This morning I arose quite early before dawn because I couldn’t sleep. Lying in the living room, something slowly emerged within the back of my mind as I read the morning news and it revealed something that I’ve been struggling with for quite some time.
For a while now, I’ve emphasized time and again that I don’t feel like I’ve been able to create some sense of “solid ground” to build my work off of. My main excuse for this has basically been that I don’t have an elaborate and complex enough system to “map out” all of my thoughts and if I could create such a system (using concepts maps or AI to do it for me), then suddenly everything would be easier.
This morning I realized that was a lie I had been telling myself to hide the fear that was actually holding me back and standing in the way of any real progression in my work.
You see my thoughts aren’t complex as a whole, they’re actually fairly easy to grasp once you understand the metaphoric narrative encompassing them all. What’s complex is believing the basic foundational elements of them. And that’s where my fear lies. I’m afraid of what people will think of me when I communicate these foundational elements.
What this is telling me is that I’ve got unresolved issues with belonging and potentially even my self-esteem as well. And until I can get over these fears and step into my own wilderness within myself (as Brené Brown refers to it in her book about True Belonging), I’ll never fully accept myself and be able to progress any further with my work.
So what is my basic fear that’s holding me back here? It’s that people will think I’m crazy (which I’ve mentioned in the past).
Why will people think I’m crazy? Because the first foundational element is realizing that we don’t see reality directly as it is but instead we perceive a mental map of reality, aka worldview, which acts like a game interface to help us interact with it and navigate our lives.
But wait! It doesn’t end there! It get’s crazier! The next foundational element is that we can level up this game interface as we progress through our lives which means everyone is perceiving life and reality from different levels of consciousness and awareness. So if you find it hard to believe that we don’t see reality directly, you’ll probably take even more offence that people somehow perceive reality at different levels, implying some sort of superiority for people at higher levels (which actually isn’t the case once you understand the paradox and deeper meaning of it).
But what’s hilarious about this all is that I actually communicated these things years ago when I was on Twitter (see quote below) but I basically haven’t really progressed any farther in publicly communicating my work beyond this point. Well, other than saying “Life is an MMORPG” which really doesn’t go into much detail so you can understand it as whole.
Again, until I can step past these fears and communicate the foundation of my work in greater detail, I will not be able to progress forward with it and scaffold on the rest of it on top of it. As Joseph Campbell would say, I need to slay my dragons if I want to progress further on my inner journey and adventure.
How Creativity Fits Into The “Big Picture”
1) We don’t see reality. We see a mental map of reality called a worldview.
2) Throughout our lives we evolve in stages of expanding world views.
3) Creativity is how we transition and transform ourselves between these stages.
1) We don’t see reality. We see a mental map of reality called a worldview.” Check out the latest books by @davegray and @rbeaulotto to make sense of the seemingly unbelievable.
2) Throughout our lives we evolve in stages of expanding world views.” Check out the latest book by @fred_laloux to learn more of how evolving through these stages increases our capacity to embrace more and more complexity.
Think of all stages, achieved through the process of Creativity, as Social Innovation and the current stage we’re collectively working on as more commonly known as The Future of Work. This is how I make sense of my work and the context with which I pursue it.
An Old Tweet of Mine From Twitter
