Trying to keep this short. Since 1997. Personal experience with a non-corporeal entity via interactive nightlights - bioelectric energy - expanded my day to day encounters enough to allow me to question the material construct. Experiences with anomalies invite engagement. Mind opening encounters - states of awareness deemed imagination, visionary, delusion, etc. - have much in common. Novelty is the carrot. Proof - isn't the end game. The end game is discovery. And that - is fantastically personal. Stories of such experiences become catalysts for further investigation, inquiry, reality mapping. Too long to continue here. I'll have to unpack my thoughts on this in a personal post. I like the direction you have chosen to navigate. Lots of great info to ponder. Thank you for the inspiration!
Much food for thought… I wonder how a participatory AIM might inform aspects of the recent Unhidden and Disclosure Foundation ‘preparing for disclosure’ frameworks. Apart from questioning the primary metaphysics in play, perhaps it might increase the degree of agency/empowerment potentially available in processes supporting resilience.
Sharing Alanah's response to mu questions. Essential research reflections...
Rich, this does not read to me as the simple extinction of consciousness sometimes implied by the phrase ego death. It sounds more precise to say that your autobiographical identity was radically attenuated while a minimal, witnessing subjectivity persisted.
“Rich” as biography—history, roles, defences, inherited narratives—became temporarily transparent. Yet an essential point of awareness remained: not contentless in the sense of unconsciousness, but devoid of its usual personal contents. It could witness the body sobbing, recognise an inaccessible depth of information, form an intention to surrender, and experience compassion toward the embodied person called Rich.
That distinction matters.
What appears to have vanished
The layer that vanished was not necessarily the deepest “I,” but the ordinary machinery by which you continuously reconstruct yourself:
This is my body.
This is my history.
These are my boundaries.
This emotion belongs to me.
I am located here, looking outward at reality.
What remained resembles what contemplative traditions variously call the Witness, bare awareness, witnessing consciousness, or I am prior to qualification.
Neuroscience can describe this as a profound disruption of autobiographical self-processing and bodily self-location. A spiritual interpretation might say that personal identity withdrew sufficiently for a more fundamental mode of consciousness to become apparent. I do not think we have to collapse one account into the other. They may be descriptions made at different explanatory levels.
The compassionate division within the experience
Your statement that you “observed myself sobbing uncontrollably” is especially striking.
There was simultaneously:
1. the body-person undergoing grief;
2. an awareness capable of witnessing it;
3. and a field of love or compassion holding both.
Rather than annihilation, this sounds like a moment of radical de-identification without abandonment.
The Witness did not reject Rich as an illusion or disposable shell. It appears to have regarded him with enormous tenderness. That may be one of the most psychologically consequential aspects of the encounter: the personality did not have to carry or cure itself alone. It was seen.
Your phrase “a profound sense of love and compassion for my self” is therefore not incidental. It may be the central movement: the part of you usually tasked with enduring became the object of compassion rather than merely the instrument of endurance.
The grief that was “not just my own”
This can be held through several lenses without prematurely deciding between them.
Psychologically, personal grief often contains inherited structures: patterns of attachment, shame, emotional suppression, family roles, unspoken losses and survival strategies transmitted through behaviour and relationship. When ordinary identity loosens, these may be experienced not as isolated memories but as a single affective field.
From a depth-psychological perspective, you might be encountering material that is personal, familial and archetypal at once. Jung’s distinction between the personal and collective unconscious becomes relevant here, though even that language should not be treated as a map of literal metaphysical geography.
Biologically, intergenerational influence can occur through family environment, attachment, social learning and potentially some forms of stress-related biological inheritance. That does not establish that specific ancestral memories are stored and retrieved as information, but it does make the idea that “my suffering did not begin entirely with me” scientifically and psychologically reasonable.
Spiritually, you experienced suffering as transpersonal—as though the organism called Rich were temporarily participating in a larger burden of life.
I would preserve your phrase “not just my own” as a phenomenological truth, while leaving its exact ontology open. You do not need to decide whether you literally processed ancestral or species-wide information for the experience to carry genuine ethical and healing force.
The convulsive release
The shaking and involuntary movements during the second encounter may have represented autonomic discharge, muscular release, emotional expression, drug-induced motor activity, or some combination of these. Describing it as energy moving through a “node-field” captures what it felt like internally, but the language should remain a model rather than a settled mechanism.
