Welcome to Ousia Analysis

(formally "Aion Psychodynamic Coaching")

 

Recursive, dialectical inquiry, education, and mentorship with William Apple

 

Ousia Analysis is a non-clinical, educational, philosophical, social, and spiritual practice of recursive dialectical inquiry. William Apple works within this practice as an educator, mentor, and guide. He is not a licensed psychologist, therapist, counselor, or mental-health provider. Ousia Analysis is not psychotherapy, counseling, diagnostic assessment, psychological treatment, or mental-health care.

 

Now…Why are you here?

 

You may be here because, despite all the work you have done, something remains in the dark and hidden within yourself, but felt all the same and nonetheless. And, it does so, certainly not because you have refused to look, and likewise certainly not because nothing has helped you in some way, shape, or form, but, instead, because the methods that taught you how to look may also have taught you where not to look.

 

You may have spent years in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, Jungian analysis, twelve-step meetings, group work, retreats, meditation, breathwork, yoga, somatic or body-based work, or some other sustained practice of self-examination. 

​

You may have studied and practiced Buddhism, Christianity, so-called Gnosticism, classical or "neo" Tantra and/or its contemporary Western adaptations, nondual traditions, Western occultism, philosophy, political theory, anti-racism, anti-fascism, Marxism, feminism, conservatism, or movements organized around liberation, tradition, consciousness, or social transformation.

 

You may have explored your sexuality, BDSM, or kink as places where questions of power, intimacy, identity, embodiment, shame, desire, and consent become especially visible.

 

And, each of these contain different schools, histories, practices, interpretations, contradictions, and modern adaptations. However, what reaches us under the name of any given tradition may be very different from the tradition itself.

 

And, likewise, you may be a therapist, psychologist, psychoanalyst, Jungian analyst, philosopher, teacher, clergy person, occultist, activist (on either the political left or right), or simply someone who has devoted much of your life to trying to understand yourself and the world around you.

 

Much of that work may have helped. Some of it may have even changed your life. 

 

And, all the same, there may be something you continue to encounter within yourself that those methods, languages, and traditions cannot quite, or do not, seem to reach.

 

You may feel it within yourself.

 

You may see it repeating through your relationships.

 

You may recognize it within a Western world whose psychological, political, spiritual, economic, and ecological structures are all under enormous pressure - and whose usual explanations no longer seem sufficient for what is happening, both internally and externally.

 

And, perhaps, in fact, you have not yet gone deeply enough. And, perhaps you have not because you have been taught not to. 

 

Perhaps the method itself has reached the limit of what it knows how to question, what it is allowed to question, or what it can allow you to question without placing its own foundations at risk.

 

Ousia Analysis begins at that limit.

 

What happens when the method becomes part of the question?

 

Every method, of course, comes to us through human beings. And, likewise and as such, it comes through their histories, cultures, religions, politics, economies, relationships to power, prejudices, revelations, wounds, biases, conditioning, and inherited ways of seeing. 

 

Nothing arrives ex nihilo - “out of nowhere”, untouched by the world that formed it.

 

And yet systems often become very good at questioning everything except themselves.

 

Science can become scientism: not science itself, but the elevation of science into something that imagines itself free from human prejudice and beyond questioning. 

 

Spirituality can become another means of insulating the self from what it does not want to face. 

 

Psychology can help a person recognize their conditioning while continuing to reproduce the individualism, productivity, hierarchy, and adaptations demanded by the culture that conditioned them.

 

Eastern and Indigenous traditions can be taken into the West and then filtered through commodification, extraction, appropriation, whiteness, patriarchy, and the endless demand to become “healthier”, “happier”, “more productive”, “more efficient”, “more enlightened”, or “more spiritually advanced”. 

 

Even movements formed to resist domination can begin reproducing the same arrangements they were created to oppose.

 

And, because these dynamics can appear anywhere - even within the systems intended to expose or resist them - we have to ask a more fundamental question:

 

What happens when a partial truth begins organizing life as though it were the Whole?

 

This is an explicitly non-supremacist practice

 

Ousia Analysis is explicitly non-supremacist.

 

Now, when I use the word supremacy, I do not mean only a particular political movement or historical formation. 

 

Instead, I mean the process through which an individual or collective gathers its assumptions, dogmas, injuries, identities, and partial truths into a collective and amalgamized superiority complex, begins organizing life through the the divisions of superior and inferior according to the ideology of that complex, and then mistakes its own position for the Whole.

 

This occurs on the political left or the political right. 

 

It occurs within religion, science, spirituality, psychology, activism, and movements created to oppose domination. 

 

These expressions are not historically identical, and their consequences are of course not equal. The point when I share the above, to be clear, is not to water-down those differences. Instead, the point is to understand how supremacy takes form without preserving the fantasy that our preferred system must be incapable of reproducing it.

 

If we are really going to question everything, then the person, the analyst, the teacher, the method, the institution, the tradition, the critique, and the identities through which we understand ourselves must all remain available for examination.

 

And, that includes Ousia Analysis.

 

What is Ousia Analysis?

 

Ousia is an ancient Greek word associated with being, substance, and what something most fundamentally is.

 

Within Ousia Analysis, it points toward Beingness as a Whole. 

 

And, to be clear, not just your individual sense of self - which human beings are already inclined/biased to treat as the center and measure of Being - but the Living Reality within which that sense of self, the world, and every relationship in-between them continually take form.

 

And, to be abundantly clear, know that your individual “I” matters immensely here. However, know too that it is neither the beginning nor the boundary of what Being is.

