23 Sasha Chapin’s Deep Okayness Blog Post

If not for Sasha Chapin’s piece  How I Attained Persistent Self-Love, or, I Demand Deep Okayness For Everyone, I would never have undergone the unio process.

I came upon the piece by chance on Twitter. I’ll narrate the circumstances which led to my own unio process in the next chapter, but for now I’ll just substantiate that I had been toying with the notion that the answer to my problems lay in Jungian psychology at the time I ran across Sasha’s post. Jung was a warren of inscrutability which I struggled to get a handle on; I found (and still find) his mystic obscurantism tiring. I came across Focusing in the process of tangling with Jung, and had begun experimenting with it, but hadn’t achieved any meaningful results.

Sasha’s piece struck me like a bolt of lightning, because he described exactly the set of effects which the Framework indicated the removal of a disposition would result in. When I read passages like:

For my whole adult life, I’d struggled with a painful yearning for validation. Now, that yearning was pretty much gone. It’s not like I hated validation after the LSD experience. I still wanted people to, like, follow me on Twitter, because it was good for my business, and I could make friends. But the emotional craving beneath it was basically dispersed.

It was immediately apparent to me that Sasha had discovered a method for altering one’s disposition; throughout his post, he consistently characterizes his issue in a manner which aligns 1:1 with a closed pathology^[1]. Therefore, as soon as I finished reading his piece, I acquired a copy of Existential Kink and made plans to replicate his experience.

I’ll describe the (successful) outcome of that process in the next chapter; for now, I’d like to take a look at Sasha’s article. While I may be able to narrate the details of my own unio process in a more Framework-aligned manner, it’s important to me that you are provided with all of the materials which went into my own unio process, to ensure that nothing which I have come to take for granted is left out. For that reason you should consider Sasha’s blog post required reading in line with Focusing and Existential Kink. You can find it here [Edit: it seems Sasha has removed the post in order to rewrite it. I don’t know why he’s done this- I’ve never spoken to him or anything. Once I get my shit together I’m going to reach out to him about it, but for the meantime you can email me for a backup copy I downloaded from the Internet Archive]:

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-i-attained-persistent-self-love

The first thing I want to clarify about Sasha’s method is that I don’t believe that either the LSD or the MDMA are necessary. In the run-up to my own moment of integration I was prepared to employ both substances, but ultimately I was able to complete the process with only a 10 mg Adderall pill. I have since then employed LSD and MDMA for completeness sake, and both experiments confirmed that I had been able to bring the process to incontrovertible completion without them. As I’ll discuss in a later chapter, LSD is a potent engine of solve and MDMA is a potent engine of unio; but they serve as force multipliers rather than supplying you with any capacities of thought you don’t natively possess.

My next note is that, while Sasha seems to have felt that his wife’s role as a mediator was essential to his trip, I performed my own unio process alone (in fact, I locked the door to my room to ensure I was uninterrupted). I have no doubt that the things she had to say to him were indispensable to his process— as my own experience confirmed, if he had chosen to look away from his personified self in that critical moment, he would not have achieved complete unio then and there^[2]. However, I believe that this was a contribution of knowledge, and that her presence as a mediator was not the essential element. So long as you understand the process sufficiently, you can (and should) replicate it alone.

Sasha breaks his process down into three steps, which I performed as well and have replicated in the format of the unio process. His first step involved mastery of Existential Kink; his second step I replicated through Focusing, which operates according to the same logic of self-personification as the method he learned from his friend Mark. EK itself actually contains all the necessary techniques in an abbreviated form, but as I have explained, peeling it out with a more specific emphasis on Focusing makes the process go much more smoothly; by the time I found out about EK I already had a good handle on the theory of Focusing, and was able to speed through the first steps of the EK method.

Sasha’s 3rd step is his unique contribution, the escalation of EK into a specific, hallucinatory moment of integration; this is where you should really pay attention in reading his post. While I’ll describe my own experience of integration in the next chapter, he does a better job of explaining the feelings involved than I will be capable of.

Those are my main thoughts about Sasha’s article. You should read it now if you haven’t already. Next chapter, I’ll describe my own unio process in as much detail as I can muster. For now, as with the other two supplemental materials I’ve covered, I’ll lay out my remaining miscellaneous notes on Sasha’s piece.

-The quotes which indicated to me that the hole Sasha healed in himself was a closed disposition were these:

…Something about the idea of spending time making my workspace pleasant was vaguely gross and sad to me.

Closed dispositions struggle to maintain cleanliness in their personal environments, because cleaning is an act of Thanattic solve— taking the undifferentiated mass of a thing and breaking it into smaller, more comprehensible pieces. Open dispositions struggle with the inverse, personal hygiene, for the same reason.

