Welcome to the start of the Backroom Files where we explore what it means to be metaphysical beings having an earthly experience. If the Art of Being looks at the experience of being and the Architecture of Being looks at the construct of being, the Backroom Files focuses on the hidden mechanics running the whole show. We start the series with one of my favourite subjects, The Entangled Field.
What is an Entangled Field?
Have you ever felt something change between you and another person before anything had visibly changed? You might be sitting beside them or living on opposite sides of the world. The relationship might be easy, intensely active, complicated, quiet, or temporarily distant.
Something simply shifts. You might feel it in your body. Their presence may suddenly become unusually strong or strangely absent. You might dream about them, experience an unexplained pull or pressure, notice a change in the atmosphere, or receive symbolic information before you have any ordinary reason to think something has happened.
Or perhaps it happened even earlier where you met someone and felt as though you already knew them. Sometimes that recognition feels warm and familiar. Conversation starts easily and affection or trust develops unusually quickly. Sometimes the reaction goes the other way. You feel guarded, uneasy, watchful, repelled, or intensely activated despite having very little information about them. People describe experiences like these in different ways: intuition, energetic connection, resonance, psychic information, somatic knowing, synchronicity, shared fields, or entanglement.
What interests me most is the architecture underneath the experience. What exists between people once they begin participating in relation to one another? What happens energetically through that participation? Can relational architecture exist before we consciously recognise it? And if it can, what exactly are we perceiving when something changes? These are working observations drawn from my own experience and study. I use terms such as shared field and entangled field to describe phenomena I have been tracking over time. The language may become more precise as the architecture becomes clearer.
We already know people affect one another
Human beings change in relationship. Spend enough time with another person and you learn their rhythms, expressions, expectations, habits and patterns. You anticipate one another. You adjust to one another. Sometimes your body responds before conscious thought catches up.
Research has found measurable forms of coordination between interacting people, including interpersonal physiological synchrony and interpersonal neural synchronisation. Social Baseline Theory also proposes that familiar relational partners can become incorporated into how we calculate effort, risk and available resources. My own observations are that everything sits in relationship to something else. Humans included. Over time, that pattern of relationship can develop organisation of its own.
In the Art of Being this is the Field of Correspondence.
The Field of Correspondence
Correspondence describes the interconnected pattern through which things exist in relation. The Field of Correspondence is the wider field in which those relationships, interactions and patterns occur. In ordinary language, it is the larger energetic and relational context we are already participating in.
Within this great interconnected field we may engage purposefully with one another, creating a distinct pattern of interaction or shared field. The nature of our participation defines the experience. Friendship, romantic partnership, adversarial relationship are all conducted within a shared field.
A shared field is neutral architecture but expectations, meanings, roles, attraction, repulsion, memory, tension, familiarity, anticipation and patterns of attention are less so and give the shared field, form. Over time, the relationship develops an organisation and what occurs within it depends on the people involved, their agreements, perceptions, choices, history, development and ways of participating.
Two people can share a field while experiencing that field very differently. Each person encounters the relationship from their own position within it. One person’s perception does not erase the other person’s perception simply because the two accounts do not match.
When does a shared field become entangled?
The clue is in the word itself: tangle. An entangled field is a shared field in which the lines of energy, participation, agreement and relationship have become difficult to follow clearly. Some agreements may be explicit. Others may be implicit. Some may have developed through repetition. Some may have become embedded so deeply in the relationship that nobody remembers when they began. There may also be relational lines that were not initially visible.
A field that appears dyadic (two people) may contain more complicated architecture. A triadic field introduces a third participant and changes the structure of the whole. Group fields add further layers of relationship, influence, agreement and participation.
What makes this significant is that we may only be consciously aware of some of the lines running through the field. It is a little like opening the cupboard under the sink and discovering that whoever dealt with the plumbing before you had a highly creative relationship with pipes. Everything may technically connect, but good luck working out what goes where at first glance. That, to me, is the tangle.
