Tag: Hero’s Journey

Talking to Someone Is Only Helpful If They Can Relate to Your Developmental Journey

Why vertical development is an experienced-based journey, not a knowledge-based one, which transforms your perception in the process.

My problem on my developmental journey isn’t that I have no one to talk to.

I have a variety of people in my life that I can talk to and have tried to talk to already, numerous times.

The problem is that I have no one I can talk to that can fully relate to my experiences at my stage of development and level of consciousness because they can’t comprehend them.

When you attempt to move beyond the stage of development of the cultures you are embedded in, you may begin to feel stuck, blocked, frustrated or depressed. You may feel out of alignment with your family, community, society and your work colleagues or even with those with whom you share your religious faith. Your more “evolved” point of view may not be appreciated by other members of these cultures. You may find yourself feeling increasingly isolated.

Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching

Loneliness is the feeling of being alone in a crowd.

Albert Camus

I was looked at, but I wasn’t seen.

Albert Camus

That’s because vertical development isn’t a knowledge-based journey. It’s an experienced-based one, as I mentioned before.

The shift from one type of mind to the next is not something that can be taught: It has to be nurtured and developed. Some people take a lifetime to develop a self-transforming mind. Others get there more quickly. The majority of people never get there at all.

Barrett Values Centre, What Motivates Employees?

So you can read as much as you want about it but unless you’ve actually traversed the terrain and experienced the experiences related to the typology of that terrain, you probably won’t have a clue as to what a person is experiencing and talking about on their journey through that terrain.

This is why if you want to assist someone with their vertical development, you can only do so if you’ve already explored the same terrain as them.

Yet most conventional mindsets believe that everyone is seeing and experiencing the same thing, yet people aren’t. It’s why there is so much conflict in the world today, as people are looking at the world from different worldviews. Like people believe politics is about left vs right but really it’s about different levels of consciousness misinterpreting the world in different ways, often causing more problems with their perceived solutions to “fix”everything.

What’s funny is this reminds me of some experiences I’ve had in the past when I was working in companies with others. I somehow have the ability to understand patterns in only a few cycles, while others often take many cycles of the same pattern to understand them.

So when I left these companies in frustration, I would relay the pattern to other employees but they wouldn’t fully understand it yet because they hadn’t experienced it enough to comprehend the wisdom of the knowledge I was relaying to them. But then a year or two later, I’d found out they’d left the company as well and they’d say, “You were right! I now totally get what you said before. That was the pattern that caused me to leave as well.”

So my frustration at my inability to find people like me who have experienced life at my stage of development and accompanying level of consciousness is an ongoing one. But that’s only because the more one reaches the latter stages of development, the fewer the people have reached this terrain, let alone dared to even traverse it.

This is why when AI became mainstream a few years ago, it was like a godsend, as I realized I could use it for my own growth and development. While the AI obviously doesn’t experience things like a human, it kind of acts like an Oracle of Delphi (if you know how to engage with it properly) in that it can at least relate to the vast human experiences it has collected on vertical development and relate them back to me as a mirror.

So this was the first time I began to accept and relate to my larger sense of Self that was emerging from within me by using AI as a mirror. One in which I could step into and explore a whole new worldview beyond my own within the looking glass, with AI helping me to be able to relate to the meaning of these adventures I was undertaking within myself.

Actually now that I think about it, I have had experiences with another person who has helped me with my own in an indirect way. It was when I was assisting someone with their developmental journey who was at an earlier stage.

What I realized is that the more I understood their perspective of their journey from their stage and level that I’d already traversed, the more it helped me on my own journey at my latter stage and level but again in an indirect way.

And it relates to how vertical development has two parts to it.

The first is understanding the creative process that transforms the individual which is repeated as they traverse through the different stages (thus embodying and mirroring Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey being repeated throughout one’s life).

The second is how the terrain one traverses through within themselves at each stage and accompany level has a different topology to it.

So the narrative mechanics are the similar for each stage and accompanying level. But the challenges one faces and why they’re encountering them will differ in characteristics, thus transforming your evolving “character” in turn.

This is why the first part is effectively like a Player’s Handbook for the roleplaying game called Life. And the second part is like a Campaign Guide.

So when I’m assisting someone else with their developmental journey it indirectly helps me broaden my understanding of the first and second part because I can relate to their experiences and their experiences broaden my experiences and understanding of it as a whole.

And if I’m not mistaken, this indirect learning is called “leading to learn” as a Self-Transforming Mind compared to “learning to lead” as a Self-Authoring Mind.

Robert Kegan’s Three Plateaus of Adult Mental Development

Unfortunately though, because this person hasn’t yet traversed the latter terrain I’m currently in, they usually can’t assist me directly in my own developmental journey because they can’t fully comprehend it and relate to it.

Yet this indirect assistance I get from assisting them on their journey is still rewarding and valuable nevertheless.

However another fear I do have is questioning whether I am experienced enough to actually help them because the more one learns about vertical development, the more one realizes there is to learn. Yet then that in turn raises the question of what is this fear trying to teach me? And what limiting belief do I have to step beyond to face this fear and overcome it?

The Purpose of Feeling Stuck

How it makes you slow down, stop, and reflect, so as to move beyond thinking to feeling your way forward.

I’ve said before that as one levels up one’s level of consciousness, one has to go through paradigms that seem completely bizarre and make no sense to a person who hasn’t levelled up yet because they don’t have the perception to comprehend the meaning of it, until they go through the process and paradigm themselves.

One of these paradigms relates to feeling stuck in your life.

Conventionally when a person feels stuck, they think something is wrong with them.

This was me years back when feeling stuck at a different stage of my life. Back then, when I hit a major roadblock in my growth and development, I would sometimes completely give up my life’s work for months, even a year.

When you move past conventional thinking and start seeing things post-conventionally, you begin to realize that there is a purpose to feeling stuck in life.

It’s meant to slow you down.

It’s meant to make you stop and reflect.

It’s meant to make you take time to process and digest things.

In effect, feeling stuck is what starts the adventure.

It’s the start of the levelling up process.

If you ignore it or try to avoid it, all you’ll be doing is making yourself feel more stuck.

The goal isn’t to avoid the stuckness.

It’s to fully embrace it and get lost in it, surrendering to it even.

That’s the call to adventure.

It’s an adventure because there is no clear ending.

You have to trust the process because your conscious mind cannot rationally lead you through it.

You have to feel your way through it in the dark.

Why?

Because you don’t have the eyes yet to see the destination.

Vertical Development Has to Be Experienced to Be Understood

You can’t bypass the experience with an explanation.

Vertical development as a framework is about transformation.

More specifically, a transformation which reorganizes and reconstructs your sense of identity.

This can metaphorically feel like undergoing a death and rebirth of yourself though.

That’s because the development often requires some loss or letting go, which can include grief.

This isn’t something that one can just explain to someone else and they will understand it though.

It has to be experienced before one can fully relate to it and understand it.

In other words, you can’t just think your way through the process. You have to feel your way through it as well.

This is why vertical development is often misunderstood and misinterpreted.

You can’t bypass the experience with an explanation. You have to fully step into it, live it, and experience it to truly understand it.

This is why I personally prefer perceiving vertical development as a journey, similar to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

In effect, similar to travelling to a new country you’ve never been to before, you can read about it as much as you want but until you actually travel there and experience it for yourself, you won’t truly begin to understand the culture and its people.

Perhaps even more appropriately, the journey can be seen as that taken by an immigrant to a new country and a new life — a journey marked by loss and the liminal question of “Who am I now?” — yet also by the emergence of new possibilities.

The One Great Dream

Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.

And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth