I’m beginning to experiment with ChatGPT and I’m finding it very interesting. Unlike other people, I’m not interested in using it to write articles that I just copy, paste, and publish but instead I’m interested in using it to help me better see and articulate the things I already know, especially when it comes to trying to explain the relationshipbetween the different things I’m researching and how they integrate into a bigger picture.
So for example if it spits out three or four paragraphs about a topic I’m asking it about, I may find one specific sentence that I may save from it because that sentence helps me to better describe the relationship between that topic and another topic I’m researching. So the idea (hopefully) when I’m done is to take these individual separate sentences and then reword and integrate them into a paragraph that articulates a bigger picture of my work in a much simpler, concise form than the excessive verbosity I’ve used in the past.
Neuroscientist: Consciousness didn’t evolve. It creates evolution
Cognitive scientist Hoffman starts by trying to align his consciousness theory with standard evolution theory and then just chucks that and says what he thinks.
How could it possibly be that true perceptions could guide useful behavior? And fortunately we have a nice metaphor with the advent of computers and laptops and user interfaces that I think can help us to see what’s going on here.
The whole point of the desktop interface is to hide the truth and to guide your behavior.
So what you want is an interface that hides the complexity that you don’t need to know so that you can do the things you need to do… It’s not lying to you; it’s actually helping you. But it’s helping you by hiding the truth.
So evolution has done the same thing for us. It has given us perceptions that are like a user interface…
So I’ve used Evolutionary Game Theory to conclude that everything that we see around us in our perceptions is not veridical; it’s just a user interface, okay. And that means I have to go back and rethink what do.
Consciousness didn’t emerge from a prior physical process of evolution. Consciousness is fundamental and so we have to rethink the whole history of the universe actually from this point of view, from The Big Bang up through evolution. We have to rethink it in terms of how to rewrite that story, consistent with all of our current science but understanding that it’s … consciousness is fundamental, not the physical universe (7:23)
And, you know, one thing that comes out of this as well is, no one has been able to give a reason for why consciousness would evolve. What is it for? And so my attitude is, it didn’t evolve. It’s the ground from which evolution occurs.
When I find articles like this, I get this immense feeling of elation because it verifies what my intuition has been trying to tell me over the past decade or more. That being that the evolution and transformation of our perception through vertical development isn’t just like a computer getting a new operating system / user interface but it’s more like a video game whereby when you level up your level of consciousness, your perceptual user interface improves in turn. And just as quoted above, this newer perceptual user interface empowers you and gives you the capacity to work with and understand complexity at a greater level.
This is the meaning behind my description of myself as “playing at a whole new level” right now in my life. In effect, when you level up your level of consciousness to a new stage of psychological development, you’re effecting playing within a whole new game and perceiving reality in a whole new way.
So no, consciousness doesn’t evolve, as noted above, but rather consciousness is what allows us to evolve in turn, gaining a greater understanding and clarity of it as we level up in life.
I’ve been following Tiago Forte for some time now. Initially I was fascinated with what he is known for today, his approach to knowledge management using a Second Brain to boost your productivity, but over time I became more fascinated with how he expresses his vertical development (similar to Robert Kegan’s stages of development) and really wanted to see him dive deeper into it.
Well in reading his recent 2022 annual review, it’s evident I won’t have to wait that long, as so many points within it seem to focus around not just his own vertical development but how he wants to begin helping others with their own as well. Let’s take a look at some of them.
I began to find clues in my past writing that indicated a life stage was drawing to a close and a mid-life crisis was looming:
My usual sources of motivation stopped working
Pursuits that used to fill me with enthusiasm started to feel grey and flat
Contemplating a future filled with more of the same began to feel dark and depressing
I found that a mid-life crisis is characterized by a sudden, pervasive loss of energy. Like the engine that powers my psychology is grinding to a halt. My goal then becomes to find a new source of energy and motivation for the next chapter.
This mirrors the recent article I found on how boredom can reach a transformation state that can reinvent us and our sense of self. It also states how social media can addictively distract us to prevent this transformation from occurring.
It’s pretty much the same experience I’ve been having with ever increasing frequency over the past few years. Things that once seemed meaningful to me are now feeling meaningless because I’m looking for a deeper sense of meaning. And I’m even becoming aware of the addictive distraction of social media for what it is and slowly starting to respond differently to it rather than just reacting automatically to it (thus helping to avoid an endless case of doomscrolling which appeases the explorer nature in me but really doesn’t get me anywhere).
Releasing my book to the world has been the adventure of a lifetime, but also the challenge of a lifetime.
