Living Across Two Lives

Part 1: The Synopsis of Living Across Two Worlds

Apr 23, 2025

Whether you are a mystic straddling the sacred and the mundane, or a parent and professional trying to remain whole across the split between your inner life and your outer roles of career and society, the challenge is the same: how to traverse the threshold between these domains without losing the thread of who you are.

Before we begin, please note that you can listen to this post like a podcast episode by downloading the iOS app. In fact, would thinking of this as a podcast episode change the way you engage with it?

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As always, this post is not just more content, it is an invitation—for you to slow down for a moment, to compartmentalise a bit of ‘me’ time for yourself, and to not allow the momentum of everything else to intrude on this moment. Presence, discernment and intentionality are how we choose a life by design, instead of living a life by default.

This post is aimed at a certain kind of soul, who is struggling to bridge not just two lives, but essentially two versions of themselves that they have to embody across those two lives, in ways that leave us feeling depleted, incoherent and psychologically exhausted. We continually feel estranged from our own Self.

There is a cultural artefact that captures this experience with uncanny clarity: the television series Severance. I highly recommend watching it. You don’t even have to commit to finishing the series. I would go so far as to say that the plot is actually less valuable than the premise and the mirror it holds to our society.

In the show, corporate workers voluntarily undergo a procedure that splits their consciousness in two, a process aptly called ‘being severed’. After which, one ‘self’ exists only at work, and another exists that knows only life outside of it. Neither remembers the other. Neither has access to the full continuity of self, but the trauma and sense of being less-than whole invariably bleeds through.

If you have ever worked a corporate job, this sounds a lot less surreal. The premise resonates disturbingly because it mirrors something many of us live every day. We do not need surgery to feel severed. We feel it in the dissonance between who we are at home and who we become at work. In the distance between our soul life and our social life. It is a performance we must maintain just to function in what we call normal.

This is the normalised psychological abandonment of the modern condition. We adapt to survive the world we inherited, but in doing so, we begin to lose our inner thread. We become two versions of ourselves, cut off from each other by the narrow corridors of expectation and necessity. Severance is a mirror, and what it reflects is our need—not just to remember who we are—but to build a bridge back to that knowing.

This ‘Severed’ existence was once my reality. That was why I was always destined to leave the corporate world. Interestingly, the business world calls such terminations ‘Severance’.

Now I live a different kind of Severance.

For the past six years, I have lived two separate lives. In one life, which I dare say is my second life, actually, I contend with the ordinary world—the daily rituals and demands of keeping a life afloat—of bills, social obligations, and the eternal conundrum of ‘what’s for dinner?’

The other life, is how I try to find my real sense of coherence and authentic sanity, via a deeper world—a symbolic, mythic, spiritual dimension which is the only place I can real find coherence, sense-making, and true refuge. One recognises the literal; the other nourishes and heals the soul. When human beings enjoy anything a golden age, all it means is that these two are integrated. Right now, our two worlds are not only not integrated, but a raw and yawning wound gapes between them. Straddling both is not something we can do without initiation, and we have well and truly lost that art and practice.

I am what I now call an Urban Mystic. I cannot afford to reject the whole world, nor would I wish to, because I love my wife and child so very much, and I feel a sense of profound duty and calling that can only find its fulfilment in the world. So, I live in the ordinary world, but I do not belong to it. Certainly not in the way most people do.

I walk the streets of my neighbourhood, I watch the news. I try to meet the demands of this life, pay its costs and show up—but my compass, my true north, points elsewhere entirely. I am not driven authentically by status or conformity; in fact I find something deeply disturbing and nauseating about our prevailing social operating system. It is for me like an abusive relationship I cannot escape, a form of spiritual bondage with no real kink appeal.

I feel compelled instead by meaning, by coherence, by the invisible thread that stitches the soul to life. I am not just waxing on about philosophical musings for the hell of it. I am deeply bound to this calling to free us from the hell of it all.

My work—all of my work—is about naming and mapping the delta between those two worlds. It is about building a bridge between these, the literal and the symbolic, the scientific and the soulful. It is about diagnosing what is sick in our modern paradigm: a worldview that is disenchanted, left-brain dominant, and reductionist to the point of psychological derangement. We live in a culture that is illiterate in the languages of the psyche or the soul. And so we feel sick and society feels sick.

Soul is what is missing when life feels wrong.

I have spent years trying to hold both ends of the bridge—doing the inner work of sense-making, writing, teaching, formulating, structuring—and at the same time, trying to be a provider, even just a good citizen in the world, cleaning up messes, being a good partner, a present father, a contributor to a shared life. But what no one tells you about living in two worlds is that the transitions cost you. The psyche does not shift gears cleanly. There are no rituals to guide you back. When the sacred is interrupted by the mundane—unexpectedly, urgently—I lose the thread. I forget where I was. I forget what I knew. I forget what I was building towards. I live half my life in exile, and the other half, only half present.

After a weekend of family demands and errands and social banality, I come back to the work, and it is like being Theseus, dropped unceremoniously again into the labyrinth. I anxiously find myself here again every week, sometimes every morning. It feels a bit like the transitions in the show Severance. My whole other self arrives disoriented and missing some key thread of coherence. And I must reorient, again and again, with no clear way to hold continuity between the two domains. Aside from the deranging impact on my mental health, it is also quite inefficient and has cost me so much momentum in both lives.

I know that in this, I am not alone.

So this is part one: An attempt to lay out the problem—not just mine, but ours. Those of us who live across two lives, who feel the tension of the sacred and the practical, the call of depth and the pull of duty and feel at most times like a chameleon in a tub of mixed LEGO, not knowing which colour to turn first.

This framing is for those of us who know there is something essential we are meant to bridge, if only we can stay oriented long enough to finish the crossing in a world where the two sides we are attempting to bridge keep getting pulled further and further apart.

This is the beginning of it, after which I will formulate a practice—a way to honour our commitments to both worlds, and navigate the crossing between them with more grace, more consciousness and intentionality.

Wouldn’t we all benefit from that?

At a deeper level, this is about a certain kind of soul that is struggling to integrate a mystical experience or a profound sense of calling while being hamstrung by the unavoidable demands of our ‘normal’ lives. If this speaks to something in you, then perhaps you, too, are an Urban Mystic or a Wayfinder. And perhaps it is time we stopped walking this edge alone. If you subscribe to the A Better Way Community, there will be announcements of that program starting over the next month.

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Two Worlds: Exploring the Problem.

Jim Morrison is quoted as saying, “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors.”

This quote has appealed to teenagers wrestling with the threshold of adulthood and with the counterculture grappling with the limits and bounds of the conventional reality they were trying to transcend and find refuge from. It reflects a liminal sensibility—an awareness of thresholds between worlds: the seen and unseen, the known and the mysterious. It is in that in-between space—the doorway—where transformation, encounter, and meaning emerge. It is also what gave his band The Doors its name, inspired further by Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which itself references William Blake:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every ‘thing’ would appear to man as it is: infinite.”

In the model of Consciousness I teach as part of Opening The Way, the reality is that we live in two ‘worlds’.

This itself can mean so many things.

Here are three examples to help frame the understanding:

The CEO and The Janitor

Archetypally speaking a ‘world’ is a context of conscious experience. The CEO and the janitor may share the same office, work in the same building, breathe the same air—but they do not live in the same ‘world’, so to speak. Each has a completely different framing and relationship to opportunity, power, consequence, and agency. They can each walk the same corridor, and see the same mess on the floor and their experiences and expectations, what they perceive as limit, obligation or permission, are ‘worlds apart’. They are each engrossed in a different mythos, one that shapes not just how they see the world, but how the world sees them and what they believe about their place and their role in that world. This is the ‘world’ of Class or Caste.

