Nollind Whachell

My life is bursting with meaning.

Or as Bernardo Kastrup describes it, it is “pregnant with meaning.”

He actually aptly describes it because often at times, when one is experiencing growth and development, it often feels like one is dying in birthing a larger sense of one’s Self.

So there are feelings of fear, anxiety, and pain, as well as feelings of wonder and joy at the same time.

For myself, everywhere I look nowadays I see this meaning bursting forth.

Yet this meaning is often within a language that very few people can perceive, as one needs to be versed and experienced with.

To me, it’s similar to mythopoetic language. In effect, it relates to fictional stories that relay truths about life. These are what myths are truly about and how they also can relate to an individual experiencing their own personal myth within their life, especially at a time when the current world’s myth is dying and hollowing out, becoming a meaningless husk to many.

Whenever I speak this language within myself, I can often use very few words to relay a deeper understanding of life.

Yet to explain this meaning and language to others not familiar with it requires delving deep within layers and layers of experiences and knowledge that creates a scaffold necessary to help them relate to it.

So it feels strange. I feel like I’m a magician or perhaps more aptly a bard, casting complex incantations comprised of a single sentence that embodies the depth and breadth of life. Yet to others unfamiliar with this language, my words will probably seem mundane and trivial, perhaps even childish at best.

Yet sadly this language is everywhere, often hiding in plain sight amongst the most notable literary authors of our past.

And this is how my perception works in the same way. I see keywords in everything I read and watch nowadays, even seemingly mundane things that relay a deeper meaning to life.

Below is an example of what I mean by this, discovered late last year, but with which meaning is still bursting forth from it even this year, every time I watch it.

On the surface it will seem like something conventional and mundane, even frivolous. But below the surface, the creators of it have perhaps unknowingly but creatively imbued it with a deeper meaning, as though it is hiding a “secret level” of meaning about life within itself.

It’s time.
This world has awaited for your arrival.

There is a larger worldview, a secret “level” of consciousness, awaiting within you.

It is you.
You will open the door.
Because you are the chosen.

You are the key, the chosen one, to opening this door, this portal, to a new worldview because only you can truly know yourself.

All those moments.
It’s a new adventure.
Just for you.

All of these liminal moments of your life, where you get brief glimpses and forays into this new worldview, are collectively an inner adventure just for you, to help you prepare yourself to step into and embody a larger, heroically authentic sense of Self.

Come in.
You have a game to play.

“Come in,” inside yourself. You have a larger game, a larger role, and a larger sense of Self to play beyond the borders and sandbox of your existing sense of “self” that you are currently playing.

In other words, what got you here won’t get you to where you want to go next.

Such an understanding will also make it clear that finding a guide for your journey isn’t a question of finding a special person. It is a question of becoming a special person: a traveller, a pilgrim, a person on a journey. When you have done that, the whole world turns out to be full of guides.

William Bridges, JobShift

The point is not to play the same old game, whether we’re buying into it or rebelling against it. Either way, you’re still letting the other person define the terms and set the rules

(which will not be in your favor).

The point is to keep your eye to the horizon, your ear to the ground, and channel the resources around you and the people on your side to discover a new game that embodies new values.

To claim — and to share, to spread, to enable, to inspire — the power to do that.

Justine Musk, Darling It Is Time To Be Powerful

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.

Alan Watts

For the last two and a half decades, a unique vision has been slowly emerging from within the depths of me.

Back when I was a younger adult, I used to play role-playing games and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft.

Within these games, I was a part of guilds which helped players within them to level up their characters. They did this by collaborating together, undertaking quests, facing monsters, discovering treasure, and gaining experience.

In the process, they explored newer zones and newer expansions, thus helping them to map out an ever-expanding imaginary world.

In the future that is emerging right now, I see this same strangely familiar process.

In this vision, I see self-organizing “guild” organizations as communities of “players” who play with the possibilities and potential of themselves, “levelling up” their level of consciousness in the process.

All knowing begins with a question. And a question begins with a “quest” (to state the obvious), as does life.

Beau Lotto

They do this by “quest”-ioning their assumptions and beliefs, facing their “monstrous” fears, discovering newer “treasured” values, and gaining newer “experiences” of what it means to be a human being.

