeling. Absence of the self-other boundary that prediction error itself maintains. It feels like jhana — not metaphorically, but because the underlying computational process is the same. The effortlessness threshold every tradition describes (”the prayer breathes itself,” “the jhana does you”) is what happens when the system’s predictions run so accurately that top-down models generate experience with almost no corrective input.

This state is designed by natural selection to be entered collectively. A solitary meditator can access it by manufacturing extreme predictive simplicity — one object, quiet room, no social demands. It works, but it’s a hack. The original trigger was coordinated action among intimately known others.

What This Could Explain

This may be why jhana practice is difficult. Zerfas spent four months on the edge of his bed. That’s because a solitary nervous system is doing alone what it was designed to do with others.

It might also explain the specific affective texture. If jhana were simply “what concentrated attention feels like,” the hedonic tone would be somewhat arbitrary. But if jhanic states evolved as the reward signal for collective coherence, the internal marker that says your predictions about the group are accurate, you are synchronized, you are safe, then the intense well-being starts to make functional sense.

Sorenson saw something like the same phenomenon across populations with zero mutual contact: sea nomads in the Andaman, maritime nomads in the Sulu Sea, forest nomads on the Malay Peninsula, herders on the Tibetan plateau. His six-part “Sensuality and Consciousness” series in Anthropology of Consciousness (1993–1998) documents these parallels. Cross-cultural consistency among people with no access to any contemplative tradition is, I think, stronger evidence for the universality of these states than the cross-traditional comparisons Zerfas marshals. Though Sorenson’s methodology has real limitations: single observer, unreplicable conditions, a niche journal. The observations are consistent with broader ethnographic work on intensive alloparenting and low-individuation identity in small-scale societies,

Teresa of Ávila wrote in the sixteenth century. The Buddha’s maps are twenty-five hundred years old. But the Fore boys are a suggestive window onto something that far predates all contemplative traditions. Maybe the traditions didn’t independently discover jhana. Maybe they independently rediscovered it, after the social conditions that originally produced it were disrupted by the very process of civilization that made formal contemplative practice necessary.

Zerfas says the rooms were already there. He’s right. But they weren’t empty rooms waiting for lone explorers. They were full of people.

I am 46 years old. I was raised by a mother with nothing but contempt for everyone else’s troubles, because they might take away from her own. Her niece (her sister’s daughter) was eight years older than me and frequently lived with us. She had several kids in short order after a shotgun wedding at 17.

Her second child, a boy, was diagnosed with ADHD around age six. He was very hyper indeed. My mom dripped with contempt about the diagnosis and medication. Her niece was simply not disciplining him enough, in her view. If she beat him properly, as she had done with my brother and I, there would be none of this ADHD nonsense.

The implicit lesson of this, given that, yes, my mom had beaten my brother and I quite liberally whenever our behaviour deviated from her wishes, was that there was no way I could have AD(H)D.

I was certainly not hyperactive. I was great at sitting still (it kept me safe). Maybe not so great at paying attention but school was boring; too easy for me. I literally slept through a semester of advanced math in grade 12, taught myself the whole course the night before the final exam, and proceeded to get one of the best marks in the entire province. The exam was miscalibrated in its inaugural year, far too difficult, and the province-wide parental outcry resulted in the exam not counting towards a student’s final marks if it lowered their grade. I was the only one to keep it.

The inability to focus until crunch time is a classic hallmark of ADHD, but since I perceived that it was impossible that I had it, I must therefore simply have a character flaw of too little discipline. I was too smart to have learned to work hard.

University life was more challenging. Standards were higher and my lax habits were put under strain. I would procrastinate term papers until the last minute, pull an all-nighter, and still get solid grades. I felt smugly superior to those who had diligently worked on their paper all term. Why bother when the last minute produced manic focus at last? I could spend all the rest of that time partying.

But partying took more and more of my time and energy, to the point I dropped out of school in my second year, literally to get refunded my tuition so I could party harder. I returned home with my tail between my legs once the money ran out. I could only see myself as an abject failure. I had tried to live life on my own terms. I was near-suicidal when I had a religious experience of a personal god who spoke love to me. I was undeniably transformed by this experience.