Becoming a Parent and Losing a Parent

To become a parent, or to lose a parent, is to cross into a ‘world’ that did not exist a moment before—one to which we can never return. The event itself is biographical, but the transformation is mythological. These are not just life changes; they are initiations. They shift the mythos we live inside of—the symbolic architecture through which we understand our place in the story. Parenthood casts you as guardian, bearer of lineage, steward of innocence. Loss of a parent recasts you as orphan, and as one who carries memory beyond an impassable threshold of absence. In both cases, the world changes not because its matter rearranged, but because its meaning did. A different archetype now stands at the centre of the stage. A different story is being told through you. This is the ‘world’ of parenthood.

Neanderthals and Romans

In a similar way, the Neanderthals and the ancient Romans lived in the same physical world we occupy now, walked the same earth, breathed the same air. But the context of their reality—the meanings, beliefs, expectations, and sense of possibility—was an entirely different world. A Roman lived in a world that had borders and social ordering within those limits. For a Neanderthal, such ideas were utterly inconceivable. For a Roman citizen, Rome was not just a city, it was the centre of the ‘world’, the source of identity, meaning, and divine order. Their ‘world’ was built around that axis. This is the ‘world’ of Culture.

This then, is what we mean when we speak of different ‘worlds’. Our ‘worlds’ are not separations of geography or even time necessarily, but of structures of meaning and significance we inhabit.

Each ‘world’ holds its own internal logic and its own sense of meaning. What is expected, permitted, feared, or celebrated in one may be incomprehensible or irrelevant in another. These are not merely different situations—they are different existential architectures. What we call class, kinship, or culture are just surface expressions of deeper mythic configurations that determine how reality is lived from the ‘inside’ of our ‘inner’ experience.

To move between worlds—or to straddle more than one—is not simply a logistical adaptation. It is a restructuring of ‘self’ and meaning. It is to inhabit a different myth, one with different gods, laws, different consequences, and different stakes.

Mythos & Logos

The ‘world’ of childhood is not ordered by the same principles, nor bound by the same constraints and limits, as adulthood—and vice versa. What matters, what is feared, what is deemed ordinary or exceptional, what feels possible or impossible—these are all different. The rules of one world do not automatically translate to the other. A child may live in a world governed by wonder, immediacy, and dependency, while the adult world is shaped by responsibility, consequence, and long-range foresight. Both worlds are real, but they operate according to different logics and structures of meaning.

Our ‘worlds’ are modelled in two primary ways: paradigmatically and mythically. Paradigms structure how we interpret reality through models, systems, and assumptions—what we believe to be true, likely, or rational. Mythos, on the other hand, structures how we experience reality through narrative, archetype, and symbol—what we believe is meaningful, sacred, or redemptive. The paradigm defines the scaffolding of thought; the mythos defines the architecture of meaning. One governs cognition and coherence, the other governs belonging, significance, and becoming.

We navigate life—its decisions, opportunities, and obstacles—through our predictive models. These models are not conscious blueprints we consult, but internalised frameworks of sense-making and meaning-making. They govern how we interpret reality, assess risk, and forecast outcomes. They are our private physics: our expectations of causality, consequence, and coherence.

These models inform everything—from how we keep ourselves safe and get our needs met, to how we choose where to invest our energy and attention. They shape how we pursue satisfaction, and more importantly, how we orient ourselves toward meaning and fulfilment. They are the silent architecture behind all our striving, adaptation, and desire.

Only part of this architecture is purely logical. The most salient part—the part that actually moves us—is narrative. It is not just what we think about the world, but the story we believe we are living in. That story is not composed merely of facts and premises, but of symbols, roles, expectations, and meaning. It is encoded archetypally. We understand ourselves not only as individuals making choices, but as characters within a story: the provider, the seeker, the orphan, the guide. These roles shape how we interpret events, how we weigh Consequence, how we imagine Possibility. Logic may help us map the terrain, but it is the archetypal narrative that tells us why the journey matters.

