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.
Stumbled across this talk on TV today, only to go online and find out it’s from a couple of months ago but a great round table discussion nevertheless on the current upheaval affecting the work world.
One thing I felt while watching this was flashbacks of pain and frustration from previous work experiences. I’ve mentioned before that due to my highly sensitive personality, I’m kind of like a canary in a coal mine, thus I’m able to detect and empathetically feel the cultural atmosphere of the organizational environment based on its people. But trying to talk to management and get them to understand the feeling of the needs of their people can be an exhausting affair.
We can’t even get to the table to talk to people.
Of particular note was one employer in the restaurant industry saying it’s even difficult to try to start a conversation with potential employees because many don’t show up for interviews and others even quit and disappear without giving notice as to why.
And as soon as I heard this and another employer complaining about potential employees ghosting them without notice, it’s evident to me that this is effectively decades of horrible business practices by employers that are effectively coming back and haunting them. In effect, employees are only mirroring the hiring practices of most business in that they often don’t respond, indicating if you’ve gotten a job or not, or even if why.
And it’s only the beginning, once you’re hired. Trying repeatedly for days, months, or years to talk to management to get them to see and understand issues is exhausting. Employees have had enough. They’re exhausted trying to talk to someone who won’t listen and won’t try to understand their perspective.
Why this is poignant is because over the Christmas holidays, I spent time with my wife’s family and a discussion came up about the labour issues in Canada and the feeling for some was that people are “lazy and don’t want to work anymore.” I immediately turned around and disagreed with this.
I indicated that work is one of the primary ways people feel a sense of belonging, self-esteem, and of being valued by others. People want to work. They’re just exhausted working the old way and have had enough of it because work is no longer working for them.
And this is most evident by the one employer indicating how her remaining employees are being overloaded because she can’t find and hire people, as if she has no choice but to overload them with work. As usual, employees always become the ones who have to stretch and fill the gap. The only problem today is that you can’t fill these gaps anymore because they’re too bottomless and can’t be hidden.
All said and done, I find the situation somewhat ironic in that here we have employers now finally in distress and knowing what employees have felt like for decades in trying to talk but no one was interested in truly listening to them.
Oh my god! This is a hilarious! I just remembered a realization I had some time ago that relates to my last post about how thinking we know everything often blinds us from growth and development.
My greatest fear in stepping forward into my life’s work, and truly owning it and accepting it, is not knowing everything and thus being unable to provide “all the answers” that people may need relating to my work.
To put this another way, my very mindset and perception of what I need to be “successful” is a wrong perception of reality that’s actually impeding me from my own growth and causing me to suffer in my life, because I feel like I’m stuck in place.
Therefore to step forward and out of the way of myself (my ego), what I need to do is not avoid this but actually embrace it and leverage it as something that can help me going forward in my work. Why this is hilarious is because it actually describes the traits of leaders at the highest plateau of adult development, as pictured below, whereby leaders with Self-Transforming Minds are “leading to learn.”
Robert Kegan’s Three Plateaus of Adult Mental Development
In effect, leaders with Self-Transforming Minds don’t have all the right answers. They are instead the ones asking all the right questions.
This is pretty much why I’ve been unable to step into this plateau and realm of perceiving because my outdated mindset and perception is preventing me from understanding how it works differently as a whole, even though I’ve mapped and seemingly understood pieces of this terrain over the last decade or so.
Simply put, for me to truly step into this space, I actually need to live and embody the values of it in my very work. In doing so, only then will I be able to step beyond all of my “monstrous” fears and effectively “slay” them (as per Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey). Effectively as a whole, this means meeting my base needs of 1) economically surviving by doing my own unique work, 2) truly accepting the belongingof my core Self (as per Brene Brown’s True Belonging), and 3) finally satisfying my need for respect and recognition by truly doing something of deep value to others.
While I’ve been aware of these base needs for a while, I just couldn’t figure out the correct context and intention for my work to try to “package” it as a whole…because I’ve been trying to contain it within an outdated approach which never seems to eloquently fit these newer concepts, ideas, and methods. This newer, broader perspective may finally provide me with a larger space of possibilities to contain everything I’ve wanted, in a way that may finally make sense on so many levels.
I just realized something today that relates to what Carol Sanford said about trying to share the understanding of her work to other people in her book Indirect Work.
The number one thing impeding people from their own growth and development is their assumption that they know everything already (which is why they often listen to just affirm their own beliefs).
This in turn relates to a question I had a very long time ago about trying to help people in corporate environments but without much success. “How can you help someone who doesn’t want your help?”
The reason you can’t help them and they don’t want your help is because they think they know everything and have it all figured out already. In other words, they don’t realize that their own belief that they have everything figured out is in itself a misperception that is causing them suffering.
