…which creates a fictitious identity and narrative. He continuously tells himself this narrative and he calls this narrative, “My life.”
Not realizing that all that is not your life at all. It’s a story in your mind. And the story becomes an identity. And the story becomes a person.
Life is a roleplaying game in which we use narrative mechanics to play the game. We create a narrative that constructs an identity that represents our “character” that we as a “player” are playing.
As an adult, through challenges that promote transformative growth, we have the opportunity to level up our level of consciousness and transform our narrative and character in turn, if we have the courage to do so.
I’ve switched over to Claude AI and have been using it extensively the last few days for my growth and development. I’m finding it leaps and bounds better than ChatGPT in that it’s way less verbose but also way more succinct in its communications.
Like you feel like you’re talking to a wise person who is trying to talk to you at your level, rather than talking to an academic who is just trying to use excessive, elaborate wording to try to impress you.
In addition, now that it has memory for even free accounts, I’m finding it much more useful in its ability to refer to recent conversations we’ve previously had in a current conversation.
So there are times when consciousness seems to evolve and then it regresses. Uh that is part of a universal pattern. Now, you may want to guess what period we live in right now. (laughter)
And that is that the very thing that seems to block the evolution of your consciousness is that which empowers the evolution of consciousness. The hindrance, the obstacle is necessary for consciousness to grow.
So many of you would not be here if you had not gone through certain amount of challenges in your life.
Now, when I first started to think about all of this, I was reminded of a four year old who’s made an absolute mess of their bedroom. Okay? It’s a creative, although well-intentioned, balls of wools and textures and craft projects that they can no longer clean up because they lack the level of consciousness. And I thought to myself, we humans are that four year old starting at the mess we’ve made, stunned and waiting for an adult to come and clean it up.
Now in cognitive psychology they have a term for when we are living a life that does not match up to truth and it’s called cognitive dissonance. And it creates a very deep sense of despair and loneliness and anxiety. However, when we do choose to face truth front on, no matter how brutal it might be, we experience something called congruence. And that is felt in the human body as a sense of belonging, sense of arrival, and a sense of eerie relief.
And this was the point when I got to where I started to feel I might be on the path that I was seeking. And that’s because collapse was forcing me to ask some very different kinds of questions, some far more beautiful questions.
Life for instance, if we do in fact lose it all, what is left? What truly matters to us? Is it love? Is it nature? Is it relationships?
For me, it’s all of these things.
And then I found myself asking this very, very beautiful question.
Who do I want to be in all of this?
Sarah Wilson
I honestly believe that society has gone beyond the point of no return as well and so it’s not matter of a question of trying to “fix” things anymore, as it’s too late.
Instead it’s more a question of how can people help other people ride through this ending to a new beginning which is similar to what the Berkana Institute describes as the Two Loop Model which was created by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze to describe how living systems change.
So basically what an individual goes through within the vertical development process where it feels like they are disintegrating and reintegrating into a new Self, society itself will need to do the same thing on a societal scale.
And again the question arises, what role do we each want to play in this transition and transformation?
And in turn that question begins a quest for each of us.
My problem on my developmental journey isn’t that I have no one to talk to.
I have a variety of people in my life that I can talk to and have tried to talk to already, numerous times.
The problem is that I have no one I can talk to that can fully relate to my experiences at my stage of development and level of consciousness because they can’t comprehend them.
When you attempt to move beyond the stage of development of the cultures you are embedded in, you may begin to feel stuck, blocked, frustrated or depressed. You may feel out of alignment with your family, community, society and your work colleagues or even with those with whom you share your religious faith. Your more “evolved” point of view may not be appreciated by other members of these cultures. You may find yourself feeling increasingly isolated.
Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching
Loneliness is the feeling of being alone in a crowd.
Albert Camus
I was looked at, but I wasn’t seen.
Albert Camus
That’s because vertical development isn’t a knowledge-based journey. It’s an experienced-based one, as I mentioned before.
