Charting Your Inner Terrain: A Tripartite Language for the Mind’s Hidden Flows

Having a language for our inner experience is long overdue.

Grant H. Brenner / Upscale

Produced by author, from original source material, multiply reiterated AI with sophisticated prompting.

We are fluent in some aspects of inner life. We can name a headache’s throb or a sunset’s glow without hesitation. But many of the mind’s most consequential movements remain poorly named: the directional “pull” in your gut that seems to come from somewhere vaguely visceral; the way time stretches out during anxiety and flattens in depression and boredom, or speeds up under danger; the quiet moment in a conversation when “the room changes,” and everyone can feel it though no one can quite say why; the sense of heightened awareness which tells us something is shifting. When we catch these fleeting moments, the topology of experience becomes more fluid and mutable. Something is happening therapeutically.

These are not mystical curiosities.

They are signatures of how mind and brain traverse the present, or how the present, the flow of entropy and potential and kinetic energy and information, flows through us. Perhaps we are stationary, and the sense of time in this regard is a perceptual manifestation of how the brain processes the physics…