Does it make sense to you that you were meant to be born, live out your life in unconscious servitude to delusions, conditioning, and unintegrated parts of a self that was constructed before you had the capacity to understand it, and then die?

Do you ever wonder why you struggle with feeling like a fraud, and why no amount of spiritual practice or self help makes any lasting difference in the way you feel?

Spirituality sells promises of elevation and escape. Therapy helps you manage symptoms. But neither explain the deeper process behind humanity’s widespread developmental arrest, or how nearly everyone reaches physical adulthood without reaching existential maturity.

Humanity’s arrested development can be described as a developmental process that successfully constructs the psychological child but doesn’t complete the job of outgrowing it.

Most development makes its earlier stage increasingly inadequate, but the human psychological/existential structure remains functional enough that neither biology nor culture forces the next transition. Biological maturation continues automatically, while existential maturation doesn’t.

As such, we inherit ready-made identities, roles, beliefs, and coping strategies long before we understand what we’re adopting, and the socially constructed self remains in charge long after its original developmental purpose.

This is a peculiar form of arrested development because it differs from many of the developmental processes we recognize elsewhere in human life.

A toddler’s body eventually makes crawling insufficient. Language gradually replaces pointing and crying as the primary means of communication. Concrete thinking expands into greater abstraction. In much of development, the organism changes in ways that make the previous structure inadequate, forcing some degree of reorganization.

The psychological child is different. Nothing necessarily makes it stop working.

Rather than following the typical transcend and include model of development, the identity structure built in childhood can expand right along with the rest of us. It learns more words, acquires more sophisticated ideas, develops better emotional control, earns qualifications, makes money, has sex, raises children and becomes very good at navigating the adult world. Instead of being incorporated and gone beyond by development, it becomes increasingly capable.

This is the central developmental anomaly. The structure appropriate to childhood doesn’t remain visibly childish. It matures functionally without maturing existentially, and this arrested development ends up hiding in plain sight.

It can be impeccably dressed. It can have a doctorate, manage a hedge fund, perform neurosurgery, negotiate international treaties and quote Nietzsche in the original German. It can obviously even become President.

How does this happen?

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Note from Tomas:

Kia ora! Huge thanks to all the new subscribers - we’re happy to have you here.

Early subscription notes and Field Reports submissions are showing a strong interest in exploring Human Adulthood, which Anicca is eager to address this month.

The Patterns piece below begins with the many convincing ways humans perform adulthood. Next week Fault Lines will go underneath that performance to look at how and why psychologically juvenile structures persist into adult life. And in this month’s Foundations piece Anicca unpacks what authentic existential maturity actually means, and what lies beyond the developmental plateau of conventional adulthood.

~Tomas

Not all planes fall out of the sky. But some do.

I’m standing in the airline lounge watching jets being refueled on the other side of a wall of glass and thinking how unlikely it seems that something that size can be airborne.

Is this how I go out? I think I’d prefer it to a lengthy illness, and I suppose there’d be some poetic irony in dying on the way to a funeral.

The gate for my flight has changed twice since I’ve been here. I’ve skipped the concourse migrations, but we begin boarding in 15 minutes so I make my way to Gate C17 where I find over a hundred highly functional adults who’ve just been told they can’t have what they expected.

Our flight is delayed.

Nothing dramatic. No blizzard, emergency landing, volcanic ash cloud, or flock of geese sucked into an engine. Just the sort of ordinary airline delay that occurs hundreds of times daily and is irritating mostly because everyone has somewhere else they believe they should be.

The departure board now says 6:10 instead of 5:15.

A collective disturbance passes through the room. Phones come out. People stand and look at each other with exasperation.

I have to be aware of my default stupid resting grinning face in situations like this.

A man in a blue blazer approaches the gate agent and asks to speak with someone in charge. She explains that she’s in charge of this particular gate.

This doesn’t satisfy him. He has an important meeting.

I know this because he tells her, and then tells someone on his phone, and then tells the man standing behind him in line. By the third telling the meeting has taken on the significance of an emergency NATO summit. He wants to know what the airline is going to do about this.

The gate agent says the aircraft has a mechanical issue and maintenance is looking at it.

Blue Blazer wants to know how long that will take. A mechanical issue doesn’t seem like something you want to rush, but, hey, this sounds like a big meeting.

She says she doesn’t know yet, which is apparently the wrong answer judging by the man’s facial contortions.

Next to me, a young woman keeps refreshing the airline app every fifteen or twenty seconds. The information hasn’t changed, but she continues checking as though persistence might eventually force reality to update.

A family of five is beginning to unravel near the windows. One child is lying across two seats whining that he’s hungry. Another is kicking a suitcase. Their mother is snapping at both of them while their father has disappeared into his phone.

“Stop,” she says sharply to the kicking child.

He doesn’t.

“I said stop.”

He kicks harder.

The theme selected by Tomas for this month’s Patterns piece is: The Pattern of Performing Adulthood - What does arrested development actually look like in ordinary “adult” life?

I just learned of this yesterday and haven’t given it much thought until now, when I consider the wide swath of humanity I’m being served here. I take a moment to settle into the perfection while all around me, as if on queue, dozens of people perform our culture’s version of adulthood.

Everyone here has successfully navigated a complicated system in order to arrive at this gate. Passports, schedules, credit cards, luggage restrictions, security protocols, parking, traffic, boarding passes, apps, gate changes.

These are competent people. They have jobs. They have homes. They raise children and manage employees and run companies and perform surgeries and repair plumbing and teach university courses and refinance mortgages.

One man near me is simultaneously conducting a business call, answering emails, and eating something from a plastic container using chopsticks.

