Category: Vertical Development

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.

Eckhart Tolle

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.

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?

NOLLIND

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.

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

This article highlights a narrative repeating itself throughout time.

There is an emptiness within us that we are trying to fill, both individually and societally.

Filling the void can’t be done by building or consuming something to fill it, it’s done through relationships.

Societally it’s about building interpersonal relationships by relating to others as they are.

Individually it’s about building an intrapersonal relationship with yourself by relating to yourself as you are.

This applies to the stereotypical zen quote.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

What most people are misinterpreting and misunderstanding about this quote is that the teacher has always been there, waiting patiently for you to hear it, recognize it, and become aware of it.

This teacher is your larger sense of Self, waiting patiently for you to listen, recognize, and embrace a larger sense of yourself.

Thus getting out of your own way is actually slowing down, listening, and making space for your larger sense of Self to emerge.

In other words, your larger sense of Self is already there, waiting patiently for you. You just need to recognize and become aware of it.

Again this embodies what creativity means to me.

It’s discovering something that’s been there all along but you just weren’t unaware of it until you discovered it and became aware of it.

So you can’t growth and development unless you’re willing to accept and receive a larger sense of your Self that’s already there, waiting patiently to emerge.

I wanted to provide a quick overview of how life is a role-playing game but one that starts from an experiential perspective and then leads to an explanation of the knowledge behind this.

However, I realized that before I can do that, it’s essential to quickly clarify what a framework is, using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as an example because it’s the foundational primer that helped me to unlock my own framework for growth and development.

Right now on Substack, I see person after person saying that they don’t want to follow someone else’s “map” but instead forge their own path. What these people mean by this is that they don’t want to follow someone else’s framework.

What I find interesting though is that then these people proceed to forge and map out their own unique path which they then want to share with others as their framework. And then another person will see their framework and in turn say, “I’m not going to follow your map or framework. I’m going to forge my own path.”

This is why I’ve stated before that the number one obstacle to your growth and development is your own limited perception of what growth and development is. Why? Because in misinterpreting what growth and development is, you will in turn misunderstand it and spend more time avoiding it, rather than embracing it.

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is the epitome of this, as it can be considered a mythic framework but only if one truly understands that it’s not about writing epic stories but rather about psychological development. The beginning of the hero’s journey highlights this.

In the departure part of the narrative, the hero or protagonist lives in the ordinary world and receives a call to go on an adventure. The hero is reluctant to follow the call but is helped by a mentor figure.

Hero’s Journey, Wikipedia

All this is saying is that you will reach a point in your life where the way you navigate the world will eventually no longer work and in doing so, you will question your assumptions and beliefs about life that embody this way of navigation. As I mentioned before, this will feel like a cataclysm whereby your life will feel like it’s falling apart, not literally but psychologically.

Note that I’m not saying that someone else will approach you and tell you to change your way of navigating life. No, this is an internal process that begins with you. You are the one who is questioning your life because it feels like it’s falling apart, so you are the one initiating the transformation of it.

And the refusal of the call is simply your current limited mindset disbelieving the experience that is happening to you because it doesn’t feel “normal”, since a sense of certainty has been lost. In effect, it is your outdated mindset giving its last gasp at trying to maintain itself as your current constructed sense of identity.

More importantly, the mentor in this mythic framework doesn’t need to be an actual person. In fact, it could be a framework that the person stumbles across in the questioning of their worldview (like I did). The key thing here is what the framework represents as a “mentor.”

Now back to what I said earlier, in terms of understanding what growth and development is truly about and what a framework should embody in relation to it.

Growth and development is a process of change and transformation, whereby the certainty in the way you see the world and yourself begins to shatter, causing you to enter a period of uncertainty.

Thereby a framework for growth and development is a narrative that helps you traverse uncertainty, primarily because you’re undergoing a process of creative transformation in terms of your constructed sense of self.

To clarify this further, a framework for growth and development is not a “map” that you follow. Rather it helps you to explore the unknown and uncertain terrain within you and helps you to map a larger sense of Self on your own.