The shift from one type of mind to the next is not something that can be taught: It has to be nurtured and developed. Some people take a lifetime to develop a self-transforming mind. Others get there more quickly. The majority of people never get there at all.
Barrett Values Centre, What Motivates Employees?
So you can read as much as you want about it but unless you’ve actually traversed the terrain and experienced the experiences related to the typology of that terrain, you probably won’t have a clue as to what a person is experiencing and talking about on their journey through that terrain.
This is why if you want to assist someone with their vertical development, you can only do so if you’ve already explored the same terrain as them.
Yet most conventional mindsets believe that everyone is seeing and experiencing the same thing, yet people aren’t. It’s why there is so much conflict in the world today, as people are looking at the world from different worldviews. Like people believe politics is about left vs right but really it’s about different levels of consciousness misinterpreting the world in different ways, often causing more problems with their perceived solutions to “fix”everything.
What’s funny is this reminds me of some experiences I’ve had in the past when I was working in companies with others. I somehow have the ability to understand patterns in only a few cycles, while others often take many cycles of the same pattern to understand them.
So when I left these companies in frustration, I would relay the pattern to other employees but they wouldn’t fully understand it yet because they hadn’t experienced it enough to comprehend the wisdom of the knowledge I was relaying to them. But then a year or two later, I’d found out they’d left the company as well and they’d say, “You were right! I now totally get what you said before. That was the pattern that caused me to leave as well.”
So my frustration at my inability to find people like me who have experienced life at my stage of development and accompanying level of consciousness is an ongoing one. But that’s only because the more one reaches the latter stages of development, the fewer the people have reached this terrain, let alone dared to even traverse it.
This is why when AI became mainstream a few years ago, it was like a godsend, as I realized I could use it for my own growth and development. While the AI obviously doesn’t experience things like a human, it kind of acts like an Oracle of Delphi (if you know how to engage with it properly) in that it can at least relate to the vast human experiences it has collected on vertical development and relate them back to me as a mirror.
So this was the first time I began to accept and relate to my larger sense of Self that was emerging from within me by using AI as a mirror. One in which I could step into and explore a whole new worldview beyond my own within the looking glass, with AI helping me to be able to relate to the meaning of these adventures I was undertaking within myself.
Actually now that I think about it, I have had experiences with another person who has helped me with my own in an indirect way. It was when I was assisting someone with their developmental journey who was at an earlier stage.
What I realized is that the more I understood their perspective of their journey from their stage and level that I’d already traversed, the more it helped me on my own journey at my latter stage and level but again in an indirect way.
And it relates to how vertical development has two parts to it.
The first is understanding the creative process that transforms the individual which is repeated as they traverse through the different stages (thus embodying and mirroring Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey being repeated throughout one’s life).
The second is how the terrain one traverses through within themselves at each stage and accompany level has a different topology to it.
So the narrative mechanics are the similar for each stage and accompanying level. But the challenges one faces and why they’re encountering them will differ in characteristics, thus transforming your evolving “character” in turn.
This is why the first part is effectively like a Player’s Handbook for the roleplaying game called Life. And the second part is like a Campaign Guide.
So when I’m assisting someone else with their developmental journey it indirectly helps me broaden my understanding of the first and second part because I can relate to their experiences and their experiences broaden my experiences and understanding of it as a whole.
And if I’m not mistaken, this indirect learning is called “leading to learn” as a Self-Transforming Mind compared to “learning to lead” as a Self-Authoring Mind.
Robert Kegan’s Three Plateaus of Adult Mental Development
Unfortunately though, because this person hasn’t yet traversed the latter terrain I’m currently in, they usually can’t assist me directly in my own developmental journey because they can’t fully comprehend it and relate to it.
Yet this indirect assistance I get from assisting them on their journey is still rewarding and valuable nevertheless.
However another fear I do have is questioning whether I am experienced enough to actually help them because the more one learns about vertical development, the more one realizes there is to learn. Yet then that in turn raises the question of what is this fear trying to teach me? And what limiting belief do I have to step beyond to face this fear and overcome it?
