24 The Moment of Integration

The culmination of the unio process is a single moment of integration, a climactic conversation with and acceptance of the repressed contents of the self.

Each of the the three chapters of the unio section thus far serve an important role in bringing this moment of integration about.

• Focusing is used to get in touch with and establish communication with the Repressed contents of the lower mind
• Existential Kink gives you a formula for expressing acceptance of these elements
• Sasha Chapin’s Deep Okayness Blog Post gives you a benchmark by which you can measure your own progress towards and through this climactic moment.

While Sasha triggered his own moment of integration with an LSD trip, I believe the more sustainable method is to build up to it as an extension of discrete sessions of Existential Kink. The process is therefore straightforward:

1. Read all three supplemental works— Focusing, Existential Kink, and How I Achieved Persistent Self-Love, or: I Demand Deep Okayness For Everyone— without trying to implement their specific therapy
2. Perform the exercises in the Focusing book until you’ve achieved sufficient mastery that you can recognize a felt-sense at will, and achieve a body-shift occasionally
3. Perform the exercises in Existential Kink repeatedly, making sure that each time you do so, you perform them in a dedicated, private space for a dedicated, set amount of time. This is important both because it is part of the method Carolyn Elliot prescribes, and because when you do achieve integration, you need to be able to persist with it uninterruptedly.
4. As you perform the EK exercises, keep in mind that what you’re trying to do is achieve a similar episode to the one described in Sasha’s piece. Simply remembering that this is your goal should be enough to eventually bring it about.

When you manage to bring about the moment of integration which ends the unio process, you will engage in a confrontation with your repressed self. This is a literal, mental conversation which you will have with a visual representation of your subconscious mind that you see with your eyes closed. You will know that you have achieved the moment of integration because you will not be willing this visual representation to say whatever it has to say; it will be in control of itself, as though it were another person. The conversation may take place to a greater or lesser extent verbally; the communication will be rendered in the style of a Focusing felt-sense, that is to say, feelings attached to words which summarize them, but there will be many felt senses, a kind of cascade in which they pour out one after another. Sasha’s confrontation with his repressed self involved the representation of his subconscious mind as an open wound; my confrontation represented my subconscious mind as a child-version of myself. There’s no telling what form your repressed mind will take. It is important to remember that this entity with which you are communicating is not an instantiation of your pathology— it is a representation of those elements of your self which your pathology has separated from you.

The conversation will be back and forth. It is important to determine what it is your subconscious mind wants from you. In doing so, you must find the felt-sense phrase which eases the pain in which your pathological miscommunication has placed you. For me, the phrase I arrived at was “It’s okay, I forgive you”. I said numerous things to myself during my moment of integration, but this was the most important. I repeated it over and over again like a mantra, drawing out every inflection which I intended the statement to convey. Your mantra might be something different; in the moment, it will come to you. I believe that the theme of the statement will be forgiveness; it is shame that has repressed these elements into your subconscious mind, shame which you have willfully inflicted on yourself, and forgiveness is the necessary antidote.

If you reach the point of confrontation with yourself and fail to forgive yourself, your unio process will halt at a state of maximal executive dysfunction. I know this because I made this mistake, for reasons I will explain in my narrative later on. This does not mean that you are permanently unable to continue the unio process; progress through the Framework Process only proceeds in one direction, and the only way out is through. Resuming the unio process will be straightforward— resume your EK exercises and you will reach the moment of integration again, and this time you must choose to accept and forgive yourself. However, until you do so, you will be subject to the most severe executive dysfunction you will ever experience, whether hyperactivity or indolence. I myself, having begun with an open disposition, was essentially catatonic for the 2 months between my abortive attempt at integration and the moment when a relative’s renewal of my Adderall prescription gave me enough mental focus to attempt it again.

The fact that the unio process can be stopped but not reversed teaches us something important: no one can force you to re-integrate your subconscious contents and heal your pathology. The process is never automatic, and it isn’t a runaway reaction. Even up to the last moment, you can reject unio. You will never be trapped in the process or feel compelled to do anything; but by the same token, no one but you can do the work for you.

You will know when you have finished the unio process. I believe it took me around 2 to 3 hours, though I wasn’t watching the clock. When I had found my mantra and sufficiently convinced my subconscious self that I forgave myself, I felt an incomparable sense of lightness and relief. The pathological weight holding me down fell away, and I felt as though I was thinking clearly for the first time in my life. I continued stating my affirmative mantra regularly in the days and weeks after my moment of integration, whenever my subconscious mind brought to my attention something I was unduly ashamed of; when this occurred, my forgiveness would cause an unraveling of threads of subconscious tension, and another small weight would fall away. By the time I attempted a wrap-up MDMA trip a month or so later, there was very little tension left to resolve.  I have continued to say my mantra whenever I encounter this kind of subconscious tension, though generally now the tension both arises from life circumstances and is forgiven within the same few moments.

