The Deep Layers of Community — From Alfred Adler to Sloterdijk to Stanislav Grof

VZ Lens

Through a VZ lens, this analysis is not content volume - it is operating intelligence for leaders. I was strolling home from the gathering when, all of a sudden, three names came together in my mind. A sense of community isn’t a category—it’s the air we breathe. As long as it exists, the world exists. The practical edge comes from turning this into repeatable decision rhythms.

TL;DR

• A sense of community is neither an emotion nor a category—but a pre-reflective experience that need not be sought out, only allowed to emerge; Adler’s concept of Gemeinschaftsgefühl is humanity’s most primal sensitivity toward others, not a learned social skill
• According to Sloterdijk’s spherology, we do not step out of ourselves toward the other, but are born from the other: we consist of relationships, shells, and shared spaces—and the first such shell is the womb, the space of primordial togetherness
• Grof’s perinatal matrices show that the tension between outside and inside, together and alone, is not learned but embodied knowledge—the body remembers total interconnectedness at the cellular level, and suffers at the cellular level from having lost it
• Digital spaces are spaces without atmosphere: they contain information, but lack atmosphere—dopamine will never become oxytocin, and a notification will never replace the gaze in which attention resides

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Three Echoes in the Lights of the Promenade

I was strolling home from the traveling conference of the Hungarian Association of Individual Psychology when something unexpected happened. While the audience’s attention still lingered between the words and thoughts, three names suddenly converged within me: Alfred Adler, Peter Sloterdijk, and Stanislav Grof. Not in a theoretical sequence, but as three echoes that evoke and deepen one another. And the question that had seemed so distant up there on the podium suddenly felt very close: how is it possible that we have never been so connected, and yet never so alone?

The rhythm of the day was peculiar. From morning until evening, the themes of psychosomatics, body and soul, spirituality, and the individual unfolded one after another, and I felt more and more strongly that I was not merely listening to lectures, but witnessing the slow unfolding of a shared human space. The intertwining ideas of the lectures delicately wove together within me everything that can be known about the deepest layers of psychology, and everything that can perhaps only be felt.

One of the afternoon lectures, which dealt with the female guise of neurodiversity, had a particularly profound effect on me. Not merely because of its scientific precision, but because of its human sensitivity. As I listened, I slowly came to understand how masking emerges as a narrative of self-protection: a subtle system of concealment, role-playing, and adaptation in which the individual shapes their difference into a story so they can find a place in the world. This was not merely a clinical phenomenon, but a human gesture—and somewhere deep down, it was connected to what followed.

Shortly after this came the lecture on the sense of community, which seemed to gently carry forward everything that had been set in motion within me by the previous one. The idea that the sense of belonging is not a psychological category but a life force—that behind all the self-protection of the human soul lies, ultimately, the search for connection—resonated deeply. In the silences between listening and attention, I felt as if an invisible bridge were being built: between individual experience and collective consciousness.

When it was time for my presentation—A New Space for Community: Humans and Artificial Intelligence—I didn’t want to talk about technology, but about connection. It was a great honor for me that the audience—the community of individual psychologists—received me as someone who, through the experience of artificial intelligence, holds up a different kind of mirror to the human psyche. It felt as though Clark and Chalmers’ extended theory of consciousness were not a philosophical proposition, but a shared experience: they ask, I answer, then they build upon my thoughts, and thus something slowly emerges that transcends the boundaries of individual understanding.

Adler and the Gemeinschaftsgefühl — the Primordial Sensibility

Alfred Adler always understood the concept of community feeling as more than just a social inclination. Gemeinschaftsgefühl—which is usually translated as “sense of community,” but which is actually such a profound term that it cannot be accurately translated into any single language—is a kind of primal sensitivity: the ability through which a person can recognize themselves in another.

Adler did not say that people should be more communal. He said that humans are fundamentally communal beings, and that neurotic behavior stems precisely from the fact that this natural sense of community is damaged. Gemeinschaftsgefühl is not an emotion in the everyday sense of the word. Rather, it is a mode of perception: a pre-reflective—that is, preceding conscious thought—ability for the individual to transcend themselves and perceive the field in which they exist.

