To visualize this stepping out of one’s “self” to create a sense of psychological distancing, imagine you’re playing a MMORPG game like World of Warcraft as a “player character.”
Your “character” is who you believe you are, your identity / ego as a construct, because you’re so immersed within the game.
You as a “player” represent the boundless you, your soul.
So being able to step out of both your present “self” and future Self is like a liminal moment of being boundless and witnessing yourself outside of time and space. It’s a moment where you become aware that you are not a body with a soul but rather a soul with a body.
So this process is one in which you let go and follow the lead of your larger sense of Self trying to emerge from within the hidden depths and core of yourself.
My work seems to be about experiencing ontological dissonance within one’s life which arises from a collection of cognitive dissonance forming a door or portal that can allow one to teleport to a new sense of being.
This portal, however, seems both foreign and dangerous, yet alluring and mysterious at the same time.
The trick with it is to not close the portal prematurely, assuming we “know” what it is and means, but to continually hold space for it, so you can explore the emerging meaning of it daily, like an adventurer making forays and dispatches from a new world which embodies a newer, larger sense of Self.
I once told someone who was struggling through a growth moment, beating themselves up in the process, that there is more potentiality within them than they’re aware of and realize.
I indicated that when they feel compassionate and try to help someone else, think of themselves as that person and apply what they said to them to their very self.
This is not always easy to do though because 1) you need to be able to step outside of your current “self” and 2) perceive yourself as both your future Self helping your present “self” which 3) means being neither of them and both of them at the same time.
I just had a realization based upon what I’ve been seeing happening online on platforms like Substack.
The old “expert model” of social media was built on stability, where you mastered a topic, established credibility, and then broadcast your expertise outward. It assumed a relatively stable world where knowledge had lasting value.
Then came “learning in public” which was a response to accelerating change. The idea was that transparency and curiosity mattered more than authority. Yet even that model assumed a kind of linearity: you’re on a knowable path of learning something specific, and the social experience is about documenting that path as it unfolds.
But in today’s world, change is not just faster, it’s nonlinear and emergent. What we’re dealing with isn’t just learning new information but learning how to learn in the midst of instability. So the social experience that fits this era might not be “sharing expertise” or “sharing learning,” but something like “sharing emergence” which is about being in visible dialogue with uncertainty itself.
That would mean showing how sense-making and meaning-making happen before learning stabilizes, so when it’s still messy, ambiguous, even contradictory. It’s not about “Here’s what I know” or “Here’s what I’m learning,” but rather “Here’s what’s trying to form through me in real time, even though I don’t yet know what it means.”
That kind of presence fits a world where transformation, not transmission, is the real work.
And this type of presence is what I continually struggle to outwardly express as my mantra of “the adventure of your life,” even though it is a daily inner experience for me.
In closing, I just want to highlight one of the best examples I’ve seen so far that actually embodies this sharing of emergence. It feels a bit messy and chaotic, yet at the same time it’s real and authentic, as though the person is stumbling through a wilderness, trying to make sense of their inner terrain in the present moment.
For many people, this is what their entire lives revolve around. Working. So much so that they have very little time to actually live.
However, for more progressive individuals and organizations today, life-longing learning is becoming just as important as work, especially in relation to the future of work that’s emerging right now.
Because of this, what appears to be happening is that no longer does learning just happen in the early stages of our lives but it’s becoming a life-long, daily endeavour.
But what about playing though?
If learning is becoming a daily endeavour, just as much as working, what about playing?
Perhaps it depends upon what we mean by playing?
If we perceive playing as some frivolous, childish activity that is often a waste of time than, more often than not, playing obviously won’t be a part of the future of work.
However, if we perceive playing as something much more substantial than the conventional aspect of it, perhaps it can be something integral to our daily lives, just as much as working and learning can be.
To begin to transform our understanding and perception of playing, let’s get Stuart Brown to help us by referring to some of his quotes from his book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul.