Three months later, I was a TA at the high school I’d only just graduated from, working with mentally handicapped students. I was also an unpaid (and laughably unqualified) youth pastor, additionally volunteering 3 nights a week at the aggressively evangelistic local youth drop-in. I had never been so busy. I loved it. I thrived. It was also doomed to fail, not due to business, but due to my restless mind that could tell most everything we believed was full of shit. I got kicked out of the drop-in first, and later the youth pastor gig because I tried to deviate from the party line with the kids.

Now I was home a lot more and that was Not Good. My parents had tried to get back together and our house was toxic. I fled my small town for the big city and never looked back. But I never again recreated that magical year of busyness. I had aptitude to spare in many things but I only wanted to chase intensity. I got involved with a cult-ish church that chased spiritual experience, later nearly joining an even cultier group that left due to the main group’s perceived low energy for big experiences.

The reasons I dodged that cult were that I had just gotten married to a very intense young woman and moved across the country (again) to go to a small Christian university to prepare for the pastorate. I was gonna be the right kind of pastor for the right kind of church, unlike all the disasters I had been a part of up to this point.

Upon graduation I knew that paid pastors were subject to the perverse incentives of telling people what they wanted to hear to keep the offering plates full. I wanted truth in all its unvarnished intensity. So I would need a side hustle to pay the bills. I’d heard of several pastors with similar convictions being web designers on the side. This is how I accidentally became a programmer in the late 2000s, where the same dynamics of procrastination and cramming as in university would repeat.

The point in all that oversharing is that I was easily bored, had trouble consistently applying myself until the pressure got so high that I could finally be completely absorbed in intensity. Bust and boom. I was at my best when I didn’t have time to sit still. But unfortunately I also had something like C-PTSD of the freeze and fawn variety that tried to hide in dissociation from everyone all the time. This tendency became stronger and stronger as I rejected the path of the pastorate, convinced that it wasn’t just this or that church that was sick, but the whole stinking edifice of modern/Western Christianity. I took a programming job with the “benefit” of working from home. I retreated from the public. My wife and later, kids, were enough. Fuck ‘em.

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I finally got serious about finding out what the fuck was wrong with me around four years ago, doing my first big psilocybin trip. Vividness returned. Passion returned. But quickly dissipated by the intensity heatsink of dissociation. I learned what C-PTSD was and boy did I have it. I started doing all the explicit somatic and emotional therapies that would target it. I reached a healed-enough place with it this year where I was no longer triggered and dissociated all the time. Responding rather than reacting became an option.

But I couldn’t fucking figure out motivation for the life of me. Even though I wasn’t chronically dissociating any more, I just couldn’t keep my focus, even on the monumental task we’ve set ourselves of starting a new life as pizza bar owner-operators in Mexico after both my wife’s and my careers came to a sudden halt (with good payouts) within five days of each other this past spring. I have a LOT to do. Way too much. But each thing itself is not very interesting or engaging. This called for a capacity I just didn’t seem to have: set a future goal and stick with the process through understimulating tasks.

I was close to pulling the plug on the whole thing, thinking I’m not cut out for this entrepreneur shit, despite the wonderfully warm promise of making food for people and getting the fuck away from Winnipeg winters forever. I tried some desperate measures, like quitting my Twitter account, cannabis, and porn. I instituted a strict schedule. And it would all crumble the second I had to decide what to do next. It didn’t even matter if my wife and I had drawn up a list that I should follow. I would look at it and nothing seemed like an emergency so nothing seemed important enough to do right now.

And then I read Gena Gorlin’s wonderful My journey from ADHD skeptic to Adderall enthusiast post:

At 22, I thought ADHD was fake. An excuse for underachieving kids to get “accommodations” for procrastinating on their homework. From what vague knowledge I had of stimulants like Adderall, I regarded them with the same scorn as the accommodations.