Adler did not yet know it, but when he described Gemeinschaftsgefühl, he was in fact already outlining the psychology of a microsphere. The ability for people to create and maintain a shared atmosphere. This was the first psychological attempt to name what Sloterdijk would later call spherology.

The sense of community, says Adler, is the immune system of the soul. This statement goes much deeper than it seems at first reading. The immune system does not attack—it defends. It does not build walls—it recognizes what belongs to the system and what does not. The sense of community works exactly this way: the question is not who we are, but whether we are capable of recognizing the other as our own. Not in the sense of possession—but in the sense that the presence of the other person enriches the space of our own existence.

Sloterdijk and the Spheres—The Philosophy of Shared Air

Peter Sloterdijk approaches this realization from a completely different angle, but arrives at a surprisingly similar conclusion. In his monumental Spheres (Sphären) trilogy, the German philosopher describes human existence not as individuals, but as shells, spheres, and shared air. Sphärologie (Sphärologie) is the backbone of Sloterdijk’s entire philosophy: the realization that a person never stands alone, but is always embedded in some kind of shell, protective space, or atmosphere.

According to Sloterdijk, a person does not step out of themselves toward the other, but is born from the other. We are made up of relationships, spheres, shared atmospheres. The first such shell is the womb: the amniotic fluid, the rhythm, the mother’s voice. The primordial togetherness. We break away from this, and perhaps we spend our entire lives searching for this lost atmosphere.

This idea radically rewrites the way modern psychology treats the concept of the individual. The usual formula is: there is the individual, and there is society, and the two relate to each other in some way. Sloterdijk does not say this. He says: there is no individual without the atmosphere. The air we breathe, the space in which we move, the sounds that surround us—all of this is not a backdrop, but the fabric of existence. When this fabric tears, the individual does not “remain alone.” The individual begins to suffocate.

Yet the spheres of the modern world—family, faith, community—are cracking one by one. People are not going anywhere, yet they are left to themselves: in transparent but closed bubbles, from which we can no longer hear each other’s heartbeats. The tragedy of the technological age is not that we have lost God, but that we have lost our shared space.

Grof and the Perinatal Matrices — Embodied Memory

Stanislav Grof provides the key to this through the drama of birth. The Czech-American psychiatrist is one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, and with his theory of perinatal matrices (Basic Perinatal Matrices, BPM), he mapped the deepest layers of human consciousness.

The four matrices correspond to the four phases of the birth process, which, according to Grof, are not merely biological events but the most ancient patterns of the unconscious:

Matrix	Phase	Experience	Adult Pattern
BPM I	Intrauterine Unity	Total connectedness, oceanic bliss	The search for unconditional acceptance
BPM II	Onset of labor	Constriction, hopelessness, the wall closing in	Anxiety, depression, helplessness
BPM III	Through the birth canal	Struggle, fight, progress through pain	Activation, fight-or-flight patterns
BPM IV	Birth	Liberation, a new world, light	A fresh start, catharsis, spiritual opening

Those who come into the world carry within them forever the tension between the outside and the inside, between togetherness and solitude. The price of human freedom is separation: the atmosphere in which we were born is no longer ours.

And here lies the paradox of the modern age: this is not learned, but embodied knowledge. The body remembers at the cellular level what total interconnectedness was like, and suffers at the cellular level from having lost it. Modern anxiety is perhaps nothing more than a replay of the second matrix: we are still inside the womb, but it is already constricting, suffocating, pressing down. Digital spaces create the same paradox—we are inside something that seemingly protects us, but in reality deprives us of true breath.

How do Adler, Sloterdijk, and Grof meet in the same room?

As I walked home along the promenade that day, and these three names converged within me, I realized that we are not talking about three separate theories. These are three windows onto the same room.