Impressive, actually.

Then the gate agent announces the mechanical issue.

He stops chewing and says, “This is fucking ridiculous.”

A young woman a few seats away is on the phone with someone I assume is her partner.

“No, I’m not mad,” she says, in the unmistakable tone of someone who is very mad.

Pause.

“I just think it’s interesting that you didn’t even ask.”

Another pause.

“Forget it.”

She hangs up and stares at the phone. Thirty seconds later she picks it up again.

An announcement comes over the speaker stating that maintenance is still working on the aircraft. The gate agent promises another update in thirty minutes, which is past the 6:10 mark.

A groan moves through the crowd. Blue Blazer returns to the desk.

A woman behind me says loudly to no one in particular, “They can’t do this!”

When we call someone an adult, we seem to mostly mean that they can function. They can pay bills, hold employment, maintain a household, operate a motor vehicle, reproduce, remember passwords, purchase reasonably priced auto insurance. But successful adult functioning and psychological/existential maturity are not the same developmental achievement.

We see signs of arrested development passing for adulthood everywhere.

Someone gives a presentation at work and spends the rest of the afternoon trying to determine whether the boss liked it.

Someone posts a photograph and checks repeatedly to see who has responded.

Someone’s friend doesn’t invite them to dinner and a perfectly capable forty-seven-year-old spends two days trying to determine what it means.

Someone receives mild criticism and constructs a full-blown legal defense.

Someone else floats around for hours on the fleeting helium of praise.

This stuff passes for normal adult life. And, unfortunately, it is normal.

These are fairly innocuous examples; we could go just one more level down (or turn on a TV,) and be in some pretty unsavory territory.

A man at the charging station is explaining to another passenger that he owns three gyms. He appears confident, funny, and expansive. The stranger asks where the gyms are and the man’s entire posture changes slightly as he answers.

I recognize the movement. I used to know it well. It’s the almost invisible adjustment that occurs when the person you’re presenting yourself to appears impressed. The shoulders open. The voice gets a little more assured. The story improves.

Nothing fraudulent’s happening. He may indeed own three excellent gyms. The interesting part isn’t the role; it’s how much seems to be riding on the reception.

I’ve worn plenty of roles myself. Wife. Mother. Business owner. Competent person. Good person. Interesting person. Responsible person. Person who had her shit together. And now, author, even.

My ability to animate roles has winnowed down substantially, but I’ve performed some of them quite well.

We may hear the word performance and assume falseness, as if performing a role means you’re lying, but it doesn’t. Roles are useful. They allow us to coordinate with one another, divide responsibilities, and move through the shared world without having to renegotiate who we are in every interaction.

Being a parent, doctor, teacher, gate agent, or business owner tells us something about what’s required of us in a particular context. The problem isn’t that we perform roles. It’s when the role stops being something we use and becomes something we identify with and define ourselves by.

The gate agent is performing a role now. She has a uniform, a script, responsibilities, and an impressive capacity to remain pleasant while adults repeatedly ask her variations of the same unanswerable question. Nothing about that requires pretending.

But notice what happens when a role stops being something we do and becomes something we require other people to confirm.

The responsible one needs to be seen as responsible. The successful one needs evidence of success. The intelligent one can’t easily be wrong. The good parent requires the child to behave in ways that validate the parenting. The desirable person needs to be desired. The independent person becomes strangely destabilized by exclusion. The spiritual person needs to appear elevated. The person who doesn’t care what anyone thinks somehow finds opportunities to mention this quite often.

The performance can be quite sophisticated, but the underlying mechanism points to the same arrested development.

Let’s turn this lens around now. It’s easy to sit in a public place and observe grown people performing adulthood. But what does all this mean for you? How are you performing?

One of the most common challenges I’ve had working with Jumpers is that once you tell psychological children what Human Adulthood is and what it looks like, you’ve also given them instructions for how to perform it. And once you learn to see this happening you can’t unsee it.

Here are some common examples:

Performing non-attachment. “I don’t need anyone.” They appear independent, but their independence is organized around avoiding vulnerability, rejection, or dependence. Authentic autonomy doesn’t require proving that nothing matters.

Performing indifference to approval. “I don’t care what anyone thinks.” But they care very much about being seen as someone who doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Disapproval still threatens the identity; it’s just become an identity built around being above approval.

Performing self-authority. They reject teachers, institutions, experts, conventions, or social expectations because “I think for myself.” But reflexive rejection is still dependence. Contrarianism is authority dependence with the polarity reversed.

Performing comfort with uncertainty. “There are no answers.” “Nobody knows anything.” “It’s all Maya.” These can become answers used to prevent actual uncertainty. Genuine not-knowing doesn’t need a philosophy of not-knowing.

Performing emotional maturity. They remain composed, measured, almost impossible to provoke. But composure is actually suppression, dissociation, image management, or fear of appearing needy. Human Adulthood doesn’t mean never getting pissed off.

Performing acceptance. “It is what it is.” But underneath is resignation, avoidance, or fear of acting. Acceptance of reality doesn’t prohibit responding. You can accept that your roof is leaking while getting a bucket.

Performing identity-less-ness. “I’m not identified with anything anymore.” The person without an identity is one of the most performed identities.

Performing fearlessness. They deliberately take risks, reject security, leave relationships, quit jobs, or cultivate an unconventional life because adulthood supposedly means not being governed by fear. Instead, they’re governed by the need to demonstrate that fear doesn’t govern them.

Performing radical honesty. “I just tell the truth.” What looks like freedom from social approval is actually aggression, insensitivity, or the pleasure of occupying the identity of someone who “doesn’t bullshit.” Human Adulthood doesn’t require becoming an asshole.