I’d even seen the viral tweet that prompted the piece, and (to my shame) joined (silently) in the smug judgment of her as somebody using drugs to avoid her children:

But I read on, for some reason. I wanted to see how a former skeptic had deluded herself into believing that she was ADHD and needed medication. I read about her pulling all-nighters to write term papers, an immediate resonance. Doesn’t everyone do that? She described missed flights and lost phones and wallets, which has never been me, so I thought, well, yeah, maybe she has it but I sure don’t. Summarizing all of her failings, she says:

As far as my inner drill sergeants and I were concerned, these were all shameful moral failings that I “should” have been able to fix by now, if only I were less lazy and weak-willed. If I could write a solid paper the morning it was due, then I should be able to write one anytime. And indeed, I could pretty much always muster enough focus and discipline when I wanted something badly enough to try.

Until I couldn’t.

Oh, yeah. I could muster it, sometimes. But not reliably. I, too, had always thought of this as a character flaw. I should be able to summon that crunchtime high performance at will. But the beginnings of the parting of self-hating clouds was happening, the first rays of sunny “maybe I’m not just horrible??” breaking through.

But then she described something new, to me. She described it in terms of *intention*, which she discovered would just… stay put:

What Adderall didn’t do: give me a high or erase my bad habits overnight.

What it did: turn my fleeting bursts of focus into something I could summon and sustain on demand. As a result, my efforts to change or override my habits went much further than they ever had before. If I put my phone away and set the intention of “listening and taking notes during this 2-hour training session,” that intention stayed with me for the entire 2 hours. Not only did I have more energy available (as would have been the case if I had guzzled coffee), but I could aim that energy more precisely and enduringly toward my chosen, values-aligned goal.

It was like I had gained access to a purer, more stable, and more malleable form of the raw material that powers my agency. What I did with that raw material was and is, as ever, up to me.

Imagine a car whose gear shift jerks unpredictably between Drive, Reverse, and Park unless you keep your hand on it, and sometimes gets stuck entirely. That’s how I experience my attention off Adderall. On Adderall, the gears click into place and stay until I decide to shift.

This description in terms of stable intention is what got me. I’ve never had anything like it. Every time I would get into a panicked state over a term paper or negative performance reviews at work, I would slip into panic mode and finally, finally be able to sustain intention, briefly, until the threat had passed and I would slide back into the mode of always wanting to be doing something other than what I’m supposed to be doing. I thought this was just something everybody dealt with, just better than I did because I suck.

How would I find out? I have a family doctor, in theory (just an initial meet and greet), who gave me a kickoff bloodwork requisition almost a year ago that I haven’t gotten around to for some reason. I would have to do that first. Fuck.

But then: oh shit. I have some 2-FMA, don’t I. I could just try some at a therapeutic dose. If it goes well I can put myself through the process of getting a Ritalin or Adderall prescription.

So I tried 8mg. Too high a dose, can feel the amphetamine as such, but HOLY SHIT. Just tearing through the todo list. Doing the things that matter to me without trying to escape them. Hoping I’m not just fooling myself by being productive on a stimulant, as anybody might be.

I halve the dose to 4mg the next day. No longer feel the amphetamine itself, I think, so now the fear of “I’m just getting high on meth” has been downgraded from 50/50 to almost certainly not. I also start coming down with a cold that day, which usually triggers a collapse in me pretty quickly (relief at no longer feeling like I’m required to push myself) but I just work at cleaning out our basement (a task my wife has been begging for for years).

Out of commission (man cold) for the next few days. Get better and try a 2mg dose, just to see if that’s enough. It’s definitely still enough to notice improvement in ability to stay with a task without trying to get away from it. Stay at this dose for a week, before returning to 4mg to see if that’s more functional, which it turns out to be.

Make an appointment with my doctor to try to get an Adderall prescription. We laugh about that bloodwork requisition from nearly a year ago that I hadn’t done. He seemed chill but I wasn’t going to tell him about the 2-FMA, instead said that a friend had given me some of his Adderall and it had worked wonders. Gave me a questionnaire to fill out.

I get frustrated that maybe my C-PTSD was all downstream of coping poorly with ADHD. But then I have two separate conversations with ADHD-diagnosed friends who are still struggling with something like C-PTSD symptoms. So there seems to be some kind of mutually-reinforcing fuckery there. It’s probable that my C-PTSD was partially a way to cope with the pain of my ADHD-induced feelings of futility.