Childhood and adulthood are not simply developmental phases—they are different worlds because they are built on different mythologies and different paradigms. What the child believes is possible or true, and what the adult believes is necessary or inevitable, arise from the distinct configurations of these two structuring principles. We call these Mythos and Logos.

This is not at all a new idea. For most of human history, the prevailing worldview was animist—rooted in the understanding that two worlds existed side by side: the seen and the unseen, the material and the spiritual, each shaping the other.

The Ancient Greeks articulated this duality as the conversation of Life occurring in two distinct languages: Logos and Mythos. Logos refers to the paradigms of reason—our logical sense-making, systems of explanation, and causal understanding. Mythos, by contrast, is the language of imagination and narrative—sense-making through story, symbol, and archetype. Where Logos seeks clarity, consistency, and prediction, Mythos seeks coherence, resonance, and meaning. Both are essential. One tells us how things work; the other tells us why they matter.

(Technically, from the archetypal perspective, we actually live in Four worlds, or more accurately, across four worlds. But that is much more technical than will be helpful for this exploration.)

Living Across Two Worlds

So it might be better to say, we live across two ‘worlds’: We live our spiritual life and we live our ‘ordinary’ life. I don’t mean to diminish this by calling it ordinary. There is something incredible about even the most ordinary of the so-called ‘ordinary life’, not the least of which is the way Consciousness and Existence give rise to Experience, which is nothing short of miraculous.

To be clear, then, ‘spiritual’ refers to nothing more than our ‘inner life’, what we regard as deeply meaningful, not only what we regard as sensible. This is of course, the part of us that can reflect on the miraculous nature of Nature, the wonder of Consciousness and the implication of having a deep Longing for Meaning. Even the capacity to reflect on any moment and how that parsing and processing defines who we are and who we become. That, we can say, is our ‘inner life’. ‘Spiritual’ just means how we anchor deep meaning to non-literal things. These are best described by what we deeply desire, what we yearn for, what we serve or devote our energy and attention to.

The take-home understanding is that the non-material is not to be confused with being immaterial. All your biggest decisions in life are not made purely logically, even if you invested a lot of reasoning and logic into the decision-making. To buy a house, get married, name a child, all these profound life decisions are made from the heart and from the gut—from our felt sense, not just our reasoned sense. That is what spiritual means.

Humanity has always been divided into two groups: the normal and the ‘sensitives’.

The normals live inside the prevailing consensus reality. They inherit the frameworks handed to them and largely accept them as given—cultural norms, social hierarchies, sanctioned beliefs about what is real and what is possible. Their orientation is to adapt, to belong, to maintain continuity with what is. For them, the world is what it appears to be. Meaning is local, practical, and largely externalised.

The sensitives, by contrast, live with an open nerve exposed to something more. They do not just perceive reality—they feel its fault lines. They sense what is missing, what is unspoken, what is becoming. Often from an early age, they are marked by a different kind of awareness, a refusal—or an inability—to fully settle into the common world. They live attuned to myth, to symbol, to the interiority of things. They carry a burden of vision, which is often isolating, sometimes maddening, and yet indispensable.

These two groups do not merely live differently—they live primarily in different worlds. One world is reinforced by what is accepted. The other is animated by what is felt, specifically the wound of its diminishment at the hands of the ‘normal’.

The Insensitives

For some, this ‘inner life’ is a shallow, hollow life.

Given the state of the ‘world’, we have to reason now that the majority of our fellow humans have little or appreciation for this ‘inner life’. It might seem shallow to us, but it is just their awareness that is shallow. Beneath the waterline of their conscious awareness, of course, there exists the fathomless umbra of their unconscious—the vast, unexamined psychic terrain that Jung rightly referred to as the Shadow. But without the means or the will to turn inward, it remains undisturbed, unintegrated.

When we see an icon, in both senses of that word—either as the religious picture of a saint or the little square of coloured pixels that represent an app on our phones—we appreciate how that icon is a representation, a portal into something deeper and more complex.

For such individuals, the icon does not point to something deeper. It is the surface mistaken for the source. Literal gods are worshipped. So are money and pleasure. The icon becomes the object. And so the inner life—the symbolic, the transcendent, the soul—is bypassed altogether.

Most people alive today live entirely within one world. The samsara—the loop of distraction, delusion, and surface reality—is for them not a trap, but the totality. It is unquestioned, unchallenged, and wholly constructed from the outside in. They manufacture the Samsara by their unquestioned participation in it, engineering their own suffering without ever recognising themselves as its architect.

Their psychologies are shaped by inherited ideologies. Their sense of self is contoured by religious dogma, social hierarchies, and reductionist cosmologies. They internalise the scaffolding of status and strip the universe of meaning, leaving themselves small, incidental, and spiritually displaced. In doing so, they do not just inhabit a prison of the mind—they construct it.

These are the plebs, the mean, the average. This is not an insult. It is a demographic fact. Most people will live and die in one world, without ever suspecting that another was there to be entered

The Sensitives

The polar opposite of the insensitives are the exceedingly rare souls for whom transcendence is everything. These are not merely spiritual people. They are mystics in the truest sense—those whose very orientation to reality is toward a world we can scarcely name, let alone reach. They live for it. They suffer for it. They carry its signal in their bones, even as it isolates them from the consensus reality around them.

We know these souls as the shaman, the high priestesses, the hierophants, the hermits, the mystics, the seers. They are not role-playing. They are not adopting postures. They are archetypal inhabitants of a different frequency of meaning. And they are necessary.

A society that neglects its alchemists becomes poisoned by its own untransformed suffering. The unrest, dysfunction, and incoherence of modern life is not simply systemic—it is spiritual. It stems, in large part, from our collective refusal to heed the medicine carriers among us. These people are exiled, mocked, or commodified. We ridicule prophets. We relegate artists to obscurity unless they wear the mask of celebrity, at which point we value their glamour more than their gift. The sacred is only tolerated when it is marketable.

Every second fool who emerges from an Ayahuasca retreat now proclaims themselves a Shaman on Instagram, diluting the word, hollowing the role, turning a sacred function into a parody. And yet—here is the cruel irony—the ones who are celebrated are often hollow, while the real ones, the ones who carry the true medicine, are ridiculed, sidelined, or silenced.

These are the souls who would help us metabolise the pain of transformation. They are the ones capable of guiding us through the narrow passage of real change. They would help us reintegrate the worlds we have allowed to split—reunite the spiritual and the material, the mythic and the mundane. But we have made them invisible, or made them into jokes. The consequence is the sickness of a world that no longer knows how to listen, how to honour, or how to heal.

The Stowaways

Now, in our era, a third group has emerged and is waking up to its troubled dual citizenship. These are not only the neurodivergent, but something else—mythodivergent or perhaps sociodivergent?

They live within a different symbolic architecture, yearning for a deeper narrative and ailing from an archetypal dissonance with dominant culture. They feel a mismatch, not with people per se, but with the systems, values, and modes of social agreement.

To be neurodivergent, in the lived sense, simply means to possess a default internal wiring of sense-making, processing, and pattern recognition that is inherently averse to norms and conventions—particularly those that are performative, disingenuous, or incoherent. It is not an affectation or a flaw; it is a fidelity to an inner truth system that resists distortion.

Ironically, neurodivergent individuals are often cast as the socially awkward or rude ones, while society remains blind to how pathological and abnormal much of our so-called normal has become. The performance is rewarded, the mask is celebrated, and those who refuse to wear it—who cannot wear it without psychic cost—are seen as defective. But what if it is not the divergence that is the problem, but the culture that demands suppression of difference in order to maintain its illusion of order?

There are those of us—what has become a besieged minority among the greater human family—for whom life is a disorienting dance between both worlds. Think of this category as our high-functioning neurodivergents.