Performing freedom from meaning. “Nothing means anything.” But nihilism can provide exactly what the previous meaning system did: orientation, certainty, identity, and protection from having to encounter life directly.

Performing freedom from relationships. They no longer “need” their partner, family, friends, or community. But if needing nobody becomes psychologically important, dependence hasn’t disappeared. They’ve just become dependent on independence.

Performing freedom from the dreamstate. Everyone else is asleep, society is juvenile, relationships are Maya, identity is false, emotional attachment is bondage. The conceptual understanding may be excellent, but spending one’s days performing the one who sees all this has become a sure-fire way to stay securely in the cocoon of arrested development until death. This one is super common among those who read a lot of books on nonduality but never actually move beyond the conceptual layer of it.

People can perform every recognizable feature of adulthood while remaining psychologically organized around the same basic needs for approval, security, belonging, validation and external authority that organize childhood.

But performing characteristics of Human Adulthood is itself another indication of arrested development.

The gate agent finally announces that the mechanical issue has been resolved.

The room changes instantly.

Blue Blazer returns to his seat. The app-refreshing woman stops refreshing. The parents’ tone changes and children are promised snacks when they board. Everyone begins gathering coats, laptops and carry-ons.

Order has been restored.

Nobody seems especially developmentally arrested now. That’s the brilliance of the arrangement. The performance works.

That’s why we mistake it for development.

Tomas: Kia ora. Good to see you.

Anicca: Yeah, you too. You enjoying early spring over there?

Tomas: Yes! Quite ready for some warmer temps. And you’ve got autumn starting, eh?

Anicca: (Nodding) Yes, gorgeous. Turning leaves and all that.

Tomas: Well, let’s dive in.

In this month’s Foundations you said: Radical Inquiry is subtractive. It doesn’t ask how much more you can understand. It asks how much of what you currently take to be true can survive direct examination.

This got me remembering a point in my own dismantling where I’d examined enough of what I took to be true to be able to see that nothing can survive direct examination.

And that realization knocked me sideways because I still had a good bit of shit I hadn’t examined. So, here I was simultaneously able to see how fake I was while I was still being animated by this unexamined structure I couldn’t get out from under.

I remember feeling an almost claustrophobic revulsion for this thing I called “Me”. And that feeling of hatred became a big motivator for me to keep going.

Anicca: (Nodding.) That’s a dicey place! I can remember passing through that terrain myself and it does turn up the heat. Others I’ve worked with have spun out pretty hard there. Self-hatred isn’t an easy thing to endure.

Tomas: (Laughs) No, it’s not! You told me to sit still there and I thought you were fucking nuts.

(Both laugh.)

But you were right, because the heat it generated ultimately helped burn the rest down.

Anicca: Yeah, most people can’t sit still in that and end up grasping for some type of relief.

Tomas: But in hindsight it can be seen that it isn’t until you really start hating the false thing you’ve become that you have the fuel to go all the way. McKenna talks about this.

Anicca: Right. Once you truly apprehend the machinery, what was once experienced simply as me becomes visible as a repetitive, needy, defensive mechanism, and the reaction can be something like hatred or revulsion.

At first you want to understand the false self, but eventually you can’t stand the sight of it. You start to see the same pathetic machinery everywhere you look. The need to be liked, the need to be right. The endless explaining and defending. The rehearsed grievances, the fear, the posing, the bargaining. All the things that make up the juvenile self.

Tomas: Yeah, I remember that stuff so well. It was almost eerie when I could finally see myself doing those things. Not humanity, or the universe, or all those unconscious people out there. Me doing it.

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Bodies grow up automatically. You moved from infant to child to adolescent to adult without ever having to investigate the process. Teeth fell out. Hormones arrived. Bones lengthened. Hair appeared in places nobody requested. Biological development took care of itself.

The juvenile self also developed naturally. You absorbed names, roles, beliefs, values, loyalties, fears, expectations, meanings, and countless instructions about how reality works and who you need to be within it.

This constructed identity is adaptive and useful. It gets the child into the game.

The problem is that we mistake this temporary structure for the finished product. Nobody is told that in order to reach existential maturity the identity built to carry one through psychological childhood must eventually become subject to examination. Instead, we spend decades reinforcing it through better education, status, relationships, and beliefs. Through better therapeutic explanations and spiritual concepts. Basically, better versions of self.

We mature biologically while continuing to operate existentially from a structure assembled largely before we were capable of examining any of it. That’s arrested development.

Unlike puberty, nothing biological arrives at adolescence to say, Okay, time to dismantle your inherited conception of self and reality now so you can become an authentic psychological adult. You have to do that part yourself.

Radical Inquiry is how you do it.

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It’s easy to assume that if you sincerely want to know the truth, the obvious thing to do is ask a sincere question. However, this turns out to be one of those tricky dreamstate sleight of hand maneuvers hiding in plain sight that can keep one running in circles for years on end.

Sincerity is cheap. You can sincerely want something that isn’t true.

Sincerity describes how genuinely you want an answer; existential maturity determines whether you’re willing to investigate the assumptions that created the question. A sincere question can still be completely in service of the false self.

This is why a person can sincerely want truth, devote years to seeking it, read books about it, meditate on it, discuss it at dinner parties, attend retreats devoted to it, acquire special cushions for sitting closer to it, and still retain one small condition: Truth must not violate my emotional requirements.

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Note from Tomas

In my last conversation with Anicca, we discussed how beneath seemingly unique questions about work, relationships, depression, surrender, and meaning are recurring developmental tensions involving control, identity, safety, and loss.