Entanglement may be generative but not ideal
An entangled field can be enormously generative. It can also be exhausting. Sometimes both are true. Entanglement can generate creativity, insight, learning, attraction, emotional intensity, collaboration and real-world creation. But also transformation, spiritual development, conflict and confusion.
A field with clear and explicit boundaries makes it easier to understand where the lines run, what has actually been agreed to, what belongs to whom, and how each person is participating. It can still be deeply generative without requiring everybody to spend half their life tracing energetic extension cords through the walls.
My recommendation: untangle the field.
That does not necessarily mean ending the relationship or dismantling what has been created. It means making the architecture more visible. What have you agreed to? What have you assumed? What are you repeatedly participating in? What has changed? What are you still contributing? What do you no longer consent or agree to? What happens when one person changes their participation? A shared field may remain. What changes is the way participation is organised inside it.
Does the field always begin when people meet?
I am not convinced that it does. Experiences of immediate familiarity, attraction, caution or visceral recognition are part of what makes me wonder whether every relational field begins at first physical contact. My experience has left open the possibility that some relational architecture may exist before people meet in ordinary physical life.
Spiritual traditions have various explanations for this, including pre-birth agreements, previous lifetimes and prior forms of relationship. Those are possible interpretations of the phenomenon. What interests me is what happens when the architecture becomes active.
Sometimes meeting someone feels less like constructing something from nothing and more like walking into a room whose lights were already on. Participation may strengthen the field, reveal it, reorganise it, add new agreements to it, or make previously invisible aspects of it perceptible. This becomes particularly interesting when the relationship begins producing experiences that cannot easily be accounted for by the amount of visible interaction that has actually taken place.
How do we perceive a shared field?
People appear to register relational fields in different ways. Some notice bodily sensations. Some dream. Some experience symbolic information, sudden knowing, emotional shifts, changes in perceived proximity, attraction, repulsion, synchronicities or changes in atmosphere. Some may consciously perceive very little while still participating in the relationship. This makes perception one of the most interesting parts of the architecture.
What do you perceive? How does your body register it? What do you notice repeatedly? What changes when the field changes? Then comes a separate question: **what do you decide that information means? **
You can perceive information before you have decided what it is. That gap between perception and interpretation gives us somewhere to investigate the experience before deciding what story belongs to it.
What are you agreeing to?
This may be one of the most important questions in The Back Room Files. Some agreements are obvious. Others only become visible through repetition. We can participate in a relationship, role, pattern, spiritual practice or energetic arrangement for a long time before stopping to ask what we are actually continuing to say yes to.
People also deliberately participate in spiritual, energetic, magical, sexual, ritual, devotional and divinatory practices. Different traditions describe what is being engaged with in very different ways. The architectural question is remarkably ordinary: what are you participating in?
What have you agreed to? What does your participation reinforce? Where does your agency sit? What happens when you change the agreement? Sometimes an even simpler question does the job: Do I still agree to this? A surprisingly large amount of energetic housekeeping may begin there.
Shared, entangled and generative fields are different
A field can be shared because relationship exists. It can be entangled because its lines of participation have become difficult to distinguish. It can be generative because something new is being produced through the interaction. These conditions can overlap. A shared field can be highly generative without being particularly tangled. An entangled field can generate mostly friction. Another entangled field may generate enormous creativity, development and real-world change.
The useful question is: What is this field actually generating?
What has emerged through the interaction? Sometimes it is creative work. Sometimes it is transformation, learning, insight, disruption or a completely different understanding of yourself and other people. Often it is several things at once. Looking at the field this way takes us beyond asking whether a relationship was good or bad, successful or unsuccessful. We can also ask what became possible because the interaction existed at all.
The architecture is still being mapped
The immaterial aspects of human experience may have architecture even when we cannot see that architecture as easily as we see the physical room around us. My interest is in understanding how it is organised.
How do shared fields form? What makes them stable? What makes them tangled? What happens when another participant enters? What changes when an agreement changes? What makes a field generative? What happens when one person stops participating in the same way? And ultimately: if we understand the architecture, how do we consciously build within it?
That is where The Back Room Files are going.