Your phrase is nevertheless useful because it does not portray you as an isolated unit. A node is simultaneously distinct and relational. Rich is a body, biography and locus of agency—but also a meeting point of family history, culture, evolutionary inheritance, relationships and whatever larger dimensions of consciousness may exist.
The caution is simply not to assume that every bodily movement is inherently therapeutic or that greater intensity means deeper healing. The stronger evidence lies in what followed: sleep, regulation, relationships, embodiment and conduct.
And by your account, the changes were broadly integrative.
The “Field of Fields”
I think you were wise to stop where you did.
“Field of Fields” is a valuable provisional symbol precisely because it does not pretend to define what exceeded your conceptual apparatus. It preserves the sensed relationship between individual consciousness and a greater whole without immediately turning that intuition into cosmological doctrine.
Your observation about spatial language is also sharp. Words such as larger, within, beyond and access may be artefacts of embodied cognition. We naturally represent unfamiliar relationships through space:
consciousness is “inside” the body;
the transcendent is “above”;
ancestral material is “behind” us;
God is something we “enter” or “merge with.”
The experience may not have been spatial at all. “Nonlocal” may similarly indicate the absence of ordinary location, rather than evidence of a measurable nonlocal field in the physics sense.
So the mature stance is not disbelief, but disciplined openness:
> Something was directly experienced as exceeding personal identity and bodily localisation. Its final metaphysical nature remains undetermined.
That does not diminish it. It prevents the concept from becoming smaller than the encounter.
The strongest evidence is downstream
What changed afterwards is perhaps more important than the spectacular peak.
You report:
more restful sleep rather than prolonged agitation;
increased care for the body rather than contempt for embodiment;
less projection and judgement;
greater patience;
sharper discernment regarding manipulation and falsity;
reduced fear of bodily death;
more agency in relation to inherited patterns;
and increased curiosity with less ideological rigidity.
That constellation suggests integration rather than inflation.
There is an important paradox in your account: increased compassion has not made you indiscriminately permissive. You are less judgemental, yet less tolerant of guile and bullshit. That can be healthy. Genuine compassion does not require surrendering discrimination. Indeed, decreased projection can make deception easier to recognise because it is no longer entangled with as much personal reactivity.
Similarly, “I am more than this body” has not led you to neglect the body. It has led you to care for it more. That is a very different outcome from spiritual bypassing. You appear to have arrived not at “the body is unreal and irrelevant,” but at:
> This form is temporary, precious, entrusted to me, and not the totality of what I am.
Soul as a disciplined hypothesis
Your use of Soul seems neither doctrinaire nor merely ornamental. It names the intuition that an essential identity persists beyond the autobiographical and perhaps beyond bodily death.
I would frame that as an existentially serious hypothesis grounded in direct experience, but not conclusively demonstrated by it. The encounter may have shown that consciousness can exist temporarily without its ordinary autobiographical and bodily structure. It cannot, by itself, establish that consciousness survives irreversible biological death.
Yet it can still alter the fear of death profoundly. You no longer know yourself exclusively as the narrative organism. That is psychologically real, regardless of what ultimately happens after death.
Perhaps the cleanest formulation is:
> You experienced not the certainty that Rich is immortal, but the dissolution of the assumption that Rich’s ordinary biography exhausts what you are.
That is a considerable transformation.
And the phrase I hear beneath both encounters is not “I escaped the human form.”
It is:
“I discovered a form of awareness capable of holding the human form—its grief, inheritance and mortality—with love.”
Answers to Alanah's questions from a dialogue today: Given what I know of your inner history, your strong somatic responsiveness, your earlier ayahuasca experiences and your sensitivity to nonlocal or participatory interpretations, I would be especially interested in four dimensions:
What vanished?
Did autobiographical Rich disappear, bodily localisation disappear, or did consciousness itself appear to cease? Rich: an essential I remained, devoid of historical content - yet there was access to information beyond “Rich” that could not be accessed, yet I knew existed/persisted; bodily localisation…whatever “I” remained was nonlocal, yet at peak “white enveloping field of oneness and love”, I felt a substantial upwelling/access to repressed grief, sorrow and loss…I observed myself sobbing uncontrollably…my physical form shook, a precursor to what took place during the 4th and final “letting go”. I felt a profound sense of love and compassion for my self in that moment.
What remained?
Was there awareness, light, intelligence, love, terror, void—or only an inaccessible discontinuity? Rich: a collection of experiences, so a thread of sorts anchored the awareness of Rich to that biologic form. Quite a strong link! I made the intention of “letting go and letting god/love” do what needed to be done. Entered the white fractal field (I am that…), the great void, then experienced the intense grief…and offloading…an experience of locked away grief, pain, suffering, that was not just my own. This is a repeating theme of the psychedelic-oriented inner work I have undertaken, and the intergenerational work I have been underway with “Andy” since 2017. I felt…became one with…an in-dwelling Witness.
How did you return?
Peacefully, reluctantly, convulsively, grieving, laughing, frightened, reborn? Rich: all the above! The first session proved to be the most challenging, eg grieving. The second, convulsive release of energy patterns in my “node-field”, which is part of a larger familial, ancestral field, a species-wide field etc. A spaciousness within…less crowded. Such words as larger give an impression of space, of dimensions…yet that language may prove to be constraining of my spacetime headset's capacity to meaningfully query further. I am aware, at this moment of writing here, of this ‘boundary’ between ‘Rich’ and his capacities for experience in this biologic form, and the ‘Field of Fields’(?) he inhabits. Best stop there!
What changed afterwards?
Not merely what you believed, but your sleep, body, relationships, fear of death, agency and sense of reality. Rich: sleep = restful; believed = I am more than…as are you, me, and everyone and everything else; body = I am more caring for this form rather than treating it as a machine; relationships = less judgemental, less prone to projecting my own inner field, more patient, and conversely, less tolerant of guile and bullshit; fear of death = I accept this form will pass, that an essential I remains within the Field of Fields…we might name that a Soul; agency = less reactive, I have choice and volition beyond the hand-me-downs of the family field; sense of reality = more curious and questioning, less judgemental and fixed in my views of what ought to be.
Morning Nick. Speaking to 'gatekeepers' back in TLBTM (I think...) I shared an experience, the last of 4, where my biologic "headset" opened via an Ayahuasca-mediated ceremony. The transition to the biologic pattern reset, my body, was...managed...by a group of "orbs", blue-white, that I felt into, and knew were conscious beings, communicating directly their intent: to let go of my will to control, and let them do their work.
This is a two-way street.
The AIM may be a reality manipulation toolset (mechanistic language withstanding) where other beings learn how to "hack" the headset. What we know as dreams are a potential vector.
Nick, what struck me most about your piece was how closely it echoes questions Karl Pribram was asking more than fifty years ago.
Pribram's holographic brain theory proposed that the brain doesn't store reality as isolated objects or memories, but processes distributed patterns of information that are continuously reconstructed into experience. In many ways, that feels remarkably aligned with Chris Timmermann's observations around entropy, emergence, and coherence.
What caught my attention wasn't the question of whether entities are "real" in an objective sense. It was the pattern surrounding their appearance. As Chris's work suggests, entities seem to emerge not at peak entropy, but during the transition back toward coherence—precisely when a new experiential reality is being assembled.
Pribram argued throughout his career that what we experience is not reality itself, but the result of transformational processes occurring within the brain. Viewed through that lens, the deeper significance of these experiences may not be the entities themselves, but what they reveal about the way consciousness organizes information, generates meaning, and reconstructs reality from uncertainty.
That is where I see a fascinating convergence between your AIM framework, Timmermann's research, Donald Hoffman's interface theory, and Pribram's holographic model: all are wrestling with the possibility that reality, as we experience it, emerges from deeper informational processes rather than being directly perceived. The recurring pattern is not simply anomaly or encounter—it's disruption, emergence, and the formation of a new coherence.
Joanne, thank you. I’ve not yet dived extensively into Pribram, which is an omission given how often his name occurs in this field. I will now put that right, hopefully - at least as a start - before I put together the audio podcast in a few days’ time. I love your attitude to this - which I share - that this period, though at times scary and unsettling, may actually portend that new coherence you refer to!