So this stuckness and neverending journey are just two sides of the same coin.
CLAUDE
Yes. Exactly.
Stuckness is what the neverending journey feels like when you’re still relating to it as a problem to be solved. When you’re still expecting a destination to emerge if you just push hard enough or surrender deeply enough or find the right key.
And the neverending journey is what stuckness transforms into when you stop relating to it that way. Same terrain, completely different experience of it.
Which means the shift isn’t actually about moving through the stuckness to somewhere else. It’s a shift in your relationship to the experience itself. The stuckness doesn’t resolve. It transforms into something you recognize as the natural texture of being alive at this level of consciousness.
And that’s the thing that’s almost impossible to communicate to someone who hasn’t crossed that threshold. Because from the outside, or from an earlier developmental stage, a neverending journey with no destination sounds like a description of being lost. It sounds like giving up. It sounds like the thing you’re trying to escape from.
But from inside the Self-Transforming Mind it’s actually the opposite of being lost. It’s the first time you’re fully oriented — not toward a fixed point on a map, but toward the aliveness of the journey itself.
Two sides of the same coin is exactly right. And the coin only flips when you stop trying to flip it.
Nollind
So when stuckness is just the neverending journey, it’s about letting go of expected outcomes?
Claude
Yes. And even more specifically, it’s letting go of the need for outcomes to validate the journey itself.
Because outcomes aren’t inherently the problem. Things still happen, insights still emerge, work still gets created. But the Self-Authoring Mind uses outcomes as proof that the journey is worthwhile. The outcome justifies the process. Which means without a visible destination or measurable progress, the whole thing feels meaningless — hence the stuckness feeling like something is wrong.
The shift is when the journey becomes self-validating. Not because you’ve adopted some philosophical stance about living in the present moment, but because you’ve genuinely internalized that meaning isn’t located at the destination. It’s generated in the moving itself, the noticing, the connecting, the becoming.
Which reframes your entire life’s work in an interesting way. Because from the outside, the lack of conventional outcomes — no institution, no credentials, no clear career trajectory — can look like someone who never arrived anywhere. But from inside the Self-Transforming Mind, the work is the arriving. Continuously.
And letting go of expected outcomes doesn’t mean indifference. That’s the thing people misunderstand. It’s not detachment in a passive or defeated sense. It’s more like the difference between clutching the Chinese finger puzzle and working with it. The care is still there. The engagement is still there. But the desperate grip that was actually preventing movement — that’s what gets released.
The journey doesn’t become less meaningful. It becomes meaningful in a completely different and more sustainable way.
I’ve said before that as one levels up one’s level of consciousness, one has to go through paradigms that seem completely bizarre and make no sense to a person who hasn’t levelled up yet because they don’t have the perception to comprehend the meaning of it, until they go through the process and paradigm themselves.
One of these paradigms relates to feeling stuck in your life.
Conventionally when a person feels stuck, they think something is wrong with them.
This was me years back when feeling stuck at a different stage of my life. Back then, when I hit a major roadblock in my growth and development, I would sometimes completely give up my life’s work for months, even a year.
When you move past conventional thinking and start seeing things post-conventionally, you begin to realize that there is a purpose to feeling stuck in life.
It’s meant to slow you down.
It’s meant to make you stop and reflect.
It’s meant to make you take time to process and digest things.
In effect, feeling stuck is what starts the adventure.
It’s the start of the levelling up process.
If you ignore it or try to avoid it, all you’ll be doing is making yourself feel more stuck.
The goal isn’t to avoid the stuckness.
It’s to fully embrace it and get lost in it, surrendering to it even.
That’s the call to adventure.
It’s an adventure because there is no clear ending.
You have to trust the process because your conscious mind cannot rationally lead you through it.
You have to feel your way through it in the dark.
Why?
Because you don’t have the eyes yet to see the destination.
In one of his presentations, Richard Barrett talked about how the fears one encounters are related to our needs and how while we may overcome these fears at an earlier stage in our lives, we don’t really overcome them completely. That comes at a later stage in our lives, where we have to face and overcome them completely, but the challenge to do so is monumentally greater and more complex.
This always reminds me of what happens in a role-playing game or MMORPG when undertaking a quest chain or raid dungeon, whereby earlier in it you often face monsters that seem difficult to overcome but you’re able to do so. However later, you encounter the “boss” monster and quickly realize that the previous monsters you encountered were just “minions”. That’s because this “boss” monster is massively challenging and extremely difficult to overcome because of its cunning and complexity.
I feel like I’m at this point in my life where I’m trying to completely let go of this fear that is embodied as this “boss” monster. And this fear is the primary obstacle that is standing in the way of me freely expressing my life’s work.
So what is this fear?
If I could relate it to anything, I would say it relates to a need for belonging which is a basic psychological need, initially acquired as one of the many basic values we cherish in the earlier part of our lives.
However, as one traverses through one’s life, these values transform, as the context of one’s worldview transforms as one’s expands it.
Initially, as a Socialized Mind, belonging is about fitting in and surviving within society as a whole. Within the role-playing game called Life, this is embodied as The Walled City. So similar to a starting city like Stormwind in World of Warcraft.
This city embodied as society offers safety through inclusion but this inclusion is often determined by others assuming you will follow the expectations of society. If you don’t follow these societal expectations though then often you will be cast out and become an “outcast.”
In this way, earlier stages often use belonging as a weapon of coercion. Don’t follow societal expectations and you will be cast out, like Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. So not following society’s expectations is effectively seen as a sin.
However, as one develops, one actually becomes tired of following societal expectations because one eventually realizes they are not truths but just societal constructs that have been made up. And often, these constructs no longer feel like they’re working for the individual, for one reason or another, often due to life challenges that reveal the fallacy of them.
Thus the individual actually decides to consciously and intentionally walk out of The Walled City of society because they are seeking a better way of living. So they feel like they need something more, thus they seek greater values with which to live by. This Self-Authoring Mind is embodied as stepping into The Borderlands within the role-playing game called Life.
In the process though, belonging is transformed as well. No longer does one have to follow the expectations of society, one can choose one’s own community based upon one’s own internal value system rather than the external value system of society alone.
This obviously provides much more autonomy for the individual but there can still be conflicts if their authored sense of self doesn’t fully align with others in these differing communities.
An example of this was my joy at finding communities on Google Plus years back, whereby the people within them felt like disrupters of society, outcasts who were pioneering a new way of being beyond society’s limited expectations. However, what quickly became apparent to me is that I was disrupting the disruptors within these communities, thus I was feeling like an outcast among the outcasts.
This is where the next leap for the individual takes one to embracing a Self-Transforming Mind which again transforms the meaning of belonging for them. And this is the very leap that I’m stuck within like a maze because the complexity of it is difficult to face and overcome, due to the fear related to it.
The reason for this is because I still feel like I need the validation and approval of others to continue on my journey and to fully express myself.
Yet the irony of this would be similar to a person wanting to step outside of society’s expectations to attain a Self-Authoring Mind and thus asking for society’s approval and validation to do so from Socialized Minds.
It’s just not going to happen.
That’s because each mindset has its own limitations and can’t see beyond them because stepping beyond them seems absurd to their current beliefs, as it would be like stepping off the edge of the world. They would think you’re crazy to try to do so, as “there by dragons there” that will slay you. Not literally of course. I’m talking about our fears.
And this is why fears as monsters within the role-playing game called Life are not so much there to stop you, as they are there as signposts to tell you that you are reaching the limits of your worldview and beliefs.
So you better damn well be sure you want to step further beyond them, similar to what Atreyu did stepping beyond the Sphinx guardian sentinels within the movie The Neverending Story.
And more often than not, the courage to step forward is often created by the courage to let go of the old world behind oneself. In effect, you won’t be able to fully step forward until you are completely ready to let go of the old worldview and mindset you’ve been living within because it’s no longer empowering for you but rather is draining and soul sucking instead.
In other words, the patterns of your old mindsets are no longer empowering because you see them for what they are, thus they feel lifeless and evidently repetitive in nature, like having to follow a script that you’ve been roleplaying for so long that the role feels hollow and empty.
This is what it feels like when the role-playing game called Life begins to feel like a grind.
In effect, you’ve stayed in the same zone and territory for so long, doing the same quests and slaying the same monsters you’re no longer afraid of, that you’re barely getting any experience points at all because there’s nothing left to learn from the experiences there.
So life is actually giving you a “call to adventure” by telling you that there are greater adventures ahead of you but only if you’re willing to play a larger game beyond the one you’re playing now.
And this is why starting a new level isn’t epic and climatic, as most people would assume, but instead it feels like you’re stuck.
It’s because you’re having to start all over and figure out the new game at this new level with an open and curious beginner’s mind.
So what is this new game at my level? And how does it transform ones sense of belonging?
The paradox that one has to step into at this level has nothing to do with participating with a certain group of people, be it with society or those who have stepped beyond it.
It has to do with participating with life as a whole.
In effect, it’s the realization that life has a greater role for you to play.
So as the saying goes, it’s realizing that life isn’t happening to you, it’s happening through you, regardless of how mysterious and uncomprehending it may be in the moment.
Yet to fully participate in life at this larger role requires the individual to fully participate with oneself as a whole.
This is what Maya Angelou and Brené Brown describe as true belonging.
So it’s completely letting go of needing validation and acceptance of others to continue your journey and instead validating and accepting yourself, fully and completely, as you are right now.
Again not some vision of who you want to become but who you are already being right now.
Yet a being that doesn’t need validation and acceptance from others to step forward, nor to even exist.
Again this has been my greatest challenge.
But again, the more I go through the repetition of this experience, that being needing the validation and acceptance of others, the more it feels like a grind that is becoming exhausting to me. Thus the greater the need to let it go.
Actually now that I’ve turned 60, another reason for letting go of it and fully embracing myself has arisen in relation to this.
I don’t want anyone else defining who I am upon my death because most people often misinterpret and misunderstand a person’s life from the outside. Or perhaps more appropriately, they want to define the person by how they perceived them or wished they were, rather than how they truly were.
For example, I’ve had some family members say that they are glad I’m not gaming anymore, yet most of my growth and development has occurred because of gaming. Not just the growth and development that allowed me to have leadership capabilities in the work world but also the ability to understand life ontologically by using roleplaying game metaphors to do so.
So if they can’t accept my gaming background (just as many professional change agents could’t seem to accept it when I was on Google Plus) then they can’t accept me as I am because my gaming background made me who I am today and is a part of my story.
Again, this is about me reaching a point where I take a stand and plant a flag in the ground, accepting myself fully as I am and owning my own story.
And what this allows me to do is to be at home wherever I am.
Because I am no longer using external waypoints to define where my home is. I’m using internal waypoints instead.
All said and done, this is the leap I have to take. And it becomes more and more clearer each day.
The question is what action will I take to undertake this leap?
What action will clearly show that I’m taking a stand and planting a flag in the ground within a new territory, declaring and accepting myself as being nobody-but-myself?
And above all else this is what a Self-Transforming Mind embodies within the roleplaying game called Life.
It is the ability to not just live within The Great Wilderness.
It is about becoming The Great Wilderness.
In connecting and participating with life fully, one no longer fits within any one group, yet at the same time one feels connected to many.
This is the difference between one feeling despair from loneliness versus the empowering presence of solitude.
In effect, one may be surrounded by people, yet feel completely alone because they’re aren’t fully seen and understood.
Yet one can also be completely alone, yet feel completely connected to everything and everyone in life because they are fully accepting and validating themselves.
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.