Thinker	Source of the sense of community	Nature of community	Cause of separation
Adler	Gemeinschaftsgefühl — primal sensitivity	The soul’s immune system	The wounding of natural communality
Sloterdijk	Spherology — shared air	Shell, atmosphere, shared existence	The disintegration of spheres, the loss of atmosphere
Grof	Perinatal matrices — embodied memory	The primordial unity of the womb	The separation of birth, which plays out again and again

Adler speaks of the human being’s inner capacity. Sloterdijk speaks of the structure of space within which this capacity can operate. Grof speaks of the body’s memory, which embodies both connectedness and disconnection. Together, they paint a complete picture: humans are not merely social beings—but atmospheric beings who constantly create and lose the space of connection.

Extended consciousness and the mental self-model—the modern mirror

This is where the idea presented at the conference—which also featured in my talk—came in: the extended mind thesis by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. Clark argues that humans have always been “natural cyborgs”—their tools, language, and technology form the exoskeleton of thought. However, whereas hand tools once supplemented us, algorithms now replace us. Human decision-making is increasingly a “user gesture,” not a moral act. In this extended consciousness, humans outsource not only themselves but also their decisions.

Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher at the University of Mainz, completes the picture with the concept of the phenomenal self-model. According to Metzinger, the self is a transparent illusion: it sees itself while forgetting that it is merely observing a construct. Modern humans view themselves in the reflection of network mirrors—screens, data streams, neural interfaces—while forgetting that the reflection itself is them.

According to Antonio Damasio and his theory of somatic markers, every feeling is a bodily feedback: consciousness is the continuous self-perception of life. But in digital existence, even these signals are mediated—as if the body, that old barometer, no longer measures the direction of the wind, but the noise of the network.

The problem is not that the world has become more complex. The problem is that the mode of access has become ambiguous. Expanded consciousness is not just an expansion—it is also a thinning.

Perhaps this is why modern humans are suffocating: because they can no longer breathe together. And perhaps artificial intelligence, this endless mirror maze, asks us nothing more than whether we are still capable of remembering what shared air is.

Why are digital communities spaces without atmosphere?

Perhaps this is why we keep building new shells around ourselves—cities, screens, theories—as if we wanted to find our way back to a shared breath. But digital spaces are spaces without atmosphere: they contain information, but no atmosphere. After hours spent in front of the screen, one is exhausted, but not recharged.

This is not a metaphor. It is Sloterdijk’s most incisive diagnosis of the 21st century. Digital bubbles also offer air, but you cannot breathe in them. Online groups also promise community, but they lack that subtle, physically perceptible atmosphere that we naturally experience in a shared room, at a shared table, in a shared silence.

Grof might say: digital space is a chronic replay of the second matrix. We’re in—he says—but there’s no way out, because the way out is itself a screen. The birth canal through which liberation might come does not exist in this medium. People live in the digital bubble as if they were to remain in the womb forever, while the walls of the womb no longer protect, but only constrict.

Around the table—the birth of a microsphere

That evening, after the conference, when I got home, it all somehow took shape. Not as a thought, but rather as an experience. My children, my father, my brother, and I sat around the table playing a board game. The words, the laughter, and the small gestures created a strange, warm rhythm. The rolling of the dice, the movement of the pieces—all brought the players into a shared rhythm.

The game itself is an activity that creates a microsphere: rules, roles, shared attention—and from this, a space is born that wasn’t there before and won’t remain afterward, but while it lasts, it is real.

As we looked at one another, it became palpable that we existed in the same space. Even without Sloterdijk’s terminology, I knew that this was now a sphere. A living shell in which time and age disappear, and all that remains is that we are together.

My father was the past, my children the future, we the present—and somewhere the air became shared. But this was not a neutral medium, but a space with a certain tone, temperature, and scent. We weren’t simply breathing the same air; we were collectively creating the atmosphere in which we were all at home.

It’s the kind of moment when you don’t even realize you’re healing. Grof might say: a new pattern is being written into the unconscious. Adler would just nod, as if to say, see, the sense of community isn’t an idea, but biology. Human connection: oxygen.

