Question Your Reality: On Healing, Identity, and the Person We Are Becoming – An Interview with Mark Stephen Lyons Jr.

What if healing is not about returning to the person you were before life changed you—but becoming someone you have never been before?

For Mark Stephen Lyons Jr., that question grew out of lived experience. Years of navigating schizoaffective disorder, psychosis, addiction, recovery, and spiritual questioning led him to examine how perception and repeated choices shape identity.

Today, Lyons is an author, North Carolina Certified Peer Support Specialist, psychology student, and founder of The Nomothete LLC. His work brings together lived experience, philosophy, psychology, and spirituality while maintaining a clear distinction between personal development and clinical treatment.

His book, The Multiverse of Self: A Unified Philosophical Theory of Perception, Time, and Becoming, presents an original philosophical framework for considering the selves we might become. Through his writing, media, and Life Strategy work, he explores how people can move beyond survival and participate more consciously in shaping their lives.

In this conversation, Lyons discusses what psychosis taught him about perception, why spirituality needs critical thinking, how present patterns influence future identity, and what it means to become someone new.

Your work today spans psychology, spirituality, philosophy, mental health, creativity, and personal development. Who were you before any of this existed?

For a long time, I was extremely curious but didn’t necessarily know what to do with it.

I loved learning. I would move from psychology to philosophy, from science to spirituality, from music and art to consciousness, religion, mythology, comic books, mental health, and whatever else captured my attention.

But collecting information is not the same as building a life.

There was a period when I knew a lot of things and was doing very little with what I knew. I was angry. I was depressed. I was struggling. There were parts of myself I didn’t understand, and I didn’t yet have a framework for connecting everything I was experiencing.

Eventually, life forced me to stop treating these questions as intellectual entertainment.

I had to ask much more difficult questions.

Who am I?

How did I become this person?

Which parts of me are adaptations to things that happened?

What do I actually believe?

What happens when I cannot completely trust my own perception?

And perhaps most importantly: Who am I becoming if I continue living this way?

Those questions became the beginning of everything I do now.

Was there a pivotal period that changed the direction of your life?

Yes. I have lived with schizoaffective disorder for much of my life, and several years ago I went through an extremely intense period of psychosis, personal crisis, and spiritual awakening.

My experience of reality, time, and meaning changed. Experiences that felt profoundly spiritual—including encounters with ancestors, the creator, and what seemed like time travel—existed alongside clear symptoms of mental illness.

It would be easy to tell that story as though I emerged from psychosis with secret knowledge about the universe.

I do not think that would be responsible.

What I actually emerged with were questions.

Psychosis made me deeply interested in perception because I discovered how convincing an internal experience can become.

The National Institute of Mental Health describes psychosis as a condition in which thoughts and perceptions can become disrupted enough that recognizing what is real and what is not becomes difficult. That description matters to me because I have experienced that problem from inside it. 

Recovery taught me that something can be emotionally or spiritually meaningful without every interpretation I place upon it necessarily being objectively true.

That lesson became foundational to my work.

How did that experience change the way you think about spirituality?

It made me both more spiritual and more skeptical.

That might sound contradictory, but I no longer think it is.

I became more open to mystery while becoming more careful about certainty.

I have had transformative experiences that can be examined spiritually, psychologically, philosophically, artistically, or neurologically. Those perspectives do not always agree, and I am comfortable with that.

I do not think spirituality becomes weaker when we say, “I do not know.”

Sometimes that is the most honest spiritual statement available to us.

One of my principles now is that meaning and mechanism are different questions.

A spiritual ritual may have tremendous meaning for someone. Psychology may help explain attention, expectation, emotional regulation, symbolism, behavioral reinforcement, social connection, or other mechanisms involved in that experience.

Science explaining part of a mechanism does not automatically destroy meaning.

At the same time, experiencing something as sacred does not scientifically prove our preferred explanation of what caused it.

I think there is a beautiful middle ground between cynicism and credulity.

That is where much of my work lives.

Awakened Magazine has explored similar intersections from other perspectives, including its conversation with psychiatrist and shamanic practitioner Kerri Husman about navigating mental, emotional, and spiritual approaches to healing.

You often say, “Question your reality.” Considering your experience with psychosis, what does that phrase actually mean to you?

It definitely does not mean abandoning reality.

It means examining the assumptions through which you interpret it.

Question the belief that you cannot change.

Question the story that one failure determines your future.

Question the idea that because something feels true, it must be factually true.

Question traditions, authority, social expectations, algorithms, gurus, teachers—even me. But most importantly, question yourself.

Critical thinking is incomplete if skepticism only points outward.