Viewed together, we also see that many people are not yet asking the question they think they’re asking. The subjects vary, but Anicca often has to make the same first move: before responding to the question, she has to find it.

A question mark, in other words, does not necessarily mean inquiry has begun.

The pattern being explored this month is: The Pattern of Not Being Able to Ask a Real Question.

What happens when someone sincerely begins looking for answers and discovers that the first difficulty is finding the real question?

-Tomas

I’m sitting in the waiting area of an auto repair shop watching a pandemic unfold.

Based on the recent noises and performance of my Chevy Tahoe, I came in expecting a tune-up, possibly brakes, and the usual mildly alarming conversation in which a mechanic points at something under my car and tells me it shouldn’t look like that.

My expectations are met, and now I’m three chairs away from a vending machine watching Contagion on a television mounted high in the corner.

Nobody else seems particularly interested. A man across from me and a young woman a few chairs down scroll through their phones. Behind the service counter, the phone rings and is answered by a middle-aged woman whose name tag says Bonnie.

I, myself, am phoneless, which has earned me suspect looks from the room.

Onscreen, meanwhile, everyone is trying not to die.

The plot-line is still in its early outbreak-response scenes. Medical workers move through hospital corridors wearing gloves, gowns, eye protection, masks, and respirators. Public-health teams enter contaminated spaces looking other-worldly beneath layers of plastic and fabric. Hands disappear into gloves. Faces disappear behind shields. Bodies disappear into coveralls.

Even with the volume down, the on-screen message is immediate: Something dangerous is present. Do not touch it directly.

I find myself thinking about personal protective equipment, (PPE.) The stuff that allows contact without exposure. With it, you can enter the room, handle the patient, move through the contaminated space, even appear fully engaged with the hazard while maintaining a carefully engineered barrier between yourself and whatever might get in.

The theme selected by Tomas this month is: Not Being Able to Ask a Real Question, one of the gaps the questions portal helped expose.

I actually feel a little naïve about my assumption that just because the definition of a real question is shared that people will ask them.

For years, I’ve mostly worked with Jumpers, whose lives have already caught fire and who are therefore highly incentivized to get real, real quick.

Fire is an excellent editor. It strips a question down.

By the time Jumpers arrive, something has usually become sufficiently untenable so that polite inquiry is no longer useful. Meaning is collapsing, identity is failing, the old explanations no longer work. They aren’t casually curious about dismantling. They’re already in it.

In other words, I’m accustomed to people who are not necessarily eager to get real but are increasingly unable to afford not to.

I assumed that giving readers a framework for asking a real question would be enough. I see now that a person can read the instructions for removing the protective equipment and still arrive wearing an extremely sophisticated new set of gear.

They may be discussing dismantling using existential language about the Dreamstate, the false self, Human Adulthood, surrender, Deconstruction, the Void, etc., and still the question can remain fully gloved, protected from any real exposure.

Even with early stages of Discontent nipping at their heels, the broader readership isn’t necessarily arriving with the containment system already breached. Many are standing just outside the contaminated area asking how dangerous it is, how long entry might take, what phase of exposure they’re in, whether everyone feels this way, and whether there might be a safer route through.

Of course these are all perfectly understandable questions. And all capable of keeping the person asking them at a safe distance from whatever is actually at stake.

These questions aren’t false in content. They’re sincere; they may even be urgent. But there’s still a layer between the question and the questioner.

Protective equipment.

A real question removes the insulating layer. It doesn’t ask how to proceed while leaving the asker untouched. It brings the hazard closer. Close enough that What should I do about this? becomes What is this exposing in me?

How do I get beyond this? becomes Who is the one insisting there must be a beyond?

That’s the distinction. Some questions let us enter contaminated rooms fully protected. Others are raw-dogging it. (We’ll see if Tomas strips that reference out, but it works here.)

A mechanic walks through the waiting room carrying a greasy metal part about the size of a grapefruit. He catches me looking at it.

“Wheel bearing,” he says, and disappears through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. I wonder if the greasy part is from my car.

On the television, a hospital worker removes contaminated gloves without touching the outside surface. There’s a procedure to it. Pinch here. Peel back. Hold one glove in the other. Slide an ungloved finger underneath the remaining cuff.

Everything is handled indirectly.

Same thing in the majority of portal questions. Advice, instructions, diagnosis, reassurance, prediction, philosophy: all respectable forms of inquiry, all capable of letting someone approach difficult territory without making direct contact.

We can discuss truth, God, meaning, consciousness, reality, and existence. We can analyze, classify, seek expertise, and become extremely knowledgeable, and still never touch the one question that has consequences.

This comparison keeps sharpening as I watch the medical workers onscreen. PPE isn’t avoidance in the crude sense. The person wearing it still enters the room. They’re still dealing with the hazard. They simply remain protected from it.

In many of the questions, people are willing to get remarkably close. Just not always close enough to be exposed.

A reader asks whether God exists. That’s an impressive piece of protective equipment. Heavy-duty. Full coverage. Theological questions have grandeur. You can spend several thousand years inside one and never run out of material: arguments, counterarguments, scriptures, cosmologies, mystics, atheists, quantum physicists. An entire civilization can suit up for that question and never get an inch closer to who or what or where they truly are.

But remove the protective gear and God stops being the subject. The question becomes closer to: What remains if no answer is allowed to give me footing? (It’s always about you.)

Contagion has moved on. More suits. More gloves. More masks. A contaminated room is entered cautiously, every exposed surface treated as potentially consequential. Appropriate procedure for infection, but a lousy way to advance inquiry.

The service adviser calls my name.

Bad news. Brakes. Pads and rotors front and back and one leaky caliper.

