Linear vs. Non-Linear Accomplishment

My thoughts on how achievement changes with consciousness

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I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while and a series of recent synchronicities forced my hand.

In my last business Troops we’d always do end of quarter retrospectives. These exercises are structured reflections used to evaluate your performance against your goals and identify key learnings. In conjunction with the annual company plan, the outcomes of retrospectives are used to help inform goals and strategies for the next quarter.

During most of my mid-twenties and early thirties, I’d also perform these type of structured reflections and goal setting across all vectors of my life using things like Tony Robbin’s Wheel of Life. This all was part of a larger obsession with self-improvement.

As my focus became redirected inward, there came a time where I started to see the context of these exercises contained a lot of hyper-vigilance and striving. I was desperately trying to free myself from this militance so I stopped doing these retros all together. In addition to the striving, I also had a strong pattern of polarity that caused me to perceive things on one extreme or the other.

During this liminal period, there was all kinds of confusion around accomplishment in general. It was hard to read all these texts that called reality a big illusion, championed surrendering to everything, and pushed me to question who is this I that needs to accomplish? I found myself sitting down at my desk each morning and not knowing what to do. So do I just sit here? Apathy began to set in around many of the things I once obsessed over like professional success.

I see this pendulum swing I went on happen quite often. Someone who is intensely externally oriented has their reality blown up, which then causes them to be intensely inward oriented. Eventually, you come back into balance learning how to harmonize the inner and outer worlds.

After a few years of being on this seesaw, I finally felt a big shift in my perceived dissonance between spiritual evolution and accomplishment towards the end of last year. I became excited to step back into my “person in the world suit” and contribute from a new context of inspiration and service. As a part of this, I decided to experiment with reintroducing quarterly goal-setting and retrospectives early this year.

My outlook on goals had evolved beyond the polarity I felt before. I learned that you can use goals to set direction while still also be committed to following the flow of your energy and inner guidance as it arises. So long as you are clear on what part of your life leads and you approach your goals without attachment, I think goals can be useful.

Using the Past To Define The Future

Leading up to my most recent retro something inside of me felt awry. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but there was this feeling of “why are you continuing to play these games” in my being.

I decided to go for a bike ride. I was closing out windows on my browser before I was about to leave and this video popped up on my youtube feed. For some reason I just knew that I was supposed to watch it. This wouldn’t be the first time Universe was working through the youtube algorithm like that for me.

Alberto Villodo is a scientist and shaman. I had second-hand familiarity with him because my friend Zach trained with him and led me through some of his energy work techniques. The day before I had spoken to a new acquaintance that was also training with him.

I popped the video on the Youtube app and went on a bike ride. 

The main message in the video is about stepping into your power to create a new life story. Alberto eloquently put into words something I’ve been seeing emerge in my own experience for awhile.

He discussed how when we are caught up in the story of our past, we limit the possibility of the future. For example, from the reference point of Scott who has been a tech entrepreneur and did XYZ over the last 6 months, there is a very predictable future story that will come out of this. When we’re attached to the past instead of creating a new story, we likely create a derivative that feels very realistic.He went on to describe how only when we move beyond our identity and all the debris from our past, do we have the ability to start writing the story on an entirely new page.

Getting to this point is no easy task. It requires a tremendous amount of housecleaning to create space for a deeper, more formless identity to emerge. Many people call this shadow work. It’s my experience that many seekers go through an obsessed with shadow work phase. I was in the throes of this for about 3 years. This can be very fruitful, but at a certain point, Alberto illuminates how we need to move beyond it. It’s not that we stop the housecleaning as things come up, but that the emphasis expands to include stepping into your loving power in order to take authorship of your life.

This really resonated with me. I’m not saying I don’t have more clean up to do, but it feels like I continue to get guidance from all directions of life that are saying: 

“It’s okay. Own your power. It’s coming from the right place now.” 

Linear Goals

Throughout this bike ride, I started to get all sorts of downloads which is quite common for me during cardiovascular exercise these days. Steady state cardio can almost feel like a mini psychedelic experience sometimes where I just get these rapid downloads one after another.

One of the downloads was about how the retrospective exercise is a double edge sword. It’s useful to reflect back and get some learning, but it’s also precarious in that it grounds future pursuits in the past context. This can manifest in realistic aims. For example, if my goal was to teach 100 people last quarter and I taught only 50, then perhaps this quarter I’d shoot for 75.

Thinking back to my startup experience, this type of modeling is how I’d approach setting “stretch goals.” This type of thinking would usually create incremental goals, followed by incremental outcomes.

Linear Accomplishment vs. Non Linear Accomplishment

This is a very linear way to approach what you strive to create in the world. I believe the linear goal setting complex has to do with how your perceive reality.

The predominant view of reality is the newtonian-spacetime paradigm, where everything is oriented around cause and effect:

If I do A, then B happens.

So in the context of my example, if I wrote one blog post a week and got 50 clients, maybe this quarter, I would write 1.5 blog posts and be able to get 75 to 100 clients. This model of accomplishment assumes causality between actions and semi-predictable outcomes.

This is how most people think the world works and how I did for most of my life.

The Non-linear Paradigm

I first read about the non-linear paradigm via the work of David Hawkins. He highlighted how the non-linear paradigm emerges at a certain level of spiritual maturity after which the rules of reality seem to change. In his model, I interpret the level of consciousness one reaches to be the most fundamental lever to impact this plane of reality.

When I first encountered his description of a non-linear reality, I knew things seemed to be changing around me, but I didn’t fully grasp how to work with the concept.

The idea is that “the universe and all existence is an infinite potentiality that is formless and infinitely Power.” Self includes context and content, and all actions originate from the entire field. Practically, this field of potentiality can be influenced by intent. 

In this model, all possibilities exist and arise spontaneously as consciousness expressing itself. You move from having an intention to becoming the intention.

I acknowledge that this description still might seem very esoteric, but I will attempt to share my understanding of how practically this might manifest in your experience.

Understanding The Non-Linear In My Life

I started to question the Newtonian paradigm when the outer world started to more closely mirror what was happening in my inner world. One word for this is synchronicity. I began seeing for the first time how thoughts and intentions were being met with unforeseen support from the people and events around me in perfect timing.

This recognition came online a few years into taking my spirituality seriously. It didn’t feel like I was doing anything different, just more clearly seeing the pattern of life unfolding around me in a way that I was not able to before.

In the context of accomplishment, what became obvious is that instead of my life just being a function of the cleverness of my actions ( A -> B), there seemed to be a greater intelligence involved bringing life together to support me in the moment. This support would often be unexpected and unpredictable. For example, I’d be working towards something and then get a random text message from someone I hadn’t heard from in years. The conversation would somehow result in them helping me with what I was working on in a way I could have never expected.

Things like this happened over and over again. The more it happened, the more it strengthened my conviction that reality was being governed by an intelligence much more significant than my little strategies. Understanding how to work with this became vastly more interesting than leaning more into linear accomplishment.

I will be the first one to tell you coherence between my intention and reality unfolding does not happen 100% of the time. But the more I have recognized the phenomenon and learned to trust life itself, the more consistent the creative intelligence seems to deliver. It’s like there is a correlation between trust and the intelligence being online. I also believe the consistency has a direct relation to the purification of the information in my consciousness which I talk about in my ideas on manifesting. 

From my vantage point, it seems like the universal intelligence has a multi-pronged goal of:

• A) becoming aware of itself (Self realization)

• B) expanding to new possibilities that support the greatest good for all collective evolution

• C) supporting your intentions within the context of A + B

This understanding is how we bring together the harmonization of spiritual evolution and accomplishment. 

If I were to sum up the difference in texture of linear vs. non-linear accomplishment, one feels like you are a separate agent efforting to bring something into your life. The other feels like you are a part of life witnessing it accomplish itself. 

Context For Non-linear Achievement

So how practically could you approach accomplishment working in the non-linear paradigm?

I think first, there are some requisite conditions for this to be a viable option. Hawkins calls this context and I agree with him that this shift only seems to occur at a certain depth of awareness.

Let’s assume you are committed to this path and have been prioritizing your spiritual work. You begin to notice glimmers of what I am talking about and are trying to learn how to work with it.

Below seem to be the conditions that really move things. Obviously, you can try to work with shaping reality without these conditions, it’s just my experience that the coherence for it to support you is not as meaningful.

Conditions for non-linear achievement:

• You are intimately aware of this inner-outer coherence phenomenon which is a function of awareness.

• Your goals need to be for the greatest good. You can’t fake this. Believe me I’ve tried to lob in “for the greatest good” before or after egocentric manifestation exercises and it doesn’t work. There’s no fooling the highest power. Eventually, instead of trying to retrofit goals to meet the proverbial greatest good criteria, you move to a place where you see yourself as more of an instrument that actually desires to be used for pure benevolence. When the heart opens, the desire to serve becomes automatic vs. considered or efforted.

• You deeply trust life and the guidance you receive as indicated by your actions. It’s through following the inner guidance, where we receive the most support.

• There needs to be openness and flexibility around how the Divine seeks to work through you. This is accompanied by an understanding that the form things take may look different than expected. The universe is dynamic and constantly evolving. You may start with a strong intent in one direction that you feel guided towards and notice that this shifts despite the original guidance. Trust and go with the flow. 

When this context is in place, it also seems important to be explicit with the power of intention. This includes both from mind and action. 

I’m sure there are probably much deeper levels of this, but I am just describing my own experience and conceptions at my current evolution. I’m sure all of this is subject to change with greater awareness and understanding.

