The 9-Square Paper

In therapy, we all wish something simpler could work. But we’re not simple people.  Over the last five years the therapeutic field has documented a 40% average reduction in the time between relapses, across all conditions.  Clearly the methods employed by therapists have failed fundamentally, not marginally, to deal with such a complete mental disintegration.  That was what led me to VR and Dream Work in the first place.  I sensed that a cure would have to be found forward, not back.

Our solution was called the 9-Square. Originally we were working on a program preemptively coined The Revelation Machine, which was supposed to gauge a person’s personality orientation, their diagnostic ailments, as well as their positioning on several autonomous psychological cycles and growth-processes.  Then a personalized story would be produced by the algorithm, fit to offer them a VR experience that would work like a video game.  It would be a story that challenged them, but was not too difficult—something that would offer them exactly the frame they needed to access a breakthrough experience—where at key moments their decisions would determine the outcome.

What happened was unsurprising in retrospect: the diagnostics were never good enough.  We could never capture the exact moment or exact cure the individual would need, so our virtual story experiences fell flat 90% of the time. 

After studying the works of Carl Rogers and James Hillman the project took a turn.  These two practicing psychologists began the two camps of the great modern split in American psychology. Rogers repeatedly emphasized that all a therapist can do is provide the conditions wherein insight can take place; revelation is an achievement on the part of the client, not something that can be contrived. This was essential to the birth of the 9-Square. But whereas Rogers stood for reasonableness, autonomy, responsibility and consciousness, Hillman took up the stand for what does not make sense, what is unknown and unconscious, what exists in myth and darkness. Hillman understood that what has been cast out of the psyche returns in a deranged form. Such that in the denial of the importance of dreams and myth (of unconsciousness) as a primary mode of interpreting reality, our age has been forced into a engulfing sleep from which no sense of perspective or reflection can emerge. Mystery was banished and returned as blindness. We knew the 9-Square would not provide the necessary results working only on the conscious level. The use of programmed VR experiences were a dead end.

Our new research began with the realization that the effects of social media and the network were being etched into human consciousness, such that we all had trouble with linear thinking, an abundance of affective disorders, attention and sociability disorders, an obliteration of the sense of history, and complete identity fragmentation.  So rather than targeting a personality profile, our technology targeted the social psychic underpinning.  If the mind was now functioning more like a network and less like an arrow or a loop, we would have to replicate a network system that contained real unity within its seemingly disparate nodes.  

Rather than using an algorithm to create a VR story, we invented a neural hookup, fit in a VR helmet, which could fluctuate delta waves in the mind in nine different frequencies, such that the client could be taken from, on one end, a state exactly similar to dreaming, and on the other, a lucid dream that, it was found, could only operate under realistic conditions (as if the mechanisms that create the dream allow conscious lucidity in exchange for a realistic sequence.)  This would allow the two vectors of Hillman and Rogers to be worked on at once: depth and responsibility.

This took care of the problem of relevant content: we didn’t have to create it.  All we would do is randomly alternate between these 9 delta wave nodes, such that the client would have the deepest unconscious content dragged into a lucid state; and the clearest bits of reality, memory, and current issues loosened into a dream context.  Ultimately it would be the client’s task, on having the full contents of his psyche scattered before him, to discover the unity in a eureka moment—to build out of the conflict a new pattern which would run like a shockwave from the depths to the heights; producing a healing that would be profound and stable against years of buffeting from the shifting network world.  More than that, it would be direct training in how to have a paradigmatic healing of this new sort, such that it could recur autonomously from that point on, when the client ran into a new block.

Unfortunately it turned out that some client’s could not endure the weight of this conflationary, frontal insight into their disorder, and, when the 9-Square helmet was taken off, would keep cycling through every iteration of those 9 nodes, never finding a way out, as if the system had imprinted itself and corrupted the programming of their waking consciousness.  So naturally, with much regret the project was completely discontinued in early 2029, as I turned my attention towards studying the relevance of Confucius for the modern age.   

Val Lenny

September 5th, 2030

[Reader, go to 7-Square, as Kyu responds to Val.]