Note from Tomas:
Kia ora! Huge thanks to all the new subscribers. We’re happy to have you here and appreciate the subscription notes and Field Reports. We’re still seeing a strong interest in Human Adulthood and the dismantling process. This month, Anicca will begin unpacking the Phases of Jumpers.
She’ll also be speaking on things outside of monthly themes in Notes, so be sure to check those out if interested.
A woman named Fran has been emailing me on and off since reading my book last year.
She’s thoughtful, articulate, and unusually well-read. She found Jed McKenna years ago, then moved through many of the usual nonduality writers, teachers, talks, interviews and podcasts. By the time she encountered my work, she already understood most of the vocabulary. False self, Dreamstate, No-self, Surrender, Truth, Human Adulthood.
Fran wants Truth Realization. She initially assumed that because I am truth realized that it’s something I can help her get. After steering her back to Human Adulthood she has, to her credit, made an earnest effort to understand her current position and the territory it occupies.
She’s begun noticing how much of her life is constructed around maintaining an identity. She can see the performance involved in being competent, dependable, spiritually open-minded, a good partner, a good daughter, a person who has things reasonably figured out.
Recently, Fran wrote to say she suspected she’s reached a point where intellectual understanding is no longer enough. I think I’m ready to dismantle this for real.
I believed that she meant it. I still do.
Since then, Fran’s begun asking careful questions. Would it help to spend more time alone? Was meditation useful during Deconstruction? Do people commonly lose interest in their careers? Could relationships survive? Does the process tend to accelerate once it begins? How does one distinguish genuine surrender from passivity?
None of these are foolish questions. Most I’ve heard before. In fact most could be plucked right out of the portal archives.
What interests me is the shape they make together. Fran wants to enter the territory, but she also wants some sense of what will happen once she does. She isn’t exactly asking for guarantees; she’s too sophisticated for that. She wants orientation. A little visibility. Enough information to tell the difference between an important developmental transition and an avoidable disaster.
Reasonable enough, right? After all, isn’t that what the Phases of Jumpers are for?
Before we answer that, let’s take a closer look at Jack, one of the OG Jumpers I ever worked with whom I described in my book.
Over ten years ago, Jack arrived at an old one-room cabin on my property carrying a duffel bag, a box of books, and the unmistakable appearance of someone who had run out of reasonable options.
I’d bought some land from him previously, but we barely knew each other. The cabin sat on the property near the river. It had no electricity, a wood stove and a propane water heater. Rustic but livable.
When he called one day and asked whether it was empty something in his voice made it pretty indicated that he should come.
Jack was in rough shape. His wife thought he ‘d lost his mind. His relationship with his young son had become strained. He had walked away from a successful career almost without warning. Nothing about what was happening made sense to him. When he did speak it was stuff like, I don’t know who I am. I don’t think I know what’s real anymore.
After a couple of conversations I was reasonably certain I wasn’t witnessing a conventional mental health or substance abuse issue.
Jack hadn’t read Jed McKenna. He had no interest in nonduality. He wasn’t pursuing awakening. He didn’t know what Human Adulthood was. He would’ve been delighted to discover that what was happening to him was merely a philosophical misunderstanding.
But it wasn’t.
For months before arriving at the cabin, Jack had felt increasingly uncomfortable inside his own life. The career he’d spent years building stopped fitting. His marriage felt wrong in ways he couldn’t articulate. The identity he’d spent decades constructing had started feeling strangely artificial.
So he did what people usually do when their life begins to crack. He kept going. He worked harder. Stayed busy. Performed the roles. Overrode the discomfort, basically.
Until one day he couldn’t.
Fran recently wrote something that reminded me of him.
She said she can feel the structures of her life becoming less convincing. Her job is fine, but she can increasingly see how much identity she extracts from being good at it. Her relationship is loving, but she notices herself continually shaping her behavior around preserving a certain version of it. She finds herself watching conversations while they’re happening and seeing the small manipulations involved in being liked, approved of, reassured.
This is not nothing. Something is becoming visible. But Fran’s life still basically works, and that distinction is important here. She’s standing somewhere she no longer entirely believes in, looking toward a place she suspects she may have to go.
Jack, on the other hand, no longer had anywhere to stand.
By the time he reached the cabin, Discontent had become Disruption. Everything that previously told him who he was seemed to be failing at once. Job, marriage, fatherhood, competence, future, self. All of it.
He wasn’t wondering whether dismantling might interfere with his life. It had already interfered in very tangible, fundamental ways.
For months, he tried to understand what had happened. At first his questions were practical. Had he destroyed his marriage? Should he find another job? Was he harming his son? How could he get himself back to normal?