Putting This Into Practice

Back to my Q3 2023 goals…

After things came into focus on my bike ride, I decided to heed the advice I had been given.

Goal Setting

The next morning, I wrote out what felt like some very blank canvas goals. I did this exercise before and separate from the retrospective. The idea is divorce yourself from the context of the past and move into the infinite potentiality of the universe. The goals were written in a very inspired state through automatic writing which made them feel almost channeled. Even though they were written with a blank mind, the goals felt pretty congruent to what I might have came up with if I used cognition; they were just felt bigger and more clear. Skeptics might look at this and say, how do you know this isn’t you mind then? I feel pretty in touch with my soul desires these days which I choose to attribute the coherence too.

Context

My context for all of this is genuine, benevolent contribution. In order for there to be universal support, I believe this needs to be there. This doesn’t feel like something I need to conjure. It’s just a fire that’s there which seemed to arise with a remembrance of why I am here.

Guidance

Each morning and evening, I quiet my mind asking the Divine and my guides for help with the intentions in a very open hearted state. Sometimes I receive information in the moment and others times later on. For a while, I didn’t know what to think about the concept of guides, but I kept getting downloads that used the word “we” which opened me up to it. 

Intent

My direct communion during these experiences is one primary way I declare my intention. The other is by following through with my actions. I don’t really go hard on the whole visualization stuff that many manifestors harp on. If you have a divine connection accessible to you in your awareness, you can just go right to communion with the Source. I don’t think the highest power needs you to create a picture in your head to support you. I also acknowledge that information comes through to me audibly and in the spatial knowing of the third eye, so maybe this would be different if I was more clairvoyantly oriented.

Trust

When I get information in these states, I prioritize it with my actions. I also know I will receive guidance from the language of the responsive reality which speaks to me through the people, places, and events around me. Deciphering all of these inputs is a skill that comes with time, but eventually becomes second nature. There is an immense trust in the information and if I am unsure about what to make of something, I quiet the mind and ask for clarity. I think if you do all this without the deep trust component, the results will likely not be the same.

Openness & Flexibility

Lastly, there is an openness to how all this wants to emerge which is inclusive of the timeline. I think this is really important. For example, let’s say you have a goal of wanting to inspire and help many people like I do. You may think that this will take the form of writing a book, but perhaps you find yourself being guided to another form that you didn’t anticipate. There is an art of moving forward in your hypothesized direction while being observant of how you are being led. Skillfully balancing taking consistent action, maintaining flexibility, and trusting that directives & support will show up as needed comes with experience. 

The only way you will get to this place is through experimentation. You need to try living your life this way and then observe verifiable evidence in order for trust to build. At first, this will likely feel very uncomfortable. Eventually, the anxiety of surfing the unknown is replaced with a sense of wonder and anticipation.

Closing Thoughts

So this is my plan and approach for creating in the world with the recognition of the non-linear phenomena. From the outside, it might look very similar to what I was doing before, but the context of all the actions and inner experience is entirely different. We’ll see how it goes! If things don’t pan out, it’s all good. There’s trust that it’s all happening as intended for the greater good. 

I think the old me would have looked at this approach and thought it was incredibly risky or irresponsible. Ironically, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more secure! 

I used to think achievement was all about efforting and strategizing. I think this was true at a certain point in my journey, but it feels like the inputs to achievement have expanded to include all the things I mentioned earlier. This doesn’t discount things like effort and strategy. It’s just that there is much more going on here with less weights placed on pillars of the previous paradigm.

I think these shifts only occur as awareness grows. Practically, if anything I just discussed seems compelling, this just points to prioritize working on the consciousness.

What I can also say is that the more I live in this way of being, the more life takes on a texture of awe and wonder. Each day there’s this curiosity and expectancy that wonders how life will creatively orchestrate? That’s not to say I just have magical shit happen to me all the time. I experience lots of inconveniences too. For the most part these are seen as invitations if any major disturbance arise. So it’s really all good and not a big deal. Having lived in both worlds, I prefer the essence of this experience far more than the more ego-centric, control paradigm I was in before which also felt more linear.

For now life seems to be moving me towards continuing to be a person in the world who accomplishes things, but from a different context. I hope we can move beyond the cultural perception that there’s a polarity between spirituality and material achievement. It’s an old narrative that needs an upgrade if we realistically want to uplift global consciousness. So long as people perceive this polarity, there will be a reticence to open up to new ways of creating in the world that are more harmonious with others, nature, and the Divine. Unlike the predominant linear model of accomplishment, what I am proposing emphasizes the relationship with the Divine and your subjective expansion of consciousness. I’m with Jesus in believing that these components are in fact the most primary inputs to create what you seek in the world:

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

As stated before, all of these are just feelings where I’m at in my own evolutionary journey.

I’m sure all of this is apt to change as my awareness and understanding grows.

I look forward to reporting back in a couple months! : )

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If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