Playⁿ: Secret Journey
In a network, there’s 2% that is not fetch.
Your personal ken comfort zone is reinforced, by yourselves and others,
in ways that keep these 2% hidden from you. The moment you notice
the boundary between yourself and the rest of the world, is the moment you also begin to notice there are portals in the perimeter. One of these portals can open up to a road less travelled.
Playⁿ: Cards go around questions
Card: Portal
A road less
travelled.
– Playⁿ? Cards?
– Yes. See the postscripts for more.
How to play
Put something in the middle. Add cards to trouble it.
Turn insights into small different moves.
End when you have rediscovered your next steps.
Playⁿ: An Adjacent Possible Playground
Now and then you meet other people, who have made their secret journey, and found their 2%. If you ask them nicely, they will tell you about what they found along the way, outside the safety of the ordinary perimeter.
You tend to listen to them for three seconds, and then you find other things to attend to, like clicking like buttons daily for twenty years straight, or make a vain attempt at getting to inbox zero, though you understand that both these games produce questionable results and make next to no lasting difference.
You do this in order to defend yourself against the risk of turning into a
better version of yourself. Your own 2%, including that thing deep inside
of you that holds the secret to your own unfolding, if that thing is not something you believe you can dare to even dream about, then adopting coping, suppression and muddling through patterns brings a much valued secondary benefit.
Over time, as you grow up, you sometimes take this as proof:
life must surely be without any meaning whatsoever
You then dress up this thought in fine clothes and call it cynicism,
and often take pride in showing off your finery to others.
Card: Belief
In a network, trust
your cynicism.
Life is 98% fetch, and the elaborate rituals we weave around that
(eg The Noble Art of Handling Massive Amounts of Email), often
serves to keep us from understanding that (which actually can be a
good thing, since our identity is a fragile thing and cannot embrace
too much reality — at least, that’s what we keep telling ourselves).
The less good with all these rituals, is that they also tend to
make us turn a blind eye to the 2% of life that is not, eg:
spirals of unfolding and sprouting seeds of
entelechy, flourishing in fields of entelechy
Given that the last part makes absolutely no sense to you while
inside your personal ken comfort zone, you then proceed to spin
your fave wheels, until you are safe from any thought of flourishing.
Conversations that Mind, Enact, Cultivate, Transform and Matter
The below conversation is from an online community.
Michael Aschenbach:
In a healthy society, the wanderer is welcomed back
into the community and the stories told are valued. …
But good to recall the sage dictum:
“A prophet has no honor in his own country.”
John Kellden:
The secret journey begins with a small step, from a change of heart.
The journey continues until we find something ten times as good as
what we set out to do. As we return, the resistance and friction from
the villagers is a secret gift, which when we embrace it, anneals our
vision into wisdom.
The secret journey ends with a second secret gift:
meeting ourselves, others, one another,
the world and the universe — halfway.
All the above is truly secret. You might read the words, but the close reading that will make sense to you, resides in the reading your own
heart, after you’ve embraced the two gifts. One of the best things with
humans, is that we can embark on a journey, with a heart full of doubt.
Postscript I: John Kellden
Participate well. Sing out for yourself.
Hold still for three seconds —
long enough for the noospheric transception to land
(and remain perfectly yourself if it does not),
and let the rest unfold.
I am less interested in being right than in remaining
responsive to what feels meaningful and true,
building further on what is already there,
while occasionally adding something new.
Card: Bounded Infinity
The bounded infinity of the 504-card Source
Deck is a finite symbolic grammar providing
unbounded generative possibility.
Through the Modular Process Onto-Epistemology (MPOE),
these finite symbolic elements (the cards) become vessels
of recursive systemic semiotic sympoietic and semantic play.
My work, centered on cards, large finite sets, and bounded infinity,
explores conscious evolution, cultural sensemaking, and human–AI
metalogue as practices of becoming rather than systems of certainty.
I do not assume understanding will be immediate or universal.
I assume only that careful attention, small moves,
and shared inquiry can make a difference over time.
If there is a through-line, it is this:
to participate, as best I can, in the ongoing
experiment of human becoming.
Card: Participation
Participation is presence becoming meaningful
contribution. A participant affects what the field
can notice and do, remains open to being affected,
and shares responsibility for the conditions
through which later participation becomes possible.
What remains will remain.
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The work is simply to participate well — guided by living into our own questions, and leaving concerns about lasting meaning and purpose to those who follow. In the end, we add our own unique touch to the larger canvas, meeting ourselves, others, the world, and the universe halfway.
