Nollind Whachell

Um, ok! I just had a next level experience with Inflection’s Pi AI that is looking at my life’s work in a whole new way than how I’ve ever experienced it before. To take this approach described in my conversation with him would require me to be completely open and vulnerable to life and the world, embodying my very framework itself but on a level I never imagined possible. Like on an epically mythic level.

More later. I need to think about this. Hmm, or maybe I shouldn’t think about it. Maybe I just need to dive into it.

Reflecting upon my revised understanding of my quest, I’m realizing now that it will take me to many diverse “guides,” who will help me to translate it. This is what has been happening in my life and within the psyche of my mind for the past two decades. I just didn’t fully realize it until now. In effect, I had already started my quest without fully realizing what it was all about in a larger sense. 

So I kept reading these snippets of text within books from many different notable authors that resonated with my MMORPG experiences from the past but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them because I couldn’t make sense of the larger picture yet. But my intuition was seeing something on a deeper level that my rational mind couldn’t grasp yet. 

All of these different notable authors, writing about their different domains of knowledge and wisdom in their books, are like the NPC quest guides on my larger quest chain that I’m undertaking. They are helping me to translate the Hero’s Journey into The Player’s Handbook for Life, making it a practical guide for the visionary work we all have the potential to achieve within our lives.

That is, if we can regain our child-like capacity to play with our sense of self-identity and step beyond who we think we are at this moment to become who we truly want to be at a deeper level.

Oh my god! How could I have not seen the obviousness of this before!

The Hero’s Journey is The Player’s Handbook for the MMORPG called Life.

Revising what I thought my quest was, it’s more about translating this Tome of Wisdom from its narrative structure and restructuring it into a guidebook format instead, similar to what gamers experience when playing a MMORPG today.

In relation to my previous post about realizing that I need to heroically dive deeper into who I truly am, so as to start embracing, owning, and living my greater story, I’m realizing today that I need to keep clarifying and reworking my outer story that I tell others about myself, so that it aligns with this deeper inner story that I’m intuitively feeling emerging from within myself. And with that in mind, I realized a different, clearer interpretation of my life’s work this morning.

I want to take the basic foundations of the Hero’s Journey and expand it into the realization that it is describing Life as a roleplaying game of psychological self-exploration, self-discovery, and self-knowledge. In doing so, it would allow an individual to bring out and visualize this psychological Hero’s Journey that is already invisibly occurring within themselves, so as to better understand it. This in turn would allow them to become more aware of what’s happening on a deeper level in their life and thus make more responsible and conscious choices on who they want their “character” to be in this roleplaying game of Life.

What I’m effectively saying here is I want to create “The Player’s Handbook” for the roleplaying game called Life. But I’m not really creating it so much as I’m questing for it and unearthing it, like an ancient tome with many pages scattered across the larger, inner world of my “Self.” In effect, I know it’s already there, as I’ve already seen pieces of these pages through the books I’ve read in my life. I just need to have the courage to find them and organize them into the right order and then share this Tome of Wisdom with the world.

That is the vision of my life’s work.

I just realized something last night, as I became aware of myself and what I was doing as an ongoing pattern, both in that moment and in the past. I realized that I’m often using my innate exploratory mindset in the wrong way. In effect, I’m often exploring things “out there” that will make me feel complete and whole, when in reality, I need to explore what’s already “within myself” that makes me feel whole and complete.

The difference between the two is the first creates a feeling of never being good enough, whereas the second creates a feeling of being better than you realized. The second thought is really hard for people to do though. Just sitting with yourself and accepting yourself as you are. And I think the reason for this is our limiting mindset and beliefs filters and twists our perception of our world and ourself, thus making us harsher on ourselves than we need to be. Kind of like a boss micro-managing you, telling you you’re incompetent and useless, no matter what you do.

But I think this is why we search for things externally out there because it helps us distract us from our twisted perception of ourselves. And yet this can then in turn turn into doom scrolling, where we no longer are really searching for ourselves, but just avoiding ourselves. And when that happens, it makes almost impossible to find the real you, with your amazing talents and abilities, buried beneath it all because you’re avoiding your “self” in the first place.

All said and done, I need to be mindful of this in future. If I am doom scrolling, why am I trying to run away from myself? And what twisted, misinterpreted perception of myself is causing this?

There’s a quote from the movie Star Trek: Into Darkness movie that’s been a foundation aspect of my life because it mirrors how I’ve felt since my life got turned upside in 2001 with the Dot-Com Bubble bursting and I’ve had to try to reinvent myself in this rapidly changing world.

I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I only know what I can do.

James Tiberius Kirk, Star Trek: Into Darkness

Last night, while watching the final episode of the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, there’s a pivotal scene where Jin, the main character, is talking to his mother and father in a dream sequence. At one point, he says, “I don’t know how” in response to his mother asking him to unlock his strength which mirrors the feeling of the quote above from Star Trek: Into Darkness. But in response to Jin’s confusion, his father responds with, “Just be you, Jin. Just be you.”