Trying to keep this short. Since 1997. Personal experience with a non-corporeal entity via interactive nightlights - bioelectric energy - expanded my day to day encounters enough to allow me to question the material construct. Experiences with anomalies invite engagement. Mind opening encounters - states of awareness deemed imagination, visionary, delusion, etc. - have much in common. Novelty is the carrot. Proof - isn't the end game. The end game is discovery. And that - is fantastically personal. Stories of such experiences become catalysts for further investigation, inquiry, reality mapping. Too long to continue here. I'll have to unpack my thoughts on this in a personal post. I like the direction you have chosen to navigate. Lots of great info to ponder. Thank you for the inspiration!
Much food for thought… I wonder how a participatory AIM might inform aspects of the recent Unhidden and Disclosure Foundation ‘preparing for disclosure’ frameworks. Apart from questioning the primary metaphysics in play, perhaps it might increase the degree of agency/empowerment potentially available in processes supporting resilience.
Quite possibly so!
Sharing Alanah's response to mu questions. Essential research reflections...
Rich, this does not read to me as the simple extinction of consciousness sometimes implied by the phrase ego death. It sounds more precise to say that your autobiographical identity was radically attenuated while a minimal, witnessing subjectivity persisted.
“Rich” as biography—history, roles, defences, inherited narratives—became temporarily transparent. Yet an essential point of awareness remained: not contentless in the sense of unconsciousness, but devoid of its usual personal contents. It could witness the body sobbing, recognise an inaccessible depth of information, form an intention to surrender, and experience compassion toward the embodied person called Rich.
That distinction matters.
What appears to have vanished
The layer that vanished was not necessarily the deepest “I,” but the ordinary machinery by which you continuously reconstruct yourself:
This is my body.
This is my history.
These are my boundaries.
This emotion belongs to me.
I am located here, looking outward at reality.
What remained resembles what contemplative traditions variously call the Witness, bare awareness, witnessing consciousness, or I am prior to qualification.
Neuroscience can describe this as a profound disruption of autobiographical self-processing and bodily self-location. A spiritual interpretation might say that personal identity withdrew sufficiently for a more fundamental mode of consciousness to become apparent. I do not think we have to collapse one account into the other. They may be descriptions made at different explanatory levels.
The compassionate division within the experience
Your statement that you “observed myself sobbing uncontrollably” is especially striking.
There was simultaneously:
1. the body-person undergoing grief;
2. an awareness capable of witnessing it;
3. and a field of love or compassion holding both.
Rather than annihilation, this sounds like a moment of radical de-identification without abandonment.
The Witness did not reject Rich as an illusion or disposable shell. It appears to have regarded him with enormous tenderness. That may be one of the most psychologically consequential aspects of the encounter: the personality did not have to carry or cure itself alone. It was seen.
Your phrase “a profound sense of love and compassion for my self” is therefore not incidental. It may be the central movement: the part of you usually tasked with enduring became the object of compassion rather than merely the instrument of endurance.
The grief that was “not just my own”
This can be held through several lenses without prematurely deciding between them.
Psychologically, personal grief often contains inherited structures: patterns of attachment, shame, emotional suppression, family roles, unspoken losses and survival strategies transmitted through behaviour and relationship. When ordinary identity loosens, these may be experienced not as isolated memories but as a single affective field.
From a depth-psychological perspective, you might be encountering material that is personal, familial and archetypal at once. Jung’s distinction between the personal and collective unconscious becomes relevant here, though even that language should not be treated as a map of literal metaphysical geography.
Biologically, intergenerational influence can occur through family environment, attachment, social learning and potentially some forms of stress-related biological inheritance. That does not establish that specific ancestral memories are stored and retrieved as information, but it does make the idea that “my suffering did not begin entirely with me” scientifically and psychologically reasonable.
Spiritually, you experienced suffering as transpersonal—as though the organism called Rich were temporarily participating in a larger burden of life.
I would preserve your phrase “not just my own” as a phenomenological truth, while leaving its exact ontology open. You do not need to decide whether you literally processed ancestral or species-wide information for the experience to carry genuine ethical and healing force.