As the weeks went by the questions changed. What is actually real? If all of these roles can disappear, what was underneath them?
His notebooks filled up. Eventually he devoted page after page to a single question. Who am I? Then one evening he threw that notebook into the wood stove.
“I don’t think I’m going to get an answer,” he said.
Fran would probably understand that moment intellectually. She knows that the false self cannot discover some truer permanent self underneath itself. She knows that “Who am I?” is not going to conclude with an improved biographical statement. But, knowing that and arriving at the end of the question are very different things.
This is the distinction we’re looking at.
Fran isn’t pretending; she’s genuinely looking. But for now, she’s still doing the looking from a position that assumes there will be a Fran who comes through the experience. Perhaps a freer, less defended Fran. A Fran who no longer needs approval. A Fran with less fear.
She would object to that characterization, and quite correctly point out that she understands there may ultimately be no Fran at all. And conceptually, she does understand this.
But then she asks whether her partnership can remain intact. Whether she’ll still enjoy her work. Whether dismantling makes people less ambitious. Whether she might become emotionally detached.
She’s not demanding that nothing change; she’s trying to determine what change will cost.
I recognize that impulse. The tourist wants to know what the trip requires. Of course they do.
Jack, on the other hand, discovered there was no trip. There was just the disappearance of the place he had been standing.
His Deconstruction was not poetic. There were days he barely ate. He stopped sleeping properly. Sometimes anxiety became so intense he vomited. He paced, cried, stared at old family photographs.
More than once he considered simply returning to his former life. He imagined calling his boss, going home, apologizing. He fantasized about stepping back into his old roles and deciding the whole episode had been some kind of breakdown.
The problem was that he could no longer believe those roles in the same way. He could remember them, and maybe try to keep performing them. He could miss them terribly. But he couldn’t make them real again.
That may be one of the simplest ways I know to describe a Jumper. They’ve lost the ability to return.
Fran still has return available. Her career still means something. Her relationship still provides orientation. Her identity is becoming visible to her, but visibility hasn’t yet made it unusable. She can close the books. Go to work. Have dinner with friends. Take a holiday. And for long stretches, the structure still holds.
Again, this is not a criticism of Fran, nor does it mean Human Adulthood is somehow optional terrain reserved for unusually brave people. Quite the opposite. Human Adulthood is the developmental movement available to all of us.
Fran is in the Discontent Phase, but hers has a different flavor from Jack’s. Her dissatisfaction has been amplified and given language by years of spiritual seeking. She’s read enough to suspect that the identity she inhabits is constructed, and that something more fundamental may be possible. In that sense, the seeking has done useful work: it’s made the seams visible.
But there’s an important difference between becoming dissatisfied because you’ve encountered the idea of awakening and becoming dissatisfied because your own life has stopped making sense. Fran’s Discontent still has an object on the horizon. Enlightenment, Truth, freedom, no-self. However carefully she qualifies the language, there’s still something elsewhere that seems more real than where she is. Her dissatisfaction can therefore remain productive. It gives her something to pursue, study, refine, and move toward.
Jack’s Discontent had no such destination. His job, marriage, roles, and identity simply stopped cohering. The question wasn’t, “Is there something more?” It was closer to, “Why can I no longer live convincingly inside what I already have?” That’s the hum beneath Discontent.
This is where the phases can be especially useful to someone like Fran. They can help her distinguish between dissatisfaction generated by the seeker (I want something beyond this life,) and the deeper developmental signal that begins when this life, these roles, this identity, no longer organize experience convincingly. One points toward another prize. The other begins to undermine the structure that still wants one.
That doesn’t make Fran’s Discontent false. It may be the beginning of the same movement. But spiritual seeking can keep Phase One going for a very long time by giving discontent somewhere to go. Instead of asking what’s actually become unlivable, the seeker can continue asking what comes next.
That’s the real contrast between Fran and Jack. Fran’s not a tourist because she has no developmental business being here. She’s a tourist because, for now, she’s still approaching the territory through the imagery of seeking. She can study dismantling, imagine surrender, wonder about enlightenment, and picture what the journey might eventually give her.
Jack had no such romance available. His developmental impasse had become immediate enough that the old structure could no longer carry him.
Fran wants to know what it would mean to jump.
Jack looked down one day and realized he was already falling.
So what does this mean for you? Probably less about deciding whether you’re a tourist or a Jumper, and more about noticing what’s actually happening where you’re standing.
Is dismantling still something you’re studying, or imagining? Or has some part of the life and identity you’ve relied on already stopped making sense?
The phases aren’t there to tell you where you should be. They’re there to help you recognize where you are. What happens next mostly depends on your willingness to discover what you're still treating as true, and ceasing to protect it from investigation.