Category: Vertical Development

This is basis for the player and character within The MMORPG Called Life metaphor that I’ve created. I’m just replacing the stage that one is roleplaying upon with a MMORPG that one is roleplaying within.

There’s something that Rupert says near the end of this video that feels somehow connected to something I’ve experienced in the past.

When King Lear is miserable about his relationship with Cordelia, John Smith’s enjoying himself on stage. He’s happy. He’s not saying no to Cordelia.

So even in the midst of our suffering, the inherent nature of consciousness is shining. All you need to do is take a step back from your mind into the true nature of your awareness and immediately your happiness is restored.

Whenever I’ve experienced a deep realization or almost revelation about something, it’s almost as though the deep emotions from it are catalyzing and connecting a bunch of previous memories and experiences that I’ve had, so much so that it feels like you’ve stepped back from your life and are almost watching it cinematically on a screen as a flashback.

When this occurs, even though the separate experiences within your flashback may have been painful, sad, or frustrating ones, there’s almost this deep profound sense of joy in the overall collective experience of watching the flashback, as it reveals a deeper sense of meaning within your life that reveals who you truly are at your core.

So it’s like revealing the “player” behind the “character” that you’re roleplaying (when we see Life as a MMORPG), just as John Smith the “actor” is behind the “character” of King Lear that he is playing (when we see Life as a stage).

Life is much more paradoxical than we believe it is.

And it is definitely much more paradoxical than we expect it to be.

The first represents what a person experiences when they struggle to shift from a Socialized Mind to a Self-Authoring Mind and begin to realize that life is paradoxical.

The second represents what a person experiences when they struggle to shift from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind and begin to realize that life is even much more paradoxical than they first realized.

Whenever we expand beyond limits, the ego experiences it as a death. Whenever we go beyond ourselves, the ego experiences a little death because the ego is defined by its limits. That’s what the ego is, a limitation or an apparent limitation on our true nature.

The ego says, “Ah, if Darren gets a job working at a higher level, he’s going to expand beyond his current limitations.”

So the ego says, “I will not survive that expansion. I will die.”

That’s the voice of doubt in you. That’s the voice of the doubt.

It’s the ego telling you, “No, no, no, no, don’t, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t expand. I’ll die. I’ll die. You don’t, don’t do that. Just stay comfortable. You’re fine. You’re well paid. You’re well respected. You have a nice life.”

Really the ego couldn’t care less about you. It just wants to stay. It just wants to stay. It doesn’t want to die.

Fortunately the impulse for truth is stronger than the ego’s resistance to it, sooner or later. To begin with they kind of battle with each other. They go backwards and forth. But sooner or later, truth—our intuition of truth—overrides our fear.

So it’s helpful to have the right interpretation for the doubt because when it rises again. you’re less likely to listen to it, if you understand the mechanisms behind it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you find that just by having this confidence in this intuition that you have and no longer listening to the doubt because of this correspondence between our inner life and the outside world that just having this understanding will in some way somehow reconfigure the world that you live in and some new opportunity will open up. There’ll be this magical response of the world to this inner change in you and all the inner changes.

You’ve understood the doubt. You no longer listen to it. You’re going to listen to this deeper voice inside you. You’re going to acknowledge it, validate it, follow it, and not let the doubt prevent it. And chances are the world will respond to that.

Rupert Spira

Rupert’s words above are a beautiful embodiment of the hero slaying the monster within the Hero’s Journey. The monster embodies our fears which stands in our way, blocking our progress. But it is created from our limited beliefs which are a part of our current identity, now having become outdated.

So to go beyond it, we have to let go of our old sense of self and our old sense of beliefs which effectively feels like we are killing ourselves by letting go our old sense of self and discarding it by the wayside, thus no longer giving it the attention it feeds from and desires. But in the process of doing so, we are able to expand our sense of self-identity, become more than we thought possible.

This is the struggle I am going through with my old sense of self right now. And the more I struggle with it, the more I realize that you just can’t ignore it and “get busy” to try to overcome it because that’s the very thing it feeds off of. Instead you have to fully stop, turn towards it, stare at it, sit still with it, and say, “I see you for what you are.”

This is why vertical development to me is like playing within a MMORPG. Your True Self is the “player” and your identity, who you misbelieve you are, is your “character.” When your character has achieved enough experience in life to outgrown itself and level up its level of consciousness, it does so without fear or grief of losing itself. Instead it’s seen as a wondrous experience of greater opportunities and possibilities, as it expands itself.

Knowing this is one thing though. Living it is completely another.

You’re still expecting something to happen. That’s the problem.

Enlightenment is not an event. It’s not a marvellous event. It’s not a mundane event. It’s not any kind of event. It’s not something that happens.

Enlightenment is not something new. It’s not something that was lost and now has to be found. At best, and even this is not quite true, but at best we could say it was overlooked…

In fact, awareness doesn’t have problems, doesn’t know problems. Why? Because in order for there to be a problem, there needs to be resistance. There needs to be the, “I don’t like this.” That’s what makes a situation a problem.

But awareness is like empty space. It’s never saying to the current experience, “I don’t like you.” And therefore, it doesn’t have problems.

So it’s not saying, “My separate horrible self needs to be got rid of. I’m fed up with her.” The “I” that is fed up with her is another form of herself. In other words the separate self is perpetuating itself by trying to get rid of itself.

So you’re caught in this mind from which you are understandably tired of trying to get rid of yourself. “I, the separate self, want to get rid of myself, so that I, the separate self, can experience enlightenment.”

And you’re going round and round and round. And you’re rightly frustrated and disheartened because you’re engaged in a never-ending endeavour which is perpetuating the separate self by trying to get rid of it.

It’s just see the situation clearly. You cannot get rid of an illusion.

What can you do to an illusion, what do you need to do to an illusion, just to see that it’s an illusion? Don’t spend your life trying to get rid of an illusion. It’s a waste of a lifetime.

Just live what you understand. Take your stand there.

In other words, enlightenment is a fancy name for the most simple, the most ordinary, the most well-known experience there is. And all seven billion of us know it. However, because it cannot be found by the mind, in most cases it is deemed missing. And as a result of that, the peace and the happiness that are inherent in it are also considered missing. And hence, the imaginary self goes off into the world in search  for the missing peace and happiness.

And as we all know, it doesn’t live there. Where does it live? In the simple knowing of our own being. It’s knowing of itself. That is awarenesses awareness of awareness.

Instead of mistaking yourself for a cluster of thoughts and feelings, just noticed, “Oh no. I am the one who is aware of those. I’m not a cluster of thoughts and feelings. All those flow by. But I’m not flowing by, I’m just always here.”

Just allow that to come from the background into the foreground, more and more.

Rupert Spira

Rupert uses an amazing metaphor for life within this video as thought one were looking at a movie screen and seeing their life play out upon it (which mirrors Plato’s Allegory of the Cave) but then forgetting that what we’re seeing is an illusion cast upon a screen. (I, myself, prefer a more modern metaphor for this whereby life is playing out upon a VR headset screen that is covering our eyes which is why it’s hard for us to realize this.)

Thus this “screen” is what is often overlooked, as he notes.

Compared to the woman who Rupert is speaking to, who is experiencing this problem, I would say it mirrors my own experience in that I’m seeking some transitory and transformative event that will shift my perception but that in looking for it, even expecting it, I’m actually preventing it from happening.

In effect, so often how we think things will turn out is completely different than how they will because we often misinterpret the meaning of the experience itself, thinking we know it. When it’s actually much more paradoxical than we imagined it would be.

At the same time though, the reverse of this also happens! In effect, we often do things that we think are “wrong” but they are actually naturally right. Like I kept feeling like having a blog and taking things only one step at a time and just writing that thread of an experience separately, wasn’t enough. So I put a massive expectation upon myself to try to force it all out at once which only made it worse and made me stuck even more.

