Creativity often begins with cognitive dissonance — the friction between competing truths.
It doesn’t resolve the tension by choosing one side (e.g. this OR that). Instead, it uses the tension to transform both into a more complex whole (e.g. this AND that).
This is, in effect, vertical development which is creativity applied to one’s sense of self.
You remain your old self while simultaneously becoming a new Self.
Vertical development as a framework is about transformation.
More specifically, a transformation which reorganizes and reconstructs your sense of identity.
This can metaphorically feel like undergoing a death and rebirth of yourself though.
That’s because the development often requires some loss or letting go, which can include grief.
This isn’t something that one can just explain to someone else and they will understand it though.
It has to be experienced before one can fully relate to it and understand it.
In other words, you can’t just think your way through the process. You have to feel your way through it as well.
This is why vertical development is often misunderstood and misinterpreted.
You can’t bypass the experience with an explanation. You have to fully step into it, live it, and experience it to truly understand it.
This is why I personally prefer perceiving vertical development as a journey, similar to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.
In effect, similar to travelling to a new country you’ve never been to before, you can read about it as much as you want but until you actually travel there and experience it for yourself, you won’t truly begin to understand the culture and its people.
Perhaps even more appropriately, the journey can be seen as that taken by an immigrant to a new country and a new life — a journey marked by loss and the liminal question of “Who am I now?” — yet also by the emergence of new possibilities.
Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.
And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth