“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.” ~Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Level 1.) The Sleeper (The Robot):

“Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty.” ~Carl Jung

Sleepers live in the realm of illusions. Unaware that they are unaware. Afraid of the unknown. Clinging to the safety of their comfort zone. They are asleep at the wheel of their life. Everything passes them by. Everything is an authority they bounce themselves off like a pinball machine.

They are so attached to their beliefs that they are all Ego and no Self. They’re rigid, hard, and invulnerable at the expense of flexibility, openness, and vulnerability. There’s so much armor around their heart that their Soul can’t breathe. Their wishful thinking is so powerful that they can’t think through their hope.

Sleepers don’t even know that they don’t know. They cannot see that the only way to be free is to question. But they are afraid to question things because they are afraid that the entire construction will collapse in on itself. They’re afraid the bottom will fall out. That the glass house they’ve been living in will shatter under the heavy stone of questioning.

To move to the level of the Imitator, they must wake up to the value of knowledge.

Level 2.) The Imitator (The Peacock):

“From the outside, you seem mature with a philosopher’s mind. But inside, you are just a child lost in sweet delusion.” ~Fyodor Dostoevsky

Imitators live in the realm of indoctrination. They have awakened themselves to knowledge, but they are drowning in it. They mimic it. They quote it. They Tweet it. They memorize and regurgitate in showy displays of high ignorance. But they are drowning in their newfound knowledge. They don’t know yet how to question what they have learned. Rather, they take what they have learned and use it as bricks in the walls of their comfort zone. Or they toss it around willy-nilly without knowing what it will do.

Imitators don’t understand what they know. And they are deathly afraid of someone finding out. So, they reinforce their comfort zone with the hollow “bricks” of their knowledge. They batten down the hatches using a myriad of cognitive and logical fallacies. They escape into their mimicry afraid of what people will think when they are outed as frauds.

They are so attached to what they have learned that they begin to forge their ego into a persona. This persona becomes a mask, a front, a conviction. But it is all surface and no substance. It’s worn to appease the world. It hides their ignorance in dramatic presentations of pseudo wisdom.

As Jung proposed, “Persona is the most subtle obstacle against true individuation,”

To move to the level of the Schemer, the Imitator must stop caring about what people think.

Level 3.) The Schemer (The Fox):

“Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.” ~Wisława Szymborska

Schemers live in the realm of culture. They are aware of their knowledge and how to use it despite what others think. They use their knowledge to observe reality as it actually is. Rather than imitate, they emulate. They have dropped their need for validation and gained the ability to question. They become individuals with agency.

The schemer is a Fox, cunning, calculating, and effective. They use culture as a chessboard. They are playing and winning the finite game. But they are so blinded by winning the game they cannot see how the game is playing them.

Schemers are stuck in the game of one-upmanship. Their ego is trapped in winning at all costs. They are not free. They are lonely in their scheming. They don’t have the courage to break free of the game because they cannot take responsibility for their own involvement.

To move to the level of the Commander, the Shemer must develop courage and take responsibility.

Level 4.) The Commander (The Lion):

“This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” ~George Bernard Shaw

Commanders live in the realm of the battlefield. A Commander is an unstuck wheel, a forward motion, a disciplined force of nature. Capable of profound leaps of courage, Commanders have the nerve to stretch their own comfort zone and the wherewithal to adapt and overcome. They have the audacity to question all authorities, but they run the risk of getting stuck within their own pride. Their fierce independence gives rise to a mighty ego which is the tip of the spear leading them into their own hero’s journey.

A Commander is a lion. And lions realize that life is a risk. They embrace that risk with honor and courage. They thrive in conflict. Where sleepers, imitators, and schemers fear making waves, lions relish it. For they realize that sometimes you must rock the boat to keep it afloat.

Life is too short to be a bystander. Lions take a stand. They draw a line in the sand. They bare their teeth. They show their claws. They crush ultimatums through the power of their own moral autonomy. They ruthlessly reveal why the buck must stop here. They are leaders of men and commanders of armies.

But Commanders carry a heavy burden. They have power but they are vulnerable. As commanders, they are too much out in front. Too visible. Too much of a target for assassins or usurpers. They misunderstand power. They believe power is about taking it and holding it over others.

To move to the level of the Manipulator, a Commander must learn subtlety and psychology.

Level 5.) The Manipulator (The Puppeteer):

“You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” ~Andrew Boyd

Manipulators live in the realm of dissociation. They are master chameleons. They practice their powerplays behind the scenes, in the shadows. They whisper into the ears of kings and queens. They manipulate commanders into playing out their grand strategies. They pull the strings of power through soft power.

