Applying creativity to one’s sense of self to transform oneself, which is also known as vertical development, is not a linear process but rather an emergent one.
You cannot think your way through this as a problem in a tradition sense because your current way of thinking and perceiving is in itself the problem.
In other words, your problem isn’t the problem that you perceive as impeding your way and making you feel stuck. Your perception of your problem (aka your mindset) is what’s actually impeding you.
This mirrors how Alfonso Montuori describes creativity as “getting out of your own way.”
This also mirrors how Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is effectively about “slaying” your old sense of self that stands in your way, so that your newer, larger sense of Self can emerge (i.e. Luke Skywalker slaying Darth Vader in the swamp, only to see his own face behind Darth Vader’s mask).
So to progress one has to instead feel their way through the process, perhaps going around in circles numerous times like within a maze, before something clicks and makes sense from multiple lived experience that are felt and embodied rather than something just explained as knowledge.
If you watch YouTube videos by non-duality teachers like Rupert Spira (who actually doesn’t like to be called a teacher), you will see that that he often uses metaphors to try to help explain things (i.e. actor on a stage). Yet you also see the confusion of his students faces because they are trying to think their way through a process that has to be lived, felt, and experienced, not just thought about, to be understood.
In effect, you can’t fully relate to something you haven’t fully experienced yet.
The way I’ve described this process in the past is like you are exploring newer, unknown terrain within yourself, beyond the edge of your current sense of self, as this newer terrain represents an expanded sense of Self.
And this exploration is usually done through a portal which represents the ontological dissonance within your life.
So it’s not just a process of stepping through this portal into an unknown space and mapping it grid by grid in a linear, rational way because it feels more like you’re manually mapping it within very dense fog that makes it difficult see the relationship between everything to make sense of the terrain as a whole via triangulation.
To put this another way, this isn’t simply a process of just doing something. It’s more a process of enduring something.
So the question that is the quest before you is this.
Can you hold space for yourself over an extended period of time for enough newer experiences to be collected, so that they can cluster and crystallize, finally making sense of your Self as a larger whole?
And the reason you have to hold space for yourself is because you are continually fighting with your “self” in being within an uncertain, unknown space that initially feels wrong and unnatural on every level, even though this transformation is a natural process of change within life.
This is the experience of what ontological dissonance feels like, as it’s like cognitive dissonance but applied to your entire life and entire sense of being as a whole.
This is why I use Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a lens for this but I’ve extended it into perceiving life as a role-playing game because the language of the Hero’s Journey already mirrors the language of role-playing games (i.e. adventure, heroes, quests, monsters, treasure, etc).
And this touches upon something else that’s important.
When a person goes through such a transformative life experience, they may feel like their experience is completely unique and thus no one has ever experienced it before.
Thus they may give a unique “name” to this experience and process because they believe it is something “new” that no one else has experienced before.
But it isn’t.
These transformational life experiences have been going on for multiple millennia, described by different cultures and civilizations in different ways and that’s what Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a monomyth is an embodiment of.
It is a fictional story, an allegory, that relays truths about life.
And the main truth about life that it is trying to communicate is what transformational growth feels like.
In effect, Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey embodies creativity applied to one’s sense of self as psychological development (aka vertical development).
This is why previously I would describe the framework of perceiving “life as a role-playing game” as “my” own framework.
But it’s not really “my” framework.
All I’m really doing is giving a new perspective to something old, known, and practiced as a scaffolding framework that many others have used different names to describe the experience of traversing and transforming oneself through an uncertain unknown.
But this is what I believe is actually unique about this universal experience.
Each person, through their own transformational growth process, can effectively helping humanity to perceive this old, timeless, universal experience in a new way.
In effect, the articulation of each person’s unique experience of this universal experience is each of our Hero’s Journey itself.
It is giving time and space for oneself for the creative process to emerge at its own pace, rather than trying to force it, which only collapses the emergent flow of the experience.
So again, there is no shortcut or bypass to this transformational process to speed it up, as forcing it only slows it down and stops it completely.
Rather it is a process that one has to immerse oneself within and sit within it for the creative emergence to occur.
And yet, the very act of most people will be to do the exact opposite, as I have experienced with others in the past.
Most people will not want to go through a process that does not have a certain outcome because they will not want to waste their time on something that doesn’t have a certain outcome.
Yet note how this mirrors with how many people approach life.
Most people want to figure out life before they live it.
“I need to figure out my passion and purpose first, so that I can live my life in the right way.”
Yet the paradox that leads to the breakthrough paradigm is that one figures out one’s life by actually living it, not thinking about it.
This effectively embodies what I mean when I say, “the adventure of your life.”
You will only make sense of your life by stepping into the uncertain unknown of it first and then reflecting back upon it (which mirrors Steve Job’s quote about “connecting the dots”).
This as a whole embodies the three primary perspectives of “change” as an adult which one can transition through by transforming oneself as an adult.
The first perspective sees change as threat to be avoided.
The second perspective see change as an opportunity.
The third perspective sees change as the creative ground of life itself.
This third perspective is effectively perceiving life as a playful, never-ending adventure.
But again, it can’t be explained.
It can only be felt, lived, and experienced to be understood.
This is why what I’ve explained here is just a waypoint in my own ongoing never-ending journey of understanding and making sense of this all, as I will have to continue to immerse myself within more lived experiences to widen my understanding of it as a whole some more.