This mirrors how I see vertical development as The Adventure of Your Life because it is an ever changing journey across your entire life.
What my series of mid-life crises has taught me is that identities are malleable and temporary.
An identity is an information construct – a loose collection of beliefs, values, viewpoints, priorities, goals, and principles for living held together by a story about who you are. Humans cannot survive psychologically without an identity. It’s the narrative glue that gives meaning to the chaotic storms of electrical activity cascading through our brains.
Like changing clothes as the weather turns, identities serve you for one situation but not necessarily others. When your identity wears out and no longer serves you, it’s time to find a new one. As the saying goes, the identity that got you here won’t get you to where you want to go next.
At certain liminal moments of unpredictable change, such as during a mid-life crisis, the superstructure of our identity becomes especially fluid. There’s a brief window in which we have the chance to shake it loose and build another.
This is vertical development in a nutshell. We don’t have a static identity, awareness, and perception in life but instead they all evolve over the course of our life. And they transitionally evolve by our own identity shattering like a container and the fluidity of our Self flowing outwards discovering a newer, larger “container” of being.
What people often misperceive though is that when they grow up and become an adult, the believe this evolution stops and our identity becomes permanently molded into a set container for the rest of our lives. It doesn’t. There are deeper and broader ways of being a human being but only if we wish to explore them. Because most of society isn’t aware of this, society often can’t help you go beyond this point and may even obstruct you from doing so, as the post-conventional growth beyond is often paradoxical and the antithesis of conventional beliefs.
Using that lens, the picture I see is of a man who is overworked, pushing himself too hard on too many fronts, and using a combination of social media, sugary junk food, strong coffee, and distraction to salve the pain that causes. I see someone who is so tired and anxious that he doesn’t have the capacity to do the things he knows would make him less tired and anxious. I see someone who deeply wants to spend more and better time with his growing family, but doesn’t have clear enough boundaries between work and life to create the necessary space.
Absolutely love this candour and honesty which will probably shatter his most ardent followers beliefs that he’s a “successful individual” living a “perfect life” (especially with the release of his book).
It’s funny. So often we use addictions to fill the gaps in our lives or distract us from them when we should be actually stopping and exploring them further. When we do so, that’s when we find a larger unknown sense of Self awaiting for us. But ya, it can be scary and fearful because you’re stepping into an uncertain unknown, rather than standing on solid ground with a sure footing of who you are.
And this is the key to the identity change that comes next: it has to come from a place of complete self-acceptance and self-love, not a desire to change someone who is bad or wrong.
This is my greatest struggle. Accepting myself as a I am…right now, as I am. I believe this is the core to understanding creativity at a higher level. Having a clear vision of where you want to be is essential but without a clear picture of reality as it is right now, you won’t have a stable conduit for change. Both sides of the bridge need to be firmly rooted. Again I know this but putting it into practice and living it is something different.
I am a Wisdom Worker, not a Knowledge Worker
Early in my career, I was an Information Worker – I spent most of my time taking in, organizing, editing, and manipulating information for others to act on. Later on, I became a Knowledge Worker, conveying tacit knowledge I’d begun to gather from experience. Now I increasingly see myself as a Wisdom Worker, letting go of the implementation details almost completely and instead helping others feel through uncertainty and fear to their truth.
This is the key definitive statement in Tiago’s review that made me realize his next leap is into vertical development work, as this again perfectly articulates what it is about and what I’ve even experienced about it myself.
In Susanne Cook-Greuter’s paper on Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory of Vertical Growth and Meaning Making, she indicates that the shift from conventional linear reasoning to a post-conventional systems view is achieved by shift from a focus on knowledge to a focus on wisdom, whereby we “strip away illusions” and “recognize our assumptions” thus “understanding more deeply.”
More importantly there is a shift away from a focus on just relying upon our thinkingto beginning to rely upon our feelings more so, with our intuition being a perfect example of this. This is something I experienced some years back in that I realized that this latter part of the journey, you have to feel your way through it rather than trying to think your way through it.
My purpose is to bring people together over ideas, in inspired communities
Part of my reason for diving deep into my past journaling was to find evidence of my essential nature – what has always been true about me? And when I looked at the most fulfilling, most meaningful experiences of my life, they all had to do with bringing people together in inspired communities centered around the power and beauty of ideas. I want to return to this more purposefully next year.
This pretty much encapsulates my own purpose as well. In effect, when I was younger, I created communities online to help people to level up within the imaginary worlds that we played within (i.e. World of Warcraft). Today, I’m imagining a world of “play” (as a higher level mindset) wherein communities of practice help people to “level up” psychologically in life, thus helping them to prepare for “The Adventure of Their Life.” In other words, helping to create a society that fully recognizes and supports the growth and development of people beyond just the conventional stages of development and into the seemingly paradoxical post-conventional stages.
