thank you S for this exploration - I will point people to this post whenever I am asked what unpsychology means. This is a far more eloquent response than the verbal brick wall they meet in my own attempts, which often include me grinding to a halt and confessing 'I don't know.' Haha. And it reminds me too of the slippery nature of how to respond to an equally perplexing question: what is mad studies? A friend recently questioned my stock answer (an emerging academic discipline that critiques the mainstream mental health system) as he thinks of mad studies as an undiscipline, so to speak. Undisciplined and anti-discipline. I veer toward a more nuanced view, an undisciplined discipline perhaps. Anyway thank you for this, rich food for thought. :-)
I often find it hard (impossible) to describe unpsychology, and fumble around until the inquirer's eyes glaze over. Stock answers seldom stick, do they? That's why I said to J that "I genuinely haven't got a definition for you that can be pinned down, and that might not mean something very different a few hours later".
That might, of course, be a cop out, but it feels like that to me. Chris's first thought: "...that unpsychology is still open, if not unmade, unthought, unwritten..." feels right, beautiful and validating, I think.
First thoughts are that unpsychology is still open, if not unmade, unthought, unwritten. It is an emergent thought form that does not want to be defined (as yet). It seems a vehicle for this type of undefining thought.
Second thoughts are around its etymological cousins associated with reversal or negation, which could include anti psychology and a link to Cooper and Laing's revulsion of the coercive control of 'psychiatry' in the form of Anti-psychiatry. The anti prefix is binary in a way that 'un' is not.
The 'un' is pregnant with potential and rather like a liminal space that is held by Hermes as the spirit in this transitional spaces before the inevitable Saturnian boundaries come to 'protect'.
There is something in me, like J, that searches for a clear communication of the function of Unpsychology especially if it is as a response to what is feeling to be a more chaotic world.
My experience of unpsychology is a great carefulness to include everything and to not offend or even offer up opposition .... I liken it to the art of children where everything is equally admired and encouraged.
But as adults, we are always choosing even if we are not conscious of doing so - we have to or else we become overwhelmed, and this is even more so in a chaotic world - where do I expend my energy, my time and my physical resources that is best for this body/mind. And in the choosing there inevitably is conflicts, offence and exclusion.
Whilst there is something very beautiful and open in the poetic communications offered by unpsychology, in my view, something else equally valid, is avoided in the lack of clarity. I am curious about why that is.
Oct 22, 2023·edited Oct 22, 2023Liked by Steve Thorp
Hi Yinchi! I guess all choices risk causing offence to some people, even as others are inspired or entertained. I have enjoyed the variety of voices on this substack and in this magazine and find that the mixing of different perspectives calms me in these times of increasing chaos, more so than the more “clear” this-is-who-are voices. I don’t know exactly why. I think I feel there is more room for me when the purpose isn’t locked down too much. When things are more distinct and take a specific position, I find it easy to feel on the outside Yet perhaps this very environment finds you feeling on the outside? I'm sorry to read that is your experience.
I’d be interested in what kind of spaces have the right mix for you? Is it the lack of “clarity” here that you’re uncomfortable with or something else? Do you want to feel your challenges taken seriously? What would it mean for you to feel included?
or scrap all that and come and play with us! We're actually just a group of humans playing around.
I hadn't really appreciated the role of calming in less distinct and specific positions. I actually experience less distinct and specific positions as very threatening. In my history there has been a litany of superficial agreeable communications masking an underbelly of control and I suppose there is something in Unpsychology that activates that and probably leads my communications to feel openly aggressive because I don't understand what people are trying to communicate. I am grateful through J's questions and your responses to see this and to recognise this community is not really for me. It really is as simple is one perspective as playful is completely the opposite of my version of what playfulness is...not right or wrong in itself but wrong for me. Namaste.
Thanks for your honesty, Yinchi. I can really appreciate how the experiences you've had might have led to your perspective. Just to be clear, I don't read your communications as aggressive. Challenging, yes, but that's OK. Your comment has reminded me that MY experience of aggressive, conflictual experiences in my adolescence (bullying in my peer group mainly, but also later adult experiences in workplaces and political contexts) has led me to seek and create space where polarities and 'othering' is minimised. Of course, it's never not there, and I do it too, but I realise on reading your piece, that this might be my version of your feeling threatened. Go well, and I genuinely thank you for your insight and engagement.