And the C-PTSD seemed to be a way to squeeze myself into performing anyway. Once I was no longer doing this, my ADHD was actually so much more apparent. I started forgetting things in a way that I never allowed myself to previously. Initially I was very concerned that I was going into cognitive decline, maybe from too much chronic weed use. But it turned out to be much more surprising than that. It was good that I had finally unclenched long enough to not have to be perfect, when being perfect hurt so much (and didn’t always work anyways).

That’s what the weed had been for. And the alcoholism through most of my 30s. Quenching the pain of trying to force myself, always forcing and squeezing and tensing myself into a shape that my bodymind rebelled against.

The doc called me a week after I’d filled out that self-assessment questionnaire. I was worried I’d undersold my symptoms (I’ve been in denial for so long) and I was waiting to jump through a lot more hoops but he just laughed and said “yeah this looks like ADHD to me” and wrote me a 20mg prescription for Adderall XR on the spot.

I circled back to this piece while on my first dose of it, and it actually feels a hell of a lot closer to that initial 8mg dose of 2-FMA (that freaked me out a bit) than the 4mg dose I’ve been subsisting on for the past month or so. I feel alive, a mixture of terror and exhilaration.

I can just do things. 😭

I wrote most of this while it was fresh, before I even met the doc for an official diagnosis and prescription. It’s rambly and disorganized and passionate, like me. I can’t fucking believe all of the people who failed me over four plus decades. I should not have had to self-diagnose. But I did, because fuck yeah I did.

Look out.

Background

A core spiritual practice for me is simply talking, sometimes with psychedelics (especially Low-5), but usually with just a bit of cannabis. I worked from home for 15 years and for the last three of them I would pace my house or neighbourhood while speaking into my AirPods whenever I had something I needed to process. When typing you can get writer’s block. With speech, you just keep going, and sometimes, you surprise yourself.

Sometimes, I convert myself. Sometimes I fall back in love. Sometimes I speak forth a pattern that my body has recognized long before I had a name for it, and insight seems to cascade further when the patterns receive appropriate naming.1

This is the result of naming that pattern many, many times over the last three years. I call it Traumatic Individuation Under Persistent Cultural Threat. At its heart it asks: are we really built for individuation? What kinds of dysfunctions might we expect from a social ape forced into atomized individuation? Could this explain some facts of our world, and could we use this for some healing?

This theory doesn’t acknowledge the boundaries between anthropology, sociology, psychology, spirituality, and biology, for both better and worse.

Some days I would wake up early, before everyone, and just speak and try to capture a comprehensive take on this theory that I could share publicly. I liked this one the best of this group and I’m completely abandoning my plan to turn it into cleaned-up prose or re-record it with better diction and audio quality.

I cleaned up the transcript with an LLM a bit if you prefer text to audio, but otherwise no LLM oracles were consulted in the creation of this theory.

Transcript

Yesterday, I tried to record what I’m calling my core thesis here, which is Traumatic Individuation Under Persistent Cultural Threat. To say it a little more briefly: individuation is unnatural. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it’s unnatural.

If we were in an environment—and for human beings, our environment is always primarily, at this point anyway, a cultural environment—if we were in a cultural environment that was safe and communal, we would never individuate. And this has, of course, been the case throughout most of human history. The sense of the self as an individual is a relatively recent innovation. We would never have thought of ourselves that way, and we’ve only been able to think of ourselves that way as we’ve gone through generation after generation of traumatic individuation.

So let’s get a little more into this. What do I mean?

Firstly, and primarily, for most human beings—I won’t say for all, but for most—the process of becoming an individual is a trauma response. It’s not something we really want to do, but something we have to do. Firstly, it’s necessary because there’s no way to survive in this world without becoming some level of an individual, without some level of individuation. Secondly, it’s really just the only strategy available to us. And we’re so wonderfully flexible that we can adapt to all kinds of unnatural environments.