The thing is, we are not alone in wanting this. I’m seeing other people wanting to create similar communities of practice as well. For example, John Hagel noted that he is wanting to create a community of a similar nature but it sounds like he’s struggling with with it as well. In other words, there are many of us wanting to create the same universal meaningful thing but we’re often just describing and naming it from our own familiar metaphors and disciplinary perspectives which can in turn create a barrier to seeing it for what it is because we often misperceive the meaning of things.
This to me is the greatest challenge of these types of communities. They’re not so much about ideas, as they are about accepting people as they are which in turn allows their potential and ideas to emerge effortlessly and without fear. This is what a world of play looks like and means to me. It’s everyone having a radical openness of each other, letting each person play within their own space of possibilities (as Beau Lotto would describe it).
My official theme for 2023 is Reinvention. I am reinventing who I am, what I do, and what I’m committed to for the next leg of this journey.
There is so much more that I could have highlighted from his annual review but I think this quote from near the end of it pretty much sums what he’s looking for in his life, what I’m looking for in my life, and what I think a lot of people are looking for in their lives in 2023, especially with work not working out for so many people today.
This above all else is what I’m the most interested in with regards to Tiago’s path ahead. How will he market himself and articulate this newer work to new potential customers (as I doubt he’ll call it “vertical development” work), especially to those who are effectively oblivious of this deeper aspect and growth potential of life? If anyone can do it though, I think he can. He has almost a natural propensity to playwith his sense of self, leaping exhilarating into the unknown, rather than being hesitantly fearful of it.
When superficially bored, “We are held in limbo by a situation that restricts us from doing what we want to be doing, while simultaneously being left empty insofar as the situation does not satisfy us.” Think of being stuck in a useless work meeting or trapped inside on a rainy day.
When repeatedly exposed to superficial boredom, we can reach profound boredom, defined as “a deep state of indifference towards oneself and to the world” leading to “an existential discomfort in which people struggle with their sense of self.”
But social media couldn’t hold off subjects’ profound boredom forever. “I felt empty, an emptiness that was difficult to escape from,” one of the interviewees, Richard, told the authors. “The longer I was bored, the worse I felt about myself. Like, who am I and what do I want to do with my life?”
But when Richard and many of the other subjects became profoundly bored, they cited their listlessness as an impetus for reinvention.
As awful as the COVID lockdowns were, they provided “ideal” conditions for profound boredom, the authors said, which ultimately pushed many to discover new passions. The much discussed Great Resignation, in which employees are now leaving their unsatisfying jobs in far greater proportions than has been seen over the past two decades, could very well have been galvanized by profound boredom during the pandemic.
Addiction comes from the Latin dicere, related to the root of the word dictator. It’s like having an internal dictator usurping our agency.
Furthermore, an addiction is like a useful set of armour that helps us through the world, but eventually it gets too heavy and cumbersome until we’re finally ready to start shedding it. Addictions offer a temporary illusion of protection from suffering that then becomes a cause of suffering. Specifically, addictions offer protection from the present moment. We’re fighting just being. We get a little bored or aggravated or sad, and we reach for a drink to soften the hard edges or start to scroll through social media to distract ourselves – anything to take us away from being right here right now. But if we can sit with the present and tolerate our discomfort with it, then what we might consider negative emotional states can be opportunities: boredom can become creativity, aggravation turns to innovation, and sadness can bring us to the awareness of the precious beauty in the world.
Our conventional growth and development involving learning to wear psychological masks and armour to fit into society. Post-conventional development involves learning to let go of these facades and thus stand out from society but in the process learn to fit into and just be ourselves.
Instead it develops the capacity of awareness of the moments of quiet that already exist between our thoughts. They’re there already; they just need to be noticed. These moments of nothing are vital. It helped me to understand like to a piece of music has rests that provides moments of quiet that are indispensable to the music, or similar to how a painting has areas of restraint, areas with nothing happening that are necessary for us to better see what is happening. Without the moments of nothing, music, art, and our minds are just chaos. We meditate to find that nothing. Once we can find these gaps between our thoughts, we can work to sustain them a little longer each time. It’s not about stopping our thoughts or fighting to get them to settle down, but just noticing those slivers of peace between them.
And then, once we grasp these moments of nothingness, we can begin to appreciate that we aren’t our thoughts. The self isn’t just a collection of ideas that come to us wrapped up in a brain in a stable body. We exist in the moments between our thoughts as well. And when we start to look at who we are, if it’s not our thoughts, then we’re nothing, but in the best possible way. We can be without having to be something. I can never remember this for long, though. I set up reminders because I’ve found nothing more useful to distance myself from ideas or arguments or expectations than mere observation of the inner world as distinct from identity.
To take it just a little further, this craving we all share comes from adhering to the illusion of having a separate self. We meditate to find that we don’t exist as a distinct entity. This is great because then we don’t have to worry about doing all the things!! We’re all part of a bigger ocean.
“Nothing matters.”
Without “emptying our cup” and holding space for ourselves, nothing new came come into being, emerging from that space deep within us.
“The New World is often found within the in-between moments of the Old World.”
We are not the character, the identity, we construct and are playing but are the limitless player behind the character.
We’re not comfortable with emptiness, so we try to fill it, grasping at fixing problems or finding that one solution to solve our issues instead of coming to terms with our true nature. People worry that finding the emptiness within will be like falling through space, but it’s more like floating in warm water or opening the door to an empty house that is rife with possibilities. Our dissatisfaction with ordinary life provokes us to seek a permanent euphoria, but everything is constantly changing anyway, so who really benefits from elevating the importance of particulars?
My intuition is telling me that there is something profoundly important about this statement that relates to a previous post of mine talking about using knowledge (via concept maps) to create a sense of “solid ground to stand on.” It’s almost like it’s telling me that I’m going in the wrong direction by striving to use knowledge to seek certainty.
Wait a minute. Or is it that I’m using knowledge as a crutch in this way? I am addictivein saving every article and paper the I read in PDF form, highlighting and annotating the parts of them that I find important. I think I do this because I believe that they can validate what I’m experiencing, seeing, and perceiving that others seem perceptually blind to. So it’s almost like I don’t trust myself and accept myself, the being that I becoming.
But to fully accept and trust myself, I need to let go and “float in the warm water” of possibilities, without trying to contain and codify myself within a “collection of ideas” that solidly define an identity that I can stand upon (thus defining me as one thing but also limiting me in the process of my becoming something more). I think this is one of my greatest fears and frustrations, my inability to articulate my identity in a conventional way that people will understand, because the scope of what I’m working on seems so massive and encompassing, as if to include all of life itself.
It’s funny. I remember decades back talking about my frustration with categorizing the content on my website because I felt like I couldn’t contain it within one area or discipline but rather it needed to straddled multiple borders. It sounds like I’m experiencing the same thing in terms of categorizing my identity.
What’s poignant about this all though, particularly the quote about “floating in warm water,” is that I already realize what I’m talking about here. It is the continuum of creativity.
In effect, so much of life is initially seen as crossing rivers as obstacles by creating bridges across them. What I’m slowly learning from vertical development though is that the “river” isn’t something to avoid but something to eventually immerse oneself within, as it is the creative source of life itself. Thus life is about learning to master creativity by experiencing it in greater forms.
Yet as been proven time and again, knowing something and truly understanding the wisdom of it on an experiential level is two completely different things. That’s because immersing yourself in a new realm of being can be just as fearful as immersing yourself fully into water for the first time when you were young. Once the initial shock and disorientation wears off though, it becomes quite exhilarating and wondrous in its nature.
Transitional Absurdity: A Developmental Notion That Offers Hope
It is essential that we acknowledge the craziness of much of what we encounter today, and that we have ways of understanding that craziness that can guide us going forward.
But new cultural chapters don’t tend to arrive smoothly. Predictably, there will be a necessary time of transition where the loss of familiar truths causes disruption. The theory describes how we would expect this to be particularly the case with today’s needed changes. Transition between modern-age realties and cultural maturity’s more systemic perspectives requires a letting go of culture’s past role as mythic parent—and with this, the surrender of absolutist, ideological beliefs of all sorts. We should expect the resulting need to more directly confront life’s uncertainties and complexities and to take a new kind of human responsibility to be particularly disruptive.
You have to create your own “game” within the game, one that opens up a whole new space of possibilities that lets you step outside the previous game.
My quote above was written from the perspective of how to overcome the current issues within an MMO game I had previously been playing, as the developers of the game weren’t meeting the needs of the players within it.
What’s remarkable about these words though is that they also perfectly describe what happens when we undergo vertical development in life. The game you’re playing is your current mindset and worldview. The new “game” that you create within the old game is a new mindset and worldview, one that broadens your perception and space of possibilities.
And in a similar fashion, the reason for the leap between the two is often necessitated by your current needs not being met by the existing game due to the way it was created.