I have found that remembering what play is all about and making it part of our daily lives are probably the most important factors in being a fulfilled human being. The ability to play is critical not only to being happy, but also to sustaining social relationships and being a creative, innovative person.
Once people understand what play does for them, they can learn to bring a sense of excitement and adventure back to their lives, make work an extension of their play lives, and engage fully with the world.
Ultimately, this book is about understanding the role of play and using it to find and express our own core truths. It is about learning to harness a force that has been built into us through millions of years of evolution, a force that allows us to both discover our most essential selves and enlarge our world. We are designed to find fulfillment and creative growth through play.
The genius of play is that, in playing, we create imaginative new cognitive combinations. And in creating those novel combinations, we find what works.
The truth is that play seems to be one of the most advanced methods nature has invented to allow a complex brain to create itself.
Of all animal species, humans are the biggest players of all. We are built to play and built through play. When we play, we are engaged in the purest expression of our humanity, the truest expression of our individuality. Is it any wonder that often the times we feel most alive, those that make up our best memories, are moments of play?
Stepping out of a normal routine, finding novelty, being open to serendipity, enjoying the unexpected, embracing a little risk, and finding pleasure in the heightened vividness of life. These are all qualities of a state of play.
To sum up with Stuart Brown is saying here, play isn’t just a pastime—it’s a natural drive and orientation to life that sparks creativity, reveals our true selves, deepens connection, and turns everyday life into a joyful adventure.
To take this a step further though, in terms of understanding how play specifically is integral to our development and “levelling up” in life, not just as children but as adults as well, let’s get D. Stephenson Bond to help us by referring to some of the quotes from his book Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life.
I want to suggest for now that play is our participation in the process of our own development through the imagination.Adults mature through play just as children mature through play precisely insofar as play represents the intermediate step from potential development to actual “work.”
There is a movement beyond conscious play. We all have private fantasies. We all have guiding fictions of our life in our “personal intermediate areas,” that we may or may not share with others whom we trust. But there comes a time when we must make a claim, when simple insight seeks a lifestyle; a time when we’ve played long enough with what may or may not be, and in that day simple play becomes a game with rules for living meaningfully.
There must be a middle ground, a place between two worlds. There must be a place where inner life can find the validation to hold itself together. At the same time there must be a place where outer life can open itself to imagination rich enough to offer meaning. There must be an “intermediate area of experience,” as Winnicott said, where what is subjectively conceived of meets what is objectively given—in other words, a place to play in trust so strong it becomes a way of life.
What is risked in play is the sense of self. Therefore, the building of the symbolic field has to do with the building of trust in the sense of self that is risked in play.
After the field is prepared, at a certain point in this creative process a person is ready to play. A moment comes when there is simply no other choice. We have to liberate ourselves from the idea that playing is for children. Playing, as we shall see, is for maturation. In that sense, as Jung said, play becomes serious.
And then comes immersion, the moment of being lost in play. This is the transitional state, a different state of consciousness. The potential space “is akin to the preoccupation that characterizes the playing of a young child.” Immersion is an in-between state. “This area of playing is not inner psychic reality….It it outside the individual, but it is not the external world.” Immersion is the sense of fantasy activity becoming “real.” Then the writer feels the story writing itself and hours are lost.
What emerges in play is crucial. Three remarkable things occur in play: something emerges from within (potential); something emerges at the right time (developmental work); something is formed (a sense of self).
The phenomenon of imagination has to do with the emergence of a content from what in potential is only form. The virtual miracle of the creative act is through the crystallization of what is needed but not known—a pattern inherent in the situation. Play is an event, a true gestalt—something potential evolves into something actual. Through playing the pattern is recognized. And we’ve stumbled on quite a different way of knowing.Potential, hidden in the unconscious matrix, is “known” through play that gives it substance.
The subtle aspect of potential forms and possibilities is that the moment they are actualized, they cease to be potential at all. The actualization never really fullyincarnates the potential. Therefore, what actualizes is the resonance. What emerges is a metaphor, which connects the potential with the actual. Metaphor is play.
