Month: October 2025

This is strange.

It’s like to fully embody what I want to express as my life’s work, I need to actually embody my developmental journey as one within my inner terrain, as though I was actually exploring and expanding my inner world(view).

So I would be relaying real experiences but relaying them like a fictional story, similar to how a myth is a fictional story that relays truths about life.

Where is this coming from?

Wait, does this have something to do with me reading about how Alis Anagnostakis, a coach for vertical development, is exploring fantasy writing?

Perhaps. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do. But my work seems more transdisciplinary in that I’m wanting to create something within the space between all these things as an integration of them, rather than exploring them as separate domains. In doing so, it feels like it would integrate all of the knowledge and experiences I’ve gained throughout my life in turn, as per the following statement, thus letting my life come full circle.

From playing within imaginary worlds to imagining a world of play.

Wait. That reminds me of a quote at the end of the book The Cluetrain Manifesto which was the catalyst for me exploring a new way of working, as well as the future of work, over two decades ago.

Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.

Yeah. Imagine that.

The question though is does one fully immerse oneself within this liminal, imaginative space or does one just touch upon it with the occasional keyword to bridge the gap.

For example, as I’ve expressed before, I love Richard Barrett’s quote below because of the dungeon keyword.

Only when you reach the higher stages of development, when you feel safe in the harbor of your soul, will your ego be willing to surrender the keys to the dungeonwhere your darkest fears and unmet needs are locked.

Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching

As an example of what I mean, in terms of vertical development and expressing the three primary plateaus of the mind as (per Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan’s work), below are what I’ve named these three mindsets, as to me they mythically embody what I feel like their experiences are like. And I even created a map in the past to show this (using a mapping service called Inkarnate).

The Walled City = Socialized Mind

The Borderlands = Self-Authoring Mind

The Great Wilderness = Self-Transforming Mind

For example, The Walled City as an embodiment of a Socialized Mind is about fitting in within the roles, beliefs, and expectations of society to survive, thus allowing you to be accepted and feel like you belong to it. So there are lots of guards walking about it covered in masked helms and medieval armour which embodies the highly defensive nature of the environment where people aren’t very vulnerable and open to one another. In addition, everyone there fills conventional societal roles, in the sense that people try to avoid stepping out of place.

But as an example of where I’m at right now, I could express something like the following for my own journey.

I’ve been taking deeper and deeper forays into The Great Wilderness on almost a daily basis over the past month but the complex dense foliage is making it difficult for me to find and carry in the gear I need to setup a base of operations. Or at least so I thought. The past few days, I’ve decided to leave behind a lot of my gear as it’s just seems like unnecessary dead weight now. Because of this, I feel much more agile and able to traverse the tricky but wondrous terrain here. In doing so, I feel like I’m ready to start building a sanctuary here in the wilderness, perhaps even one in the tree tops, so at to become more acclimatized to its environment.

Why am I doing this though, you might be wondering?

Well I’m not alone in thinking about this. For example, I heard Susanne Cook-Greuter say in a video that she wants to do something similar, using I believe the Watership Down setting of rabbits to help people better understand vertical development and thus make it more accessible to more people.

I mean this is the crux of it, as I’ve said before. Explaining vertical development only gets you so far. You have to really experience it to truly understand it. And that’s from someone like myself who has spent at least a decade exploring it but feels like they’ve barely touched the surface of it.

That’s funny though. These thoughts just made me think of when I played Dungeons & Dragons as a young adult. It’s pretty much the same thing. You can explain what a role-playing game is to others but to really understand it, you need to dive in, try to play it, and actually experience it for yourself.

I guess that’s what I’m trying to achieve here. I want to create a playful way for people to bring to the surface their own inner adventure of their lives as a vertical development process, so that there’s a framework that people can more easily share their experience with, particularly if they’re familiar with RPGs or MMORPGs. And in doing so, it effectively creates a peer-based support group for the process which is effectively a “guild” that is a community of practice (and inquiry).

All that said though, I guess that’s the answer to my questions above. For me to truly know which approach to take, I actually have to take action and experience them both. Only then will I know for sure.

This embodies the meaning of the maze within the hero’s journey. You actually have to make choices and go down certain paths to determine if they’re dead-ends or not.

This also reveals the primary difference between how life is a role-playing game and how traditional role-playing games work. In traditional role-playing games, you choose and know your role and class before you start the game. Within life, you actually have to adventure and live your life first to understand your unique role and class. This is similar to young adults trying to figure out their passion and purpose before they’ve lived their life (because society places expectations on them to do so). It just doesn’t work that way though. You have start living your life first to reflectivelyfigure out your passion and purpose afterwards.

That said though, it’s also recognizing that you’ve already been playing within this role-playing game called Life for most of your life, without fully being aware of it.

Imagine that!