Real questioning requires asking: What evidence would change my mind?

That question has become increasingly important to me.

There is a difference between healthy skepticism and simply deciding that every institution is lying to you. There is a difference between spirituality and treating every unusual coincidence as proof of a supernatural explanation.

“Question your reality” means investigate more deeply.

Do not replace one unquestioned belief system with another.

That search eventually became the Multiverse of Self. What is it?

The Multiverse of Self is my philosophical framework for understanding perception, identity, time, possibility, and becoming.

I use the word multiverse as a model of potential selves rather than claiming that every human decision literally generates a new physical universe.

Think about yourself five years from now.

There is not only one imaginable version of that person.

There may be a version who completes the degree, becomes healthier, starts the business, or repairs an important relationship—and another who abandons those possibilities or never tries.

Those possible selves are influenced by far more than individual choice. Biology, opportunity, environment, relationships, socioeconomic conditions, culture, trauma, illness, luck, and events beyond our control all matter.

That is important because I reject the personal-development idea that people create everything that happens to them.

We do not.

But wherever meaningful agency remains, our repeated actions help shape which possibilities become more likely.

The Multiverse of Self asks: Given the reality you are actually standing in, what possibilities remain available to you?

Perception is one of the central ideas in the framework. Why is it so important?

Because human beings do not experience the world as completely neutral recording devices.

We interpret.

Memory, emotion, expectation, language, culture, attention, previous experience, biology, and context all influence what becomes meaningful to us.

The National Institute of Mental Health describes perception itself as involving processes that construct and transform representations from sensory information, helping us gather information, make predictions, and guide action.

That does not mean external reality is imaginary.

It means our experience of reality involves interpretation.

Consider two people receiving the same criticism.

One hears, “I am a failure.”

Another hears, “I need to improve this skill.”

The external event may be similar, while the psychological worlds produced from that event are very different.

Interpretation shapes emotion and behavior, which influence consequences and reinforce future beliefs. Perception therefore becomes part of a continuing feedback loop.

Sometimes changing our interpretation does not change what happened—but it changes what becomes possible next.

Time is another major part of your philosophy. What is the “Perpetual Present”?

The Perpetual Present started with a simple observation.

We remember the past now.

We imagine the future now.

We regret yesterday in the present.

We fear tomorrow in the present.

We make plans for ten years from now in the present.

We reinterpret childhood from the perspective of the present.

Whatever the deeper nature of physical time ultimately is, our decisions occur at this point of experience we call now.

That makes the present extraordinarily important.

I am fascinated by physics and philosophical theories of time, including relational approaches, but my practical work focuses heavily on experienced time.

A person can become psychologically trapped in a remembered past or mentally consumed by an anticipated future.

Trauma can give past experiences extraordinary present influence.

Anxiety can make imagined futures emotionally immediate.

Goals work in the opposite direction: an imagined future can motivate present behavior.

The past and future continually influence us, but we can only act from where we are.

That is the Perpetual Present.

And what is the “Inevitable Self”?

The name sounds like destiny, but the idea is almost the opposite.

Your Inevitable Self is the person your present patterns are increasingly making likely.

If you practice the piano consistently, a future pianist becomes more probable.

If you repeatedly avoid difficult conversations, avoidance becomes part of your behavioral pattern.

If you study consistently, knowledge accumulates.

If you repeatedly violate your own boundaries, that has consequences too.

One decision rarely creates an entire identity.

Patterns do.

So I ask people: If nothing changes and you continue living exactly as you are living now, who are you becoming?

That can be uncomfortable.

But then comes the more empowering question: If that is not the person you want to become, what pattern needs to change?

The Inevitable Self is therefore not some mystical future waiting to claim you.

It is a direction.

And directions can change.

Your philosophy seems expansive, but The Nomothete LLC is focused on practical change. How did the business grow from these ideas?

I eventually realized I did not simply want to write philosophy.

I wanted to build structures people could use.

The Nomothete LLC became the home for that work.

The word nomothete historically refers to a lawgiver or someone involved in establishing laws. I became fascinated with the word because I realized that all of us live according to internal rules.

Some are conscious.

Many are inherited.

Beliefs such as “I have to make everyone happy,” “My diagnosis defines me,” or “I am only valuable when I am useful” can begin to function like internal laws.

Those beliefs can function almost like laws.

The question becomes: Who wrote the laws governing your identity—your parents, trauma, religion, culture, a former relationship, fear, or survival—and have you ever reviewed them?

The Nomothete is ultimately about learning to become a more conscious participant in writing the principles by which you live.

Today, that work is developing through one-on-one Life Strategy, small-group experiences, books, essays, educational programs, media, and frameworks that integrate psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and lived experience.

You use the phrase “Turn survival into structure. Turn insight into action. Turn pain into becoming.” What does that mean?

It is essentially the mission of my work.

Turn survival into structure means recognizing that survival strategies deserve compassion because they may have helped us endure something—but we should still ask whether they belong in the life we are trying to build now.

Turn insight into action means understanding that realization alone is not transformation.

I can understand perfectly why I procrastinate and still procrastinate tomorrow.

I can understand my trauma and still repeat a harmful pattern.

Insight matters, but behavior is where life changes.

And turning pain into becoming does not mean pretending suffering is good.

I am very careful about that.

Some things hurt because they are terrible.

Some losses should never be romanticized.

The question is what we do with ourselves afterward.

Can suffering become knowledge?

Can knowledge become compassion?

Can compassion become service?

Can experience become art?

Can pain become boundaries?

Can a survival story eventually become something that helps another person survive?

That is what I mean by becoming.

You created the B.E.C.O.M.I.N.G. Method to make that process more practical. How does it work?

B.E.C.O.M.I.N.G. organizes growth into eight interconnected areas.

B — Building Stability & Daily Structure

Before someone tries to discover their cosmic purpose, sometimes we need to ask whether they are sleeping, eating, maintaining routines, keeping appointments, and creating enough stability to think clearly.

E — Emotional Mastery & Self-Regulation

Not controlling every emotion, but developing awareness and learning how to respond rather than automatically react.

C — Clarity on Identity & Personal Growth

Who are you? What do you value? Which identities were chosen, and which were inherited?

O — Overcoming Limiting Beliefs & Trauma

Recognizing that some patterns began as protection but may now interfere with life.

M — Mindset Shift: Perception, Time & Becoming

Examining interpretation, temporal perspective, expectations, and the future self our behavior is building.

I — Integrating Spiritual Alignment & Healing

Creating room for spirituality, ritual, meditation, reflection, meaning, or faith without forcing one religious worldview on everyone.

N — Navigating Life with Confidence & Purpose

Turning reflection into decisions, communication, boundaries, goals, and action.

G — Growth for the Future: Long-Term Stability & Success

Making transformation sustainable instead of depending on temporary motivation.

The most important part may be where it begins.

Stability comes before transcendence.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is get enough sleep, make the appointment, drink water, apologize, create a budget, or do the next necessary thing.

You are also a North Carolina Certified Peer Support Specialist. How has lived experience changed the way you work with people?

It keeps me humble.

Academic knowledge is valuable.

Professional training is valuable.

Clinical knowledge is valuable.

But lived experience contains information that cannot be learned entirely from a textbook.

There is a difference between studying psychosis and knowing what it feels like to question your own perception.

There is a difference between studying addiction and recovery and knowing what it means to rebuild your life from inside that struggle.

There is a difference between describing hopelessness and remembering what hopelessness felt like.

Peer support does not replace professional treatment. It serves a different function.

SAMHSA describes peer support workers as people who use lived recovery experience to offer understanding, mentorship, resources, skill-building, advocacy, and connection to others navigating similar circumstances. 

Sometimes hope becomes more believable when another human being can stand beside you and say:

“I cannot promise you exactly how your story ends, but I know change is possible because I had to rebuild too.”

With so much mental-health content in your work, how do you distinguish Life Strategy and coaching from therapy?

Very carefully.

I am not trying to replace therapists.

A coach should not treat conditions outside their competence or imply that coaching substitutes for psychotherapy, psychiatric care, crisis intervention, or medical treatment.

My Life Strategy work is oriented toward personal development, identity, goals, structure, decision-making, values, meaning, habits, reflection, creativity, and helping someone translate insight into action.

Someone may discuss how a difficult experience influenced them because our histories naturally affect our goals and identities.

But when clinical treatment is needed, I believe in respecting that boundary.

Actually, knowing when not to be the person providing the answer is part of professionalism.

That matters especially in mental health.

Your work also incorporates art, storytelling, and even comic books. What can Batman or Spider-Man possibly teach us about ourselves?

Potentially quite a lot—if we use them as mirrors rather than diagnostic tests.

Human beings have always used stories to think about themselves.

Myths gave us gods, heroes, monsters, journeys, deaths, rebirths, betrayals, sacrifices, and transformations.

Modern comic books do much of the same thing.

Consider why somebody identifies deeply with Batman.

Is it resilience?

Trauma?

Control?

Preparation?

Justice?

Fear?

Obsession?

What about Spider-Man?

Responsibility?

Guilt?

Humor under pressure?

Sacrifice?

Trying to maintain ordinary life while carrying extraordinary burdens?