It is the yearning for development, for evolution. What emerges in play wants to go somewhere. Play becomes developmental work.
Maturation, fully living the pattern of development, leads to a growing sense of self. The play on the symbolic field must eventually lead to something durable and vital. Play aims at coalescing into a work, an “opus.” The structure that emerges in play is the sense of our self as a “self.” If I may suggest this subtle distinction: play, if followed to its true development, evolves into a game. In the end play imposes a set of rules. It begins to develop into a way of life, which is to say, a myth.
In play we come to experience our whole self through relationship.
We learn to “play” in a serious way that produces something vital and durable. As a result, we are left with a “felt sense of meaning.” The relationship to the psyche matures into a new context. Play becomes a game. Personal meaning becomes a way of life.
The personal myth is the meaning that spans the gap between outer and inner life. It restores the context through which the two are related. Myth is the age-old image for the perception of integration—how the larger world and my life fit together; a pattern in which my life finds its relationship to all its parts. That’s what “meaning” feels like—you know how life fits. Once the meaning is perceived, then each of the separate parts begins to fit together. Each part the myth touches feels alive—multidimensional and multilayered. Soulful imagination begins to penetrate each separate moment. You discover the symbolic life. Outer life feels layered with inner meaning; inner life pushes for outer manifestation.
And that is so because in times like these many people desperately seek a context in which to play. All too often, we are watching other people play. We are literally paying people millions of dollars to play for us. And not just on the baseball diamond. They are playing for us on compact disks; playing for us on videotape; playing for us on the stage, at the concert, on the silver screen. We pay them because they play so well. But perhaps we pay them in exact proportion to our longing to be playing ourselves, which is why they are worth more and more every year. The longing for play is the longing to take the field ourselves, to play with heart and soul as each of us has the potential. We need a lifestyle that creates a context for us to make our own music, rather than always listen; do our own dancing, rather than always watch; perform our own plays, make our own films, write our own stories.
To sum up what Bond is saying here, it’s that play is the serious work of becoming, where imagination shapes our potential into a larger, meaningful sense of Self that emerges from a nurturing and supportive liminal space of being within ourselves.
And if we perceive playing in this larger, more meaningful way than it becomes something integral to our daily lives, just as much as working and learning are. Even more so because of our rapidly changing world around us.
Finally, if it’s not already apparent from reading the quotes above, my own life’s work that I’m sharing here emerged and is still emerging in very much the same way. It is emerging from a lifetime of experiences and knowledge that are integrating together and birthing through playful imagination. And my struggle to articulate it here is part of the process, of figuring out how to play in my own unique way.
Hello. Welcome to the human race. We are playing a game. And we are playing by the following rules. We want to tell you what the rules are so that you know your way around. And when you’ve understood what rules we’re playing by when you get older, you may be able to invent better ones.
AI gives us access to understanding the meaning of that knowledge.
Example: You might read an article or watch a video and something doesn’t feel right. Copy the text into an AI chatbot and ask it to help validate the meaning of what the author is saying.
Why does this matter?
It’s because even notable figures and respected sources can misinterpret the meaning of things.
This is why 80–90% of my time using AI is spent clarifying meaning and understanding how things relate to each other. It improves my growth and development, giving me a much wider lens through which to view the world and myself.
A treetop sanctuary within the wilderness (via Ideogram).
This is strange.
It’s like to fully embody what I want to express as my life’s work, I need to actually embody my developmental journey as one within my inner terrain, as though I was actually exploring and expanding my inner world(view).
So I would be relaying real experiences but relaying them like a fictional story, similar to how a myth is a fictional story that relays truths about life.
Perhaps. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do. But my work seems more transdisciplinary in that I’m wanting to create something within the space between all these things as an integration of them, rather than exploring them as separate domains. In doing so, it feels like it would integrate all of the knowledge and experiences I’ve gained throughout my life in turn, as per the following statement, thus letting my life come full circle.