Yet you can’t force a seed to grow. You have to give it time, space, and room to grow on its own. Thus when finally in the right fertile environment and conditions, it flourishes rapidly upon its own.

It’s funny. I remember saying something a while back about the quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I said that the teacher is actually always there, they’re often just not noticed. This is remarkably similar to what Rupert is saying here. Our awareness, which is constantly with us, is always there.

BTW Rupert’s mention of defusing your vision to become aware of our awareness is also remarkable close to an experience I had many years back, while I was in a liminal state while preparing to fall asleep. Effectively my deep rhythmic breathing and a state of focus that was out of focus, both between what was I looking at and what I was, caused this experience to occur. But as I noted before, I never replicated this experience, even though I knew I could, because I was too afraid of the feeling of the experience of not being my “self” and thus potentially losing my “self” permanently in the process.

When it comes to poetry, we should not demand that the poet uses words in too literal or rational a way. The words of a poem don’t operate on the rational mind, they operate on a deeper level. And the same is true of a prayer.

So the main thing to understand is that the god to whom we might pray, if we’re inclined to pray in words like that, the god to whom we might pray is the god that we are. It is a prayer of ourself to our self, couched in the limitations of language.

Sitting in abidance, abidance as being, is the ultimate prayer. Liberate your idea of prayer from the belief that it is something that is contained in words or expressed in words.

So abidance, being knowingly the presence of awareness or resting in being, is the highest form of prayer.

Understand you are the one you are praying to. It’s a way of speaking to yourself. It’s a way of personifying yourself, so that you feel that you can, in some ways in your mind, objectify yourself and have a relationship with yourself. But at some point that has to go, so that you feel that you are the being that you pray to.

I remembered a while back reading something that mentioned that people are “seeking something larger than themselves” and I intuitively realized at the time that this “something,” that was “larger” than themselves, was actually their True Self which lies beyond their current limited sense of “self.”

This video above by Rupert Spira mirrors this realization.

In fact, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero Path mirrors this realization as well.

And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.

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, The Hero Path

That Rupert also mentions that it’s about having a relationship with yourself is also poignant, as I’ve noted before that this is what vertical development is really about at its core. It’s about beginning a lifelong journey of getting to know yourself by being within an intrapersonal relationship with yourself.

Why? Because when we reach a point of being able to truly accept and love ourselves as we are, thus truly becoming at “home” with ourselves, then will we be able to accept and love others as they are as well. This is the oneness, the “god”, within us all, as Joseph Campbell speaks above about.

This also poignantly ties into what I intuitively felt like was required to “level up” one’s level of consciousness. In effect, one has to completely trust one’s larger sense of Self would catch oneself, as one falls back into its embrace which occurs when one turns around and steps back from one’s life to understand it better.

While doing some research today to understand the relationship between play and intrinsic motivation, I was dumbfounded to see the words “belonging” and even “recognition” within the description of intrinsic motivation. To me, this seemed absurd, since I always believed that intrinsic motivation was doing something for its own reward rather than for an external reward and doing something so that you can “belong” or get “recognition” from others seems to me like that’s an external social reward.

Digging a bit deeper, I discovered that intrinsic basically means “naturally” and it also relates to our psychological development. When I read that, it suddenly made me realize that “intrinsic motivations” are our basic psychological needs and values that we strive to meet as we grow and develop through our different stages of development.

So when we’re younger, play (which is intrinsically motivated) helps us to develop our social skills, including a sense of belonging with others. But as we get older, we “level up” and “play” within newer roles (i.e. job, career), seeking a sense of self-esteem and recognition in our work as well.

If this is accurate though, then intrinsic motivation goes beyond belonging and recognition and includes many more mature aspects of growth like freedom, autonomy, creativity, and meaning. In effect, we are naturally drawn to these newer needs and values as we mature and evolve, just as we are drawn to belonging and recognition in our younger years.

