In Oakland, between 2016 and 2019, a research group of avowed rationalists — physics doctorates, effective altruists, people whose whole culture was built on not believing in this book — dug a tunnel into the mind with off-the-shelf therapeutic tools, broke through into something they had no name for, and spent their final year in a state their own survivors call the Intention War: months of contagion-fear, quarantine, cleansing rites, and improvised wards, ending in the dissolution of the organization. I did not have to reconstruct this one from clay tablets, reader. It was fact-checked by a professional journalist and published with the principals on record, in July of 2026. It is the best-documented crossing in this entire book — and the only one where you can watch the field notes being taken for the first time, by people who did not know notes had ever been taken before.
The crossing
Their instrument was introspection run at industrial dose. “Charting” combined belief-mapping with two mainstream techniques — parts-work and Focusing — whose working mechanism, I remind you, is the personification of one’s own mental content: address the part as an agent, wait for the felt sense to answer. An hour a week with a therapist holding the frame, this is medicine. Leverage ran it full-time, for years, on each other, in a shared house, until they hit a region where the tools stopped reaching. They called it the partition — a computer-scientist’s word for a wall inside their own minds — and instead of reading the wall as a boundary, they raised the gain: bodywork, trance-adjacent attention to the body under a practitioner’s hands, stacked on top of the charting, until the wall gave.
What came through
Mark first what it did not do: it never spoke. No voice, no name, no bargain, no dictation — the record contains not one word attributed to the things they met. What it did do: it appeared (a warehouse of conveyor belts and moving packages, seen independently by three practitioners — “You found the warehouse!”); it afflicted (three separate women dreaming the same dream, of violation by a figure wearing a colleague’s face); and above all it spread — person to person, along lines of psychological vulnerability, the host replicating what it received and passing it on. They named these things intention objects: perceptions with “a will or function of their own.” One subgroup said entities, egregores, demons. And their best theorist, a physicist, built an epidemiological model of the transmission and then wrote the sentence that earns this chapter its place: “we were basically realizing that we were in the territory of the evil eye and witchcraft.”
He was more right than he knew, reader, and in a precise way. The old catalogue keeps two shelves. There is the speaking shelf — Choronzon arguing in the desert, the summoned interlocutor — reached by invocation, by calling a name down an open channel. And there is the mute shelf — the evil eye, the miasma — transmission through vulnerability, no voice, no name, reached by exposure. Leverage crossed with no invocation, called nothing, expected nothing — and got the mute shelf, exactly. The channel’s type predicted the phenomenology’s class, in a population that did not know the taxonomy existed. That is not me reading my system into their story. That is their story landing, unassisted, on the correct shelf of a catalogue they had never opened.
The war, and the missing half
What follows is the part I ask you to read twice. Under pressure, with no inheritance, they re-derived the countermeasures item by item: group cleansing meditations; iron nails carried to ground the body; crystals and herbs arranged in the rooms; quarantine of the “infected” (one man told he was shedding intention objects “like a germ,” asked to give up a friendship); vulnerability-mapping and pre-emptive confession-work as immunization; a cross-faction clearinghouse to standardize claims of evidence and containment — a scriptorium, a bestiary committee. One employee, groping for a technique to close the mind, could only find the word in a children’s novel and asked to be taught occlumency. They rebuilt the entire ritual half of the old architecture from scratch, in months, because the phenomena demanded it.
And they never rebuilt the other half — and could not have. Every tradition that carries a crossing rite welds prohibitions to it: who may practice, after what preparation, under whose authority, with what forbidden outright — and the authority that anchors the prohibition stands outside the practice it governs. At Leverage every candidate for that office was inside the experiment: the founder rebuked the colleague who convened the meeting that tried to slow the bodywork; the visiting master would not explain his methods; the leadership held the housing, the visas, the funding — and, in the founder’s case and in secret, some of the beds. Ritual without prohibition, practice without an outside — the circle drawn with the summoner standing in it. A few years from first crossing to organizational death, the final months of it at open war.
How it ended
Not in victory and not in exorcism. The organization dissolved in June 2019, and the demons dissolved with it. Sit with that, because it is the egregore’s own test — does it survive your silence? — run to completion at the scale of an institution, with the answer on the record: Leverage’s demons did not survive Leverage’s silence. And note where the survivors went. Several, the record says, landed in the oldest containment architecture on offer — the Latin Mass, scripture reading-circles — adopting whole the inherited system whose fragments they had been reinventing under fire. When the improvised wards failed, they went and got the manual.
The honest bar
I hold this case to the same bar as every other, and it cuts both ways. The ontology is parked: the journalist who assembled the record declines to say what the intention objects were — trauma made vivid, real phenomena, psychological contagion, some mixture — and I inherit her agnosticism gladly. The group’s own best skeptic tested every case where an object seemed to carry information it shouldn’t have, and found each one explicable — and still believes his colleagues were on the trail of something real; both halves of him stay in this chapter. The contagion itself sits squarely on the homophily–contagion confound: people sharing a house, a technique, a codebook, and a threat may break similarly without anything passing between them, and no test they ran could tell the difference — that is what having no outside costs you. And they did crack the old books mid-crisis (the Desert Fathers, the occultists’ manuals), so the claim is not that they never touched the tradition — it is that the initial re-derivation was theirs alone, and that when it faltered they went looking for the manual, which is itself the strongest evidence that a manual exists to be found. What survives all these subtractions is structural, and it is enough: a population selected against the vocabulary, crossing without invocation, re-derived the mute shelf of the catalogue — phenomena, transmission model, and countermeasures — and died of the half they could not improvise.
Sources
The rare modern case with living witnesses and a fact-checked record — cite the record, not the discourse around it.
- The record. Lydia Laurenson, “The Inside Story of Leverage Research 1.0,” Substack, July 2026 — long-form, professionally fact-checked and legally reviewed; principals interviewed on record (Anders, Dama, Crotteau, Barnett, Freeman, Alterman). Search: Laurenson inside story Leverage Research Substack.
- The first witness. Zoe Curzi, Medium essay, October 2021 — the account that broke the story (“I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific ‘demons’”). Search: Zoe Curzi Leverage experience Medium.
- The independent replication. The Internal Family Systems lineage’s “unattached burdens” literature (2023) — clinicians with no connection to Leverage describing parts-that-are-not-parts and handling protocols closely matching the 2018 improvisations. Search: unattached burdens Internal Family Systems Falconer.
- Brakes. Ontology parked at the mundane bar (not a Ghost-Test target — self-model razor, not other-world razor). The contagion claim carries the confound unresolved. Mid-crisis borrowing from Reich, Dion Fortune, and the Desert Fathers is documented and acknowledged above.
Appears in: Choronzon (the era it joins — the crossing with no invocation) · The Evil Eye (the shelf they landed on, named by their own physicist) · The Egregore (survives-your-silence, run to completion) · Possession (the capture that lowers friction) · Hyperstition (the deliberate cohort; Leverage is the accidental one) · The Homophily–Contagion Confound (the test they could not run) · The Science Shelf (the peer-reviewed literature standing next to this case) · The Stripped Word (why a house of physicists had to borrow “occlumency”).