The word 'path' can have many meanings. There are, for example, paths in the forest, paths to ruin, paths to fame and fortune, paths to recovery, paths to glory, paths to building or owning your own home, paths to finding gold in the mountains, paths in a video game, paths to healing, and paths to achieve certifications such as a black belt in Judo or a Doctorate Degree at a University.

One of the strongest coachings from modern culture is to 'get your career path started'. The idea is that following recognized achievements and employment steps empower you to command a higher salary, move up the corporate hierarchy, gain reputation and professional credibility, and eventually become 'successful'.

Each kind of path reflects the values of its gameworld.

One particular path is the path of evolution. What is that?

'Evolution' in the sense given by the context of Possibility Management means the evolution of how much consciousness you can apply practically to create real results.

You have already experienced what this feels like. Before any particular evolutionary step you could create one set of things. After the evolutionary step you could create something different that you could not create before. After the step you are able to create something new because you are able to be more responsible. What is the thing in you that changes for you to become more responsible? Your Matrix!

Responsibility is consciousness in action. In other words, responsibility is applied consciousness.

The change of your Being from one shape of responsibility to another shape of responsibility occurs during a Liquid State during which time the 'matrix' structure of your Being reorders from one pattern to a more elegant, more sophisticated, more integrated arrangement. In other words, evolution occurs best within a specifically held space (held and navigated by a Spaceholder) who navigates you through any of the 5-Body Liquid States that may occur.

Did you ever consider what the purpose of the Universe might be?

If you look at what happens over time to star systems, planets, living organisms, or social systems, you will see that they become more complex, more elegant, more refined, more aware. One could reasonably claim that the purpose of the Universe is the evolution of consciousness.

There is no top end to evolution.

A thoughtmap is a construct made out of distinctions. Your thoughtmaps determine how you can interact with the real world.

Gaining a new thoughtmap changes the structure of your Being. This explains why, when you gain a new thoughtmap, the Universe and Gaia and E.C.C.O. can each interact with you differently.

What you think with is very different from what you think about.

A thoughtmap is what you use to think with. What you think about are the facts, ideas, opinions, conclusions, and information you copied from your parents and learned in school and from the media.

Adding new information to what you know expands your knowledge bank.

In comparison, gaining a new thoughtmap builds the matrix to hold more consciousness in your Being and moves you on your evolutionary path.

Gaining more knowledge is not the path of evolution.

You need new thoughtmaps to enter new territory, for example, to go step-by-step across a bridge from modern culture to next culture.

And yet, the skills that enable you to implement the clarity of a new thoughtmap as real-life changes in a gameworld such as a relationship or a nanonation, are different from the skills that enable you to discover, refine, document, and successfully deliver a new thoughtmap to another person.

Those skills would come from Possibilitator Training.

There exist many intelligence tests and classifications (IQ Tests, Mensa), certification programs (Bachelors, Masters, PhD), personality typing systems (Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, Human Design), chakra readings, aura readings, hand-eye coordination tests, etc. These all have their specific uses.

Which test measures your awareness? How can you find out where you are on your path of evolution of consciousness?

One answer about where you are is that results never lie. The Universe is a gigantic feedback generator. The results you are creating indicate where you are on the Path. Regardless of the excuses you come up with or the justifications you believe, what you have is what you want.

Who you are is other people's experience of you. You know you have changed when other people's experience of you changes.

What you are is where you are. Trying to figure out in your mind where you are may not help you much. Trying to be somewhere else other than where you are also may not help you very much.

Relaxing attentively into being who you are and where you are will tell you what you are in each moment. From what you notice, you gain clarity for taking your next steps.

You can only take the step directly in front of you. You cannot take the step that you may see 'over there'.

The path itself is an amazingly accurate indicator of where you are.