From playing within imaginary worlds to imagining a world of play.
Wait. That reminds me of a quote at the end of the book The Cluetrain Manifesto which was the catalyst for me exploring a new way of working, as well as the future of work, over two decades ago.
Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.
Yeah. Imagine that.
The question though is does one fully immerse oneself within this liminal, imaginative space or does one just touch upon it with the occasional keyword to bridge the gap.
For example, as I’ve expressed before, I love Richard Barrett’s quote below because of the dungeon keyword.
Only when you reach the higher stages of development, when you feel safe in the harbor of your soul, will your ego be willing to surrender the keys to the dungeonwhere your darkest fears and unmet needs are locked.
Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching
As an example of what I mean, in terms of vertical development and expressing the three primary plateaus of the mind as (per Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan’s work), below are what I’ve named these three mindsets, as to me they mythically embody what I feel like their experiences are like. And I even created a map in the past to show this (using a mapping service called Inkarnate).
The Walled City = Socialized Mind
The Borderlands = Self-Authoring Mind
The Great Wilderness = Self-Transforming Mind
For example, The Walled City as an embodiment of a Socialized Mind is about fitting in within the roles, beliefs, and expectations of society to survive, thus allowing you to be accepted and feel like you belong to it. So there are lots of guards walking about it covered in masked helms and medieval armour which embodies the highly defensive nature of the environment where people aren’t very vulnerable and open to one another. In addition, everyone there fills conventional societal roles, in the sense that people try to avoid stepping out of place.
But as an example of where I’m at right now, I could express something like the following for my own journey.
I’ve been taking deeper and deeper forays into The Great Wilderness on almost a daily basis over the past month but the complex dense foliage is making it difficult for me to find and carry in the gear I need to setup a base of operations. Or at least so I thought. The past few days, I’ve decided to leave behind a lot of my gear as it’s just seems like unnecessary dead weight now. Because of this, I feel much more agile and able to traverse the tricky but wondrous terrain here. In doing so, I feel like I’m ready to start building a sanctuary here in the wilderness, perhaps even one in the tree tops, so at to become more acclimatized to its environment.
Why am I doing this though, you might be wondering?
Well I’m not alone in thinking about this. For example, I heard Susanne Cook-Greuter say in a video that she wants to do something similar, using I believe the Watership Down setting of rabbits to help people better understand vertical development and thus make it more accessible to more people.
I mean this is the crux of it, as I’ve said before. Explaining vertical development only gets you so far. You have to really experience it to truly understand it. And that’s from someone like myself who has spent at least a decade exploring it but feels like they’ve barely touched the surface of it.
That’s funny though. These thoughts just made me think of when I played Dungeons & Dragons as a young adult. It’s pretty much the same thing. You can explain what a role-playing game is to others but to really understand it, you need to dive in, try to play it, and actually experience it for yourself.
I guess that’s what I’m trying to achieve here. I want to create a playful way for people to bring to the surface their own inner adventure of their lives as a vertical development process, so that there’s a framework that people can more easily share their experience with, particularly if they’re familiar with RPGs or MMORPGs. And in doing so, it effectively creates a peer-based support group for the process which is effectively a “guild” that is a community of practice (and inquiry).
All that said though, I guess that’s the answer to my questions above. For me to truly know which approach to take, I actually have to take action and experience them both. Only then will I know for sure.
This embodies the meaning of the maze within the hero’s journey. You actually have to make choices and go down certain paths to determine if they’re dead-ends or not.
This also reveals the primary difference between how life is a role-playing game and how traditional role-playing games work. In traditional role-playing games, you choose and know your role and class before you start the game. Within life, you actually have to adventure and live your life first to understand your unique role and class. This is similar to young adults trying to figure out their passion and purpose before they’ve lived their life (because society places expectations on them to do so). It just doesn’t work that way though. You have start living your life first to reflectivelyfigure out your passion and purpose afterwards.