It’s only when someone goes through that repeated suffering and finally realizes they haven’t got everything figured out and actually asks for help…or at the very least steps back from their beliefs and begin to question them…that they can begin to grow and develop again.
That said though, I think our world is going to go through a whole lot more suffering before people begin to wake up and realize that they’re belief that they have everything figured out is the main reason why their world(view) is collapsing in the first place.
This discrepancy in evolutionary development between the individual and the cultures the person is embedded in, is one of the reasons people decide to leave the corporate world. As they get further along in their evolutionary journey, they reach a stage in their development where they no longer feel aligned with the values and beliefs of the organisation they are working in. They become gradually more stressed and begin to feel burned out, either because their needs —the opportunities they require to move ahead with their development—cannot be met by the culture they are working in, or because they no longer feel a sense of alignment with the values of the organisation.
Many people put up with such situations for far too long. Because of their loyalty to the organisation or their commitment to their work, they stay longer than they should. They justify their actions by entertaining the dream that somehow the culture will magically change. Others stay because they believe they will not be able to make the same level of income or get the benefits they now enjoy, elsewhere.
They lock themselves into a cultural environment where they feel they have to park their values in the car park every time they enter their place of work. Spending long periods in such a state of misalignment sickens the soul. Eventually, most people get to the point where they cannot stand it anymore. They feel so unhappy that they look for alternative employment, perhaps accepting a lower-paying job, one with fewer benefits, or part-time employment. They will be willing to go anywhere, to get away from the toxic environment of their current place of work. The more talented and courageous among them will start their own businesses.
I think it’s kind of curious to now see that how in this world do you do things that are equally crazy and how do you have the courage to believe in your imagination for things right off the bat mathematically seem incoherent.
John Seely Brown
Found this amazing quote by John Seely Brown in a speech he did, that I watched online back in January 2020. This is pretty much how I feel about my work right now. It probably seems completely crazy to most people on the surface but if you start going below the surface of it, you start seeing how it psychologically connects to everything, relating very poignantly to the world we’re living within now and The Future of Work we want to step into.
For me, this embodies creatively playing with the very perception of your reality, your worldview, which is why I call it “playing on a whole new level” because it requires stepping into a whole new psychological terrain of being human that “levels up” your level of consciousness in turn, making what was previously impossible seem possible.
Pushing beyond the limits you’ve set for yourself, or others have set on you, is called edgework. Here’s how to “play the edge” in the name of growth and thriving.
In the natural world, the edge is where the action is. The zone between two ecosystemswater and land, or field and forest—is where the greatest diversity and productivity are found, as well as the most predation. This is fitting, as the Greek word for this region, an ecotone, means tension. But it’s characterized by a fertility that biologists call the edge effect.
In human affairs, the ecotone between the life you have and the life you want, between your status quo and your potential, is equally fruitful if not fitful, full of passion and suffering, productivity and predation. The exercise of pushing beyond your assumed limits into this zone of intensity and virility, in search of fulfillment and new possibilities, is rightfully referred to by sociologists as edgework.
It’s a kind of personal anarchy, an affirmative revolt against your own stuckness,as well as the entrapments and over-determined nature of everyday life (they don’t call it the “beaten” path for nothing). It’s not loss of control, though, but an acute sort of self-control, says Jeff Ferrell, author of Making Trouble. It’s self-control in place of control by others, whether church and state or job and gender, and it’s based on the understanding that if you don’t control yourself, somebody else will.
“It’s self-control for the sake of self-determination,” Ferrell says. “Self-control in the interest of holding on to your life while letting go of it. Self-control that gets you hooked on the autonomy of self-invention. It’s a defiant disavowal of secondhand living. It’s the refusal to live in a cage and have food thrown in.”
In fact, the primary evolutionary advantage of these behaviors comes down to exploration. Some members of any tribe, especially in new environments, have to investigate what’s dangerous and what’s not, and test the limits so that others will know what they are and either avoid them or exercise caution in approaching them. The explorer and aviator Charles Lindbergh rightly asked, “What civilization was not founded on adventure? Our earliest records tell of biting the apple and baiting the dragon, regardless of hardship or danger, and from this, perhaps, progress and civilization developed.”
Thus the importance of supporting the dragon-baiters, both in society and in ourselves. Of keeping alive the role of edgewalker, outlier, provocateur, and imagineer, the one who stands outside the shop window looking in and questioning; who lives in the liminal zone between civilized and wild, conformity and rebellion; who dives beneath the surface of life to its depths.
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that “civilized” society is defined by having five qualities: beauty, truth, art, peace and adventure, and that it preserves its vitality only as long as “it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.” And the same goes for its civilians.