We do not dwell fully in either world. We are stretched across them, not with ease or grace either, but increasingly with tension and exhaustion. We cannot find firm footing in the world of the normal, nor can we fully retreat into the world of meaning, without severe cost. And yet, we are unwilling to abandon either. We are not trying to escape the world—we long to belong to it, to sanctify it, to find a better way to live within it without becoming false to ourselves. This is what it means to try to maintain integrity while having to compromise authenticity. If you have a deep and profound inner life, the ‘normal’ world absolutely demands this of you. Imagine figuring this out without guidance. This is the poor spiritual health we mistakenly think is poor mental health.

It is as Jiddu Krishnamurti said, no measure of good health, to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick ‘world.’

How can we not feel like stowaways of our own uncertain journeys? No map, no life-jacket, no passport to either world and no ticket for passage.

We want to flourish in our ordinary lives. We want homes that feel safe, relationships that are rich, rituals that are real. We want to engage in the honest work of loving, building something, of losing, of beginning again. And we want to feel spiritually prosperous—not in the abstract, but in the lived sense of fulfilment, alignment, and meaning. We yearn for connection and purpose, for rootedness and vitality. We are those with souls rooted in the ordinary world, and it is that very rootedness that renders the ordinary extraordinary to us.

Even the most devout ascetic monks, renouncing the world in form, must still acknowledge the basic conditions of embodied life—hunger, fatigue, illness, mortality. The necessities of the organic persist. The body itself is an altar, not an obstacle. It must be fed, tended, honoured.

So for us, who try to live across both worlds, the tension is sacred, but nevertheless physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. But this is the condition of our calling. We do not simply believe in both worlds—we are trying to integrate them. We live with the extreme discomfort of what it feels like to live across both worlds, but keep trying to find a better way. It is this tension that defines us.

The ones I am speaking to here are the ones who cannot simply withdraw into spiritual reclusion because we are so deeply drawn into Life, into the roles of husband (or wife)—of son, of father, of teacher, of healer, of participant in human life.

The ones I am speaking to, for us, if the arechetypal ‘God’ we yearn for is anything, it is in no small measure the presence we encounter in the meaning we make—through our commitments, our callings, and the fulfilment we find in even just pursuing them. ‘We’ are called to not only chop wood and carry water, not just for ourselves, but to do so for the village, and to discover different forms of profound meaning in both forms of service—one from the grounded world, and one from the world that is still becoming.

For such a person, this means precisely that leadership and initiation, maturity and necessity, and the search for a better way—these are not abstract ideals. They resonate deeply. They speak to something primary within you.

Authenticity and Integrity are not lifestyle affectations. They are internal imperatives. They orient your behaviour, your choices, your sense of self. Like ‘icons’, these words are keys, portals to very personal and profound contexts of meaning.

The idea of actualisation and integration is not a motivational phrase—it is a description of the life you are already trying to live. It names the pull you feel toward coherence. Toward becoming whole.

This vital and vulnerable intersection is where we find The Urban Mystic and The Wayfinders.

If this is you, you are a rare type of soul, you are my intended audience, my kind of person.

Next up:

Part 2: How To Bridge Two Worlds

The User Manual of the Butterfly, for The Caterpillar and the Chrysalis

The next post introduces a practical, structural ritual—a transitional protocol—for those of us living across two worlds. It is a user manual, not for what to become, but how to manage the crossing: how to preserve coherence, track continuity, and return to the thread without derailing your inner work.

The ritual is simple but essential. It is a conscious system for closing and opening, for caching, logging, and transitioning between the mythic work and the mundane life. It provides a mechanism to store orientation, leave breadcrumbs, record the state of inner work in progress, and safely re-enter from where you left off. Like a changelog for the soul.

This practice is not at all about escaping the world or our life. It is about making the difficult transition journey between them, without forgetting who you are. It is a technology of self-remembrance designed for those navigating sacred work in the context of ordinary life. For the butterfly still remembering the crawl, and the caterpillar sensing wings it cannot yet use.

If this resonates with you, subscribe to the A Better Way Community and come and see how I am leading the conversation and practices.