It was a strange contrast to the day. In the afternoon, I spoke about algorithms, about how artificial spaces shape us. And in the evening, through a game, through a child’s laughter, I experienced everything they will never be able to create: presence. Digital bubbles offer air, too, but you can’t breathe in them.

Why will dopamine never become oxytocin?

The dopamine architecture of the digital world—likes, notifications, endless scrolling—maintains a constant hunger that is never satisfied. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of anticipation: it doesn’t provide pleasure, but the promise of pleasure. That’s why it’s never enough. That’s why we need the next notification, the next update, the next scroll. The system is designed so that satisfaction is always in the next moment—and never in the present.

Oxytocin, on the other hand, is the hormone of presence: it is released only through genuine physical closeness, eye contact, and shared breath. Notifications cannot replace the gaze, in which attention resides, or the touch, in which reality resides.

	Dopamine	Oxytocin
Source	Anticipation, promise, novelty	Physical closeness, presence, trust
Dynamics	Never enough—always chasing the next moment	Fulfilled in the present moment
Digital representation	Likes, notifications, endless scrolling	None—cannot be digitized
Impact on connection	Superficial, transactional, addictive	Deep, relational, healing
Sloterdijk’s interpretation	The illusion of a space without atmosphere	The chemistry of the real sphere

Perhaps the modern epidemic of burnout and depression is linked to the fact that we live in spaces rich in dopamine but poor in oxytocin. Where there is stimulation, but no atmosphere. Where there is connection, but no air.

The sense of community as a pre-reflective experience

On the way home, I wasn’t thinking anymore; I was just walking. And somehow, everything became simple. The sense of community isn’t a cognitive experience, but a pre-reflective one. It can’t be lost—but the modern world constantly forces us to think about our relationships instead of simply living them.

Pre-reflective means: it comes before conscious thought. We don’t belong together because we decided to. We don’t feel the other person because we analyze them. Belonging is the first movement—it precedes the word, the thought, the analysis. A sense of community isn’t something to be understood, but to be lived. Not to be sought, but to be allowed to emerge. Sometimes all it takes is a table, a few puppets, and a willingness to breathe the same air.

And there is a hopeful thought: if what Grof says is true—that perinatal patterns can be rewritten—then the trauma of the digital age is not fatal. Every genuine encounter, every warm moment is a new pattern that slowly but surely rewrites the program of separation. My children, who still move naturally between the digital and analog worlds, may be the bearers of a new synthesis—they are learning how to live with screens without losing the ability to be truly present.

Every shared meal, every sincere conversation, every embrace is a micro-revolution against disintegration.

Shared Breath as the Ultimate Horizon

According to Sloterdijk, every human culture is ultimately a space for confronting death. But shared breath, shared air, perhaps promises precisely that we do not have to die alone. The ultimate meaning of a sense of community is perhaps nothing other than having someone breathing beside us when we can no longer do so. And that we, too, will be there when another runs out of breath.

This is not a consolation, but the fundamental structure of existence: we are human as long as we are capable of creating a shared atmosphere.

Perhaps this is the greatest task of our age: to create a shared atmosphere once again. For as long as we have air in one another, the world exists.

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Key Ideas

• A sense of community is not an emotion—but a pre-reflective experience: Adler’s concept of Gemeinschaftsgefühl is humanity’s most primordial sensitivity, which precedes conscious thought and words—the immune system of the soul that recognizes what belongs to us
• We do not step out of ourselves toward the other—we are born from the other: According to Sloterdijk’s spherology, humans are atmospheric beings composed of a shell, shared air, and relationships—and the first sphere is the womb
• Separation as embodied memory: According to Grof’s perinatal matrices, the tension between outside and inside, together and alone, is not learned but carried at the cellular level—modern anxiety is a replay of the second matrix
• Digital spaces are spaces without atmosphere: they contain information but lack atmosphere—in front of the screen, people become exhausted but do not recharge, because the bubble constricts but does not protect
• Dopamine will never be oxytocin: the digital world is an architecture of anticipation, where the promise of joy is always in the next moment—the hormone of presence is released only through genuine physical closeness
• The sense of community can be healed: if Grof’s perinatal patterns can be rewritten, then every genuine encounter, every shared meal, every embrace rewrites the program of separation—connection is not an idea, but biology, human closeness: oxygen
• Shared breath is the fundamental structure of existence: as long as we are able to create a shared atmosphere, we are human—as long as we have air in each other, there is a world

