If you’re wondering why in my previous posts I decided to describe why vertical development is important and why vertical development training should be accessible to everyone first, before describing what vertical development is, hopefully the reason for this is obvious. Often times, the whyof something is more important and compelling than the what of it is.
Like if I tell you what vertical development is first, you’ll be like, “Ok, that’s interesting but why would this matter to me?” Therefore, I spun things around and explained why vertical development was important (hopefully in an emotional way that connected with you) and why the training of it should be accessible to everyone.
The other primary reason for doing this is that it’s really hard to explain whatvertical development is in a way that will connect with you, unless I can bridgesome emotional experience within your life that relates to it and helps you to understand what it means to you personally. This more than anything is what I struggled with when I first started learning about vertical development. That being understanding the meaning of it.
It Goes Beyond Skills & Knowledge
So what is vertical development then? To explain this, let’s first describe what it is not. In fact, let’s just step back and describe what most people think the word “development” often conventionally means to them.
Usually most people think of the word “development” as meaning the acquiring of skills and knowledge. It is but specifically with regards to what’s known as horizontal development.
An easy way to visualize this is thinking of information going “in” to you, like you’re a cup that you’re filling up. This is the conventional way people see learning. You read or are taught something, you acquire it, and you can use it again later.
Another way of thinking about this is thinking of this type of knowledge gained as explicit knowledge. It can be easily transferred by word of mouth, usually from an expert on the subject.
It Transforms Your Perception & Identity
Now vertical development is radically different than horizontal development. It’s about growing the capacity and awareness of your mind, so that you can understand the complexity of life in a much deeper way than what you might have believed or interpreted it to be before.
An easy way to visualize this is to imagine you being able to increase the size of your cup through the transformation of it. So while horizontal development is informational learning that adds to “what we know”, vertical development is transformational learning that changes “how we know”.
Another way of thinking about this transformational learning that occurs within vertical development is realizing it is more about tacit knowledge. What this means is that it is knowledge that can’t be easily transferred via word of mouth but it actually has to be experienced to be fully understood, usually with the assistance of a mentor who has already experienced it themselves.
If it’s still not evident about the difference between horizontal and vertical development, let me try to narrow this down and clarify it even further. Vertical development relates to your perception of yourself, your identity, and the world around you, encompassing your assumptions and beliefs, as well as your needs and values. It therefore encompasses what you believe is possibleand impossible.
It Upgrades Your GPS for Navigating Life
Now let me give you some more comprehensive ways to visualize vertical development, with the first way being visualizing it as way to upgrade your GPS for navigating life.
Basically think of your perception of yourself, your identity, and the world around you, which encompasses your assumption, beliefs, and values, as being your existing worldview. Think of it like a mental map within your mind. But again, as the saying goes, “the map is not the territory,” even though we might think and believe it is.
So when we undergo vertical development, we are able to expand our worldview and mental map of the world (represented by us as a cup), understanding it in a broader and deeper way. Why this is essential is because without doing this, we may face challenges within our life that are beyond our comprehension of what’s possible and thus may think they are impossible.
But they’re not impossible. We just need to upgrade our internal map so that we can see a way to bridge these challenges and drive across them into a whole new world of possibilities that previously we thought were impossible.
At the same time though, if we don’t upgrade our mental map via vertical development, the opposite can occur as well. In effect, the world will change around us and it will be operating in a different way, yet we are still utilizing our old map which no longer works. Thus we can take a turn and suddenly we’ve driven into a lake of trouble without being aware of it because we just implicitly trusted the way things previously worked, even though they’re not working that way anymore.
It Upgrades Your Operating System & Interface
Another way to visualize vertical development is to visual it as way to upgrade the operating system and interface of your mind.
For example, back when we just had MS DOS, the operating system was quite basic, yet still functional, primarily just using a keyboard for input. Yet if you wanted to do any sort of drawing or artwork, your capabilities and options were extremely limited.
Today with operating systems like Windows and Mac, which give us a mouse as a powerful input and an upgraded graphical “windowed” interface, our creative capacities are dramatically increased.
The same applies to seeing vertical development in this same way. By upgrading your mind via vertical development, you gain more experiential inputs to understanding life and in turn gain greater creative capacities for it. Most important of all though, your interface for interacting with life is dramatically improved, allowing you to perceive things that others might lack the awareness of.
It Feels Like Freedom in a Whole New Way
Now to close off and wrap this all up, I’d like to describe to you a way of visualizing vertical development that has been around for ages.
The Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic describes The Allegory of the Cave to help us understand “the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature.” He does this by getting us to imagine people who for their entire lives have been chained by their necks to a lower inner wall within a cave and can only see the outer wall of the cave in front of them.
Unbeknownst to these prisoners, behind the lower inner wall that they are chained to are people who walk along it with a large fire behind them which causes their shadows to be cast on the outer cave wall that the prisoners can see. Only the shadows and sounds that these people make form the effective reality that these prisoners experience, so they believe it to be the “truth” and their world.
But imagine if one of these prisoners is released and was able to look around, seeing the fire and people behind them, and then, even more so, was forced upwards out of the cave and into the sunlight. Wouldn’t that whole experience feel not overwhelmingly threatening and disorienting, as their existing reality up until that time was just the shadows. Yet the fire and sunlight are unknown things to them, since they had no previous experience and thus comprehension of them.
But let’s say the escaped prisoner finally begins to reason and understand what’s going on and realize that there is a much larger world out there than they had initially believed. Might they not want to go back to the cave and help the other prisoners there escape from their predicament as well? But when the escapee does so, explaining the larger world that awaits them, most of the prisoners might think them crazy (and perhaps might even try to kill the escapee) because the prisoners cannot comprehend and believe the larger reality that the escapee has perceived, seen, and understood because it seems impossible for them to do so without experiencing it for themselves firsthand.
It Feels Scary, Exhilarating, & Adventurous
What I’ve just described is a way to understand what vertical development feels like. Initially it can feel like a very threatening experience because you’re coming up against things that you’ve never experienced before and thus you won’t be able to comprehend them at first. And thus as usual, we often fear what we don’t know.
But over time, if one becomes curious to the experience, one may begin to question their existing assumptions and beliefs about their previous perceivedsense of reality and in turn openly embrace a quest for a much larger one.