Again, I don’t use “unnatural” pejoratively. I’m saying that what has happened is that we’ve formed a cultural environment that is itself unnatural. And again, I don’t say that pejoratively. I just mean this is an environment that has been constructed, created, made by humans. That’s everything from the level of ideas—being able to conceptualize ourselves as an individual self and believe that’s the normal state of affairs—all the way to the way we’ve terraformed the earth. We’ve killed off most of the other apex predators by being the apex of the apex ourselves. We’ve terraformed the earth, or more specifically, androformed the earth. We live in what’s called the Anthropocene.

Of course, it’s a strong statement to say that to become an individual, as a Homo sapiens, is unnatural. But you see this colloquially. What do you hear from people? “I want to be part of something bigger than myself.” “I want to belong to something bigger than myself.” This is a natural impulse. It’s what we were selected for in evolutionary history.

One of the interesting things, if you look at the work of Richard Wrangham—the anthropologist who wrote The Goodness Paradox—is that he makes the case that Homo sapiens are a species that have self-domesticated. We selected for the features of domestication ourselves. He talks about the Russian experiments where they domesticated foxes—now called silver foxes—just by selecting for lower and lower levels of reactive aggression. That’s the hallmark of domesticity: lower reactive aggression.

It’s basic: you can touch a silver fox without it trying to bite you. A wild fox will try to bite you. Homo sapiens selected against reactive aggression. This enabled us to work closely together without constantly triggering hierarchical dominance behaviors. Not that dominance hierarchies don’t exist today, but they were built later, on top of a substrate that was radically non-aggressive—or at least non-reactively aggressive.

Wrangham’s point is that we still have strong proactive aggression, which is what enabled us to collaborate to eliminate dominators in our midst—to literally murder them, to assign them the death penalty. This gives an interesting shading to René Girard’s thesis on the scapegoat mechanism. Girard’s work interleaves fruitfully with Wrangham’s “murdering the dominators” idea in our path toward self-domestication.

What makes us distinct is our propensity for mimesis—imitation. And that only happens if we can remain in each other’s presence without driving each other away through reactivity. You only get the full flowering of mimesis in low-reactivity environments, where you can be in each other’s presence constantly without the need for one to dominate the other. This produces the kind of egalitarian, flat social structures you see in hunter-gatherer tribes.

A big source for me here is the work of E. Richard Sorenson, especially his seminal essay Preconquest Consciousness, where he describes pre-contact tribal societies functioning as a kind of hive mind—what he calls liminal consciousness. Sorenson points out that this mode of being is unintelligible to most of us, being so heavily individuated—what I would call traumatically individuated. His observations are indispensable.

It’s also profound to see the breaking of that group mind in these tribes—the fall of liminal consciousness—under the pressures of post-conquest life. Contact with the outside world, and all its aggression and violence, shatters it. Sorenson’s reports are heartbreaking: weeping, wailing, blank looks in the eyes, sleeplessness, screaming in the night, night terrors. He notes how much people turn to sex in the aftermath, having lost more compelling forms of sensuality. This liminal sensuality was strongly pleasurable—rapturous—and there were immense rewards for living that way.

So what went wrong?

First, liminal consciousness only scales to about the size of a tribe—around Dunbar’s number, 100–120 people, maybe as low as 80. Second, even in such groups, reactive aggression hasn’t been eliminated entirely. There are always more prickly individuals, less able to sync with the group. That creates discord. Girard’s point is that our shared mimetic field becomes problematic when both of our attentions fixate on the same scarce resource—mates, children, food, or status. Status, by definition, is limited. That competition spreads like wildfire through the group, creating chaos.

The instinct then is to use the “disgust” reflex: get rid of whatever is causing the discord. We already knew how to get rid of dominators, per Wrangham’s self-domestication thesis, so we find someone to blame and kill them. Girard’s point is that in killing the scapegoat, believing they are responsible, we restore unity—a pacific, rapturous field, or in Sorenson’s terms, the restoration of liminal consciousness. We act together against the “evildoer” and come into one accord.

The trouble is, it feels permanent at the time because the before-and-after shift is so strong—but it isn’t. The conflict always returns. We resort to sacrifice again and again. Modern people don’t realize how saturated in blood human history has been. The long peace of the West is a historical aberration. I pray it lasts, but history is not on my side.