You’re playing within a game right now but you’re just not aware of it.

Why? Because you’re so immersed within it, you’re like a fish in water.

In effect, just like how a person can put on VR headset and feel immersed within a virtual environment, so too are we immersed within a virtual environment which is a representation of the information being transmitted to our brains via our senses.

To put this more simply, we don’t see reality.

In fact, we’ve evolved this way on purpose.

What we call reality is, in fact, our perception of it.

Beau Lotto helps explain this within his book Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently.

The answer is that we don’t see reality. The world exists. It’s just that we don’t see it. We do not experience the world as it is because our brain didn’t evolve to do so. It’s a paradox of sorts: Your brain gives you the impression that your perceptions are objectively real, yet the sensory processes that make perception possible actually separate you from ever accessing that reality directly. Our five senses are like a keyboard to a computer—they provide the means for information from the world to get in, but they have very little to do with what is then experienced in perception.

Beau Lotto, Deviate

Others can also help us understand this from different perspectives as well.

Dave Gray describes how our beliefs form our perception of reality, using the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

This is what the story of the blind men and the elephant is all about. We are all blind. Reality is like the elephant. We may be able to grasp pieces of the truth, but the whole truth about reality is unknowable.

Reality is something that is out there. It has a concrete existence, whether you believe it or not. A belief is something you hold in your mind, a kind of map or model of that external reality. But just as maps and models can be wrong, so can beliefs. And just as following the wrong map can get you into dangerous places, a wrong belief can get you into trouble.

When people confuse their beliefs with reality, they get into arguments and conflicts, sometimes even wars.

Dave Gray, Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think

Donald Hoffman helps us to understand this from the perspective of seeing life as a video game whereby we don’t see reality directly but rather we have evolved to see “fitness payoffs” which help us to survive and evolve in turn.

Think of life as a video game.

In a video game, you have to try to grab as many points as quickly as you can at the level you’re at. And if you get enough points in the minimal time, you might get to the next level. If you don’t, you die.

And the idea is that life is like that. It’s like a video game, but instead of the points in the game, we have fitness payoffs.

Donald Hoffman, Truth vs Reality: How we evolved to survive, not to see what’s really there

Perhaps the most famous perspective of this is Plato’s allegory of the cave which he described in his work Republic around 375 BC, written as a dialogue between the famous greek philosopher Socrates and his brother Glaucon.

In the allegory, Plato describes people who have spent their entire lives chained by their necks and ankles in front of an inner wall with a view of the empty outer wall of the cave. They observe the shadows projected onto the outer wall by objects carried behind the inner wall by people who are invisible to the chained “prisoners” and who walk along the inner wall with a fire behind them, creating the shadows on the inner wall in front of the prisoners. The “sign bearers” pronounce the names of the objects, the sounds of which are reflected near the shadows and are understood by the prisoners as if they were coming from the shadows themselves.

Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not the direct source of the images seen. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.

Allegory of the Cave, Wikipedia

In fact, if you’re familiar with the movie The Matrix, you might remember Morpheus mirroring a quote that sounds very similar to how these inmates react within the cave when presented with the opportunity to escape it.

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Morpheus, The Matrix

Now while this perceptual “Matrix” we are within ourselves is not so much our “enemy,” since it is a simulation of our own evolutionary creation, it is important to become aware of it so that we don’t become trapped and stuck within it ourselves, like prisoners within the cave or people within The Matrix.

Fortunately, Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American philosopher, can assist us with this, when he said the following.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

Alfred Korzybski

Donald Hoffman himself mirrors this quote by describing how using this map is like using a useful computer interface.

So I don’t take the icon literally. It’s not literally true about what’s in the reality. But I do take it seriously. I would not drag that icon to the trash can carelessly. If I drag the icon to the trash can, I could lose all of my work. So I take my icons seriously, but not literally.

Donald Hoffman, Truth vs Reality: How we evolved to survive, not to see what’s really there

What I find fascinating about this all is that if you understand what myths are in terms of Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology, they work very similarly.

Myths are fictional stories that communicate truths about life.

So if you believe myths to be true and literal, just like you might believe your perception is actually reality, then you’re completely missing the entire point of what they’re trying to communicate to you.

But how can we take all of this knowledge now and actually put it to use?

We can do so by beginning to see life as a game.

Again not literally. But more ontologically, to understand the true nature of life.

To do so, let’s get the help of an American academic by the name of James P. Carse to assist us, using his book Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility.

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

To summarize the meaning of these two types of games that we are playing with life, Carse is describing how there are at least two primary mindsets within life. One is focused on competition and conclusion, while the other is focused on continuation and evolution.

What I would like to now propose in presenting all of this knowledge is to take a step further and see a much bigger picture of life as a whole.