Not catastrophic, apparently, but “definitely something we should take care of today,” he says in a way that doesn’t feel especially elective.

I authorize the repair, which I’m told will take about two hours, grab my daypack, which contains food and water in anticipation of just this type of stranding, and head out.

About two blocks south of the repair shop there’s a walking path leading to a small pond. Nothing spectacular, but there’s a willow tree I’m fond of and sometimes herons.

It’s a beautiful day and I take a moment to appreciate the sun on my face after sitting under the fluorescent lights of the repair shop.

As I walk, images from the movie mingle in my mind and then settle into a coherence that feels useful for understanding how to close this gap.

PPE lets us enter scary rooms, inspect the damage, ask intelligent questions about the hazard, discuss protocols, timelines, causes, and outcomes. It’s possible to get very close and still never make direct contact.

That, I think, is the pattern Tomas is pointing to. Questions that let us approach without exposure. Questions that preserve the distance between the problem and the person asking. That seek to solve while leaving the structure of the asker intact.

A real question doesn’t solve; it dissolves.

The problem changes. The subject changes. The questioner changes.

Eventually, there’s no clean separation left between the thing being examined and the one doing the examining. No elaborate gear. No safe-handling procedure. Just direct contact.

Can you do it? Maybe you think you already are, but are you? What’s your real question if you were to form it right now?

Everyone knows how to ask a question while wearing PPE.

Almost nobody is willing to ask barehanded.

Opening note from Tomas

Greetings from New Zealand.

I want to say how genuinely happy I am to be part of this project. Working with Anicca in this capacity feels very full-circle for me. I encountered the phases framework fairly early in my own experience and it helped me orient to some pretty rocky territory I was moving through. Coming back to that framework now as an editor and curator feels both rewarding and rather unexpected in the best possible way.

I’ve spent the past few weeks working with the portal archive and the outreach from readers that didn’t get published, which has been really fascinating. I look forward to unpacking the many insights it’s yielded. However, I’m most excited about the potential of this new format going forward.

Even though Anicca is no longer answering individual questions from readers, paid subscribers are invited to contribute observations that will help shape future essays and conversations like the one below.

Going forward, the publication will follow a consistent monthly rhythm that will look like this:

In Patterns, we’ll begin with an Editor’s Note from me identifying a developmental structure or theme, and why we’re exploring it. Then Anicca will reveal and unpack the underlying architecture.

In Fault Lines, Anicca takes the central mechanism apart in greater depth.

In Foundations, she examines an enduring principle underlying the work. The Phases, and things like identity, control, surrender, resistance, meaning, attention, or another piece of the developmental terrain.

At the end of the month, Anicca and I return to the themes explored in Conversations. By then, readers have had time to sit with the material, and these conversations becomes a kind of commentary track connecting the essays, clarifying distinctions, and following questions that emerged during the writing.

Ask Anicca will become an ongoing exploration of the dismantling process itself. Drawing from reader submissions, the publication will investigate the common structures, blind spots, and developmental transitions that characterize the movement toward Human Adulthood.

This opening month begins a little differently. Anicca’s Ground Zero piece establishes the publication’s starting point, and the conversation below is our chance to look at the terrain before the standing rhythm begins. Going forward, Patterns will be available to all subscribers, while all other pieces will be reserved for paid subscribers.

Because it’s the first one, this first conversation is available to all subscribers and it’s also a bit longer than they’ll be going forward.

These conversations come from Zoom recordings between Anicca and me. We’re spread across some pretty challenging time zones, so talking live isn’t always the easiest option, but we chose to do it anyway. We wanted a real exchange, not a polished version of one, and the recordings give me solid notes to work from when I put together the transcripts.

For readability, I do some very light editing to trim out repetition, side tracks, and verbal filler, but I’ll keep the natural flow and heart of each conversation intact.

Tomas:
Kia ora, Anicca! It’s great to see you.

Anicca: (nodding, smiling) And you. Greetings from yesterday.

Tomas: (Laughs) Yep, next day over here in Auckland.

Before we jump into the deep end of the pool, can you share a little bit about your experience with the questions portal? What was it like answering individual questions like that?

Anicca: Yeah, sure. It was interesting. When the Ask Anicca portal first launched, there was an expectation from the team, mostly Elaine, that readers could be guided toward asking increasingly authentic questions.

Tomas: You mean real questions as defined in the book?

Anicca: Yes, and in the portal submission process; it’s laid out quite clearly. The expectation was that readers would submit real questions and that my responses could expose assumptions and provide orientation.

Tomas: Was that not your expectation?

Anicca: No. I didn’t really have any expectations to be honest, but I kind of knew it wouldn’t go that way.

Tomas: Why do you say that?

Anicca: Partly based on questions I’ve gotten in person, but also knowing what this type of inquiry requires.

And yeah, as the archive grew, a different picture emerged and portal submissions helped expose an important gap that can now be addressed.

Tomas: Ah, yeah? What was that gap?

Anicca: Well, how to ask a real question is one of the fundamental principles of the book, right along with humanity’s arrested development and authentic Human Adulthood. It is a major pre-req of the radical inquiry required to dismantle the false self. If someone isn’t able to do this one thing, then nothing else matters.

In my writing, I put forth that humanity’s failure to reach existential maturity has positioned us as an aberrant species and propose radical inquiry as a necessary process to reach authentic Human Adulthood.

People seem to understand these things in principle, but radical inquiry is where the rubber hits the road and asking a real question is a hard requirement.

There are endless types of inquiry. But the kind required to dismantle the juvenile self and mature into an authentic human adult cannot be done without asking real questions. Period.