The X-Men can create discussions about difference, belonging, stigma, power, exclusion, identity, and community.

When somebody says, “This character has always meant something to me,” I become curious about why.

That led me to begin developing M.A.S.K., a comic- and character-based reflection and coaching framework.

The goal is not to say, “Your favorite superhero scientifically reveals your personality.”

That would overstate the evidence.

The goal is to use characters as structured prompts for self-exploration.

Which traits do you admire?

Which flaws make sense to you?

Which storyline resembles something in your own life?

Who is this character without the mask?

Then comes the real question: Who are you beneath yours?

How do you decide whether one of your new frameworks is actually credible?

This has become one of the most important changes in how I build.

My rule now is: Build evidence before scale.

An idea can be brilliant and still be wrong.

A framework can sound psychologically sophisticated and still fail when tested.

So instead of building an entire empire around an assumption, I increasingly want to:

Pilot it.
Document it.
Measure it.
Review it.
Improve it.
Then expand it.

That approach comes partly from studying psychology and partly from becoming more disciplined as an entrepreneur.

I don’t want to claim something is clinically effective just because I find it meaningful.

I want the language surrounding my work to match the level of evidence supporting it.

Credibility should be constructed, not announced.

Your book, The Multiverse of Self, brought many of these ideas together. What do you hope a reader experiences while reading it?

I hope they disagree with me at least once.

I mean that seriously.

A book about questioning perception should not become another authority the reader accepts without examination.

I want people to ask:

Where does this idea fit my experience?

Where does it fail?

What does psychology say?

What does philosophy say?

What assumptions am I making about myself?

Which version of me is currently running my life?

The book explores perception, time, identity, possibility, choice, and becoming, but beneath all of it is one question: Who are you becoming?

Not who do you say you want to become.

Not who does your social media profile say you are.

Not who you were ten years ago.

What person are your actual patterns producing?

That question can change a life because it moves identity from something we merely describe into something we continually practice.

Readers interested in exploring the book can find The Multiverse of Self: A Unified Philosophical Theory of Perception, Time, and Becoming through its published listing and through The Nomothete.

You have completed extensive professional training while studying psychology. What drives you to keep learning?

I am fascinated by how much I do not know.

Every subject I learn opens five more doors.

Psychology leads to neuroscience.

Neuroscience leads to consciousness.

Consciousness leads to philosophy.

Philosophy leads to language.

Language leads to culture.

Culture leads to anthropology.

Spirituality leads to comparative religion.

Mental health leads to sociology, law, public policy, trauma, ethics, and community.

I think people sometimes imagine a polymath as someone who knows everything.

My experience is the opposite.

The more disciplines I study, the more clearly I see the limits of any single explanation.

That is why integration interests me.

But integration should not mean randomly combining impressive-sounding concepts.

You have to respect what each discipline actually knows.

That is the challenge I have given myself.

You have built a company, published a book, earned professional credentials, created frameworks, and developed a growing media platform. What achievement means the most to you?

The person I had to become to do any of those things.

There were periods of my life when none of this existed.

No company.

No book.

No professional identity.

No frameworks.

No larger mission connecting everything.

There was simply a person trying to survive himself.

When I look at the company, the book, my education, peer-support work, and media projects, I do not see a collection of trophies.

I see evidence that identity is not static.

That does not mean everyone gets a perfect ending.

It means a chapter is not necessarily the entire book.

That distinction matters enormously to me.

What has entrepreneurship taught you that philosophy could not?

Entrepreneurship taught me that ideas eventually have to meet calendars, budgets, deadlines, customers, administrative work, and the terrifying “publish” button.

Entrepreneurship exposed one of my own weaknesses: I can generate possibilities almost endlessly.

That sounds like a strength until possibility becomes avoidance.

You can spend years improving an idea that has never met another human being.

I have had to learn that completed work teaches you things imagined work never can.

Sometimes the next stage of becoming is not another revelation.

It is shipping something.

Publishing.

Testing.

Receiving feedback.

Improving it.

Repeating.

That has changed how I think about personal development too.

At some point, you have to leave the laboratory of your mind and conduct the experiment in your life.

What do you believe the self-help and manifestation worlds sometimes get wrong?

They can overestimate individual control.

I believe intention matters.

Goals matter.

Mindset matters.

Attention matters.

Belief can influence persistence.

Visualization can help people mentally rehearse possibilities.

Planning matters.

Repeated action matters enormously.

But none of that means we control everything that happens.

Illness, poverty, violence, discrimination, disability, loss, systemic barriers, random events, and other people’s decisions all shape our lives.