Most people have no concept of where their motivations come from, what stage of psychological development they are at, what stages they have passed through, or what stages they still need to master to find fulfilment in their lives. The only criteria they have for making choices are: what makes them feel happy in the moment, or what gives their life a sense of meaning and fulfilment.

Happiness, meaning and fulfilment are not synonymous. What makes us happy is the satisfaction of our ego’s needs, and what gives our life meaning and fulfilment is the satisfaction of our soul’s needs.

Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching

It’s funny. I just remembered something else from a long while back talking about leaders in The Future of Work acting more like hosts rather than bosses. Therefore, their goal isn’t to take control of the conversation and dominate it but rather it is to make it more conducive, connected, and flowing amongst others. This is pretty much the same thing a leader of a community strives to do online. They act like facilitators more so.

I think for them to be effective with this though, especially if they want to connect a large group of change agents with different disciplinary perspectives, is that they have to be good at understanding and bridging the different disciplinary perspectives, metaphors, and languages of each one of these people, showing how they are actually similar to one other.

Hmmm. And perhaps in the process, a shared metaphor and language can be created that everyone can understand, thus leading to a shared vision in turn.

It’s Time for a Forward Thinking Conversation. It’s time for a #ReOrg « Chris Heuer’s Insytes

We live in an amazing time. A time where we are able to not only stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, but also where we can be lifted by our peers and give them a boost too.

http://chrisheuer.com/2014/11/21/its-time-for-a-forward-thinking-conversation-its-time-for-a-reorg/

As I said then and as I believe more than ever today, the principles aren’t wrong or misdirected. However, in the war of words that is central to the battle for the soul of our organizations, fighting under the banner of social business is a losing proposition – the modern equivalent to knowledge management. It’s just not winning the hearts, minds and slices of the budgetary pie necessary for our shared vision to become reality as quickly as we need the change to be the reality.

Unfortunately I have come to feel the same way about the “Future of Work” discussion and movement, despite the fact that it is the direction where my social business cohorts have headed. It’s hard to talk about the future of something when you haven’t created a shared vision upon the present that is emerging and what distinctions must be embraced and elevated.

So what are the words that will serve as our campfire around which we will gather for camaraderie and warmth? What is the language of the movement that encapsulates the multiple distinctions and insights that collectively are driving us towards a future free of today’s most commonly accepted defects? I don’t think it’s social business, I don’t think its future of work. I’m open to other suggestions, but for now I’d like to start this conversation focused on what I have consistently heard as the most fundamental change we must realize – a change in organizational structure and governance. A re-imagination of what an organization looks like and a rethinking of what we mean by work.

While we may not yet have adequate language for what we envision, I submit for your consideration that we are talking about a widespread #ReOrg. The reorganization of our mindsets, methods and measures about the organization, about our relationships to them as humans and about the fundamental practice of management as the underlying operating system that governs its behaviors. It’s time to create a more holistic view of how we create value, and especially with a focus on how we can optimize our ability to create shared value that benefits society as a whole instead of just those who have won the war for control.

Yes, it’s time for a #ReOrg. Are you ready? Let’s talk about it.

The Future of Work Requires New Mindsets, Methods and Measures « Chris Heuer’s Insytes

[This is a reposting from my no longer available Alynd blog originally dated March 12, 2015 as I re-engage with the #FutureOfWork movement]

http://chrisheuer.com/2019/09/19/the-future-of-work-requires-new-mindsets-methods-and-measures/

In order to even get started on a journey to a New Way to Work, we need to embrace new mindsets that give up on “doing things the way they have always been done”. As I’ve stated in my post “It’s Time for a Forward Thinking Conversation“, we need to rethink, reimagine, redesign and #ReOrg our entire approach to organizations and their culture.  A lot of people have been spreading the meme that “Culture eats strategy for lunch” but too few people really understand what culture is and even fewer understand what must be done to shape it and how leaders are negatively reinforcing it with their own behaviors.The challenge is that there are so many contributing factors that go into culture, getting to the root causes, language and actions that create it and reshape it can be a daunting task. There are no standard best practices for fixing a broken culture, though there are some common insights that may be applied to your unique situation. As I see it, the first thing that must change is a need for REAL Relationships in the workplace as much as we need them for success in the marketplace.