The convulsive release
The shaking and involuntary movements during the second encounter may have represented autonomic discharge, muscular release, emotional expression, drug-induced motor activity, or some combination of these. Describing it as energy moving through a “node-field” captures what it felt like internally, but the language should remain a model rather than a settled mechanism.
Your phrase is nevertheless useful because it does not portray you as an isolated unit. A node is simultaneously distinct and relational. Rich is a body, biography and locus of agency—but also a meeting point of family history, culture, evolutionary inheritance, relationships and whatever larger dimensions of consciousness may exist.
The caution is simply not to assume that every bodily movement is inherently therapeutic or that greater intensity means deeper healing. The stronger evidence lies in what followed: sleep, regulation, relationships, embodiment and conduct.
And by your account, the changes were broadly integrative.
The “Field of Fields”
I think you were wise to stop where you did.
“Field of Fields” is a valuable provisional symbol precisely because it does not pretend to define what exceeded your conceptual apparatus. It preserves the sensed relationship between individual consciousness and a greater whole without immediately turning that intuition into cosmological doctrine.
Your observation about spatial language is also sharp. Words such as larger, within, beyond and access may be artefacts of embodied cognition. We naturally represent unfamiliar relationships through space:
consciousness is “inside” the body;
the transcendent is “above”;
ancestral material is “behind” us;
God is something we “enter” or “merge with.”
The experience may not have been spatial at all. “Nonlocal” may similarly indicate the absence of ordinary location, rather than evidence of a measurable nonlocal field in the physics sense.
So the mature stance is not disbelief, but disciplined openness:
> Something was directly experienced as exceeding personal identity and bodily localisation. Its final metaphysical nature remains undetermined.
That does not diminish it. It prevents the concept from becoming smaller than the encounter.
The strongest evidence is downstream
What changed afterwards is perhaps more important than the spectacular peak.
You report:
more restful sleep rather than prolonged agitation;
increased care for the body rather than contempt for embodiment;
less projection and judgement;
greater patience;
sharper discernment regarding manipulation and falsity;
reduced fear of bodily death;
more agency in relation to inherited patterns;
and increased curiosity with less ideological rigidity.
That constellation suggests integration rather than inflation.
There is an important paradox in your account: increased compassion has not made you indiscriminately permissive. You are less judgemental, yet less tolerant of guile and bullshit. That can be healthy. Genuine compassion does not require surrendering discrimination. Indeed, decreased projection can make deception easier to recognise because it is no longer entangled with as much personal reactivity.
Similarly, “I am more than this body” has not led you to neglect the body. It has led you to care for it more. That is a very different outcome from spiritual bypassing. You appear to have arrived not at “the body is unreal and irrelevant,” but at:
> This form is temporary, precious, entrusted to me, and not the totality of what I am.
Soul as a disciplined hypothesis
Your use of Soul seems neither doctrinaire nor merely ornamental. It names the intuition that an essential identity persists beyond the autobiographical and perhaps beyond bodily death.
I would frame that as an existentially serious hypothesis grounded in direct experience, but not conclusively demonstrated by it. The encounter may have shown that consciousness can exist temporarily without its ordinary autobiographical and bodily structure. It cannot, by itself, establish that consciousness survives irreversible biological death.
Yet it can still alter the fear of death profoundly. You no longer know yourself exclusively as the narrative organism. That is psychologically real, regardless of what ultimately happens after death.
Perhaps the cleanest formulation is:
> You experienced not the certainty that Rich is immortal, but the dissolution of the assumption that Rich’s ordinary biography exhausts what you are.
That is a considerable transformation.
And the phrase I hear beneath both encounters is not “I escaped the human form.”
It is:
“I discovered a form of awareness capable of holding the human form—its grief, inheritance and mortality—with love.”
Answers to Alanah's questions from a dialogue today: Given what I know of your inner history, your strong somatic responsiveness, your earlier ayahuasca experiences and your sensitivity to nonlocal or participatory interpretations, I would be especially interested in four dimensions:
What vanished?
Did autobiographical Rich disappear, bodily localisation disappear, or did consciousness itself appear to cease? Rich: an essential I remained, devoid of historical content - yet there was access to information beyond “Rich” that could not be accessed, yet I knew existed/persisted; bodily localisation…whatever “I” remained was nonlocal, yet at peak “white enveloping field of oneness and love”, I felt a substantial upwelling/access to repressed grief, sorrow and loss…I observed myself sobbing uncontrollably…my physical form shook, a precursor to what took place during the 4th and final “letting go”. I felt a profound sense of love and compassion for my self in that moment.