Thanks Yinchi, I have a better sense of where you’re coming from with your challenging of this space. And, as I think you may already know from our conversations, I also have struggled with superficially agreeable conversations and the sharks that swim underneath, although perhaps different species of sharks than the ones you have encountered. My sharks use the word “should” a lot which I guess relates to control.
You may not feel like posting on here, and fair enough, but you might also find from reading/looking /listening to some of the magazine contributions that they offer a different perspective to your current take on what’s going on here. And you might even feel drawn to writing something for our next issue. Bringing your own perspectives and life experience into the amorphous mix. I’ve read a lot of your recent writing and have loved what you’ve been exploring, as I’ve told you.
HI Yinchi, just emerging in UK Monday! As always, a thoughtful challenge.
I suppose my first response is to say that unpsychology is only a very small part of a much wider ecology of communication. It can't, and I'd say probably shouldn't try to encompass everything.
I'm speaking for me here, so this isn't reflective of your engagement at all - but I read and engage with other projects too, some of which carry more direct political and campaigning agendas. You're right, in making choices, I find myself in some difficult places and have to decide whether my responses to what I am reading or watching mean I stay or not. I've disengaged with a lot - and I have tried to find a style of engagement that works for me in this stage of my life and with my own body/mind needs.
Thanks for appreciating the beauty and openness, and I totally agree that other things might not get to appear in the uncertainty (I like what Chris Robertson has to say about that below). I might say that it's this very uncertainty which is missing in the communication spaces, where strong opinion, conflict and 'robust' argument (which often goes nowhere) is the order of the day.
Your thought about the art of children is an interesting one. My first response was to say that adulthood in the dominant culture is so often a performative thing. As you say there's a strong unconscious (or projective) strand to our choices, and we often shut out ambiguity and complexity - which then gets lost. Beyond that, I'm not sure that I agree that 'opposition' isn't offered up – it's just more 'un' than 'anti' (to use Chris's distinction) in this context. And what is to be opposed? That's a very subjective thing... I don't agree with everything we publish actually, but I suppose there is a kind of curation around creating a kind of conversation that isn't conflictual - though you're right, an element of this might sometimes be inevitable!
I’ve been involved as an editor/designer, with Unpsychology for three issues now (one of which hasn’t quite entered the world yet). And yet I’m not sure if I have ever thought seriously about what “Unpsychology” even means. I found out about the mag through Steve who I’d met online. I liked his vibe and I liked the vibe of the mag so I joined in. And not only did I not think too much what “Unpsychology” meant, but I noticed that what it was being, was changing with my being involved. And I’m sure that’s true for anyone’s involvement as an editor, a contributor and even as a reader. Perhaps the word Unpsychology is like a signpost that points the way to multiple simultaneous destinations, and somehow with some luck involved, our searches are overlapping
All true Lesley! I like your vibe too and you've brought so much to Unpsychology (the mag) and unpsychology (the idea). So it can't ever be fixed if it's a set of relationships and influences? As I said to Gloria below, I didn't think too much either about the name. It just fitted the contexts at the time. Now it influences everything we do, but we don't always notice it! A good time to be having this conversation with our 10th year coming up in 2024!!!
No matter what you say (or what J says) Unpsychology is or isn't, theres a space and relationship between whatever claim, partial claim or non-claim is made, the maker of the claim, and the reader of the claim. The universe rushes in and Unpsychology - if its going to - happens in that space.
A space for quality... emergent and emergent/see in every sense
Thanks Mark, it's definitely there in potential and I appreciate the non-negotiable space that you identify, though would I attribute it to the universe rushing in? Another good question to ponder!
I'm glad to hear this discussion of what "unpsychology" means because I have been UN-easy about the word since I started getting the emails. I started thinking about exactly why I am UN-sure the word makes sense. And now I have figured it out! See my two words above that begin with UN: "easy" and "sure." These are adjectives. I started putting UN in front of lots of words and figured out that this prefix only goes with adjectives and adverbs. Unhappy, Unable, Unreliable.... adjectives. or Unbearably, Unknowingly, Unhappily... adverbs--these are often inflections of adjectives. But one can quickly see that not all adjectives or adverbs can be changed to their negatives with the prefix UN. Only some. You know how English is... Inconsistent! But not Unconsistent. So my reason for being Uncomfortable with your Unpsychology is just this. It's Ungrammatical! Psychology is a noun and I can't think of a single noun that can take the prefix UN. Can you?