REAL is an acronym as well as an intention – it stands for Reciprocal, Empathetic, Authentic and Long Lasting. We all need to get something out of our time together. Despite your title or position, the employees are not only there to be subservient to your will. For many senior leaders this may in fact be the most difficult insight to accept, but the performance improvements to be gleaned have already rewarded those bold enough to embrace this reality. When leaders embrace the fact that we are all in this together and support a deeper sense of TEAMWORK, costs go down, opportunities increase and employee engagement dramatically improves.

New mindsets are more then the foundation of a team based, collaborative culture. They are also about the shift in what we value, what we are willing to accept and what we are not willing to accept. Do we tolerate assholes simply because they are high performers? Do we only care about profit? or do we care about people and planet too? Increasingly market leaders are the one’s who understand that money is only one measure of success. Yes, it is an important measure of success, but as consumers and even corporations are shifting their mindsets, there is a greater realization of the benefits of serving the whole of the market. This is resulting in more leaders and more organizations discarding institutional thinking focused on capturing maximum value for shareholders and instead optimizing to create maximum shared value for all stakeholders.

Quotes from these two posts by Chris Heuer relate to what I said in my last post about the importance of understanding the bigger picture and narrative of vertical development. It helps you to see how each stage of development and level of consciousness is like its own world(view) and reality, with it’s own vision, mindset, values, and meaningful language.

It also explains why there is so much conflict in articulating a shared vision for The Future of Work because leaders are often operating from different stages of development and thus from different mindsets and values. In fact, this is the same reason why there is so much conflict in the world as a whole today and why so many of our political leaders are unable to deal with the wickedly complex problems that are emerging.

Taking my last post a step further, I’m realizing that my work isn’t just about showing other people the larger context of vertical development within the world’s events, such as The Great Resignation, but more importantly it’s about showing how my all of the research over the last two decades fits within the larger context of vertical development as well.

This is something profoundly important to recognize because the reason I kept researching new and larger things since 2001 is because no singular thing I researched seemed to be able to contain the meaning and understanding of everything that I was looking for. When I finally grasped the meaning of vertical development though, I began to realize it not only provided a larger context of life but it provided a larger context and container with which to organize the knowledge I had been researching for the last two decades of my life.

An easier way to understand this is to view each aspect of knowledge as a stepping stone contained within a larger narrative of wisdom that helps one gain a broader understanding and meaning of what’s going on.

So for myself, I indicated previously that I’ve been “Researching The Future of Work, Social Innovation, and Creativity” over the past two decades, describing it linearly as I learnt it. But if I reflect back upon my research and rearrange the knowledge I’ve learnt into a narrative format, I’d describe it as “Researching how Vertical Development helps us to understand the Creativity needed to achieve the Social Innovation to step into The Future of Work.” But it even goes beyond this because it is play (at a higher conceptual level) that makes this creativity possible.

But to put this within the context and reality of our world today. Many people are feeling like work is no longer working for them and perhaps even feel like it’s working against them. This is why The Great Resignation isn’t over but it is evolving into something larger.

Initially these people will be just be angry and depressed, grieving at the way things used to be but also frustrated at seeing no way forward. Eventually they may learn about The Future of Work which makes them feel hopeful, like they aren’t alone, as other people are looking for a new way of working as well. But then the question arises, how do we get to this new world of work? They may learn about the social innovation required to do so but will then learn about the (social) creativity which what makes this possible.

Very few people will probably learn about vertical development though which again helps you to understand all of these things within a larger narrative arc of life. In effect, individual and societies are continually evolved and changing, although many many not perceive that. The Future of Work is just the current name (albeit a poorly named one) for the social innovation needed for us to continue evolving and growing as a society.