That said though, it’s also recognizing that you’ve already been playing within this role-playing game called Life for most of your life, without fully being aware of it.
The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it.
Dune
I’m noticing this inherent need for me to explain my experiences from the outsideafterwards, rather than embodying the experience of them from the inside. Yet embodying the messy experience in the moment is what “the adventure of your life” is all about.
Explaining it is like reading a structured Wikipedia article on a travel destination. Whereas experiencing it is like reading a person’s experiences of travelling around a destination by just wandering through it and stumbling upon its unexpected wonders.
There’s nothing wrong with explaining things but embodying the experience is where the deeper connections of understanding are made. So you need both.
It’s like a master craftsman talking about making something to their apprentice and then actually showing them afterwards. The showing reveals the deeper tactic knowledge that can’t be grasped by the explanation alone.
It’s funny. This reminds me of my experiences adventuring with World of Warcraft years back, particularly in taking part in the end-game raid dungeons which were highly complex encounters against some of the toughest boss monsters in the game.
During the actual raid encounters, there’s obviously this visceral experience of being in the moment and just having to flow with it as best you can, regardless of what happens. Like I remember some experiences where we would need two tanks to fight a boss and hold the aggro of it, as one tank couldn’t survive normally. But then when we begin the encounter, the one tank would immediately die, due to a mistake, and we’d say, “Oh crap. We’re dead.” But then somehow we would survive and drop the boss with just one tank.
But then afterwards, we would have an after action review to reflect upon the experience and figure it out (e.g., “What the hell just happened?”). This is where you break things down, see the relationship between things, and begin to make sense and meaning of things in a structured sort of way.
That’s what it feels like I’m needing to do here. Communicating the experience of life as a role-playing game is just as important, if not more important, than communicating a guide that explains life as a role-playing game.
Am I explaining too much here already? Perhaps. Yet going forwards I want to use these adventurer’s journal posts as a way to try to embody this experience of the adventure in the moment, as my thoughts unfold in real time.
Making art gives you agency in a world where we have little control. So creativity is our power to enact change and bring order to the chaos that we are currently experiencing.
You’re playing within a game right now but you’re just not aware of it.
Why? Because you’re so immersed within it, you’re like a fish in water.
In effect, just like how a person can put on VR headset and feel immersed within a virtual environment, so too are we immersed within a virtual environment which is a representation of the information being transmitted to our brains via our senses.
To put this more simply, we don’t see reality.
In fact, we’ve evolved this way on purpose.
What we call reality is, in fact, our perception of it.
Beau Lotto helps explain this within his book Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently.
The answer is that we don’t see reality. The world exists. It’s just that we don’t see it. We do not experience the world as it is because our brain didn’t evolve to do so. It’s a paradox of sorts: Your brain gives you the impression that your perceptions are objectively real, yet the sensory processes that make perception possible actually separate you from ever accessing that reality directly. Our five senses are like a keyboard to a computer—they provide the means for information from the world to get in, but they have very little to do with what is then experienced in perception.
Beau Lotto, Deviate
Others can also help us understand this from different perspectives as well.
Dave Gray describes how our beliefs form our perception of reality, using the parable of the blind men and the elephant.
This is what the story of the blind men and the elephant is all about. We are all blind. Reality is like the elephant. We may be able to grasp pieces of the truth, but the whole truth about reality is unknowable.
Reality is something that is out there. It has a concrete existence, whether you believe it or not. A belief is something you hold in your mind, a kind of map or model of that external reality. But just as maps and models can be wrong, so can beliefs. And just as following the wrong map can get you into dangerous places, a wrong belief can get you into trouble.
When people confuse their beliefs with reality, they get into arguments and conflicts, sometimes even wars.
Dave Gray, Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think
Donald Hoffman helps us to understand this from the perspective of seeing life as a video game whereby we don’t see reality directly but rather we have evolved to see “fitness payoffs” which help us to survive and evolve in turn.