Thanks for your playfulness Gloria, such a great response.
The project name has a very prosaic origin story. I said in the conversation with J that it emerged out of the Dark Mountain Project. For a while, near the beginning of Dark Mountain, there used to be gatherings. They were playful and serious, full of activists and artists from all sorts of places and perspectives. And the festivals were called Uncivilisation. So at the 2013 gathering, when I was asked to run a session on my work and thinking around psychology and psychotherapy, that's what I called it. The mag came out of that, which is another story, but why it's called what it's called.
So, grammatically you're right (though I hadn't noticed before you pointed it out!) but there was a precedent with another noun: civilisation!
On another front, to be mischievous, maybe we could call this the start of an Ungrammatical movement of 'Ungrammar'?
Ha! OK! I can get my head around that--I think.... It will take some effort, though, since I'm kind of a freak about rules that enhance clarity and precision. But I'll give it a try. Always a good exercise allow some unrigidity into one's thinking. I enjoyed your post.
Hi Gloria, I liked your posts about “un” and now I am curious… I think there are some un nouns after all, and are perhaps coined when a word discovers the ghost of its opposite/negation and a new word to describe it must be created: employment requires unemployment. The sense of rest allows us to notice the sense of unrest. Certainty reveals uncertainty. Most un nouns though are probably adjectives that morphed to name the general concept: the unemployed, the unseen, unfairness, the undead in zombie movies. English is a very liquid language!
I love this enquiry! Such gratitude for J playing the divine trickster to shake up our perceptions and really get the cogs working.
Here's my stab:
Towards the end of the essay I recalled the Buddha's definition of enlightenment as 'the end of suffering'...
Nothing more, nothing less.
Nothing that you could grab hold of enough to market for a million dollars like the modern spiritual movement. Nothing rousing and inspiring enough to gather a fanatical mob (though sure, start a religion).
I think this enquiry highlights a shortcoming of the English language: we use nouns for the presence of a thing, we are biased always towards what is there, right in front of our eyes, a 'thing' that we can wrap our tiny minds around.
And so we miss everything else, and there's a whole lot of everything else!
Also love Chris's comment about the difference between un- and anti-. For being anti- something is to be just as attached to it as pro-.
So is unpsychology simply not psychology? Describing the dark side of the moon, the infinite mysterious world of everything that is not the claustrophobic categorising box of psychology. Of course, I have a toe dipped into the psychology world to know that it's not 'all bad' and am wary of how easily un- can become anti-, that's a risk we have to take I guess.
I know that's a superficially unsatisfying definition, but it only takes a brief glimpse below the surface into it's implications to be (for me) pretty satisfying indeed.
That's lovely Max. I think it's great that Chris took off on that un vs anti piece. it's not somewhere I'd even contemplated! But it makes sense, and so does your eloquent flipping of the thing. Yes, you're right unpsychology is just psychology - with the 'un' standing in for all the context that sometimes (but not always) gets lost in that field. And it is a field culturally - which unpsychology isn't - or at least as long as we can keep the uncertainty and potentiality that Chris is pointing too...
nice touch there in "a field culturally - which unpsychology isn't"... gives me pause to review how so much of my (our?) experience is shaped and defined by what gets left out... and how what gets left out remains "unvisibled" and (to quote Chris above) "pregnant with potential"... perhaps some of the personal task is to name potential without tying it to form too soon, so that its mercurial, maverick energy can "unparadigm" the moment... which process, as I recall, is number 1 on Donella Meadows leverage points (https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/) for system shift: " The power to transcend paradigms."
That's perceptive Mark. I think that 'to name potential without tying it to form too soon' is really important - but really hard culturally (epistemologically, Nora Bateson might say). In her description of "Aphanipoiesis' she describes it as 'the unseen coalescence that brings about vitality' (in Unpsychology 8 and *). I think it's a similar thing. And she's clear that 'nothing is hidden, just unseen', which tangles the threads a bit too!
I so agree with you Max, about the English (or maybe any) language and nouns in particular. Only humans use nouns (that I know of) and it does seem to encourage us to miss all the rest that’s going on. Imagine if we just got rid of the nouns! I guess we could just increase our use of “un” and see where that takes us.
thank you S for this exploration - I will point people to this post whenever I am asked what unpsychology means. This is a far more eloquent response than the verbal brick wall they meet in my own attempts, which often include me grinding to a halt and confessing 'I don't know.' Haha. And it reminds me too of the slippery nature of how to respond to an equally perplexing question: what is mad studies? A friend recently questioned my stock answer (an emerging academic discipline that critiques the mainstream mental health system) as he thinks of mad studies as an undiscipline, so to speak. Undisciplined and anti-discipline. I veer toward a more nuanced view, an undisciplined discipline perhaps. Anyway thank you for this, rich food for thought. :-)
Thanks Julia, that's why I thanked J!!
I often find it hard (impossible) to describe unpsychology, and fumble around until the inquirer's eyes glaze over. Stock answers seldom stick, do they? That's why I said to J that "I genuinely haven't got a definition for you that can be pinned down, and that might not mean something very different a few hours later".
That might, of course, be a cop out, but it feels like that to me. Chris's first thought: "...that unpsychology is still open, if not unmade, unthought, unwritten..." feels right, beautiful and validating, I think.
First thoughts are that unpsychology is still open, if not unmade, unthought, unwritten. It is an emergent thought form that does not want to be defined (as yet). It seems a vehicle for this type of undefining thought.
Second thoughts are around its etymological cousins associated with reversal or negation, which could include anti psychology and a link to Cooper and Laing's revulsion of the coercive control of 'psychiatry' in the form of Anti-psychiatry. The anti prefix is binary in a way that 'un' is not.
The 'un' is pregnant with potential and rather like a liminal space that is held by Hermes as the spirit in this transitional spaces before the inevitable Saturnian boundaries come to 'protect'.
Awesome comment Chris, I love what you have done with this. Taking it layers deeper again!
There is something in me, like J, that searches for a clear communication of the function of Unpsychology especially if it is as a response to what is feeling to be a more chaotic world.
My experience of unpsychology is a great carefulness to include everything and to not offend or even offer up opposition .... I liken it to the art of children where everything is equally admired and encouraged.
But as adults, we are always choosing even if we are not conscious of doing so - we have to or else we become overwhelmed, and this is even more so in a chaotic world - where do I expend my energy, my time and my physical resources that is best for this body/mind. And in the choosing there inevitably is conflicts, offence and exclusion.
Whilst there is something very beautiful and open in the poetic communications offered by unpsychology, in my view, something else equally valid, is avoided in the lack of clarity. I am curious about why that is.
Hi Yinchi! I guess all choices risk causing offence to some people, even as others are inspired or entertained. I have enjoyed the variety of voices on this substack and in this magazine and find that the mixing of different perspectives calms me in these times of increasing chaos, more so than the more “clear” this-is-who-are voices. I don’t know exactly why. I think I feel there is more room for me when the purpose isn’t locked down too much. When things are more distinct and take a specific position, I find it easy to feel on the outside Yet perhaps this very environment finds you feeling on the outside? I'm sorry to read that is your experience.
I’d be interested in what kind of spaces have the right mix for you? Is it the lack of “clarity” here that you’re uncomfortable with or something else? Do you want to feel your challenges taken seriously? What would it mean for you to feel included?
or scrap all that and come and play with us! We're actually just a group of humans playing around.
I hadn't really appreciated the role of calming in less distinct and specific positions. I actually experience less distinct and specific positions as very threatening. In my history there has been a litany of superficial agreeable communications masking an underbelly of control and I suppose there is something in Unpsychology that activates that and probably leads my communications to feel openly aggressive because I don't understand what people are trying to communicate. I am grateful through J's questions and your responses to see this and to recognise this community is not really for me. It really is as simple is one perspective as playful is completely the opposite of my version of what playfulness is...not right or wrong in itself but wrong for me. Namaste.
Thanks for your honesty, Yinchi. I can really appreciate how the experiences you've had might have led to your perspective. Just to be clear, I don't read your communications as aggressive. Challenging, yes, but that's OK. Your comment has reminded me that MY experience of aggressive, conflictual experiences in my adolescence (bullying in my peer group mainly, but also later adult experiences in workplaces and political contexts) has led me to seek and create space where polarities and 'othering' is minimised. Of course, it's never not there, and I do it too, but I realise on reading your piece, that this might be my version of your feeling threatened. Go well, and I genuinely thank you for your insight and engagement.