Tomas: (Nodding) We’ve actually gotten a fair amount of outreach from readers sharing that they really want to undergo the kind of radical inquiry you describe in the book but are having a tough time formulating a real question. And also from people who were eager to ask a question but they didn’t know if it qualified as a real question.

Anicca: Yeah, that’s the gap. It starts there. Until you can formulate a real question none of this moves from theory to practice. Period. What looks like dreamstate sorcery keeping one bound is really just one’s inability to do that one thing.

Tomas: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. The book defines a real question as one that costs the asker something. It threatens the structures used to maintain identity, turns inward, exposes rather than defends, and risks actual change.

And you point out that, by contrast, most ordinary questions seek relief, explanation, orientation, reassurance, or a better method.

A: Yes, they preserve the questioner while appearing to investigate the problem. That’s overwhelmingly what we saw in the portal.

Almost nobody asked a real question.

They asked all kinds of questions about which phase they’re in, whether they should quit something, whether their experience is normal, whether they can preserve a relationship. Or they want to know how to distinguish dismantling from pathology.

The circumstances differ a lot, but the underlying question remains remarkably stable. How can I undergo this process without losing the thing I am using the process to protect?

Tomas: (Nodding) You say, almost nobody asked a real question - can you give an example of a real question that was asked?

Anicca: Yeah, one that comes to mind is: What am I still protecting by continuing to question?

Tomas: Oh yeah, I remember that one. And you said it’s vital to not let the questioner become a new identity that needs killing…

Anicca: Right, I think I used the term, The Clubber. (Laughs)

Tomas: Yep! Can you explain what makes that a “real” question in this context?

Anicca: That question is “real” because it turns the inquiry back onto the asker’s own avoidance instead of chasing more concepts, and it directly threatens the very thing doing the asking. It targets the obstruction, not the answer and it exposes the use of inquiry as a possible shield. It’s basically asking: Maybe my endless questioning is itself a protection racket. What part of me refuses to let this inquiry become dangerous enough to matter?

Tomas: Why do you think it’s so challenging for people to ask a real question?

Anicca: Short answer is that the false self is a brilliantly designed avoidance machine, and a real question is the one thing it can’t survive. They risk everything the dreamstate has taught you to value - your story, your identity, your sense of meaning and safety.

Tomas: So you think it’s a fear thing?

Anicca: It’s always a fear thing. Fear is the dominant emotional driver in humans. And the portal submissions mostly showed fear of loss. Loss of control, loss of meaning, loss of relationships, loss of stability, loss of identity. And mostly the mother of all fear: annihilation.

Tomas: Yeah, I can see that. So you’ve got this fear-driven survival machine fighting for its survival by throwing on the costume of the Dismantler?

Anicca: (Laughs) Yeah, you got it! Never underestimate the cunningness of the juvenile self and the power of the collective dreamstate.

Tomas: Amen. It’d be hard to overemphasize the impact those two things hold over the dismantling process. I also think that the inability for most readers to ask a “real” question may be some of the strongest evidence for the book’s central claim.

Anicca: Yeah, you could be right about that.

Tomas: Okay, movin’ on. As you know, I’ve spent a solid chunk of time with the individual questions in the portal archive. People asking about a job, a relationship, guilt, depression, surrender, meaning, therapy, or whether they were in a particular phase.

But read together rather than separately, the circumstances begin to recede and the same structures appear again and again.

Anicca: Yeah, I don’t see the archive as a collection of personal dilemmas, but as evidence of a shared developmental architecture.

Tomas: Yes! When we stop viewing each submission as an isolated issue, the apparent uniqueness of each story begins to fall away and the shared structure underneath becomes visible. Recurring expressions of the same developmental tensions around control, identity, safety, and loss.

Anicca: Well-said. Yes, that shared structure is a big finding. And exciting, because that shift makes several things possible: we can distinguish symptoms from structure, recognize where readers are at developmentally, and identify the assumptions keeping them stuck.

Tomas: Right. And it also turns the archive into something larger than a collection of questions. It’s more like a snapshot of how arrested development behaves when its organizing structures begin to fail.

What other opportunities do you see with this new publication?

Anicca: The greatest opportunity I see is a living investigation of how the dismantling of the juvenile self is actually experienced.

The Phases of Jumpers outlined in the book offer readers a map of the broader territory. This publication can show what repeatedly happens within that territory. How people bargain with surrender, try to preserve identity, confuse destabilization with failure, or turn dismantling into another project of self-improvement.

So yes, as you’ve alluded to, by reading submissions together , we can reveal the shared architecture common to all.

Tomas: Yeah, I think that’s pretty exciting! There’s also an important research opportunity. Because the publication will evolve through reader submissions, it can refine distinctions that the book could only establish provisionally, you know? We can identify new patterns, and track how familiar defenses change over time.

So, the potential here becomes not just commentary on the book, but an accumulating record of what happens when people encounter its framework and attempt to live with what it exposes.

Anicca: Yes, exactly. I think for readers, that creates both orientation and recognition. There’s an opportunity to see that what feels uniquely personal is really part of a recurring developmental structure. That could help one become more precise about what they’re protecting, resisting, or misunderstanding. The aim is not to categorize people or solve their problems, but to make the underlying movement increasingly difficult to avoid.

Tomas: That’s huge! I certainly could’ve used something like this when I was wandering the existential desert all those months!

So, over time, this publication could become a living anatomy of the movement toward authentic Human Adulthood. Not a static doctrine, but a continually tested and clarified account of the territory.

Anicca: Rock n’ roll. (smiling)

Tomas: I’m so happy to be part of this, Anicca. This is the type of project I could never have seen coming but it’s like I was built for it. (Laughs.)