Manipulators understand that the Self is a hall of mirrors, each reflection a mask, each mask a delusion. They realize that true power lies in manipulating and using these masks while exploiting the personas that arise from them. They see how everyone is a puppet to culture, politics, and religion. Everyone is a pawn on a chessboard of the finite game.

This is why Manipulators are next-level puppeteers. They see how almost everyone is a sycophant or a lapdog wallowing at the feet of someone else’s decree. They just make sure that decree is their own, spoken through the mouths of kings and queens believing it was their idea.

But Manipulators are victims of their own cold dissociation. They are still a part of the finite game even if they are the one calling the shots. They cannot see that true power lies in creating the game itself.

To move to the level of the Worldbuilder, the Manipulator must learn systems thinking and patience.

Level 6.) The Worldbuilder (The Overman):

“Realize that everything connects to everything else.” ~Leonardo da Vinci

Worldbuilders live in the realm of creation. They are not players caught in the throes of finite games; they are the creators of finite games. They are supreme architects, mythmakers, bridgebuilders. They create systems, games, ideologies, algorithms, governments, and religions.

They are spearheads for a new way of being human in the world. They have learned how to rearrange the nightmare of the human condition. They can transform chaos into catharsis, wounds into wisdom, death into rebirth, and pain into purpose.

The Worldbuilder is an Overman, the primordial prodigy, the epistemological elite, the interdependent Self. The Overman is the “genius” that Jesus spoke of in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth the genius within you, it will free you. If you do not bring forth the genius within you, it will destroy you.”

An Overman is one who has transcended the human condition and achieved a self-actualized state of perpetual self-overcoming.

Worldbuilders are “over” ordinary men because they are neither a slave to reason nor a slave to realpolitik. They are beyond “good” and “evil.” They strategically elevate themselves above the battlefield of the human condition. They are Overmen—the pinnacle of man—caught up only in staying ahead of the curve and becoming the best version of themselves.

But not even the Worldbuilder is the pinnacle of awareness. Because not even the Worldbuilder, not even the Overman, is egoless and nonattached to their plight. They are still attached to legacy.

To move to the level of the Sovereign, the Worldbuilder must let go of everything, including legacy.

Level 7.) The Sovereign (The Phoenix):

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” ~Jean-Luc Godard

The Sovereign lives in the realm of the Void. It is in the void—free, fierce, and fearless—where the Sovereign experiences the interconnectedness of all things and the unity of opposites—where shadow and light, anima and animus, beast and sage become transcendent, provident, and mercurial.

The Sovereigns are the only ones playing Carse’s Infinite Game. While the Sleepers, Imitators, Schemers, Commanders, Manipulators, and Worldbuilders are all distracted playing different levels of the finite game (governed by the fallible written laws of men) chasing legacy, the Sovereign is playing the Infinite Game (governed by the infallible unwritten laws of the universe) forsaking the chase.

Sovereigns have transcended that maze of chasing legacy. They play by the infallible unwritten laws of the universe: impermanence, interdependence, entropy and emergence, the eternal flux of creation-destruction-recreation, the Golden Mean between order and chaos, the Middle Way that is neither this nor that, yet holds everything. These laws don’t end; they evolve. So, Sovereigns don’t “chase” a finish line or a statue in the square. They don’t chase at all. More precisely, they embody and perpetuate the following, all at once: The perpetual continuation of the Infinite Game, ever-deeper alignment with the cosmos, evolving radical self-sovereignty, and the expansion of possibility and play itself.

Sovereigns are beyond the game. They own nothing but possess everything. They fear nothing because they have nothing to lose. They realize that the individuation of Humor is the dissolution of Power. Through such dissolution they enter a state of absolute internal sovereignty. They gain complete emotional and psychological detachment from the world. They get power over power through the greater power of High Humor.

Sovereigns are transcendent. They see all the levels of awareness, even their own, as laughable aspects of the cosmic joke. So, they live without expectation, without hope, without an agenda. They go with the flow until they become Flow itself, repeatedly. They reflect the world like a mirror. They receive but do not keep. They absorb but do not cling. They learn but do not dwell. They question but remember to never settle upon an answer.

The Sovereign is a Phoenix. Caught up only in the throes of rebirth. They personify transformation. They practice resurrection. They embody the hottest fire in the universe: a profound sense of humorous nonattachment. And they make gold of that.

As Marcus Aurelius said, “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”

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About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (The Seven Levels of Awareness) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.org. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.