Superficially, I was getting by extremely well—mentally stable, solid income, marriage, house, friends. Internally, I had a lot of conflict, but I’d accepted a certain level of pervading background pain as normal.

“Pervading background pain” is a concise description of a pathology. I generally like the notion of Deep Okayness as the sort of pseudo-enlightenment which results from completing the unio process, though I prefer to delve more technically into the kinds of equanimity that N consists of.

Like, it was so cool that I’d arranged a way to both slake my lust for affirmation and never be seen by anyone, thus remaining in safety. So ingenious how I’d permanently arranged the role of misunderstood artist for myself. It was fantastic how I could thus remain forever unknowable, unredeemable, distant, separate, but still special, praised, remarkable.

This is framed in an EK self-affirmation way because that’s what he’s discussing at this point in his post, but the notion of having to balance these two contradictory aims— keeping safe and being affirmed— is a neat description of the self-bargaining that a pathological disposition constrains you to.

For my whole adult life, I’d struggled with a painful yearning for validation. Now, that yearning was pretty much gone. It’s not like I hated validation after the LSD experience. I still wanted people to, like, follow me on Twitter, because it was good for my business, and I could make friends. But the emotional craving beneath it was basically dispersed.

This yearning for validation describes the experience of a closed disposition to a T.

-It’s worth noting that I saw Sasha’s post and then set out to replicate his experience. It’s entirely possible that this is some kind of logical fallacy, but I consider this kind of shot-calling much more compelling evidence than purely retrospective analysis. I faced a similar situation with my sugar-free diet— I watched a video explaining that sugar causes obesity, decided to quit eating it to lose weight, and then lost 50 pounds. Rather than these interventions dove-tailing with efforts I was already making, they represented methods which claimed sufficiency in and of themselves and proved sufficient in their execution, which strikes me as greater evidence that their underlying logic is sound than an intervention which merely augments an existing program.

-Possessing this knowledge seemed easier and more normal than not possessing it.

Sasha rightfully points out here that the post-unio accord is a more natural resting-state than a pathology. I think that this is essential to its permanence; it’s a more efficient, better-fit point of homeostasis than the irrationality inherent to pathology, which continually collides with a reality that undermines it.

-I had an unusual relationship with my self-image. A few years before this, I‘d published a memoir, largely about some of my shortcomings, the fulfillment of a book deal that was given to me based on lyrical essays about my shortcomings. So, notionally, I was very self-aware.

This is another instance of the double-meaning of “awareness’ ‘ as “knowledge” and “acceptance” tripping us up. I would argue that this is strong evidence that Sasha had completed solve, likely several years before he attempted unio. What he describes as “self-mythology” seems to me like a rational self-understanding, which will always be more hollow than a self-understanding which is grounded in self-acceptance, but which still is an essential step in the process of overcoming the rationalizations which disguise repression.

-One of the elements which got me invested in Sasha’s blog post was the finality of his method. Most therapeutic interventions are couched in the language of gradualism, and I take this gradualism as a sign of the weakness of their claims. While it is ongoing, a process which heals you by tiny degrees and a process which does nothing at all feel identical; this can easily be exploited to keep you hooked on a baseless program. Real change, wherever I have experienced it, is transcendental and all-consuming.

–A better world of mental health, then, might start with a lot of good, well-written qualitative research into how different individuals have attained Deep Okayness, such that there is a thorough anecdotal understanding of the different monsters people tend to encounter in their own self-loathing dungeons, and how they can be slain. In this world, this research is then assembled into a sort of Monstrous Manual that can be learned and flexibly used by anyone who wants to be Okay or wants to help others become Okay.

The awkwardness of the counterfactual compels me to clarify that this paragraph had no bearing on my decision to write this book. I’ve been shuffling my Framework out in various formats for eight years; I even tried to publish it online twice but desisted because, without a means of changing one’s disposition, the whole system was horribly depressing. While this BlogBook is certainly a Monstrous Manual of the kind he’s describing, it has involved no well-written research, qualitative or otherwise.

-His “loving awareness” notion is a description of the motive force of unio; unio is widely available through a variety of religious and therapeutic vehicles, but needs to be combined with solve to produce intentional, dramatic change in an individual. One of the great limitations of sublimative progress is that generally the one or the other is neglected by any system which claims to present a transformative method. New-age religious schools want Love (unio) to be all that you need, and very few of the analyses that look at society critically (solve) strive to find anything redemptive in it. The Tao of the thing is strewn about and has to be reassembled anew every time someone tries to heal themselves. It is this dissociation of Yin and Yang which the Framework BlogBook seeks to rectify.