Life is an overarching game in which the different levels of it are each their own smaller game within the larger game.

Let’s jump back to Donald Hoffman’s quote to help us absorb what this means.

Think of life as a video game.

In a video game, you have to try to grab as many points as quickly as you can at the level you’re at. And if you get enough points in the minimal time, you might get to the next level. If you don’t, you die.

Donald Hoffman, Truth vs Reality: How we evolved to survive, not to see what’s really there

But while Hoffman is speaking from a physical life perspective (in terms of passing on what you’ve learnt to your offspring before you die), I’d like to propose a twist and present life from a psychological perspective of meaning instead.

Life is an overarching larger game whereby when you collect enough experience points, you are able to level up to the next level, and in doing so, the game changes.

Or to put it another way, when you level up within life, you’re able to shift from playing finite games to infinite games.

But to finish things off, I’d like to throw in a paradoxical kicker related to something Hoffman said, which I will later elaborate on, especially with regard to its meaning.

Levelling up initially feels like you’re dying.

My life is bursting with meaning.

Or as Bernardo Kastrup describes it, it is “pregnant with meaning.”

He actually aptly describes it because often at times, when one is experiencing growth and development, it often feels like one is dying in birthing a larger sense of one’s Self.

So there are feelings of fear, anxiety, and pain, as well as feelings of wonder and joy at the same time.

For myself, everywhere I look nowadays I see this meaning bursting forth.

Yet this meaning is often within a language that very few people can perceive, as one needs to be versed and experienced with.

To me, it’s similar to mythopoetic language. In effect, it relates to fictional stories that relay truths about life. These are what myths are truly about and how they also can relate to an individual experiencing their own personal myth within their life, especially at a time when the current world’s myth is dying and hollowing out, becoming a meaningless husk to many.

Whenever I speak this language within myself, I can often use very few words to relay a deeper understanding of life.

Yet to explain this meaning and language to others not familiar with it requires delving deep within layers and layers of experiences and knowledge that creates a scaffold necessary to help them relate to it.

So it feels strange. I feel like I’m a magician or perhaps more aptly a bard, casting complex incantations comprised of a single sentence that embodies the depth and breadth of life. Yet to others unfamiliar with this language, my words will probably seem mundane and trivial, perhaps even childish at best.

Yet sadly this language is everywhere, often hiding in plain sight amongst the most notable literary authors of our past.

And this is how my perception works in the same way. I see keywords in everything I read and watch nowadays, even seemingly mundane things that relay a deeper meaning to life.

Below is an example of what I mean by this, discovered late last year, but with which meaning is still bursting forth from it even this year, every time I watch it.

On the surface it will seem like something conventional and mundane, even frivolous. But below the surface, the creators of it have perhaps unknowingly but creatively imbued it with a deeper meaning, as though it is hiding a “secret level” of meaning about life within itself.

It’s time.
This world has awaited for your arrival.

There is a larger worldview, a secret “level” of consciousness, awaiting within you.

It is you.
You will open the door.
Because you are the chosen.

You are the key, the chosen one, to opening this door, this portal, to a new worldview because only you can truly know yourself.

All those moments.
It’s a new adventure.
Just for you.

All of these liminal moments of your life, where you get brief glimpses and forays into this new worldview, are collectively an inner adventure just for you, to help you prepare yourself to step into and embody a larger, heroically authentic sense of Self.

Come in.
You have a game to play.

“Come in,” inside yourself. You have a larger game, a larger role, and a larger sense of Self to play beyond the borders and sandbox of your existing sense of “self” that you are currently playing.

In other words, what got you here won’t get you to where you want to go next.

Such an understanding will also make it clear that finding a guide for your journey isn’t a question of finding a special person. It is a question of becoming a special person: a traveller, a pilgrim, a person on a journey. When you have done that, the whole world turns out to be full of guides.

William Bridges, JobShift

The point is not to play the same old game, whether we’re buying into it or rebelling against it. Either way, you’re still letting the other person define the terms and set the rules

(which will not be in your favor).

The point is to keep your eye to the horizon, your ear to the ground, and channel the resources around you and the people on your side to discover a new game that embodies new values.

To claim — and to share, to spread, to enable, to inspire — the power to do that.

Justine Musk, Darling It Is Time To Be Powerful

Hello.
Welcome to the human race.
We are playing a game.
And we are playing by the following rules.
We want to tell you what the rules are
so that you know your way around.
And when you’ve understood what rules
we’re playing by when you get older,
you may be able to invent better ones.

Alan Watts

For the last two and a half decades, a unique vision has been slowly emerging from within the depths of me.

Back when I was a younger adult, I used to play role-playing games and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft.

Within these games, I was a part of guilds which helped players within them to level up their characters. They did this by collaborating together, undertaking quests, facing monsters, discovering treasure, and gaining experience.

