Vincent Trapinaud
In the Farmers’ map, every intense emotion secretes a Honey, and there are three kinds. Ba-Honey comes from heavy emotions lived with no witness: fear, shame, resentment. Hab-Honey comes from light emotions that depend on the outside, like joy or recognition. The Third Honey is not one more emotion: it is the presence that feels while knowing it feels, lucid non-reaction, and it is the only honey the harvest does not know how to take.
Emotions and energy: what exactly are we talking about?
After an argument, you feel drained. After a fit of laughter, something has recharged. Everyday language says it without thinking: a person “wears us out,” a piece of news “lifts us up.” We talk about our emotions as if they were a substance that flows and gets spent.
The trilogy Les Fermiers (The Farmers), currently published in French, takes this intuition seriously and pushes it all the way to a hypothesis. Every intense emotion, it says, produces something. Robert Monroe, who explored states of consciousness for decades, reports having learned that this production has a name and a use: the Loosh, an emotional energy consumed by others. The first book picks up that thread (see Robert Monroe’s Loosh). The second book, Le Troisième Miel (The Third Honey), goes one step further: it says this honey is not one. There are three, which share neither the same nature, nor the same value, nor the same fate.
Before going further, the frame has to be set, because everything that follows is a map, not a belief.
Ba-Honey: the energy of heavy emotions, produced by default
The first book gives the simplest definition: Ba-Honey is the energy produced by heavy emotions. Fear, shame, sadness, rage, despair. A dense energy, which concentrates easily and lingers long after the event that gave rise to it.
The second book, however, corrects an image that is too spectacular. We imagine suffering as an event: a breakup, a disaster. But what is rare does not feed a Farm. Ba-Honey is first of all the base production, the kind that drips every day, quietly.
A production calendar
Follow an ordinary day the way you would read a production calendar. The alarm goes off, and before you are even fully there, a clench closes somewhere between the stomach and the throat. On the commute, the jaw tightens on something you should have said yesterday. The phone buzzes, and before you have read anything, a small jolt. At noon, you eat without tasting. In the evening, you do not rest: you collapse. And production does not stop with sleep: it is the background tension that wakes so many people at three in the morning, heart a little fast, gripped by a worry with no object.
None of these moments is a drama. Put end to end, they form a continuous flow. Book II speaks of an “invisible tax levied on every hour,” paid without any feeling of paying it. The first book uses the same word, calendar, on the scale of collective history, while making clear that this logic needs no conspiracy: all it takes is a system that optimizes, without knowing it, for whatever holds attention most.
Why the body never stops producing
Book II’s answer is first of all a bodily one. The body produces because it is held. A permanently contracted muscle keeps the nervous system on alert, and a nervous system on alert manufactures fear, irritation, mistrust, just as an idling engine still produces heat. This holding settled in during childhood, a successful protection that never came undone. It is what Wilhelm Reich called armor (see character armor according to Reich). That is why Ba-Honey needs no occasion: you can have an enviable life and still secrete, beneath the surface, a diffuse anguish with no apparent cause.
It has many faces: background fear, shame, resentment, cynicism disguised as lucidity, constant comparison, and above all numbness. Because feeling nothing does not stop production. “The living dead produce as much as the tormented,” the author writes; they simply do it in silence, and call it being fine.
The hurtful remark in a meeting
Book II gives an example that will serve as the thread of this whole article. In a meeting, a man receives a hurtful remark. Heat rises in the back of his neck, his jaw tightens, a cutting reply forms on its own, or else he stays silent and broods for three days. At no point has he chosen anything. The wound pulled a lever, the lever produced a reaction. Heat, tension, resentment: Ba-Honey, collected without his noticing. The book sums it up in one dry sentence: he thinks he reacted; he was harvested.
Hab-Honey: why light emotions are “the sweetest trap”
If heavy emotions feed the Farm, the solution seems obvious: produce light emotions. Book II takes this objection head-on.
Hab-Honey is the energy of light emotions. The first book describes it as subtler, more volatile, far less abundant. And it gives it an unexpected function: Hab-Honey is not a luxury granted out of kindness, it is the fertilizer. Exhausted soil no longer produces anything; a humanity with no joy at all would stop producing. So the livestock must regularly glimpse the carrot, enough to get up again tomorrow.
Let us be clear: the book asks no one to distrust their joys. Good hours are good. The problem is not joy, it is its structure. Hab-Honey always comes from outside: a beloved face, a success, a compliment, a sky clearing. Remove the cause, and it goes out. And anything that depends on the outside can be given, taken back, rationed.
The subtlest mechanism is the chase. You run after something: the waiting produces tension, and so Ba-Honey. You get it: a rush of Hab-Honey, brief and delicious. Then the glow fades, and you set off again. With every lap, both jars fill up. Ba-Honey and Hab-Honey are not enemies, the book says: they are the two hands of the same milking. Our screens have taken this art very far, with the little red heart delivered at unpredictable intervals (we come back to it in social media, anxiety and anger).
Book II proposes a “merciless” test for recognizing Hab-Honey: does this joy survive the disappearance of its cause? If it goes out the second the compliment falls silent, it was a conditional joy.
The Third Honey: feeling while knowing that you feel
Ba-Honey and Hab-Honey have one thing in common, and it is what makes them harvestable: they are produced in the dark. Whoever makes them does not see themselves making them. The Third Honey is defined by the opposite.
It is not at the top of the ladder of emotions, above joy the way joy would be above fear. It is not on the ladder at all. It is not fear, it is presence to fear. It is not the anger that sweeps you away, it is the clear awareness of anger as it rises, passes through and subsides. The first book calls it the “energy of conscious lucidity” and gives it another, more practical name: lucid non-reaction.