A philosophy of personal agency becomes dangerous when somebody’s suffering is automatically interpreted as evidence that they “manifested incorrectly.”

I prefer something more grounded.

Imagine a future.

Clarify what matters.

Identify what is actually within your influence.

Pay attention to opportunities.

Develop useful skills.

Create plans.

Take repeated action.

Adapt when reality gives you new information.

That is powerful enough.

You do not have to control the universe to change the trajectory of your life.

If someone reading this feels lost right now, where should they begin?

Smaller than they think.

People often imagine transformation as one enormous decision.

Usually it is much less dramatic.

Ask:

Am I safe?

What does my body need?

What is creating unnecessary instability?

What is one responsibility I have been avoiding?

Who can support me?

Do I need professional help?

What is actually within my control today?

Then ask one more question: What would the person I want to become do next?

Not for the next twenty years.

Not forever.

Next.

Make the phone call. Attend the appointment. Write the paragraph. Set the boundary. Ask for help. Rest. Then tomorrow, ask again.

Personal transformation is often disguised as ordinary repetition.

How do you define healing now?

I do not define it as returning to who you were before something happened.

Sometimes that person no longer exists.

And sometimes the earlier version of you was hurting too.

For me, healing is increasingly about integration.

Can I remember something without allowing it to control every present decision?

Can I acknowledge pain without making pain my entire identity?

Can I understand why I developed a survival strategy and still decide I no longer need it?

Can I hold compassion for who I was while taking responsibility for who I am becoming?

The American Psychological Association describes resilience not as the absence of hardship but as adaptation involving thoughts, behaviors, emotional flexibility, relationships, coping resources, and meaning. It is not simply “being strong.” Building Your Resilience — American Psychological Association

That resonates with me.

Healing is not erasing history.

It is changing your relationship with it.

After everything you have experienced, what does spirituality mean to you today?

Relationship.

Relationship with myself.

Relationship with other people.

Relationship with nature.

Relationship with mystery.

Relationship with existence.

And, depending on a person’s beliefs, relationship with God, Source, Spirit, the Divine, or whatever language gives form to the transcendent.

I am less interested now in proving one universal metaphysical answer and more interested in what our spiritual questions reveal.

What deserves reverence?

How should we treat one another?

How do we respond to suffering?

What makes a meaningful life?

What does forgiveness mean?

What responsibilities come with consciousness?

How do we face death?

How do we live knowing that our time is finite?

Those questions have survived thousands of years because they are deeply human.

Science may answer many questions about how the universe works.

Philosophy and spirituality continue asking us what we should do with the fact that we are here.

What is the future you are trying to build through The Nomothete?

I want The Nomothete to become an ecosystem for people interested in the intersection of mental health, personal growth, philosophy, creativity, spirituality, and serious inquiry.

I want to develop these frameworks responsibly, expand my writing and Life Strategy work, and use books, programs, and media to create conversations people are not hearing elsewhere.

I want to research temporal experience, perception, meaning-making, consciousness, and mental health more seriously as my academic work develops.

And eventually, I want the work to become bigger than my own story.

I want someone who has never heard my name to encounter a Nomothete framework years from now and find something genuinely useful in it.

That would mean more to me than simply building a personal brand.

If you could speak directly to the person reading this who believes the most important parts of their life are already behind them, what would you say?

You do not know enough about your future to declare it finished.

Neither do I.

You have not met people.

Things you have not learned.

Places you have not gone.

Skills you have not developed.

Books you have not read.

Ideas you have not encountered.

Versions of yourself you currently lack the information to imagine.

I cannot promise that everything becomes easy.

I cannot promise that everything you want will happen.

But uncertainty works in both directions.

If you cannot know every difficulty coming, you also cannot know every possibility.

That realization has carried me through parts of my own life.

I have a phrase I return to: The end isn’t here yet.

You may simply be standing in a part of your timeline where you cannot see what comes next.

Keep learning.

Keep examining.

Keep creating.

Keep asking for help when you need it.

Keep questioning.

Keep becoming.

Finally, how can readers connect with you and explore your work?

The best place to begin is The Nomothete LLC, where I share my writing, philosophy, coaching work, books, projects, and ongoing exploration of perception, identity, mental health, spirituality, and becoming.

Readers can also explore The Multiverse of Self, follow my media work, listen to my podcast What Are You Even Talking About?, and continue reading my articles here at Awakened Magazine.

If something in this conversation resonated with you, I would encourage you not to simply agree with it.

Take one question with you: Who are your current choices teaching you to become?

Then pay attention to the answer.

Thank you for today.
Thank you for yesterday.
Thank you for tomorrow.

Always remember to question your reality. And at every end, there is a beginning.