basic tools for navigating reality
consider this thought exploration with me:
how do you orient yourself?
how do you decide what to do?
especially if you question your impulses, desires, beliefs, in what do you choose to trust?
how do you heal yourself?
what’s most important right now?
is there something that’s not possible right now?
we may have a decent level of clarity to answer these questions, or we may not.
when we don't have clarity, it's very easy to enter a rabbit hole of spending years digging into these questions, questioning what life is, who you are, what your purpose is, etc, and it can take a very long time and effort to reach a basic level clarity.
at least, that was my experience. hehe
although questioning all this can be very useful, i’ve been realizing that this is not the only path. more often that i’d like to admit, i’ve only taken the super-cognitive route. but now i see that there are other perspectives to take here.
during a vipassana retreat, i came into deeper contact with buddhist concept of panna (wisdom). they say it is achieved in 3 complementary ways:
suta-maya panna - the wisdom achieved by being taught by others.
cinta-maya panna - the wisdom achieved by your own thinking, not just from hearing others.
bhavana-maya panna - the wisdom of direct experience.
john verveake also arrived at a very interesting framework through his study of metacognition.
it consists of 4 forms of knowing, or 4Ps - propositional (knowing based on deduction), participatory (knowing how to “flow” with the environment/context), perspectival (knowledge derived from your perspective, based on your personal experience and time/space) and procedural knowing (knowing how to do).
these are powerful lenses that can give us some insights, but let’s come back to the perspective i wanted to share.
let's say you reach clarity of who you are, what your purpose is, what you want to do and how reality works on a deeper level.
will it be important for you to have people you care about on your side? will it be important for you to be healthy? will it be important for you to be financially secure?
perhaps most importantly, will you feel ready to bring that vision into reality?
you don't need to know your purpose to know that these things are important.
they are fundamental aspects that can be developed while you're on this journey of self-discovery. although maybe not as exciting as doing your "main thing", we can think of them as allies. tools, resources, structures that support you on your journey.
you can see yourself in an always-on process of internal and external preparation to be able to execute on those moments of epiphany.
transforming yourself and your reality to be as ready as possible to answer life's calls to adventure when they arise.
so what are the fundamental elements of our reality, that no matter what we do, are important?
i think that's a very challenging question, that will require us to spend a lot of time discovering and navigating the nuances of the possible answers.
however, i have a few starting points - the two frameworks i introduced in the previous article.
1) meta-cognitive processes
perception -> decision-making -> action -> learning
this cycle happens all the time inside of you.
2) fundamental elements of our personal realities
individual:
- mind/thoughts
- emotions/feelings
- body/sensations
- energies/spirit
collective:
- systems
- environment
these are elements or aspects that permeate our experience of reality, not matter what.
——
so let’s introduce a new framework now: our levels of interaction with reality.
reactive -> intentional -> integral -> disruptive
since these are introductory articles, i won't explain this in-depth, but i'll give an illustration i borrowed from vizi andrei which illustrates this framework. it's not a 1:1 explanation, but i think it gets the point across.
the parallel with his illustrations is: there are different ways you can combine elements (i.e. respond to external stimulus).
just like it’s clear the difference between a pro and a novice musician, the more you learn how to see, understand, navigate, and create new forms of organizing and combining elements of reality, the more beauty and complexity you can add to it.
we can trace the following parallels:
simplicity is similar to being reactive
agglomeration is similar to being intentional (being willing to see more, understand more, take on more responsibility)
informed simplicity is similar to being integral (exploring multiple perspectives and integrating the strongest ones)
organized complexity is similar to being disruptive (organizing the perspectives, tools, resources you have to be optimally interconnected and oriented towards unlocking higher levels of beauty, utility and sophistication)
my proposition is:
any time we're interacting with any element of reality, we can operate from these 4 different levels.
moving your level of interaction from reactive to disruptive is the essence of what i'm trying to develop as the "reality disruption meta-theory".
it's about developing mastery, achieving new levels of sophistication and proficiency in life.
so if we take the elements we were talking about before - either meta-cognitive processes or fundamental elements of our realities - and apply this framework to them, we can see how much we know and how much we have developed each one of them.
for example - how's my relationship with my mind? how much of it is reactive, how much is intentional, how much is integral, and how much is disruptive?
apply that for all others.
if you're anything like me, it's clear how much we don't know yet and how deep in shit we are. lol
the vast majority of our society, systems, relationships exist on a reactive level. the process of moving to intentional is already quite hard. arriving at disruptive is pretty much insane, considering how many pieces are at work at the same time, both in your favor and against you.
i believe that it's possible, though. and it can be very natural too.
did you ever feel like a piece of art, music or philosophy made you transcend your sense of self and transported you to a new dimension of beauty, of knowledge, of meaning, of existence?
