Year: 2025

Categories
Life's a Role-Playing Game

Stages Aren’t “Maps” in the Traditional Sense

While vertical development as a framework does map out stages of psychological development that people can progress through throughout their lives, realize that these stages are not “maps” in the traditional sense.

“Knowing” about a stage only helps you to understand the basic characteristics of it and even then, knowing only helps you so far. To truly understand this new, unknown inner terrain within yourself, you have to explore it, experience it, and map it out yourself.

So your exploration and mapping of a specific stage of development is completely different than someone else’s, even though the terrain may have similar characteristics or patterns to it.

This is why stages aren’t like a traditional map in the sense that you’re not following someone else’s map but are instead creating your own.

So you’re still charting your own path forward, often having to feel your way forward more than think your way forward.

Categories
Vertical Development

Holding Space for Your “Self”

The most difficult thing you can do in vertical development is to hold space for yourself because your most immediate desire is to get to and arrive at your “destination” of a larger sense of Self. Because in doing so, you believe you will get a sense of closure from it and be able to stabilize your “self” again.

Yet to truly grow, you need to hold the door open for your Self and not close it prematurely.

Even more so, at the latter stages, you’ll realize that there is no closure possible in the traditional sense. It’s about remaining open to the ambiguous uncertainty of life, letting it flow continually.

This is like learning to build bridges most of your life to cross many rivers of change.

Eventually though, you realize you need to step into the river, let go, and flow with it.

When you do, you realize that all the rivers flow into a larger ocean of you.

Categories
Vertical Development

You Can Only Figure Out Life by Actually Living It First

Everyone wants to figure out life before they live it.

It’s doesn’t work that way.

You figure out life by actually living it.

This is what it means to undertake the adventure of your life.

Categories
Vertical Development

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
Categories
Life's a Role-Playing Game

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.

Categories
Life's a Role-Playing Game

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
Categories
Life's a Role-Playing Game

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.

Categories
General

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.

Categories
General

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.

Categories
General

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.