Eventually, within the cultural milieu, violence against the scapegoat stops producing unity. We can’t form unanimities anymore because we no longer believe the scapegoat is guilty. But we haven’t stopped looking for scapegoats. So one of the persistent cultural threats we live with is the knowledge that other people are out to get us.

In the ancestral environment, threats were external—other tribes, predators, the environment. Inside the tribe was safe. Among social mammals, the group is the refuge. The scapegoat mechanism converts an internal threat into an external one. This matters because in response to threat, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) runs an escalating cascade: hot, active responses; then cold, passive responses.

Imagine you’re a zebra at a watering hole.2 You hear a rustle in the bushes. You get more alert. You’re starting to activate your threat response cascade, moving toward what’s called state one, which is alertness—paranoia, anxiety. But you scan the environment, and there doesn’t seem to be anything there, so you return to what’s called state zero, what polyvagal theory calls “safe and social.” Rest and digest.

This is the natural state, where you’re not afraid. You’re at the oasis, drinking water, hanging out with your zebra homies. Life is good. This is as good as it gets: state zero, no problems, everything’s fine.

Another rustle in the bushes—alertness. Your ears perk up, your heart rate rises, a little bit of adrenaline is injected into your system. Time slows down a bit as you assess the environment. Sure enough, there’s a lion in the bushes. It froze when it was spotted, so now there’s this attention standoff. It was trying to sneak up and stepped on a twig. All the zebras are now alert and paying attention to it.

You’re locked into state one—persistent alertness—and you can stay there indefinitely. When this gets locked in for a human being, we might call it generalized anxiety disorder, or “I’m just an anxious person,” because you never again feel safe enough to let your guard down. Constant vigilance.

State two is when the lion charges. Now you fully trigger the defense response: the fight-or-flight response. There’s a big adrenaline dump, and the zebra tears off running. The lion tries to separate one zebra from the pack, and it’s chosen you. You run, run, run. If you were a fighting animal instead, you’d be fighting, fighting, fighting. This is active defense: the desperation to survive, giving it everything you have.

Sometimes that’s enough to survive, but in this case, it isn’t. The lion catches you, jaws around your throat, and takes you to the ground. Now we move into the passive defense cascade. The active defense of the sympathetic nervous system gives way to the passive defense of the parasympathetic nervous system—cold responses, numbing. There’s no longer a spike of anxiety; now you move into numbing because you’re going to die.

You move into numbing when active defense has been exhausted and you can’t escape or fight. The lion has you on the ground. Your body dumps a lot of its own morphine supply—endogenous opioids—into your system to numb you. If you’ve had a traumatic injury, you’ve felt this as “going into shock.” You just can’t feel your body. This is nature’s gift: as you’re about to die, you’ve got your own painkillers onboard. It doesn’t hurt that much, and you’re not screaming in agony. Prey animals mostly go limp as they’re about to die, a passive acceptance of death.

But state three still has a glimmer of hope. You’re still paying attention to the environment in case conditions change so you can get away. Imagine the lion has taken you down, but suddenly a pack of hyenas arrives. The lion is distracted, competing for the kill. While their attention is caught up in each other, you take the opportunity and bolt.

Now, state three—numbing and dissociation—gives way back to state two: fight-or-flight intensity. You run with everything you’ve got until you feel you’ve gotten away. Then you come back down the activation ladder, deactivating in the reverse sequence: from state two to state one. You scan the environment—nothing, nothing, nothing—until you finally feel safe. But the full safety doesn’t happen until you’re back among your herd.

In social mammals, the safety cue that it’s actually safe now—safe enough to fully deactivate—comes when you’re back in the group. And in nature, what often happens is that the zebra starts to shake, literally shaking off the activation energy still in the system. The system is trying to restore itself to homeostasis, back to state zero: safe and social.

If no hyenas come and the lion moves in for the kill, state three gives way to state four: the full flood of numbing. The lion’s teeth are on your neck, and your body does one last big dump of opioids as you die. Nature’s gift again.

The trick for humans is twofold: we can inhibit the threat cascade’s natural drive to resolve, and we can live in environments so uncertain we never feel safe enough to get back to state zero.