Anicca: (Nodding) I’m glad you’re here, Tomas. And you also have a fair amount of lived recognition, which is also really useful.

Tomas: Okay, so, another dominant observation is that most readers weren’t really asking the question they thought they were asking.

The surface questions varied a lot. Things like, should I leave my job? Why does my partner not understand? Am I depressed or dismantling? How do I surrender? What phase am I in? Does truth exist? Does nothing matter? Why am I being targeted?

But underneath there was a much smaller number of recurring questions. Basically, am I breaking, or is something real happening? Can I survive if this identity collapses? Can I dismantle without losing everything I value? Can I control the process?

Anicca: Yeah, again fear and survival are prominent. Those are all some form of Is there a way to surrender without actually surrendering?

Tomas: (Nodding.) Yep, yep. So, phase-wise, the archive suggests that many readers cluster around Disruption and early Deconstruction.

They appear to be at a place where the old organizing structures are failing, but surrender hasn’t yet happened and a new orientation hasn’t stabilized.

Anicca: Yeah, I picked up on this as well. Many - probably most - are at a threshold where life is starting to feel fraudulent or uninhabitable but they’re not yet really seeing the one who wants to repair, or manage, or accelerate, or explain what’s happening.

Tomas: Right. Why is that threshold so frightening? Given how prominent fear of loss is in the questions themselves, what is someone actually losing at this stage?

Anicca: Oh god, everything that matters to them, really. At this stage, they’re watching the old maps fall apart; the ones that used to say who they were, what mattered, and how to decode experience. It’s the collapse of certainty. This shit doesn’t go down easy.

Tomas: (laughs) No, it doesn’t!

I think a framework like the Phases can be really useful at this stage. In my case, it helped to recognize that things like the loss of meaning, identity, and stability have a discernible developmental structure.

I also think it made the experience less likely to be mistaken for personal failure.

Anicca: Yeah, the map doesn’t remove the uncertainty, but it can clarify the territory. It doesn’t pretend to provide a method or timetable, but hopefully it offers orientation.

Tomas: Yes, exactly.

Okay, so, you chose to begin the publication with the phrase Ground Zero, which has so many meanings. What did you mean when you said oceanside has always been ground zero for you energetically?

Anicca: (sighs) It’s hard to talk about this stuff without sounding woo-woo, but it’s just my operating reality. It’s a flow v obstruction thing. Bodies are energetic systems that can be balanced or blocked, like any circuit or network. For me, oceanside environments are particularly effective at dissolving energetic obstructions and restoring coherent flow states. If you wanna look at why, I suppose they provide some combination of grounding, regulation, and sensory coherence that supports biofield organization.

Tomas: Biofield? As in biophysics?

Anicca: Yeah, some areas of biophysics describe a biofield as the field of energy and information that surrounds and permeates a living organism, helping to regulate its health, self‑organization, and responses to stress, etc.. It’s just the scientific or umbrella name for what’s sometimes called the aura, life force, or subtle energy field.

Bottom line though, when the nervous system is regulated, subtle energy comes back into coherence.

And for me, being near the ocean acts like a big energetic tuner.

Tomas: Makes sense, thank you! I think I’ve experienced what you’re describing…

Anicca: I think everyone has at some point. It’s one of those things that’s there to be seen, you know? Comes into focus when not obscured.

Tomas: Wow, yeah, thank you.

Before we wrap up, a quick reminder to paid subscribers to submit a Field Report where they can share responses and questions that help shape future essays and Conversations.

The first one is up now, and I anticipate doing more throughout the year.

Thanks, Anicca. This is all really exciting. And you’ll be exploring the things we’ve discussed in more depth soon with the first Patterns and Fault Lines publications, yes?

Anicca: Yeah. And we should probably also acknowledge that turning the dismantling of the juvenile self into a neat four-week editorial calendar contains at least a small amount of cosmic comedy.

Tomas: (Laughs) Yes! You mentioned this when we spoke last week. That’s the rub, isn’t it? The publication must use the organizing tools of the dreamstate to investigate the failure of those very tools.

Anicca: Yeah, it’s absurd, but usefully so. The structure doesn’t tame the process; but it gives us a recurring place to observe the fires as they burn.

Tomas: Huge thanks to everyone joining us here at the beginning.

We’ll see you next week.

The tide is coming in. I’m perched in some grassy dunes watching the waves pound against the shore and eating from a bag of cherries I acquired on the way here. These are the good ones, Rainier cherries from Yakima Valley. They’re my favorite and they’re only in season for a brief time each year.

I’m enjoying the warmth of the late afternoon sun and the rhythm of the waves when a black Honda Civic comes spinning down the beach sending a huge flock of shorebirds into the air.

Windows down and music blaring, the occupants include a shirtless driver who appears to be in his late 30’s, someone in the passenger seat whom I can’t see, and a scruffy looking middle-aged man sporting a bright orange tank top who is hanging as far out the backseat window as he can get while whooping loudly over the music. The car is also loud as if the muffler has been removed or modified and it appears to have been lowered, which does not bode well for beach driving.

This section of Washington shoreline borders Native land and motor vehicles aren’t allowed, which is one reason I chose it. The summer crowds tend to congregate farther south where it’s legal to drive on the beach. Deep soft sand makes it tricky even for 4-wheel drive rigs, but there’s occasionally that one guy who has fallen prey to various substances and/or bravado and goes rogue.

This particular guy is breaking half a dozen laws and tacks on one more by fishtailing into a large donut before turning around and speeding past me again.

I’m far enough up in my grassy perch to avoid interaction, but a young woman walking her dog closer to the water isn’t so lucky. The driver pulls up next to her and Tank Top hangs out the window shouting commentary on her appearance. This isn’t likely to end well.

