The Human Advantage 2.0

It’s been three years since I started my Substack nataliablagoeva.substack.com, and it has been a great journey full of the usual curves and curveballs. I am now at the start of a new stage of that journey, feeling like a natural continuation of everything I have been doing so far. Yet, it also feels different in a surprising and inspiring way, so I decided to rename the publication The Human Advantage 2.0.

When I started the publication, I felt the need to share lessons and inquiries from my own journey: I called five countries home and worked across a wide variety of professional roles, different economic and political systems, cultures, organizations, and ways of understanding people and the world.

It was the kind of life that steals from you the feeling that you know what “normal” is, yet lets you see the patterns that keep repeating.

Both a challenge and a benefit of having so many different experiences, identities, and residences is that you end up not fully identifying with any of them. I consider myself lucky that way because I’ve come to realize that loyalty to any given identity often reduces our capacity to see.

It was no different for me, and dismantling these identities was often difficult, at times even disheartening. However, today I’ve come to appreciate these past identities as windows that have given me different perspectives. These perspectives are now coming together, forming a wider view and fueling a desire to explore even further.

Along the way, a few other realizations happened:

1 |

I’ve grown wary of “Gurus” selling us what worked for them, “Influencers” of all kinds insisting we look left or right, and now also AI producing an answer to any question before we have a chance to sit with it ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong. Probably, just like you, I’ve benefited greatly from other people’s learnings, and I see a lot of value in that. I find value also in AI bringing together all of humanity's realizations into one source. However, in times like today more than ever…

I’ve also become deeply aware that no previous answers were made for who we are today, where we are right now, and the age of AI that is now unfolding.

That has made me less interested in sharing my own learnings alone, and I felt something else growing quietly within me.

2 |

My reflections on different transitions and experiences have made me realize that much of our lives unfold within narratives we didn’t consciously choose. Hence, much of what we perceive as reality has already been shaped for us through our families, cultures, education, media, governments, experiences, beliefs, and the assumptions we have accumulated along the way.

The first time I ever realized that was during the transition from a communist to a capitalist system, but it did not stop there. I kept seeing this over and over again.

When a widely accepted lie is dismantled, what we perceived as true falls apart like a controlled building demolition, but only if we wouldn’t refuse to see it.

Why would we refuse to see it? In my experience, we often do that if we have made it part of our identity.

Then allowing this new truth feels like death to us, and we would continue to guard our old understanding with our life.

3|

The chosen-for-us narratives shape far more than we realize. They shape what we consider possible. The choices we notice. The questions we ask. What we learn from our experiences. How we perceive ourselves and others. What we create. What we know about our reality. And ultimately, how we live and make a difference.

Quite naturally, we begin to mistake the edges of our perception and the narratives we have accepted for the edges of reality itself.

However, with the current speed of change, and if we pay enough attention, we begin to see that what we call reality fails to explain what we are experiencing.

4|

If what we call truth and our reality is incomplete at best and a lie at worst, how do we go on with our lives?

How do we thrive as the age of AI unfolds when our understanding of ‘what was’ and ‘what is’ keeps being dismantled in front of our eyes?

I’ve come to realize that to thrive in the age of AI, we need experiences that help us to reach beyond ready-made answers about the world as it was or as it was explained to us.

Yes, the world as it was and as it was explained to us are two different things, and we need to be willing to learn about that. We need to venture beyond the familiar ways of seeing we have learned to rely on. Beyond the narratives through which we currently understand ourselves, other people, and the world.

5|

That touches every part of our lives, but the deepest question we face in this age of AI is what it means to be human. You would think that we should know that, but we don’t.

As I wrote in one of my first articles, humanity doesn’t share a common understanding of how humans outperform AI. That includes themes like intuition and consciousness, creativity and spirituality (beyond religion), among others. Schools don’t teach these themes, even though this is how just about any great man or woman, be it a leader, artist, or inventor, describes their life’s accomplishment.

Unless we are philosophers or seekers, most of us have lived our lives so far without facing these questions, but that’s no longer the case.

We are repeatedly told now that we will have to compete for our jobs with AI. I have a lot of comments about that, but if that’s the case, we need to know our advantages, and ultimately, find a way to make sense of our lives. If we are interested in that, the bottom line is…

If we are not fully satisfied with our current understanding of what it means to be human, and we have more questions than answers about our reality, we need to become curious about the lenses through which we have learned to understand our humanness and our reality as a whole, even if that seems highly inconvenient at first.

6|

That reminds me of the old saying attributed to Einstein about changing our thinking. Well, all my experiences have left me pretty convinced that thinking got us here, but it won’t get us there…

To go beyond the edges of our current perceptions, to make decisions beyond our current beliefs, narratives, and limitations, we need to go beyond our thinking and tap into higher levels of consciousness.

That means tapping into our intuition for answers more often than relying on our existing beliefs and allowing ourselves to follow inspiration rather than what we knew to be true yesterday.

That might seem simpler, but it isn’t if we still don’t agree on where intuition and inspiration come from and how reliable they are.

But most importantly, none of that can be learnt from books and blogs. We can read about it just as you are doing right now. But no matter how profound the writing about intuition is, nothing written can come close to an embodied experience for yourself and the felt sense of knowing arising from it.

And, as any muscle in our body, we need to exercise our intuition to strengthen it. For far too long, we have neglected it, and it now feels like a body that has fallen out of shape. And just as our body, it can be brought back into shape only through exercise. Which brings me to…

7 |

My Quest did not begin as an intellectual or philosophical exercise. It emerged from direct experience, and if it were strictly intellectual, I would not be anywhere near where I am now.

Over the years, as I’ve practiced accessing my intuition, I’ve had encounters with reality that completely challenged what I thought I knew about almost anything: myself, other people, relationships, systems, intuition, consciousness, and reality as a whole.

Some happened through Family and Systemic Constellations. Some through conversations or group experiences. Some came through the personal and societal transitions I have been exposed to. Others arrived unexpectedly and unexplained, with magic, immediacy, and intimacy that was hard to neglect or deny.

For most of them, I don’t have easy explanations, and I’ve seen over and over again that trying to explain them to someone else through the currently accepted lens of experiencing reality goes only so far because our minds try to fit what we hear immediately into what we already believe to be true or right.

And, as I have tried to explain, it doesn’t work in the times we live in.

It served us well until recently because we felt encouraged and rewarded to follow the common narratives and beliefs society seemed built upon.

It worked until now. It doesn’t anymore.

Today, it does us disservice, keeping us stuck, confused, and even lost.

So, yes, I cannot explain how my perception of reality has changed to someone who tries to understand it through their own lens. And that’s OK because I know with every cell of my body that what I’ve experienced is real and important.

That inspired me to focus even more on creating opportunities for others to experience what may become available to them beyond the edges of their current perceptions.

What makes this particularly difficult is that what becomes available depends on what we are ready to see, and it is different for every one of us. But that is less of a problem than sharing my own learnings, because they might be completely irrelevant, even completely wrong for them.

What I’ve come to experience for myself and through my work with others is that as we allow our sense of certainty to loosen enough for curiosity to return, as we allow ourselves to say for real ‘I don’t know’, we start noticing what we haven’t been able to see by now, and expand qualitatively what we see as possible for our way forward.

This is where my Quest has taken me.

Beyond ideas.

Into direct experiences.

And this is where I am inviting you.

The Human Advantage 2.0

My current Quest into The Human Advantage has two inseparable parts:

• Exploring new ways of encountering the issues we face and, together with that, our understanding of reality, ourselves and others, and

• Reflecting on what we’ve encountered without reducing it to or even trying to explain it with what we already know.

And here comes my Invitation

I am currently reorganizing my offerings around the direct experiences I call Intuitive Encounters with Reality, and I invite you to join me in exploring questions that matter to you personally, or to us collectively- questions that are alive for you, maybe keeping you stuck or unsure how to go about them, or maybe just too important to neglect.

Some of these experiences are free self-guided intuitive practices I developed and made available on my website. You can use them on your own to tap into your intuition and venture beyond what you currently perceive on a given issue. Others are One-on-one and Group Intuitive Encounters with Reality guided by me.

This is not an invitation to sign up for my or someone else’s answers. No. It is an invitation to question and experience the current edges of how you approach an issue you are facing, and open possibilities that are new to you and not available before. And not just once, but as a new philosophy towards life.

The latter is key because our default state is to look for the ultimate answer to a given question and relax when we think we have found it. In a living system, today’s answer is always different from yesterday’s and tomorrow’s answer. And since we ourselves are a living system within a living system, being fully alive requires openness to new answers and possibilities all the time.

None of that is completely new for me, and I have been doing this for years. However, I did it more quietly. This is a broader invitation to experience directly for yourself. What’s also new is my intent to report much more on the experiences themselves rather than only my own explanations and conclusions.

So, I will continue to write, but these writings will be part of a larger living inquiry:

• There will be Records of Encounters with Reality, where I document what actually happened and how such experiences challenge our common ways of understanding the world and ourselves.

• There will still be Essays, where I explore my ideas and my emerging understanding about our humanness, perceptions, and this inquiry into Reality.

• There will be a Vocabulary for the language I use, which is emerging or becoming clearer from the Quest.

Some of these will be published here on my website, others on my Substack nataliablagoeva.substack.com. Altogether my website and my Substack are becoming much more integrated than before.

This is the moment to say that I am ever grateful to all my paid subscribers and everyone else who has supported me on this journey. That meant more to me than you will ever know.

And a few final thoughts…

Most of us have lived our lives thinking we know a lot.Certainly, I did.

But some of that knowing has been dismantled.Sometimes very loudly.

Maybe you’ve noticed, maybe not…None of us can dive into all of it…

But whatever reached us has left many of us with more questions than answers and a shaken sense of meaning. And I’ve come to realize that…

We live in times when we are invited to say:I don’t know. But I’m curious to explore.

If that still feels uncomfortable or irrelevant, consider whether your current understanding of reality makes you comfortable and fearless about your life ahead in this age of AI. If you do, great.

But if your sense of meaning and what’s true has been shaken and that has left you feeling somewhat empty or even maybe fearful, and with more questions than answers, then maybe the time has come to loosen the grip of what you know and venture into experiences that lie beyond your current perceptions and the narratives you’ve accepted as the edges of reality.

And then maybe, you’ll discover a different version of what was and what is.

Along the way, you may experience connection, curiosity, wonder, and profound aliveness.

Life may flow with greater ease and joy.

New possibilities may become visible.

You may expand your perception of what it means to be human altogether and get inspired about how you can thrive in the age of AI.

And perhaps, along the way, you may reenchant your relationship with life again.

That certainly happened for me.