To feel safe, we need the presence of others—our pack, our family, our tribe. As long as the threat is out there and it’s safe in here, the system works normally. But for human beings, the biggest threat is other human beings. And when you can’t tell which ones are safe, you can end up in a perpetually activated state.

In the nuclear family—again, a recent development in human history—if your family is the threat, you’re never safe. You can’t fight, though some try. You can’t run away, because society will give you back to those abusing or neglecting you. So it’s never safe.

What we call trauma is when the activation to threat never goes away and it gets locked in. You can get locked into any of the states I’ve described except for state two, which can’t be sustained. You can get stuck in state one—generalized anxiety and vigilance—or in states three or four—numbing and hopelessness—because there’s no way out.

As a child, I had no way out. I couldn’t get away from my tormentors, who I had to see as my refuge even as they were my threat at the same time. We form these splits, and they do enormous damage. We form a sense of self as an isolated individual because we can no longer merge with the hive mind—we don’t know who’s safe, and in fact nobody knows how to do that anymore.

We fail to update to our environment and feel safe even after the threat has passed. In my case, I’m 45 years old and haven’t lived under the same roof as my parents in 25 years. And yet, my inner system has found it incredibly difficult to update to the truth of my present. I locked in on the prediction that it’s hopelessly unsafe all the time. The only way to cope with that hopelessly unsafe state, when you can’t get away and you can’t fight, is to numb, to dissociate, to just live there—and to start feeling like any kind of intensity is itself threatening and must be eliminated.

In relation to individuation and the threat cascade, here’s another theory I have. When you’re under threat, a social mammal’s sense of self-boundary contracts. It keeps close track of the body’s boundaries—its integrity—because this is about survival. You need to know where your body is in relation to the threat. So you contract your awareness into the boundaries of your individual body to evade or escape the threat.3

But the natural state is for the boundary of the self to be at the level of the group—the tribe, the pack. Inside is the group; outside is everything else. Under individual threat, the sense of inside/outside contracts to the body. “I’ve got to look out for myself here. I’ve got to take care of myself.” When this contracted self-boundary under threat gets stuck, you produce the self.

Individuation is a stuck threat response.

This is why contemplative traditions aim at dissolving that stuck threat response—the self. They de-center the subject-object split so you can feel yourself flowing within a larger whole, because you’re no longer just trying to survive. Moving into that flow often feels like ego dissolution or ego death: the contracted, protected self falls away because it was constructed.

Moving in the Tao, or in Rigpa, often gets called the natural state—the state of flow—because you’re safe. That’s what happens when you’re safe. But our cultural environment produces individuals who have never felt safe in their lives, and who have never tasted the rapture of disappearing into the collective.

We see the creation of new rituals to temporarily give people that experience. This is part of the appeal of high-dose psychedelics: they dissolve the buffered, protected self. That can be terrifying—hence “bad trips”—or it can be deeply relieving if the contracted state is all you’ve ever known. The first time I took a high dose of mushrooms and my sense of self dissolved, I was relieved. To no longer be identified with that contracted, fearful self was a gift.

This is my theory of traumatic individuation under persistent cultural threat. It suggests that therapy can start at the individual level, but it can’t stay there. We need group work. Even one-on-one therapy is only a start. We need to pursue broader kinds of group therapy, dissolving the self back into the hive mind so we can feel real safety and vitality again.

When done without wisdom, this is what cult dynamics look like. People are so desperate for the group-mind experience that they’ll put up with a lot of abuse as long as it delivers that feeling of safety—where the inside is the group rather than the individual, and the outside is outside the group rather than the body. But the group has to actually be safe.

We’re so starved for it that we’ll put up with a lot. This is how cults happen. It’s important to see the individual self as a defense mechanism, part of the threat cascade that got stuck. Humans can get stuck in those places, and our environment now is primarily cultural—made by humans, constructed. That doesn’t make it less real; it just makes it different from nature. And we are not very well adapted to this cultural-technological environment.

We’re quite unhappy in it, even as it’s been effective in many ways.