The changes in your personality which result from casting aside your pathology should begin immediately after your moment of integration has completed, and should settle-out over the course of the following few months as you resolve the last few pockets of tension in your mind. Within two years, you should find that you are no longer persistently aware that a change has occurred; neutral equanimity will be your new normal.

If you find that you’ve been engaging in EK exercises for some time (2-3 months) and have not experienced integration, that likely means you’ve moved on to unio before completing solve. You should shoot me an email if you get stuck at any point in the process, so that I can help you debug. (Please also shoot me an email if you manage to achieve self-integration successfully.)

My Experience of the Unio Process

As I explained in an earlier chapter, I believe I achieved complete solve in my senior year of college, during an intense psychedelic drug trip in which I hallucinated that I had become an incarnation of Brahma and was responsible for the maintenance or destruction of the universe. This trip occurred in December of 2018, and for the next 3 years I suffered from a state of executive dysfunction I took to be a form of brain damage, called Hallucinogen Perception Persistence Disorder (HPPD). The main symptom was an utter inability to be motivated, energetic, or focused; I would spend a great deal of time staring out into space. The more strictly Hallucinogenic symptoms were a kind of TV static which covered everything, particularly the sky; a moderate fear of the dark; and a series of complex delusions related to the notion that the universe was a simulation of which I was the center, which abated more quickly over the course of a few months.

My first breakthrough in treating these symptoms came from the discovery that Adderall cured them entirely, so long as it was in my system. I developed the theory that my HPPD was analogous to ADHD on the basis of some notions about Executive Dysfunction, and obtained an Adderall prescription to treat it off-label. The Adderall brought me more or less back to normal, though it was a much more energetic and motivated normal than I had previously experienced. This was the discovery that first led me to conceptualize the Executive Functions as a tool by which the conscious mind “crowded out” the subconscious mind.

While on Adderall, I moved to New York and spent several months as the curator and sole employee of an art gallery owned by an eccentric startup founder. Fueled by amphetamines, I worked harder than I (in my agreeable 2o sloth) ever had before, generally between 55 and 60 hours per week. I lost a further 15 pounds, due to a combination of the Adderall and the insufficient kitchen resources in my Flatbush apartment, bringing me down from 165 lbs to a sickly-seeming 149. I coped with the speed and the constant hunger quite poorly, and grew very delusional. I started practicing Tarot; at first, as a form of psychological association-making— then, after an incident wherein I drew The World card three times in a row, with genuine fervor. When I wasn’t working, I would wander New York in a glaze, occasionally getting into brief confrontations with schizophrenics in Midtown and trying to commune psychically with the spirit of America. This culminated in a nervous breakdown at the gallery’s opening party, wherein I collapsed to the floor and began laughing and crying uncontrollably. A few days later, when my employer informed me that due to budgetary restrictions at the startup the gallery would need to actually achieve profitability, I quit my job impulsively and retreated back to the Midwest to restructure.

It was during this interlude that I discovered both Focusing and Sasha’s blog post, through which I learned about Existential Kink. I read Focusing on the flight back to Indiana, and began practicing it; I found Sasha’s post a few days later and began experimenting with EK.

I had arrived home in February, intending to stay briefly before securing other employment and returning to New York. However, as I tried to fulfill those plans, the unio process got in the way.

I had been practicing EK according to Carolyn Elliot’s instructions, setting a timer and devoting my attention wholly to the exercise. I found it extremely difficult to bring myself to start a session, experiencing intense psychological resistance each time I considered engaging with it. It took me two weeks to finish simply reading the book, and I was unable to bring myself to actually practice the therapy without my Adderall. I was both rationing these pills (as I was running low) and considering quitting altogether, because the incident at the gallery party indicated that my psychosis was  worsening. Each time I took a pill the odds that I would actually go through with EK practice would be low; over the course of the last two weeks of February, I performed only a few sessions— but these sessions were enough to reach the moment of integration.

The experience of this moment was a powerful one. It occurred more or less exactly as Sasha had described— as I dug deeper and deeper into a session of EK, with my door locked and a timer running, I was confronted with the mental image of an incarnation of myself as a child. It was indistinct, spectral; I saw it only with my eyes closed, not superimposed over my bedroom or anything like that. However, it was abundantly clear that this was the entity behind the felt sense communications I had received, and that my Existential Kink affirmations had drawn it out for a discussion. It was clear to me, in that moment, that the entity was seeking my forgiveness.

However, my great and terrible psychedelic trip 3 years previous had permanently altered my conception of reality. Though I had never fully resolved myself on any one possibility, I generally lived not in the active belief, but at least with the subconscious posture that the universe was either a simulation or the dream of Brahma. If I thought about it too concertedly, I would feel a flash of heat and pain on the back of my neck— which I had scratched bloody during my bad trip, and began to view as a kind of psychedelic stigmata— and would become concerned that I was about to collapse the universe into a singularity by ending the simulation or waking Brahma from his dream. The intense feeling of unreality attendant to the image of my subconscious self gave me serious pause. The dream-entity either pleaded for or demanded my forgiveness, but I refused to grant it, purely due to my fear that doing so might destroy the universe.

It is perhaps worth emphasizing during this juncture that I am incredibly vulnerable to Adderall psychosis, and that amphetamines were the only thing propelling me into these EK sessions over my intense malaise. It was easier at the time for me to rationalize the image of my subconscious self as a projection of Brahma wearing my appearance than it was for me to accept it as truly me; I had never really reconciled whether I considered myself to be myself or Brahma, and so the decision to forgive myself felt as weighty as forgiving the entire universe. Subsequent events demonstrated that, for the moment at least, I was not Brahma, as I was eventually able to forgive myself entirely, but my posture towards the universe remains mildly skeptical.

What followed my failure to forgive myself was the most intense executive dysfunction I had ever experienced. My previous sojourns at home (during the pandemic) had been marked by a pattern of consistent activity. I was generally unable to muster the concentration to work on anything difficult, but activities I enjoyed I made time for. I organized Dungeons and Dragons sessions, I played video games, I read numerous books; I was essentially always wrapped up in some form of consumption or expression. This trip was different. During the two month interval between my abortive attempt at unio and my successful one, I answered no messages, dodged phone calls, spoke to no one outside my family, and did nothing unless I was prompted forcefully. I generally could  muster the energy to turn on my television and watch a television show I had already seen or play a video game I had already played, and no more than that.

I inferred that I had done Existential Kink improperly, that I had failed to understand it, and rereading the book became an obsession of mine; the more I urged myself to open it back up, the more difficult it got, and I never managed to so much as open it. I knew, intellectually, that I needed to resume the unio process, and that my life— not only my goals, but my basic ability to function— would be on hold until I did so; but having betrayed my lower mind so fundamentally, it (rightfully) refused to grant me the agency to perform the actions that stood between myself and unio^[1].

I was delivered from this debilitating state by my father, who took the initiative to refill my empty Adderall prescription— a significant violation of his usual discretion, which goes some way towards demonstrating how deeply into the hole I had fallen. I took my pills on April 20th, and took care of some extant business; I took them again on the 21st, and tried to bring myself to read Existential Kink again but failed, being too frightened. I took them a 3rd time on the 22nd and opened up Existential Kink, intending to reacquaint myself with the material and gingerly restart the unio process.

That day, immediately upon beginning the Existential Kink method, I was thrust back forcefully right where I had left off. My subconscious manifestation was there, unchanged, and it asked for the same forgiveness it had asked for last time— forgiveness it had always been asking for, though I had been unable to hear it. This time, driven to bravery by my own dysfunction more than anything, I forgave it; again and again it presented me with some aspect of my 2o pathology, some desire I had beaten down with shame, and I forgave myself for feeling it. I found my mantra— “It’s okay, I forgive you”— and over the course of my conversation with myself this mantra took on hundreds or thousands of shades of meaning, each one an affirmation and forgiveness of some behavior I had, in the error of my childhood, taught myself to fear and reject. The sum material of my 2o disposition, rendered legible by solve, was pored over systematically by my upper and lower selves, and was forgiven.

By the end of the two to three hour session— through a great deal of tears— my personality had been permanently altered. Just as Sasha’s example had indicated, the hole in my psyche was healed; though, in my case, it was the hole of needing to be cared for rather than needing validation. Over the course of the next month and a half, I encountered more knots of the same sort of tension that I had encountered during my conversation with my inner self, and through the application of Focusing techniques combined with my mantra, I dissolved them; I would do this ambiently, as I was having conversations with other people or doing other things, rather than dedicating a particular time to it. There were a finite number of these knots to unravel, and by the time in early June that I had an opportunity to take some MDMA and pursue the matter in a dedicated way, I found that I had already resolved all of them.

After the Unio Process

Naturally I was ecstatic in the wake of my unio process; in the first place because it was the resolution of a horrible psychic pain I had endured since childhood; secondly, and more distantly, because it meant that the Framework which has been my life’s work was functionally complete. In the days and weeks following the process, I performed a few tests to test out my new equanimity.