Human beings do not change until it is too painful to keep doing the same thing. Discovering the implication of this distinction starts with remembering that each human being develops a unique psycho-emotional survival construct entirely dedicated to keeping things the same: your Box. Your Box logically deduces that if you have survived until now with the way things are, you will keep surviving as long as things stay the same. Your Box’s predisposition seeks comfort of the know and avoids the pain of change. Your Box’s safety reactions were built over years, decades of habitual grooves patterned-into your nervous system.

Considering the Box’s fear of the pain of changing its own survival habits, positive thinking, methods and motivation are weak forces. The pain of awareness, on the other hand, is a much more powerful force for change because the place from which life decisions are made is built out of awareness. The lack of awareness leaves us to make no new choice. Expansion of awareness gives us new options to choose from scary as they might be.

The pain of awareness is not to be confused with psycho-emotional pain. Psycho-emotional pain is created by your Box to keep you at home for your own survival. Awareness pain is the pain of expansion from being exposed to the unknown. Because your awareness expands it does not fit inside of your home anymore. You know this from trying to go home for the holidays after you have become more aware than your home context allows.

For decades, in your ‘comfort zone’, you might constantly feel depressed, lonely, guilty or shameful. At some point in your life, you figured out that being depressed (or anxious, self-doubting, hateful, resentful, hopeless, betrayed, ...) was safer than setting one foot beyond known limits. Depression is a mixed emotion of sadness and anger. If you are depressed, your pure anger remains inaccessible to say ‘Stop’ or ‘No’, change things or make clear decisions. Your pure sadness also waits unavailable for you to connect heart to heart, grieve or let go. In a culture where it is not allowed to feel angry or sad (or scared or glad), it is a common survival mechanism to mix emotions to avoid experiencing the transformative energy and information of pure feelings. Similarly to depression, loneliness is a mixed emotion but of fear and sadness. Guilt and shame are also both mixed emotions of anger, sadness and fear. Mixed emotions are painful, sometimes to an unbearable degree. Strangely enough, suicide is more often than previously recognized chosen over transformation because home pain is familiar. Home pain gives you an identity. Who are you if you are not depressed? Who are you if you do not feel alone? What dangerous new adventures might you create if you did not constantly feel shame or guilt?

Home pain drains your life force to the degree that you are left with little to no vitality for leaving home. A certain amount of activation energy is required to recognize that something completely different from home is possible right now. A candle wick will not start on fire until it is close enough to a burning match. The unlit candle stands for eternity alone in the dark. Until that surprising moment, you might have not even considered that you could have had a choice to leave home.

It can be that even as you are faced with choosing between the painful experience of home and the painful awareness that something else is possible, home wins. It wins because it is known. Whereas you don’t know how the transformational pain goes. You fearfully imagine that it will be bigger.

Therefore you will not change until the pain of not fulfilling your desire for something different becomes greater than the ordinary pain of home.

I want to share an inside trick, a trick I learned from Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer suddenly packs a few things into a cloth, ties it to the end of a stick, throws the stick onto his shoulder and leaves home to set out into a whole new world. The trick works because home will not change, you can always go back there. Whereas the opportunity to leave home can disappear in an instant, buried under an avalanche of reasonable addictions to mediocrity.

It is your spirit. To let your spirit suffocate and die may not be your true life wish. Something completely different from this is possible right now.

Since time immemorial it has been known that there are three kinds of Journeyers on the Path. Each kind of Pathwalker is driven by their own unique motivation when looking for the Initiators, Healers, and Trainers who will accompany them fruitfully along the Path.

The first type of Pathwalker assumes that the guide has all the information the Pathwalker will ever need. The Pathwalker participates in what the guide offers so as to collect information. Soon the Pathwalker does not like or understand an answer that the guide gives them. Rather than becoming different enough to understand the guide's answer, they conclude that the guide does not know everything. The Journeyer gets disappointed, critical, and aggressive, and then they leave looking for another guide, one who 'knows everything'. These Pathwalkers are never satisfied.