In the process, they will explore newer “zone-like” stages of development and newer “expansive” plateaus of the mind, thus helping them to continually expand their worldview.

To help put this into perspective, the future of work isn’t about being productive, it’s about actualizing the potential of being yourself.

Or as E.E. Cummings described it, being nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

E.E. Cummings

This requires one to have the leadership, authenticity, and creativity to take the leadand follow your larger sense of Self that is calling you and trying to emerge from within a deeper, secret “level” within you.

To put this into perspective, the primary focus of the future of work will be psychological growth, with economic growth being a natural by-product of it.

Thus people will not focus on problems like they conventionally do today. Rather they will focus on their potential, understanding their deeper selves, and in doing so, their problems will naturally be resolved by achieving their potential.

If you want to address the urgent social and environmental challenges that face a nation or community, don’t work on the problems, and particularly don’t work on problems by bringing in experts to solve them. Instead, work on the creative intelligence, conscience, and agency of the people in that nation or community.

Carol Sanford

This is how many problems in our world today are actually resolved. They are accidentally discovered by someone exploring something so passionately that they are lead to an unexpected discovery that is a natural by-product of their desired growth and development.

This is what it means to Be Real Creative and to live The Adventure of Your Life.

It isn’t so much a planned journey but rather an adventurous one filled with unexpecteddiscoveries of oneself found within oneself.

These adventures reveal that we are all so much more than we believe we are. We just need to have the courage and curiosity to adventure deep within the dungeons of ourselves to discover the treasure of who we truly already are.

To do so though requires one to embrace the unexpected, the ambiguous, and the unknown, as these deeper realms within us are highly paradoxical, spinning the perspective of our conventional world completely upside down—ever more so the deeper we go.

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 dungeon where your darkest fears and unmet needs are locked.

Richard Barrett

The header image for this article highlights this paradoxical nature.

It’s shows a guild of player characters in World of Warcraft tackling a dragon within a raid dungeon.

The meaning behind this image reveals how wicked problems are emerging within our world today and how we must face them paradoxically and mythically. We don’t face them directly, trying to tackle them as external problems out there, but rather we face them indirectly by overcoming our internal fears through our own growth and development.

This quote below touches upon this.

A problem whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behavior is likely to be a wicked problem.

Wicked Problem, Wikipedia

In other words, wicked problems arise in our world today often because of our limited perception and mindset of ourselves, others, and the world. So until we can adventure and step beyond our own mindsets, courageously exploring what’s over the horizon of our own minds, not much will change from our perspective, even though the world itself is radically changing at this same moment.

So the real heroic “work” isn’t so much out there, it’s within each of us. It’s why I personally call my own work my life’s work because it’s a never-ending journey. Yes, it is most definitely often scary at times in facing your own fears but at the same time it is also truly wondrous, due to the amazing inner vistas you will come across.

So we each need to change, transform, and adapt in our own unique way, thus allowing us to creatively step out of our own way, so that we can embrace a larger sense of Self that can not only survive within this newer world but also thrive within it as well.

At the end of another great period of collective effort called The Crusades, the social institutions and cultural forces that had coordinated and contained individual energies collapsed. Whole armies disintegrated into their component individuals and sub-groupings. Knights who had ridden forth under the banner of this leader or that rode back on their own. They were the “free lances” who made the late medieval world such a dangerous yet dynamic place.

It’s no accident that today we’re surrounded once again by free lances. The old rules are gone, and the new rules aren’t clear. Security—so far as there is any—is largely something that we must build for ourselves. Identities are confused and changing. We know that ultimately we are on our own, and so we are ready to learn a new way of doing and being. We know that our organizations were designed to serve the needs of another world, so we busy redesigning them.

But we also need a social order that provides for our new needs and doesn’t try to impose archaic obligations on us. We need new laws. We need new leaders. We need a new social principle, an alternative to both selfishness and selflessness. We need a new sense of the common good to justify the sacrifices we’ll need to make to help those who find the new world the most difficult. To create these things, we must begin by remembering that we are all in this together.

William Bridges, JobShift