Tangible Minds™

One year after I first noticed the curious ability to deliberately shift a feeling state using a sensory imagery map, I was left with a major decision. I felt freed to pursue whatever I might wish to pursue. But I was also a 36-year-old with a patchwork career and no possibility I could see of cobbling together a resume that would get me meaningful work. The freelance copywriting work I had been doing was not satisfying. And nothing else beckoned.

What I did have, though, was the beginnings of something quite compelling, a kind of work that promised emotional healing results that had previously been unavailable to people, as far as I knew. And the possibility of learning something truly new about the human mind.

Here’s what I knew about the work so far:

• It had liberated me from bipolar disorder, something no other method had succeeded in doing. And something that the psychiatric establishment held was impossible to do.
• It suggested that consciousness was modular, that we were made of parts which could be clearly identified and studied. It seemed to me that these sensory mapping questions had the power to illuminate and possibly cure a great variety of mental and emotional afflictions.
• It showed very clearly that standard, semantic approaches to studying and working with emotion and feeling were grossly inadequate. At the very least, here was a tool with which to bring precision to the study of the subtle, non-linguistic dimensions of mind.
• It also suggested that our understanding of feeling was far too constrained by the definitions of the strong emotions. I had mapped some feeling states that would not have been qualified to fit the category by any other methodology.

This seemed to be a very promising start. However, I knew that even if it turned out that this work was groundbreaking, it would be very difficult for me to get anyone to pay attention to me in my current status as a college dropout. I began to consider going back to school.