In the process, they explored newer zones and newer expansions, thus helping them to map out an ever-expanding imaginary world.

In the future that is emerging right now, I see this same strangely familiar process.

In this vision, I see self-organizing “guild” organizations as communities of “players” who play with the possibilities and potential of themselves, “levelling up” their level of consciousness in the process.

All knowing begins with a question. And a question begins with a “quest” (to state the obvious), as does life.

Beau Lotto

They do this by “quest”-ioning their assumptions and beliefs, facing their “monstrous” fears, discovering newer “treasured” values, and gaining newer “experiences” of what it means to be a human being.

In the process, they will explore newer “zone-like” stages of development and newer “expansive” plateaus of the mind, thus helping them to continually expand their worldview.

To help put this into perspective, the future of work isn’t about being productive, it’s about actualizing the potential of being yourself.

Or as E.E. Cummings described it, being nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

E.E. Cummings

This requires one to have the leadership, authenticity, and creativity to take the leadand follow your larger sense of Self that is calling you and trying to emerge from within a deeper, secret “level” within you.

To put this into perspective, the primary focus of the future of work will be psychological growth, with economic growth being a natural by-product of it.

Thus people will not focus on problems like they conventionally do today. Rather they will focus on their potential, understanding their deeper selves, and in doing so, their problems will naturally be resolved by achieving their potential.

If you want to address the urgent social and environmental challenges that face a nation or community, don’t work on the problems, and particularly don’t work on problems by bringing in experts to solve them. Instead, work on the creative intelligence, conscience, and agency of the people in that nation or community.

Carol Sanford

This is how many problems in our world today are actually resolved. They are accidentally discovered by someone exploring something so passionately that they are lead to an unexpected discovery that is a natural by-product of their desired growth and development.

This is what it means to Be Real Creative and to live The Adventure of Your Life.

It isn’t so much a planned journey but rather an adventurous one filled with unexpecteddiscoveries of oneself found within oneself.

These adventures reveal that we are all so much more than we believe we are. We just need to have the courage and curiosity to adventure deep within the dungeons of ourselves to discover the treasure of who we truly already are.

To do so though requires one to embrace the unexpected, the ambiguous, and the unknown, as these deeper realms within us are highly paradoxical, spinning the perspective of our conventional world completely upside down—ever more so the deeper we go.

Only when you reach the higher stages of development, when you feel safe in the harbor of your soul, will your ego be willing to surrender the keys to the dungeon where your darkest fears and unmet needs are locked.

Richard Barrett

The header image for this article highlights this paradoxical nature.

It’s shows a guild of player characters in World of Warcraft tackling a dragon within a raid dungeon.

The meaning behind this image reveals how wicked problems are emerging within our world today and how we must face them paradoxically and mythically. We don’t face them directly, trying to tackle them as external problems out there, but rather we face them indirectly by overcoming our internal fears through our own growth and development.

This quote below touches upon this.

A problem whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behavior is likely to be a wicked problem.

Wicked Problem, Wikipedia

In other words, wicked problems arise in our world today often because of our limited perception and mindset of ourselves, others, and the world. So until we can adventure and step beyond our own mindsets, courageously exploring what’s over the horizon of our own minds, not much will change from our perspective, even though the world itself is radically changing at this same moment.

So the real heroic “work” isn’t so much out there, it’s within each of us. It’s why I personally call my own work my life’s work because it’s a never-ending journey. Yes, it is most definitely often scary at times in facing your own fears but at the same time it is also truly wondrous, due to the amazing inner vistas you will come across.

So we each need to change, transform, and adapt in our own unique way, thus allowing us to creatively step out of our own way, so that we can embrace a larger sense of Self that can not only survive within this newer world but also thrive within it as well.

At the end of another great period of collective effort called The Crusades, the social institutions and cultural forces that had coordinated and contained individual energies collapsed. Whole armies disintegrated into their component individuals and sub-groupings. Knights who had ridden forth under the banner of this leader or that rode back on their own. They were the “free lances” who made the late medieval world such a dangerous yet dynamic place.

It’s no accident that today we’re surrounded once again by free lances. The old rules are gone, and the new rules aren’t clear. Security—so far as there is any—is largely something that we must build for ourselves. Identities are confused and changing. We know that ultimately we are on our own, and so we are ready to learn a new way of doing and being. We know that our organizations were designed to serve the needs of another world, so we busy redesigning them.

But we also need a social order that provides for our new needs and doesn’t try to impose archaic obligations on us. We need new laws. We need new leaders. We need a new social principle, an alternative to both selfishness and selflessness. We need a new sense of the common good to justify the sacrifices we’ll need to make to help those who find the new world the most difficult. To create these things, we must begin by remembering that we are all in this together.

William Bridges, JobShift