The second kind of Pathwalker comes to a guide because the guide meets the Pathwalker’s expectations about what a guide should be like. The image that the Pathwalker projects onto the guide matches their fantasy. They fall in love with the guide, thinking this is the way. Sooner or later the guide does something that is 'not quite right' according to the Pathwalker’s assumptions, expectations, projections, reasons, prejudices, judgements, conclusions or reactivity. The Pathwalker gets disappointed, or heartbroken. Their love is unrequited. They attack the guide, thinking that if they prove that the guide has hurt them, then the guide will come around and rescue them. The guide won't play this game, so the Pathwalker leaves, looking for another guide who fits their image better and will 'love them enough'. These Pathwalkers are never satisfied.

The third kind of Pathwalker comes to a guide because they want clarity and possibility. They want challenges and clear feedback. They want their 'X' on the map about utterly new Contexts that are possible, and how to relocate their Point Of Origin there to become a Person Of Agency. They want the rug pulled out from under the old beliefs, old decisions, and old Survival Strategies they regarded as indisputable truth for so long, so that the Pathwalker can lighten their load and can Journey into new realms. This kind of Pathwalker is not willing to let anything create doubt, or get in the way of their search for their next step. Even the lack of the guide's faith in them will not influence the Journeyer's faith in the Path. This kind of Journeyer is satisfied from the first moment on.

I want to share something here with the group. I sometimes struggle to speak during calls. I’m looking into why that is, but for now, I will share this here.

Part of my journey with this study group is a journey into seeing how crippling my niceness, charm, and charisma have been. A few weeks ago, I received some feedback that made it so that for about 36 hours, I could no longer NOT SEE the unbelievably high price I have paid and continue to pay in my life for the sake of being a smiley, likable guy. I have forfeited my Authenticity. This forfeit has gotten me a life that to almost everyone around mean looks “really good” – and what a golden handcuff that “really good” is.

During this 36 hours, I went through an emotional healing process, but all throughout, I was being worked. My body shook everywhere, tears were in my eyes constantly. An involuntary rage seared through my body. How did this happen? When did I install this “inauthenticity software?” How is it that I live in a world where at every turn, I see more encouragement for being inauthentic, for smiling more, having no balls, having no spine, having no one at home.

The weeks since this moment happened have seen me being wildly different in my relationships. A new and inelegant intolerance at the ways I’ve built connection in my life has emerged, and I have begun to take radical action. In the past, I have liked the notion of saying the scary things that risk the relationships I have in order to finally have a chance at creating the relationships I want. I have thought this was a very pretty idea. And now, these last weeks, I am living it in a way that is rocking my world.

Each relationship has needed a kind of destroying and reset, and my Gremlin has been so helpfully (and lovingly) indispensable in finally letting me say the things my Box has been unable to say. I am crying writing this.

Some friends who’ve encountered me during this phase have told me that they need to take a long pause from the relationship. One friend who I told, “I cannot be funny with you for the duration of this experiment,” initially freaked out, and then the next day sent me a text thanking me for my courage. Another friend told me, “Devin, you have a great personality – one of the best – and everyone likes it. And, if that personality is coming at too high a cost, I am in your court as you go through your process.”

What do you even say to a friend who says a thing like that? I couldn’t say anything other than, “You have no idea how much that means to me.”

There is a last friend that I am working with now. When I told him that I could no longer tolerate the way I had been in our connection and that I wanted something different, his answer was essentially, “No.” This friend is powerful, wealthy, and a man I have looked up to and given my center to for years. There has been a benefit of knowing him – he sends clients my way, he has given me large sums of money, he has introduced me to important people.

But what has the price been? My dignity. Yes, my priceless dignity has been the price. I didn’t know that until recently.

Right now, I stand in my terror as that relationship crumbles. My Box is FREAKING out. My heart feels broken. But my commitment to myself and my path does not feel broken. That is so new for me.

I want you all to know that, because when you know it, I feel held by this Village. I feel the courage to really pull the rug out and stand on the groundlessness.

Thank you for reading this and for doing this work with me.