Thanks Yinchi, I have a better sense of where you’re coming from with your challenging of this space. And, as I think you may already know from our conversations, I also have struggled with superficially agreeable conversations and the sharks that swim underneath, although perhaps different species of sharks than the ones you have encountered. My sharks use the word “should” a lot which I guess relates to control.
You may not feel like posting on here, and fair enough, but you might also find from reading/looking /listening to some of the magazine contributions that they offer a different perspective to your current take on what’s going on here. And you might even feel drawn to writing something for our next issue. Bringing your own perspectives and life experience into the amorphous mix. I’ve read a lot of your recent writing and have loved what you’ve been exploring, as I’ve told you.
HI Yinchi, just emerging in UK Monday! As always, a thoughtful challenge.
I suppose my first response is to say that unpsychology is only a very small part of a much wider ecology of communication. It can't, and I'd say probably shouldn't try to encompass everything.
I'm speaking for me here, so this isn't reflective of your engagement at all - but I read and engage with other projects too, some of which carry more direct political and campaigning agendas. You're right, in making choices, I find myself in some difficult places and have to decide whether my responses to what I am reading or watching mean I stay or not. I've disengaged with a lot - and I have tried to find a style of engagement that works for me in this stage of my life and with my own body/mind needs.
Thanks for appreciating the beauty and openness, and I totally agree that other things might not get to appear in the uncertainty (I like what Chris Robertson has to say about that below). I might say that it's this very uncertainty which is missing in the communication spaces, where strong opinion, conflict and 'robust' argument (which often goes nowhere) is the order of the day.
Your thought about the art of children is an interesting one. My first response was to say that adulthood in the dominant culture is so often a performative thing. As you say there's a strong unconscious (or projective) strand to our choices, and we often shut out ambiguity and complexity - which then gets lost. Beyond that, I'm not sure that I agree that 'opposition' isn't offered up – it's just more 'un' than 'anti' (to use Chris's distinction) in this context. And what is to be opposed? That's a very subjective thing... I don't agree with everything we publish actually, but I suppose there is a kind of curation around creating a kind of conversation that isn't conflictual - though you're right, an element of this might sometimes be inevitable!
I’ve been involved as an editor/designer, with Unpsychology for three issues now (one of which hasn’t quite entered the world yet). And yet I’m not sure if I have ever thought seriously about what “Unpsychology” even means. I found out about the mag through Steve who I’d met online. I liked his vibe and I liked the vibe of the mag so I joined in. And not only did I not think too much what “Unpsychology” meant, but I noticed that what it was being, was changing with my being involved. And I’m sure that’s true for anyone’s involvement as an editor, a contributor and even as a reader. Perhaps the word Unpsychology is like a signpost that points the way to multiple simultaneous destinations, and somehow with some luck involved, our searches are overlapping
All true Lesley! I like your vibe too and you've brought so much to Unpsychology (the mag) and unpsychology (the idea). So it can't ever be fixed if it's a set of relationships and influences? As I said to Gloria below, I didn't think too much either about the name. It just fitted the contexts at the time. Now it influences everything we do, but we don't always notice it! A good time to be having this conversation with our 10th year coming up in 2024!!!
Great stuff Steve...thank you
No matter what you say (or what J says) Unpsychology is or isn't, theres a space and relationship between whatever claim, partial claim or non-claim is made, the maker of the claim, and the reader of the claim. The universe rushes in and Unpsychology - if its going to - happens in that space.
A space for quality... emergent and emergent/see in every sense
Thanks Mark, it's definitely there in potential and I appreciate the non-negotiable space that you identify, though would I attribute it to the universe rushing in? Another good question to ponder!
I'm glad to hear this discussion of what "unpsychology" means because I have been UN-easy about the word since I started getting the emails. I started thinking about exactly why I am UN-sure the word makes sense. And now I have figured it out! See my two words above that begin with UN: "easy" and "sure." These are adjectives. I started putting UN in front of lots of words and figured out that this prefix only goes with adjectives and adverbs. Unhappy, Unable, Unreliable.... adjectives. or Unbearably, Unknowingly, Unhappily... adverbs--these are often inflections of adjectives. But one can quickly see that not all adjectives or adverbs can be changed to their negatives with the prefix UN. Only some. You know how English is... Inconsistent! But not Unconsistent. So my reason for being Uncomfortable with your Unpsychology is just this. It's Ungrammatical! Psychology is a noun and I can't think of a single noun that can take the prefix UN. Can you?
Thanks for your playfulness Gloria, such a great response.
The project name has a very prosaic origin story. I said in the conversation with J that it emerged out of the Dark Mountain Project. For a while, near the beginning of Dark Mountain, there used to be gatherings. They were playful and serious, full of activists and artists from all sorts of places and perspectives. And the festivals were called Uncivilisation. So at the 2013 gathering, when I was asked to run a session on my work and thinking around psychology and psychotherapy, that's what I called it. The mag came out of that, which is another story, but why it's called what it's called.
So, grammatically you're right (though I hadn't noticed before you pointed it out!) but there was a precedent with another noun: civilisation!
On another front, to be mischievous, maybe we could call this the start of an Ungrammatical movement of 'Ungrammar'?
Ha! OK! I can get my head around that--I think.... It will take some effort, though, since I'm kind of a freak about rules that enhance clarity and precision. But I'll give it a try. Always a good exercise allow some unrigidity into one's thinking. I enjoyed your post.
Hi Gloria, I liked your posts about “un” and now I am curious… I think there are some un nouns after all, and are perhaps coined when a word discovers the ghost of its opposite/negation and a new word to describe it must be created: employment requires unemployment. The sense of rest allows us to notice the sense of unrest. Certainty reveals uncertainty. Most un nouns though are probably adjectives that morphed to name the general concept: the unemployed, the unseen, unfairness, the undead in zombie movies. English is a very liquid language!
Thanks Gloria! I'm actually with you on grammar, so will join you in the exercise!!!
I love this enquiry! Such gratitude for J playing the divine trickster to shake up our perceptions and really get the cogs working.
Here's my stab:
Towards the end of the essay I recalled the Buddha's definition of enlightenment as 'the end of suffering'...
Nothing more, nothing less.
Nothing that you could grab hold of enough to market for a million dollars like the modern spiritual movement. Nothing rousing and inspiring enough to gather a fanatical mob (though sure, start a religion).
I think this enquiry highlights a shortcoming of the English language: we use nouns for the presence of a thing, we are biased always towards what is there, right in front of our eyes, a 'thing' that we can wrap our tiny minds around.
And so we miss everything else, and there's a whole lot of everything else!
Also love Chris's comment about the difference between un- and anti-. For being anti- something is to be just as attached to it as pro-.
So is unpsychology simply not psychology? Describing the dark side of the moon, the infinite mysterious world of everything that is not the claustrophobic categorising box of psychology. Of course, I have a toe dipped into the psychology world to know that it's not 'all bad' and am wary of how easily un- can become anti-, that's a risk we have to take I guess.
I know that's a superficially unsatisfying definition, but it only takes a brief glimpse below the surface into it's implications to be (for me) pretty satisfying indeed.
That's lovely Max. I think it's great that Chris took off on that un vs anti piece. it's not somewhere I'd even contemplated! But it makes sense, and so does your eloquent flipping of the thing. Yes, you're right unpsychology is just psychology - with the 'un' standing in for all the context that sometimes (but not always) gets lost in that field. And it is a field culturally - which unpsychology isn't - or at least as long as we can keep the uncertainty and potentiality that Chris is pointing too...
nice touch there in "a field culturally - which unpsychology isn't"... gives me pause to review how so much of my (our?) experience is shaped and defined by what gets left out... and how what gets left out remains "unvisibled" and (to quote Chris above) "pregnant with potential"... perhaps some of the personal task is to name potential without tying it to form too soon, so that its mercurial, maverick energy can "unparadigm" the moment... which process, as I recall, is number 1 on Donella Meadows leverage points (https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/) for system shift: " The power to transcend paradigms."
That's perceptive Mark. I think that 'to name potential without tying it to form too soon' is really important - but really hard culturally (epistemologically, Nora Bateson might say). In her description of "Aphanipoiesis' she describes it as 'the unseen coalescence that brings about vitality' (in Unpsychology 8 and *). I think it's a similar thing. And she's clear that 'nothing is hidden, just unseen', which tangles the threads a bit too!
* https://unpsychology.substack.com/p/new-words-to-hold-the-invisible-world-d90
I so agree with you Max, about the English (or maybe any) language and nouns in particular. Only humans use nouns (that I know of) and it does seem to encourage us to miss all the rest that’s going on. Imagine if we just got rid of the nouns! I guess we could just increase our use of “un” and see where that takes us.