It’s funny. My last post has made me realize that I’m effectively being a gamemasterand world builder in trying to encapsulate my work within a narrative package that someone can understand and make sense of in turn. But the essential trick to it is laying a solid, believable foundation that I can then build off of and scaffold other aspects of this bigger picture upon it.
In a nutshell, this bigger picture is about “how play creatively leads us to our authentic selves” which embodies my Be Real Creative mantra and how I see The Future of Work as “being nobody-but-yourself.”
But to understand what this actually means on a visionary scale, you have to understand the practical psychological aspects of how we don’t see reality directly but instead are perceiving it as a constructed mental map that helps us navigate our lives. This is the essential foundation I’m talking about. If you can’t make sense of it then everything else that is scaffolded on top of it won’t make sense either. So you have to start with the foundation and work your way upwards.
In a sense, a lot of this is like wayfinding. But instead of exploring and navigating the world around us, we’re exploring a whole new world within us which in turn transforms the way we perceive our world around us.
Just stumbled across an article talking about how the end poem within the game Minecraft has been released into the public domain. I’ve never played Minecraft, so I wasn’t familiar with it. Reading the last few words of the poem though, as mentioned in the article, took me aback.
And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.
Wake up.
You are the player.
Minecraft End Poem / Credits
Deciding to read the poem in its entirety, I was even more blown away by what I read and what Julian Gough wrote as the poem’s creator.
The core of what this poem is trying to articulate, and even the metaphor it’s using of the “player,” mirrors the same metaphor I want to use myself to explain everything I’ve learnt and still am learning about vertical development, how it relates to psychology and even potentially quantum mechanics, and how using a gaming metaphor can help us understand it in a simpler way (even though the actual workings of it are still a mystery).
The best way I could articulate this in my own words would be to say that we are living in a “simulation” but it is one of our own creation. But I emphasize the word “our” because it’s the first thing to understand about who we are as “players.”
We aren’t so much a body with a soul but are rather a soul with a body. Our soul resides within the quantum realm, a part of a collective consciousness, like a giant quantum computer which is what the universe is effectively is. Our soul inhibits our body and connects to our brain via quantum entanglement.
When we make this radical shift in understanding the larger context of our reality and apply a gaming metaphor to it, suddenly we see how the soul that I am is effectively a “player” inhabiting a body as a “character” which we are playing within a simulated “game” (see the featured image at the top of this post to grasp the awareness of this).
BTW for those familiar with Plato’s Cave, this perfectly relates to it as well. Think of your “character” as your ego, a constructed sense of identity.
Now here’s where it really gets interesting. Once we lay this base foundation, we can then begin to work off of it and understand how others things in life relate to it and fit within this larger context. For example, vertical development helps us to understand how to “level up” within this “game” which improves our perceptual “interface” for it, thus empowering us to perceive it in whole new ways.
Note how this ties into the mention of the “interface” within the Minecraft poem, as well as the mention of getting to “highest level,” as well as mentioning how this is achieved within “the long dream of life” and not “the short dream of a game.” In effect, if we look at Life as a larger, role playing, infinite game, each level of consciousness within it effectively feels like it’s own “short game,” with the player’s character having different roles, needs, and values at each level.
Now once we understand this, we can also build off this in turn and understand how our immediate needs today fit into this larger context. For example, the research I’ve been doing the last two decades around The Future of Work, social innovation, and creativity, as well as the people I’ve connected with online who are working within these areas, all relate to how we are effectively striving to level up to our next level, both as individuals and collectively as a society.
All said and done, this is a glimpse of what I’ve been struggling to articulate. But as I’ve realized recently, the struggle isn’t as much in articulating it, as in having the courage to articulate something so seemingly crazy to the average person that it almost seems heretical. But then again, hasn’t society undergone a monumental, radical shift of perception like this in the past, at a time when we once believed the Earth was the centre of the universe but only to discover that it revolved around the sun instead.
Update: I’ve been reflecting on this and I think going forward I’m going to focus more on the psychology of this rather than the quantum mechanics aspect of it. The main reason is that the quantum mechanics side is pretty much bleeding edge and still a work in process. The psychology side has been more researched over the past decade, with a lot of neuroscientists (such as Beau Lotto) substantiating that we don’t see reality directly.
There is no such thing as a “job creator.” There are employers, who hire employees, because they need them. And then employers pay the employees less than the value they generate. That’s the system. How did we get to the point at which people behave as if the wealthy are giving a gift to working people? I realize it’s not a new attitude, but it remains proudly f’d up.