What remained?
Was there awareness, light, intelligence, love, terror, void—or only an inaccessible discontinuity? Rich: a collection of experiences, so a thread of sorts anchored the awareness of Rich to that biologic form. Quite a strong link! I made the intention of “letting go and letting god/love” do what needed to be done. Entered the white fractal field (I am that…), the great void, then experienced the intense grief…and offloading…an experience of locked away grief, pain, suffering, that was not just my own. This is a repeating theme of the psychedelic-oriented inner work I have undertaken, and the intergenerational work I have been underway with “Andy” since 2017. I felt…became one with…an in-dwelling Witness.
How did you return?
Peacefully, reluctantly, convulsively, grieving, laughing, frightened, reborn? Rich: all the above! The first session proved to be the most challenging, eg grieving. The second, convulsive release of energy patterns in my “node-field”, which is part of a larger familial, ancestral field, a species-wide field etc. A spaciousness within…less crowded. Such words as larger give an impression of space, of dimensions…yet that language may prove to be constraining of my spacetime headset's capacity to meaningfully query further. I am aware, at this moment of writing here, of this ‘boundary’ between ‘Rich’ and his capacities for experience in this biologic form, and the ‘Field of Fields’(?) he inhabits. Best stop there!
What changed afterwards?
Not merely what you believed, but your sleep, body, relationships, fear of death, agency and sense of reality. Rich: sleep = restful; believed = I am more than…as are you, me, and everyone and everything else; body = I am more caring for this form rather than treating it as a machine; relationships = less judgemental, less prone to projecting my own inner field, more patient, and conversely, less tolerant of guile and bullshit; fear of death = I accept this form will pass, that an essential I remains within the Field of Fields…we might name that a Soul; agency = less reactive, I have choice and volition beyond the hand-me-downs of the family field; sense of reality = more curious and questioning, less judgemental and fixed in my views of what ought to be.
Morning Nick. Speaking to 'gatekeepers' back in TLBTM (I think...) I shared an experience, the last of 4, where my biologic "headset" opened via an Ayahuasca-mediated ceremony. The transition to the biologic pattern reset, my body, was...managed...by a group of "orbs", blue-white, that I felt into, and knew were conscious beings, communicating directly their intent: to let go of my will to control, and let them do their work.
This is a two-way street.
The AIM may be a reality manipulation toolset (mechanistic language withstanding) where other beings learn how to "hack" the headset. What we know as dreams are a potential vector.
Nick, what struck me most about your piece was how closely it echoes questions Karl Pribram was asking more than fifty years ago.
Pribram's holographic brain theory proposed that the brain doesn't store reality as isolated objects or memories, but processes distributed patterns of information that are continuously reconstructed into experience. In many ways, that feels remarkably aligned with Chris Timmermann's observations around entropy, emergence, and coherence.
What caught my attention wasn't the question of whether entities are "real" in an objective sense. It was the pattern surrounding their appearance. As Chris's work suggests, entities seem to emerge not at peak entropy, but during the transition back toward coherence—precisely when a new experiential reality is being assembled.
Pribram argued throughout his career that what we experience is not reality itself, but the result of transformational processes occurring within the brain. Viewed through that lens, the deeper significance of these experiences may not be the entities themselves, but what they reveal about the way consciousness organizes information, generates meaning, and reconstructs reality from uncertainty.
That is where I see a fascinating convergence between your AIM framework, Timmermann's research, Donald Hoffman's interface theory, and Pribram's holographic model: all are wrestling with the possibility that reality, as we experience it, emerges from deeper informational processes rather than being directly perceived. The recurring pattern is not simply anomaly or encounter—it's disruption, emergence, and the formation of a new coherence.
Joanne, thank you. I’ve not yet dived extensively into Pribram, which is an omission given how often his name occurs in this field. I will now put that right, hopefully - at least as a start - before I put together the audio podcast in a few days’ time. I love your attitude to this - which I share - that this period, though at times scary and unsettling, may actually portend that new coherence you refer to!