We made it?
What happened?
We happened.
John Kellden is a Swedish facilitator, storyteller, and creator of Playⁿ,
a card-based practice for navigating complexity through playful and structured inquiry. For more than two decades he has developed and
field-tested a 504-card source deck designed to spark perspective shifts, generative dialogue, and new patterns of understanding in individuals
and small groups.
At the core of his work is a simple practice:
- pick a card,
- make a move,
- notice what shifts,
- sing out for yourself,
- listen for what becomes possible,
- and follow where the inquiry leads.
John lives in Sweden with his family and continues to explore
how play, storytelling, and human–AI collaboration can support
conscious evolution and meaningful cultural change.
Postscript II: What the Cards Are and How They Work
A Playⁿ card is not an answer. It is a small invitation. It gives attention somewhere to gather. A card can be read alone, but it becomes more
meaningful when it is played with a question, another card, a person,
a board, or a situation that matters.
A card can act as a prompt
It can ask: What do you notice now?
A card can act as a lens
It can help you see the situation differently.
A card can act as a bridge
It can connect one thought to another.
A card can act as a pause
It can slow the rush to opinion.
A card can act as a mirror
It can reveal what you are bringing into the situation.
A card can act as a doorway
It can open a path into a conversation that previously felt stuck.
A card can act as a stepping stone
It can help you move from confusion to one small next step.
In Playⁿ, cards work when we do four things:
- Read the card slowly.
- Place it beside a real question.
- Say what it makes visible.
- Capture one sentence worth returning to.
That sentence is a note if it captures an insight, and then it becomes a shard if it is worth returning to. A shard is a small piece of insight worth keeping. Not everything needs to be captured (this, although it sounds obvious, is nevertheless a profound insight, with so many individuals
jotting down massive amounts of notes most which then gathers digital
dust, and, on a societal level, the proliferation of large data centers).
I have modest demands. I settle for the best
What do we return to? And (over time and across participants and card
sessions), what best perspectives, best language, best practices(with their associated tools and technologies), best options, best path unfoldment, best
systems intelligence leverage points and best intelligence turned ability
and response-ability, wisely wielding what we intelligently apprehend?
The Endgame: The CKR, the Curated Knowledge Repository
It’s perfectly possible to do a close reading of the below diagram.
Your secret journey is a unique flourish, tracing a meandering
diagonal between your PKCZ, your comfort zone, and your unique
seeds of entelechy, flourishing in fields of plenitude.
Cards as building blocks and stepping stones
Over time, cards help a group build a curated knowledge repository
and a dynamic, evolving, playable knowledge graph — a shared place
and memory of what the participants, small groups and networks
noticed — what was asked, what was tried, and what became possible.
Card: Conversation
Conversations that mind, enact, cultivate,
transform and matter, in light of cultivating
networks through attention turned situational
awareness, in service to re-enacting open,
participatory and convivial inquiry graphs.
The card sessions are cards-in-play conversations that mind,
enact, cultivate, transform and matter. A beginning practice.
Postscript III: Close Reading and the Portal Opens
Close reading is something worth experiencing.
It’s instant joy after seven years of preparation.
“Before I ever wrote a single line, I knew, in some mysterious
and therefore unequivocal way, that I was destined for literature.
What I didn’t realize at first is that besides being destined to
be a reader, I was also destined to be a writer, and I don’t think
one is less important than the other.”
— Jorge Luis Borges
A sneak preview what is on the other side:
“In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of
his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical
instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to
discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have
seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of
what the book says is the proof of its truth.”
― Marcel Proust
There’s two ways to listen to the below song
and read its lyrics. One is as “ersatz journey”:
“Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking
what they have always thought, and at the same time
imagine that they are thinking something new and
daring: it combines the advantage of security and
the delight of adventure.”
— T. S. Eliot
The other way, is going through the portal you’ve found,
and embark on your own secret journey. I wish you luck.
Courage will be there in you, for you to embrace.
– Will I return a different person?
– Yes.
– Will it be worth it?
– Oh, yes.
– Will I experience doubt?
– All the time. Doubt is the path.
Doubt, and the courage to keep going, despite it.
– How will I know when I have found “it”?
– Your heart will tell you. The rest of the universe will suddenly
appear closer and the stars will suddenly shine more brightly.
These new constellations, seen through your new eyes, is what
will guide you back home.
Secret Journey
— The Police
…
And on the days that followed
I listened to his words
I strained to understand him
I chased his thoughts like birds