Back to the meeting. The second time, the same remark comes in. The same heat rises in the back of the neck. But something in him sees it rising: “Ah, anger. That’s how it heats up, behind the eyes. That’s how it wants a sentence.” He has not repressed the anger. But between the sensation and the lever, a space “one breath wide” has opened. In that space, for the first time, there is a choice: to speak, or not. Whatever he decides, what he produces is no longer stolen Ba-Honey. It is, the book says, “honey that has watched itself flow.”
Remember the most important point: the Third Honey is not made from beautiful emotions. It is made from anything, including fear, pain, the worst of days, as long as it is fully felt and fully known. It means going through all things “with someone at home.”
Why can the harvest do nothing against it? Because it needs the dark. According to the Farmers’ hypothesis, the moment the bee knows it is making honey, the nature of the honey changes. Awareness does not attack the machine: it makes it visible.
Lucid non-reaction: neither indifference nor stoicism
The word “non-reaction” invites misunderstanding: people hear coldness. That is exactly what both books rule out. The first says it in so many words: not indifference, not coldness, not the Stoic detachment that cuts off emotions to avoid suffering. Lucid non-reaction is not an absence of emotion; it is an emotion that is no longer automatically converted into fuel.
Book II draws the line precisely. There is a way of taking distance that has nothing to do with awakening: looking at your life as if through a pane of glass, feeling things arrive muted, filtered, faraway. That is not the Third Honey, it is armor, and one of the subtlest kinds. The person who watches themselves from afar so as not to have to feel produces Ba-Honey like everyone else, “in a more elegant and colder way.”
The Third Honey does the opposite: it does not create distance, it brings closer. It mutes nothing, it intensifies, because nothing is filtered anymore. You are entirely in the wave, and you know it is a wave. Feeling everything, and being swept away by nothing.
As for the Stoics, book II gives them their due on one point: their distinction between what depends on us and what does not describes the trap of Hab-Honey very precisely, that joy whose switch we have handed to the outside. But the Farmers’ answer is not to reduce feeling. It is to inhabit it. Book II gives the example of a woman sitting with her dying father, who stays present to the hand she is holding, to her own tears. She did not suffer less. But, the author writes, her suffering “fed no one but a love.” The awakened person is not someone who no longer suffers; it is someone whose suffering no longer feeds the Farm.
“It happens now, or not at all”
Once the map is understood, a new trap appears, the subtlest of all: making the Third Honey a goal. Watching for signs of your awakening, measuring your progress, hoping for the day when lucidity will be acquired. The first book sees in this the same retention device, simply moved inside. And that waiting is a reaction, and therefore as harvestable as any other.
This is also why you should not go to war against your Ba-Honey. Hunting down your anxiety, forcing yourself into serenity, blaming yourself for suffering: each of these gestures adds tension to tension. The Farm, book II notes, does not care whether you produce Ba-Honey out of despair or out of fierce determination to stop producing it; either way, the jar fills. Forced positive thinking does not dry it up either: it buries it.
And if presence keeps slipping away from you, it is not a personal failure. The book insists: it is neither a lack of willpower nor a lack of spirituality, it is a mechanism written into the body, which can be understood and slowly loosened. Berating yourself for failing to “be in the moment” is adding “Ba-Honey to Ba-Honey.”
You may already have known it without naming it: before a landscape, in a shared silence, those moments when you were simply there. Book II suggests learning to return to them by a known path, rather than by chance.
How can you tell which honey you are producing right now?
This is neither a test nor a technique that would guarantee anything: just a simple observation, to do now, as you read.
- Notice what is there. An emotion, even a faint one: impatience, weariness, curiosity, worry. If nothing shows up, notice the nothing. Numbness is information too.
- Look for it in the body. Where is it? Jaw, throat, belly, shoulders, breath? An emotion lived in the dark can often be recognized by this: you think it, but you do not feel it.
- Name it without identifying with it. Book II suggests a tiny shift: from “I am anxious” to “there is anxiety passing through me.” This move, from identity to experience, is according to the author “exactly the threshold of the Third Honey.”
- Ask about the source. If it is a pleasant emotion, apply the book’s test: would it last if its cause disappeared? If it is a heavy emotion: is it responding to something happening now, or is it running on empty?
- Notice who is noticing. For a few seconds, there was the emotion, and there was what was watching it. Do not try to prolong that moment. It is enough that it happened.
A rough guide: if the emotion sweeps you away with no witness, that is the slope of Ba-Honey; if it is pleasant but hangs on a condition, that is the slope of Hab-Honey; if you feel it fully while knowing that you feel it, something else is happening. Do not grade yourself. An observation that judges itself turns back into tension.
The three honeys in the cards of the Atanor
The Atanor, the deck of 24 cards born of this universe, is built on this same distinction. Each card bears the name of a state that secretes the Honey, and each one says two things. The first formula, “It is said of you…,” shows what is harvested: the habitual slope, the lever pulled without being seen, the honey flowing in the dark. The second, “This card invites you to…,” shows what transforms: not a better emotion, but a way of going through this one.
The whole passage toward the Third Honey lies in this movement: first see what is being taken, then stay present enough for the nature of what is produced to change. The card predicts nothing. It gives sight, never power.
One card in particular stands at the threshold of the Third Honey: card 21, Silence. It helps us settle, observe, wait in silence. And book II describes lived presence as a new silence, intervals between thoughts in which you perceive without commenting. Silence is not the Third Honey itself. It is its door, the space one breath wide in which the automatic reaction can, for once, not take place.
To go further, the page The Honey presents the full hierarchy of the Farmers and lets you draw a card to look at both its sides. And the second book, Le Troisième Miel (in French), unfolds what this article sketches. The underlying thesis stays the same, and it is a modest one: learning to produce less and less of the first two honeys, and more and more of the last, one emotion at a time, now.