Think of life as a video game.
In a video game, you have to try to grab as many points as quickly as you can at the level you’re at. And if you get enough points in the minimal time, you might get to the next level. If you don’t, you die.
And the idea is that life is like that. It’s like a video game, but instead of the points in the game, we have fitness payoffs.
Donald Hoffman, Truth vs Reality: How we evolved to survive, not to see what’s really there
Perhaps the most famous perspective of this is Plato’s allegory of the cave which he described in his work Republic around 375 BC, written as a dialogue between the famous greek philosopher Socrates and his brother Glaucon.
In the allegory, Plato describes people who have spent their entire lives chained by their necks and ankles in front of an inner wall with a view of the empty outer wall of the cave. They observe the shadows projected onto the outer wall by objects carried behind the inner wall by people who are invisible to the chained “prisoners” and who walk along the inner wall with a fire behind them, creating the shadows on the inner wall in front of the prisoners. The “sign bearers” pronounce the names of the objects, the sounds of which are reflected near the shadows and are understood by the prisoners as if they were coming from the shadows themselves.
Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not the direct source of the images seen. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.
Allegory of the Cave, Wikipedia
In fact, if you’re familiar with the movie The Matrix, you might remember Morpheus mirroring a quote that sounds very similar to how these inmates react within the cave when presented with the opportunity to escape it.
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
Morpheus, The Matrix
Now while this perceptual “Matrix” we are within ourselves is not so much our “enemy,” since it is a simulation of our own evolutionary creation, it is important to become aware of it so that we don’t become trapped and stuck within it ourselves, like prisoners within the cave or people within The Matrix.
Fortunately, Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American philosopher, can assist us with this, when he said the following.
A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
Alfred Korzybski
Donald Hoffman himself mirrors this quote by describing how using this map is like using a useful computer interface.
So I don’t take the icon literally. It’s not literally true about what’s in the reality. But I do take it seriously. I would not drag that icon to the trash can carelessly. If I drag the icon to the trash can, I could lose all of my work. So I take my icons seriously, but not literally.
Donald Hoffman, Truth vs Reality: How we evolved to survive, not to see what’s really there
What I find fascinating about this all is that if you understand what myths are in terms of Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology, they work very similarly.
Myths are fictional stories that communicate truths about life.
So if you believe myths to be true and literal, just like you might believe your perception is actually reality, then you’re completely missing the entire point of what they’re trying to communicate to you.
But how can we take all of this knowledge now and actually put it to use?
We can do so by beginning to see life as a game.
Again not literally. But more ontologically, to understand the true nature of life.
To do so, let’s get the help of an American academic by the name of James P. Carse to assist us, using his book Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility.
There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
To summarize the meaning of these two types of games that we are playing with life, Carse is describing how there are at least two primary mindsets within life. One is focused on competition and conclusion, while the other is focused on continuation and evolution.
What I would like to now propose in presenting all of this knowledge is to take a step further and see a much bigger picture of life as a whole.
Life is an overarching game in which the different levels of it are each their own smaller game within the larger game.
Let’s jump back to Donald Hoffman’s quote to help us absorb what this means.
Think of life as a video game.
In a video game, you have to try to grab as many points as quickly as you can at the level you’re at. And if you get enough points in the minimal time, you might get to the next level. If you don’t, you die.
Donald Hoffman, Truth vs Reality: How we evolved to survive, not to see what’s really there
But while Hoffman is speaking from a physical life perspective (in terms of passing on what you’ve learnt to your offspring before you die), I’d like to propose a twist and present life from a psychological perspective of meaning instead.
Life is an overarching larger game whereby when you collect enough experience points, you are able to level up to the next level, and in doing so, the game changes.
Or to put it another way, when you level up within life, you’re able to shift from playing finite games to infinite games.
But to finish things off, I’d like to throw in a paradoxical kicker related to something Hoffman said, which I will later elaborate on, especially with regard to its meaning.