I spend a lot of time alone in the woods and mountains where there’s very little obstruction (people,) and mostly flow. It’s a sensory perception preference. Over the course of an average month in any season, wooded trails and subalpine lakes keep my senses straight.

I’ve been spending a lot more time in the Port Orford cabin on the Oregon coast, but even at home in the Washington mountains the pull toward sand and saltwater swells periodically, and I find myself heading west.

Oceanside has always been ground zero for me energetically.

A small pile of cherry pits accumulates on the sand by my feet as I ponder the term ground zero. It’s been kicking around in my brain for a while now.

The term originated in U.S. military jargon during the Manhattan Project in reference to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That project produced the first nuclear weapons and helped end World War II, but it also opened the nuclear age.

Ground zero has, of course, since expanded beyond nuclear contexts to indicate the epicenter of any catastrophic event like earthquakes, tornadoes, air crashes, or battle zones where damage is greatest.

There are some obvious parallels here with the dismantling process.

The “self” you think you are is a fictional, egoic costume built from beliefs, fears, and borrowed ideas. To reach Human Adulthood you don’t try to heal or improve this self; it’s something that must be seen through and burned down, which can feel a lot like a catastrophic event.

I can hear the Honda spinning its wheels loudly in place down shore. They’re officially stuck and the tide is still coming in. I decide it’s safe to walk to the water’s edge and rinse the sticky cherry juice and sand from my fingers.

As I walk, I consider the more recent figurative use of ground zero as the starting point or very beginning of something. Back to ground zero.

Still fits. In fact, given the themes Tomas has been sharing lately from the portal archive, I can see how this new publishing format is itself a sort of ground zero.

The term is especially fitting for radical inquiry where the ability to ask a real question is essential and inevitably knocks you on your ass. In this sense, ground zero is the exact spot where dismantling the false self stops being an idea and starts being a lived, irreversible pivot toward authentic Human Adulthood.

Tomas is a Kiwi. I met him years ago in Auckland at one of the first talks I gave on the phases framework. He stayed in touch via email and was one of the early readers of the book manuscript before it was published. When Elaine was initially looking to bring on an admin for the questions portal Tomas threw his hat in the ring and I was delighted to have him come onboard. He’s intelligent, unassuming, and funny, with a keen eye for pattern recognition and a lived familiarity with the phases territory. His role has already evolved from one of admin into more of an editorial/research director.

Tomas plans to collect reader submissions (I think he’s calling them Field Reports,) to get a sense for the areas that are most valuable to explore here. It’ll take several months of gathering said submissions before new patterns emerge. In the meantime, he’s begun preparing editorial briefs drawn from the dominant patterns and themes in the portal archive.

This is exactly the type of structure I was wanting to keep things simple and flowing. His insights keep me engaged at a new level and will help ensure reader submissions are represented in the most useful way possible.

I’ll use Tomas’s editorial briefs to explore patterns and themes each month in several standardized formats, including deep dives, foundational essays, and monthly conversations between Tomas and me. Going forward, those conversations will round out the month and include opportunities to discuss things I’ve written about across each format.

However, in a few days we’ll kick things off with an inaugural conversation with Tomas so you can get to know him a bit. He’ll share his curation process, unpack some high level takeaways from the portal archive, and introduce the new method for reader submissions.

It should be good.

To be honest, all this wasn’t clearly indicated until rather recently. While I enjoyed aspects of the individual Q&A format of the portal, it wasn’t sustainable and ultimately became an energetic drain. Spending time with Tomas going over insights from the submissions helped me see places where most people are spinning their wheels, the foundational gaps in understanding, and the real value in pattern mapping. In other words, where most readers are, what’s keeping them stuck, and how to help orient more effectively.

Publications typically begin with the assumption that readers need more information, but this one assumes readers have already encountered the essential framework in the book and that what they need now is not more concepts but a place to repeatedly return as those concepts become lived experience.

A place to examine what becomes visible once the initial recognition has occurred and the old explanations no longer hold.

A kind of developmental ground zero.

I gather my pile of cherry pits (no choking birds on my watch,) and make my way back to the parking lot. About a quarter mile from the beach access point I pass by the Honda.

The State Patrol has arrived, and all occupants are out of the car, which is stuck and sinking rapidly into the wet sand. It’ll take a beach-rescue tow vehicle to get it out, assuming one arrives before the tide does.

A small crowd is gathering. One officer is speaking to the driver who is very animated in his communication, and another officer has Tank Top’s hands cuffed behind his back while he searches the interior of the car.

Whenever I see situations like this where lives unexpectedly change in a major way I always wonder if I’m witnessing a critical turning point, or transition. In this case there will be fines and penalties, possibly even incarceration depending on how things play out. Is this where Tank Top bottoms out? Is this someone’s catastrophic event?

And what about you?

I suspect many readers who arrive here after reading the book are in a place where the old architecture has failed. Maybe the assumptions that once organized your life are wearing thin, or the answers that once comforted you have begun to lose their authority. You may even feel as though something has gone terribly wrong, though I suspect the opposite.

Ground zero really is an apt metaphor, I think as I climb into my car. It’s not just the starting point of this publication, it’s also kind of like a field station built at the edge of a fault line. Not to prevent the earthquake, but to understand what it’s revealing. A place readers might return to each month to examine what the latest tremors have exposed.

Every meaningful journey has a point beyond which the old map is useless. Explorers know it. Scientists know it. Civilizations know it. The deconstruction of the juvenile self has one too, and that emptied, fractured place is its ground zero.

Not because everything ends here. Because nothing false survives.

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