this transcendence is what i mean by disruption. but disruption is not just that moment of brief touch. it’s the gradual increase in the embodiment of these higher orders of consciousness.
the difference between integral and disruptive is subtle, and not set in stone in any way. it’s just what i’m making up now because it helps me understand my own reality, which might already exist in other people’s works, with other lenses and naming.
borrowing from ken wilber's work, to integrate an experience, such as that transcendental state, is to transform a state into a stage. to transform a transitory state into a semi-permanent experience.
through an integral perspective, you want to integrate as many perspectives, states, energies as possible.
the main difference i see between this and a disruptive consciousness, is that disruption points to the act of transcendence itself.
it’s not so much about integrating multiple perspectives, as it is about ascending and unleashing the utmost power that your unique perspective hold.
it is to orient yourself and your reality to integrate that which is most valuable to you. it's essentialism applied to consciousness development.
not all paths, practices and perspectives are equally valuable, and that's a distinction integral theory makes. however, when it comes to your process of decision-making, distinguishing between what's most inclusive vs most optimal can be very powerful.
this unlocks new levels of specialization and depth of your own being.
and to me, it seems like there's a time for both. if you're always pushing for disruption, you might lose sight of other perspectives that can already be disruptive on their own. if you’re always looking for and integrating multiple perspectives, maybe you can lose sight of the main one that your intuition already knows deep down is closest to your being.
it's the balance of being open to, accepting and embracing perspectives while not remaining satisfied and continuing to push for growth…
——
ok, ok… after all this sharing, let's talk about how to put this into practice!
what's easier to handle/manage/optimize for you?
your individual:
- mind
- feelings/emotions
- body
- energies/spirit
or your collective:
- environment
- systems
for me, it's been my mind, my environment and the systems i'm a part of.
even if you're making progress towards what you already identify as your purpose, if you look at your life, you've also probably made an unconscious decision of focusing on one, two or a few of these. but what were your criteria?
it could be curiosity, ease/less resistance, judgment, fear, repulsion, etc... probably a mix of them.
going back to the questions of what to focus on - even though we can work towards what we already identify as our purpose, our goals, our intentions - it can be extremely valuable to also focus on things that will be important no matter what we do.
especially if you don't have clarity though, sometimes that's what's needed. focus on something else that enables you to focus on what you want. this progress can take you to a new inner/outer place, which can have different views to help you re-orient yourself.
not so long ago i'd struggle with not knowing what to focus on and therefore default to doing nothing. this still happens, but to a much lesser extent since i realized i could default into doing these meta-optimizations.
that's where i started. mind design, environment design, systems design. how can i design these things to benefit me and others, instead of simply existing automatically - and usually unintentionally, unconsciously and very probably, harmfully?
this is the practice of ontological design - which i also mentioned in my last article as the design of being, self and other.
it's worth to mention that designing yourself and your life is an incredibly complex process. let alone deeply influencing and transforming the world around you.
but though complexity can be intimidating, it's the only way i know of to arrive at sophistication. if simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, it's because there's a lot of refined complexity underneath it. (cheers, da vinci)
so if it hasn't become clear yet, throughout this series of articles, my main goal is to share perspectives, tools and ways i discovered to transform fundamental aspects of our own realities.
the main 3 things i'll talk about are these - your mind, your environment, and the systems you have/are a part of. for the other ones, i can at times point to curation of the best resources i’ve found.
i'll assume from now on that you're interested in this and will do my best to give you what i found that worked for me.
but before we conclude, i want to make sure the purpose of this investigation is clear.
beyond what i already said - optimizing meta-processes and meta-systems is a path of progress, no matter what else you decide to do with your life - what am i really trying to convey here?
i believe there are initiatory, spiritual paths that can be unlocked within us through insights, feelings and intuitions we have when we encounter new elements of reality - either within or outside yourself (which goes back to within).
what i’m sharing is the path that i’ve walked through (mostly unconsciously until recently) that is closest to my essence and expression in the world.
and as i’m becoming more aware of it now, i’m choosing to share the principles and tools that i learned for others that resonate with this path as well.
one of these is the idea of having allies. making this tangible in our lives is a powerful tool. your mind can be your ally. your systems, your environment, items, artifacts, ideas, people, places, tools, knowledge...
it is true to me that we can tap into dimensions of deeper meaning and fulfillment in our lives, but we don't do that because we're afraid. after all, with great knowledge, comes great responsibility.
so working on your preparation, developing allies, strengthening your mind, heart and body. these can all be tools to help you get clearer on your dreams and actually transform yourself into the person who's capable of executing on them.
now, what kinds of tools and allies exist? which ones can be most useful and impactful according to each context?
that's one of our next topics. :)
i hope you enjoyed this. feel free to leave questions, thoughts or feedback below.