This is why everybody and their dog has a framework for growth and development now.

It’s not about, “Hey, be dependent upon me, follow my map, and I’ll help you get through this.” It’s more, “Here’s some adventuring techniques to help you independently forge and explore your own path, mapping out your own larger sense of Self on your own. And here are some waymarkers you might see along the way, to help you triangulate where you are on your journey overall.”

This is why the byline for my framework describes it as “the adventure of your life.”

In effect, you can’t truly experience an adventure without embracing the uncertainty that goes with it. And when people truly begin to embrace an adventurous lifestyle, they begin to become addicted to experiencing this uncertainty. It’s why most role-playing games are filled with it. In other words, if the path you took was completely certain, with no sense of risk, it would be a pretty boring adventure. So the unknown and uncertainty of it are what make adventures feel epic.

But why does everyone and their dog have their own framework for growth and development then?

It’s because everyone sees the world uniquely from their own perspective and experiences.

This is why my framework for growth and development is about perceiving life as a role-playing game. It’s because the experiences within my own life primarily revolved around playing role-playing games (i.e. Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft). So naturally what emerged from within me (and is still emerging) was a framework that used a language and metaphors similar to role-playing games (i.e. quests, monsters, treasures, experiences), as well as with the hero’s journey.

All said and done, the number one thing a framework for growth and development should be doing for a person is helping them to forge their own path. In effect, instead of having to constantly listen to someone else as a mentor and be dependent upon them for advice as to “which way should I go?”, it’s learning to trust yourself and listen to your deeper sense of Self as to which way you should go.

But here’s an additional essential thing to realize. Even if I told you what the terrain was going to be like, the monstrous fears you would have to face, it doesn’t mean your journey is going to be easy or even certain for that matter.

This happens all the time in games like World of Warcraft. Guilds create walk-through guides on how to tackle a certain boss monster in a raid dungeon. This would be the equivalent of an organization tackling a wickedly complex problem within it that they’ve never tackled before and they use someone else’s case study of how they tackled a similar complex problem within another organization.

So they may ask a consultant specializing in organizational transformation (the one who wrote the case study) to assist them. But the consultant can only help them so far. Why? Because each individual within that organization, starting with the CEO, has to forge their own individual transformation within the context of the larger organization transformation.

In other words, as Richard Barrett noted, organizations don’t transform, people do.

This is why I’ve repeatedly said time and time again that knowledge only gets you so far. To truly transform yourself, you have to step into the process and fully experience it yourself, to truly understand the meaning of the knowledge that you’ve been told.

There are no shortcuts or ways to bypass it, even though everyone and their dog is looking for one, a “hack” for life.

This is why most individual and organizations transformations fail. People are looking for shortcuts when it comes to growth and development and there are none. 

In other words, if you think you can treat it like a weekend retreat, you’re misinterpreting and misunderstanding what growth and development really is.

It’s a lifelong journey.

Therefore, with all of that in mind, the singular question you need to ask yourself in potentially using someone else’s framework for growth and development is this.

Can I relate to this framework, the language and metaphors used within it?

If not, if you can’t relate to it in any way, then most definitely don’t use it. Find another one.

And if you can’t find another one that you can relate to at all, then create your own, especially if you feel like you have the capacity to do so because you feel like something is emerging from within you.

But if you can relate to a framework, especially if it relates to the experiences in your own life, don’t avoid it just because you think it’s someone else’s “map” that you don’t want to “follow.” It’s not.

Frameworks for growth and development aren’t maps in the conventional sense. Instead they teach you how to adventure within unknown, uncertain psychological terrain, whereby you have to learn how to map it yourself as a newer sense of your Self.

BTW if you reach the point where you can begin to understand different frameworks as just different perspectives of the same thing, then I would love to talk to you, as this is where I’m at on my journey as well.

In effect, you can see past the unique words and language on the surface of the framework and you understand the deeper meaning below the surface of it that relates to all growth and development frameworks as a whole.