Looking Inwards for Guidance From Our Deeper Self

I used to look “up” for guidance — 

to signs, to angels, to destiny. 

Now I look inwards.

Turns out, wisdom was never floating above me; it was buried inside. 

Quiet, steady, unwavering. 

When I listen, life responds. 

Your highest self isn’t above you; it’s beneath the external noise.

Jonathan Francis Thompson

We’re all seeking to connect with something larger than ourselves and we often think this thing is out there. Yet within ourselves, there is a larger sense of Self patiently waiting to emerge from our core. A core that contains an opening that connects to everything and everyone.

Where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

Joseph Campbell

Getting Tired of Your “Coding”, Be It Your Own or Someone Else’s

It’s interesting in that I’ve seen two people whose work is similar to my own. However, they do so by primarily focusing on the transition to self-authoring your own life by perceiving your previous societal-focused life in a somewhat negative way, almost like you were an NPC before that just followed the herd.

These people don’t seem to realize (or are not communicating) that at higher growth transitions this repeats again but this time your own self-authored life begins to feel like a rigid script in itself.

So each time, you get tired of your own coding, be it coded by someone else or yourself, and you choose to step out of it and recode yourself.

The Most Important Boss Fight of Your Life

That’s exactly why your life may feel out of your control. You got to level 10 (childhood, school, job), but now you are stuck. The game isn’t fun anymore because the game makers don’t benefit from you going to a higher level, so they incentivize you to stay there. You get trapped in a loop of boredom and anxiety because all of your tasks are repetitive and mindless and any further challenge overwhelms you because you do not know how to learn. The most important boss fight of your life is pursue your own path.

Dan Koe, The most important skill to learn in the next 10 years

Explaining Only Makes Sense If You’ve Experienced It

Everyone is looking for a hack or a shortcut for life.

But I don’t think you can grasp the insights of a growth and development journey unless you yourself go through the messy aspects of it.

So having someone explain the essence of their journey that took them years to go through isn’t going to work.

The person receiving the essence of it isn’t going to grasp the true meaning of it because they haven’t gone through the experience of it themselves yet.

So the experience of the messy, chaotic journey is where the meaning is actually created and revealed.

So once they begin to go through the experience of it themselves then what the person explained to them earlier will hopefully being to make sense.

Standing on the Edge of a Cliff of Embodiment

Something feels wrong.

I think what I’m being asked to do by life is to completely let go of my “self” and embody something larger than myself. So it’s about completely letting go of the usual role I play (and currently feel stuck within), that being just trying to explainthings to others which requires a massive amount of scaffolded knowledge to do so.

Instead I’m effectively being asked to jump off a cliff of embodiment and trust that life will guide and carry me, expressing something through me. 

The best way I could explain this is using a quote from the trailer for the Amazon Prime Secret Level tv series…

How many lives would you give…

…just to discover what you’re capable of?

…which mirrors this other quote by a notable author.

You have to die a few times before you can really live.

Charles Bukowski

And it also mirrors something I said a long time ago. 

I’m dying to feel alive.

Shifting Your Point of Vantage

BTW if it’s not already apparent, I don’t have this all figured out.

It’s just that my perspective and relationship to that statement—what it means—is radically different than the conventional perspective of it.

That’s how growth and development transforms you. It changes how you relate to things.

Before you might have see something as “wrong” or “bad” and suddenly a perspective shift causes you to see it as “right” or “good” because you’re perceiving the context of it within a completely new way from a completely new point of vantage.

This is why if I had believed I had everything figured out, life wouldn’t be very exciting and adventurous (although my ego would be happy as a know-it-all). It’s only because I don’t have everything figured out and I don’t know everything, that the unknown and ambiguous nature of life holds so many possibilities and potential for me to explore—a true adventure.

Writing From the Outside Inwards

Something just clicked in a conversation with ChatGPT as to how I can make my work more relatable and understandable without losing the collection of metaphors that form an allegory to describe it all.

Normally I write post titles from a perspective of “within” the allegory. Of course in doing so, readers don’t relate to it because they aren’t “within” it yet but are looking at it from the “outside.”

So the idea is to flip my whole approach around. My post titles and the opening of my posts will focus on where people are at from the “outside” and then I’ll lead them “inside” the allegory by the end of the post.

For example, I was going to write a post which I was going to title “The Great Wilderness” which won’t make sense to anyone. Instead I’ll title it “Why You Can’t Find Solid Ground Anymore (and Why That Might Be a Good Thing)” which hopefully relates more to where people are at.

However in terms of tag use for content organization to organize posts, I will use these metaphors to show the allegory outline as a whole which will allow people to see how the non-metaphor post titles will relate to the metaphor and larger allegory as a whole.

Disrupting Others by Disrupting Yourself

People at the earlier stages of development usually want things to stay the same. So they don’t want people to change, as change feels risky because it can shake the sense of who they are and where they belong.

People in the middle stages start to see new possibilities and often want to help others change and thrive too…but usually in the direction they think is best.

People at the latter stages stop trying to fix or convince others. They paradoxically just focus on growing and being real themselves, knowing that kind of honesty naturally encourages others to grow too.

“Knowing” this is easy. Embodying it is epically challenging.

How to Trust the “Player” Guiding Your “Character”

To visualize this stepping out of one’s “self” to create a sense of psychological distancing, imagine you’re playing a MMORPG game like World of Warcraft as a “player character.”

Your “character” is who you believe you are, your identity / ego as a construct, because you’re so immersed within the game.

You as a “player” represent the boundless you, your soul.

So being able to step out of both your present “self” and future Self is like a liminal moment of being boundless and witnessing yourself outside of time and space. It’s a moment where you become aware that you are not a body with a soul but rather a soul with a body.

So this process is one in which you let go and follow the lead of your larger sense of Self trying to emerge from within the hidden depths and core of yourself.

“Hold the Door!” Hold It Open!

My work seems to be about experiencing ontological dissonance within one’s life which arises from a collection of cognitive dissonance forming a door or portal that can allow one to teleport to a new sense of being.

This portal, however, seems both foreign and dangerous, yet alluring and mysterious at the same time.

The trick with it is to not close the portal prematurely, assuming we “know” what it is and means, but to continually hold space for it, so you can explore the emerging meaning of it daily, like an adventurer making forays and dispatches from a new world which embodies a newer, larger sense of Self.

Artwork by Matt Rockefeller