• I practiced asking people for things, where previously I would be ashamed to. I started with simple things, like passing the salt or handing me a towel. I had to work out the boundaries of what I was now comfortable asking for manually, by trying it out, communicating with my felt sense to see what it had to say, and performing a little solve on the whole process to verify that it was rational.
• I played scrolling arcade shooter games to see if I could manage to focus intently on a physical task without getting distracted and angry (a classic 2o problem) and found that I did much better; these were a particularly good example, because your ability to succeed in these games scales directly to your ability to focus on them without distraction. I found that the creeping sense of dread by which my Thanatos-duty manifested itself when I had 2o had entirely abated, and I was able to focus intently on things without stimulants for the first time.
• I practiced telling people information which I would previously have considered an embarrassing and unforgivable sign of weakness— that I needed to use the bathroom, that I felt unable to handle something, that I liked or appreciated something they did. As with asking people for favors, for a few months this involved a process of internal defragging wherein I came to understand my new boundaries. It’s worth emphasizing that this was a process of finding my new boundaries, not of creating them.
• I started listening to music with less pathos. I could formerly only appreciate songs that had some element of pain; in the months after my unio process, I cultivated an appetite for City Pop and 70s prog rock, two genres which had largely been inaccessible to me where they were upbeat or joyful.

All of my personality changes have persisted in the two years since my completion of the unio process^[2]. These changes all align with a movement from 2o3n to 2n3n. A few of the more significant include:

• My taste in women has changed. I used to be attracted only to 2c women, who I would pursue avidly. During my stint on Adderall, I had a fling with a 2o woman, and the mild repulsion which resulted from our pathological incompatibility filled me with overpowering despair. In the years since unio, I’ve been attracted to and had successful relationships with women of a far broader range of dispositions, and have felt less compelled to engage with 2c women when I meet them.
• My compatibility with my friends has changed drastically. As per the rules of pathological compatibility, I have gained compatibility with friends whose dispositions are cracked, and lost it with friends who are uncracked. This has resulted in the end of a few long standing friendships, and the beginning of a few new ones.
• I’ve gained the ability to appreciate time alone. I used to default to seeking out the company of others whenever it was available, to the exclusion of all else. I’m still very social, but this is no longer my only instinct. I have, occasionally, decided not to go to parties.
• It takes more provocation for me to get angry; I no longer keep myself mentally prepared for physical violence in crowds and new places.

• I became less insistent on happy endings in books I read. I still generally find most literature much, much too dour for my tastes— a reflection of the repressed 3c drive for Thannatic catharsis which leads all marriages in great novels to be destroyed, all young people to die violently, etc— but I can now withstand more adversity and misery in a novel before I feel compelled to stop reading.
• I have had much less trouble meeting deadlines, answering emails, responding to messages, sending messages, and the like. I still sometimes find myself procrastinating these things— medical procedures in particular I dread— but procrastination is no longer my default for communication.
• I’m more tolerant of clutter in my bedroom and living spaces, and less tolerant of hygiene issues on my own person like acne, long fingernails, a beard that needs trimming, etc.

These changes are a positive side-effect of the unio process; but what has proven more important, and more durable, is the sheer equanimity it has granted me. I used to be upset by default. Each day I would awake, and I would need a reason to feel happy or content. If I wanted to enjoy my breakfast, it had to be a special breakfast, either because someone else made it for me (which was exceedingly rare) or because it violated the strictures of my diet. If I wanted to relax, I needed to anesthetize myself with media or drugs. None of this is true anymore. By default, as Sasha says, I am deeply okay. What this means is that each day is a blank slate; my problems are still my problems, and they still upset me. But if there’s nothing pressing bothering me, what’s left is not a sucking void but a blank slate, a slate that I can fill with whatever joy the day brings me^[3].

Afterword

This concludes, for now, the substantive content of the Framework Blogbook. This book is a living document, and as such I will likely shuffle around and revise its format substantively both in the immediate future and in the years to come. The content which exists, though, is here to stay. The Framework is an interdependent network of concepts that have been thoroughly vetted; ideas might be deepened, and they’ll certainly be clarified, but nothing major will ever be removed or reworked to the point of unrecognition.

The next chapter will be an addendum on the role of drugs and the Framework. For now, if this is your first read of the document, I’m afraid your journey is only beginning; having read the book, it’s now time for you to go back to the beginning to try and put it into practice. If, on the other hand, you’re here because you’ve just completed the Framework Process for yourself, congratulations! Send me an email to let me know how it went. Until then, may your vicus of circumlocution ever be a commodious one; goodbye, and good luck.