That’s it. That’s one of the better times I’ve tried to explain this—about 45 minutes. Time to put on the dad hat. And if everything goes well, I get to do some drugs today.4

Postscript

This snapshot is all analysis and could be taken fatalistically if you believe that, if my analysis is taken as true, that there’s not much to be done. I certainly don’t think so. I highly commend both Saj Ravzi’s Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy and Doug Tataryn’s Bio-Emotive Framework and its NEDERA Process. It’s especially important to note that while you can gain some benefit from doing either alone, there is a critical attachment repair component that comes with in-person working that you will never get working solo, and probably not over a video call either.

I also think that there’s a kind of version of liminal rapport that can be entered into selectively and volitionally to form highly-connected, probably near-psychic connectivity in human collaboration. We are built to work together. This is our advantage, syncing up with each other, modeling each other. But we have to both drop our masks, and be safe enough to do so (part of that safety is the freedom to selectively don the mask). You could also use language around the buffered and unbuffered self around this.

We must individuate. We cannot go back to a kind of naive liminal consciousness. There is no retvrn, only going forward. Just as Ricouer theorized about a second naivete, we need a kind of second liminal consciousness on the other side of a clean, complete, individuation. There is nothing wrong with individuation, some even do so with low/no trauma due to sufficiently supportive relationships. But I think this is probably a disturbingly small minority, at least in the West.

So much more to say in a future “so what to do about this then” post and now I’m in danger of trying to defend and support other parts of my thesis and I’m just done for now. It’s imperfect, incomplete, and I think it’s right.

I’ve been toying with starting a newsletter here for some time. But until it had a name, I couldn’t write. Months without a handle on it until psychephilia was suddenly just there. Just pop, there, psychephilia, from wherever things that pop, pop from. Loving the mind, the soul, the psyche. What a wonder.

It’s clearly a slight play on words with psychedelia, which I will no doubt write about, but the centre of my fascination has never been psychedelics per se, but precisely what they do, right there in that name: manifest the mind. Might as well try something like psychepocalypse while we’re at it, not in the popularized sense of apocalypse as disaster or collapse, but rather in its proper original sense, as unveiling or revealing. The mind, unveiled, revealed, in all its oddness and splendour.

I have not always loved my mind, so this is also a prayer, an invocation. I will love this mind, no matter how much I perceive that it also brings me suffering, no matter how much I’ve manifested a form of psychephobia throughout my life. The mind, turned on itself, is a horrific thing. But a step back, and a wonder that it can do that kind of thing at all.

I mean mind, or psyche, in its broader, more inclusive sense: something more like citta, or bodymind, in Sanskrit. Not divided in the Cartesian sense, where mind and body are dualistic rivals, but rather unified, as in the soul, the unifying factor that weaves together our disparate, unruly parts into some kind of unified whole. Not just the thinking mind, but the feeling mind, the intuiting mind, the vibing mind.

Jesus’ greatest commandment has always struck me:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

– Matthew 22:37-40 (NIV translation)

Heart? Naturally. Soul, of course! But mind? What a record scratch for someone who grew up in a religious tradition that believed the mind to be wicked and wayward. “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out” was a way to maintain the borders of fundamentalist churches against those slick-talking city folk. The mind must be tamed, it must submit to authority. Never trust a smarty-pants.

But Jesus explicitly names the mind as a way we love God.1 And in obedience to his command, I found the church that bears His name to be less and less hospitable to my sincerest attempts. It was just like being a schoolkid who was too smart, who experienced the agonizing double bind of the school saying that they valued the mind—above all else!—while in the real social setting of my peers, I was excluded because of it.

So psychephelia is already slightly misleading, because it’s not about loving the mind, but loving God2 with the mind. Psychetheophilia. A bit too unwieldy, not that catchy. But that’s what I mean when I speak of loving the mind: loving that I can love God, and love my neighbour, with it. The mind may serve.

But the theophilic properties of the mind notwithstanding, we don’t need such a grandiose justification for mind to be a good, if bewildering, part of this experience of mind-in-body incarnation. When I identified with mind, it felt horrific, because I couldn’t tame it. But it never needed to be tamed, but freed, freed to serve. So I’ll try.