 

This is why the Work cannot end with the isolated, purely subjective question, of “Who am I?”

 

We must also allow this ultimate question of "who am I" to question: 

 

What has formed this “I”? 

 

What is it related to? 

 

What does it exclude? 

 

What does it imagine itself to be separate from? 

 

Which histories, relationships, fears, desires, ideologies, ancestors, institutions, spiritual images, and structures of power are speaking through it? 

 

What becomes visible when the “I” asking the question is itself placed inside the question?

 

And, it is in this way, that Ousia Analysis is metacognitive. 

 

Metacognition is often described simply as “thinking about thinking”, but the Ousian dialectic goes further than that. 

 

Here, we are examining how the “I” thinks, feels, perceives, interprets, questions, and arrives at what it believes it knows, which includes the histories, relationships, assumptions, and structures through which that knowing becomes possible.

 

Ousia Analysis is, therefore, also meta-analytic in the literal sense of the word (not in the statistical sense ordinarily used in academic research). It does not only analyze a person, an experience, a system, or an idea. It also analyzes the analysis itself.

 

this means, that the person asking the question, the person responding, the question being asked, the method being used, and the conclusions toward which the inquiry is moving all remain within the field of examination. 

 

To which, the dialectic must be capable of turning back upon its own activity and asking: What are we assuming? What are we excluding? What might this explanation be protecting? What is this method allowing us to see, and what might the method itself prevent us from seeing?

 

And this is what is meant by “recursive dialectic”, and to which is central to Ousia Analysis. 

 

The inquiry does not rise above Being and pretend to observe it from somewhere outside of Being.

 

That is impossible. 

 

Instead, what is doing the examining is itself part of what must be examined. 

 

Ousia Analysis is therefore not simply a method applied to you; it is a living inquiry in which you, I, the relationship between us, and the method itself remain inside the question.

And, to all of this, if the person, the method, and the system are all capable of mistaking a fragment for the Whole, then simple sincerity to “do the Work” is not enough. 

We must learn to practice a more radical form of objectivity.

 

The discipline of not knowing

 

The Work is led by what we can actually know - not merely by what our identities, ideologies, anxieties, or preferred explanations would like to treat as knowledge.

That includes the facts of subjective experience: what you feel, remember, dream, imagine, desire, fear, believe, and encounter within your own body. A feeling is real as a feeling. A dream occurred as a dream. A memory is present as a memory. But none of these facts, by itself, tells us the total meaning of what is happening.

 

You will often hear me say, “We do not know.”

 

That does not mean we know nothing. It means we may know this one thing, possess this one fragment, or recognize this one pattern without pretending that the fragment has given us the Whole. We can work carefully with what is present while remaining honest about what it does—and does not—allow us to conclude.

 

Objectivity here does not mean pretending that either of us can stand outside the relationship and observe it without bias. It means including our biases, assumptions, reactions, desires, and interpretations within the analysis. It means learning to distinguish what we know from what we suspect, what we infer, what we fear, and what we need to be true.

 

This is critique in the sense of careful discernment. It is not criticism, self-punishment, rumination, or the anxious attempt to think your way into absolute certainty.

 

Where did this Work come from?

 

Ousia Analysis grew through more than thirty years of study, practice, scholarship, self-examination, analysis, and sustained engagement with psychological, philosophical, spiritual, political, mystical, and esoteric traditions. Its deepest spiritual and psychological roots lie in Meher Baba and C. G. Jung, although the Work has been shaped through an ongoing conversation with many traditions and thinkers.

 

The Work is also educational.

 

I will not simply offer an interpretation and ask you to accept it as though I possess some private gospel about who you are. When useful, I will explain the psychological, philosophical, historical, or spiritual process I believe we may be encountering. I may show you where an idea came from, name the thinker or tradition behind it, recommend a book or passage, share relevant research, or invite you to study the source for yourself.

 

I bring a particular education, history, and way of seeing into the encounter. You bring knowledge of your life that I cannot possess in advance. Neither of us stands outside the relationship as its final authority. We investigate what is happening within you, within me, between us, and within the larger world that has made the encounter possible.

 

The door is open. Everything comes through it.

 

You do not need the correct politics, the approved spirituality, an academic education, or a particular psychological vocabulary to enter this Work. You may come from "the left", "the right", somewhere between them, somewhere outside them, or from a place you cannot yet name.

 

The door is open.

 

But entering means becoming willing to place what you bring with you on the table. Nothing will be protected from inquiry simply because it is cherished, painful, politically righteous, spiritually meaningful, academically established, or central to who either of us believes ourselves to be.

 

The questioning will be direct. Sometimes it will be difficult. Sometimes it may be confrontational. But I will not ask you to face something with me before enough rapport exists between us to hold the question.

 

By rapport, I mean that a trusting relationship has been built. We have learned something about one another, and you have reason to know that my directness is not an attempt to humiliate, overpower, diagnose, or dispose of you. I am not interested in cornering you with an interpretation and calling that insight.

 

The gentleness of this Work does not mean that the language will always be gentle. It means that we will try not to abandon the relationship when something difficult becomes visible.

 

Ousia Analysis is, in principle, available to anyone.

 

It is not, in practice, Work that everyone will want.

 

If something here names a threshold you have already encountered—and you are willing to allow the questioning to reach the structures through which you presently understand yourself—then this may be the right work for you.

 

It may also not be.

 

That, too, can be discovered honestly.

​

One-on-one work is offered on a pay-what-you-can basis.

A complimentary discovery conversation is available for those considering beginning this Work.