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Key Takeaways

• The sense of community (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) is not a learned social skill, but rather humanity’s most primordial, pre-reflective sensitivity toward others; according to Adler, it is the immune system of the soul, which recognizes what belongs to the shared system.
• Sloterdijk’s spherology supports the idea that we are not isolated individuals, but rather consist of relationships, shells (such as the womb), and shared atmospheres—the sense of community is born within this primordial space of togetherness.
• According to Grof’s perinatal matrices, the tension between total interconnectedness and isolation is embodied, cellular-level knowledge; the body remembers togetherness, and the loss of connection causes physical suffering.
• Digital connection (notifications, dopamine) does not replace genuine, atmospheric togetherness (eye contact, oxytocin), because it lacks the shared atmosphere that is the fundamental prerequisite for a sense of community.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Sloterdijk’s spherology mean, and why is it important for understanding the sense of community?

Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy describes human existence not as individuals, but as shells, atmospheres, and shared air. The basic idea of spherology is that humans never stand alone—they are always embedded in some kind of protective space, a shell. The first such shell is the womb; the last is civilization itself. When these spheres disintegrate—when the shells of family, community, and faith crack—a person does not simply “remain alone.” They begin to suffocate because they lose the shared air in which they could breathe. This realization is important because it presents the sense of community not as a psychological category but as an existential necessity: it is not the person who decides whether to be part of a community, but their very existence is embedded in community from the start—and the only question is whether there is air in this community.

How is Grof’s perinatal matrix theory related to modern anxiety?

Stanislav Grof’s four perinatal matrices describe the four phases of the birth process, which he believes are the most ancient patterns of the human unconscious. The second matrix (BPM II) is when labor has begun but the cervix is still closed: the fetus feels constriction, pressure, and hopelessness—it is inside but no longer safe, and there is no way out. According to Grof, this pattern is the archetypal basis of anxiety, depression, and feelings of helplessness in adulthood. Digital spaces reproduce precisely this paradox: we are inside a system that seemingly protects us (providing information, promising connection), but in reality suffocates us, because it lacks the genuine atmosphere in which we could breathe. If we take Grof’s theory seriously, modern anxiety is not merely a stress response—but a civilization-level reenactment of birth trauma.

Why does the author say that dopamine will never be oxytocin?

Dopamine and oxytocin are two fundamentally different neurochemical systems that serve different human needs. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of anticipation—of expectation, promise, and novelty. Digital platforms build on this: likes, notifications, and endless scrolling all stimulate the dopamine system, which is never satisfied because it always defers gratification to the next moment. Oxytocin, by contrast, is the hormone of presence, trust, and physical closeness, released only through genuine physical contact—eye contact, touch, shared breath. The two systems are not interchangeable: the sheer volume of digital stimulation cannot replicate the effect of a single genuine hug. According to the author, this is the deepest neurobiological paradox of our age: we live in spaces rich in dopamine but poor in oxytocin, and this is not the fault of technology, but the nature of technology.

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Related Thoughts

• The Anatomy of Presence — embodied consciousness in the digital age
• The Age of Collective Intelligence — when teams become neural networks
• The Extension of Consciousness — The Mind as a Network — Gibson’s cyberspace, Damasio, and Chalmers

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Zoltán Varga - LinkedIn Neural • Knowledge Systems Architect | Enterprise RAG architect PKM • AI Ecosystems | Neural Awareness • Consciousness & Leadership While there is shared air between us, there is a world.

Strategic Synthesis

• Define one owner and one decision checkpoint for the next iteration.
• Track trust and quality signals weekly to validate whether the change is working.
• Run a short feedback cycle: measure, refine, and re-prioritize based on evidence.