About me
From the moment I crossed a certain threshold of awareness in this lifetime when I was around 17 years old, I have been seeking answers to the following pairs of questions that I noticed kept re-emerging in different forms and situations in my life and the lives of others:
Who am I and who should I become?
What is reality and what could it be?
What is right & good and what is wrong & could be better?
What am I doing and what should I be doing?
I believed that a profound understanding of these questions and the embodiment of the wisest answers I could find was tantamount to the art of living. This quest led me to study and get two degrees (BA1, MA2) in the discipline that is traditionally associated with examining such questions and trying to answer them wisely: philosophy. But I soon noticed that the preconditions for answering these questions and the art of embodying the answers required a broader study and life experience than what was offered in the typical academic pursuit of philosophy.
Thus, I decided to follow an idiosyncratic way towards what I felt was the pursuit of wisdom & the good life.
So from the departments of philosophy and martial arts dojos3, to the creative departments of ad agencies4, to solitary hermitages in distant islands5, to the buzz of the tech scene & the roller-coasters of entrepreneurship in San Francisco & Silicon Valley6, to the founding of live/work cultural powerhouses filled with artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, and activists7, to tastes of being a Buddhist monk in Nepal8 & Japan9, to experiencing military service10, becoming a skipper11, working in Intellectual Property12, being a Visiting Researcher in the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University tasked with re-imagining the modern monastery, to creating teams of traveling speakers & seekers attempting to map the new silk road of the evolution of consciousness research & practice13, to being part & co-designing experiences, like The Philosophical Fight Club14, in many communities15 & retreats around the world focused on personal and community development, only to recently end up in the astonishing community of mystics, psychonauts, tantric & kink lovers, and artists of Greater Los Angeles, it’s been a wild, magical ride of unprecedented astonishment & evolution.
After doing a variety of jobs to support my philosophical path and frequently sharing my learnings freely with those I’ve been blessed to meet along the way either in person or in writing, I decided it is now the time for the path itself to support the one walking it, by sharing what I’ve learned & still learning while using the funds provided by those who value my gifts, work, and service, to keep walking, learning, sharing, creating, and loving, in service to the benefit & evolution of all beings.
About Change your reality
Throughout my adult life I noticed I would often enter a certain mode of discourse that people found great value in, where something other than mere conversation was taking place. The closest characterization of it would be to say that it was philosophical dialogue, and to a large extent this was true, but this combination of words had by now become too generic to provide any concrete description of what I was doing with people. So I decided to set out and provide such a description. The three offerings, or as I would like to call them: rites of passage, that you will find at Change your reality, are a detailed description of three sides of that mode of philosophical discourse:
Though I wrote them down as separate, so as to give people the choice of where to emphasize, in actuality in each session I often do a bit of each, for they are interconnected. For instance, Purpose Recall helps with recalling one’s purpose, but often that may require a small upgrade in one’s sensemaking operating system that can be achieved through Comparative Sensemaking. Finding one’s tribe (which is one of the aims of Cosmic Playing) can facilitate both, but often for that to happen we need to resonate with our purpose and have a new way in which we make sense of the world. So the way that each affects and reinforces one another is not linear. But if I were to describe how this interrelation contributes to a larger goal in a sentence it would be: If you recall your purpose, upgrade your sensemaking, and find your tribe, that will lead you to the discovery of magic and equip you to play the cosmic game, and that will change your reality.
Though my birth name is Alexandros Pagidas the pen name I’ll be using will be Alexandros Lysios after a set of synchronicities led me to an epithet of Dionysus (lysios) which means the one who unties, solves, and frees, since the element of mystic self-transcendence and liberation from everyday life was a common element in Dionysian rites. As my last name at birth literally means the one who sets traps, I felt one way to honor the personal transformations I’ve experienced the last years would be to change the reality of my name along with the launch of changeyourreality.com. For if philosophy’s goal is the one Wittgenstein thought (“to free the fly from the fly trap”) the addition of this epithet to my names is an appropriate ideal to aspire to, and matches in spirit the historical association of my first name with an incident connected to the man who resolved the Gordian knot, a knot held to be impossible to untie, that interestingly enough, symbolized the ineffable name of Dionysus.