Formulas, Mosquitos, and Muscles: How Non-Duality Turns Rules into Insight

For a long time, many of us were taught to think of life as a system of rules and exchanges.

• If you do X, you get Y.
• If you are disciplined, you are rewarded.
• If you help someone, they owe you.

We were also taught to see ourselves as largely at the mercy of circumstances:

• The economy
• Politics
• Market forces
• “What life does to us”

The conversation behind this article explores what happens when that frame starts to break down and a very different one starts to take shape.

At its core, it is a move from:

• Victim to creator
• Red Worldview to Green Worldview
• Rules and formulas to direct insight

The bridge is not a slogan. It is a very practical shift in how you handle moments, attention, and responsibility.

When the “gearbox” starts to run smoother

Imagine moving to a new city and suddenly noticing:

• Life feels lighter and more playful.
• People approach you with warmth and generosity without you doing much.
• Opportunities and small gifts (like daily strawberries from a neighbour) seem to appear from everywhere.

The temptation is to say:

“The people here are just nicer.”

There may be some truth to that.

But the deeper observation is about alignment:

• Before, there was “sand in the gearbox”: something inside you was not fully in line with your deeper self.
• Decisions were being made from partial alignment, so friction was inevitable.
• Now, after a decisive shift, it feels as if “three compass needles” – conscious choice, deeper self, and subconscious – are pointing in the same direction.

As that happens, life does not become perfect. It becomes more coherent.

Non-bilateral giving and delayed reciprocity

In a typical exchange model:

• Person A gives something to Person B.
• Therefore Person B “should” give something back to Person A.
• If that does not happen and it does not happen quickly, A feels cheated.

In a different logic:

• You help an elderly neighbour carry their bags.
• Someone else, perhaps a different neighbour, surprises you with a basket of strawberries or a box of wine.
• The return does not come from where you “paid in”, and it does not come on a fixed schedule.

This is deeply unsettling to a transactional worldview.

Yet, the experience recurs often enough that another interpretation becomes available:

• You contribute where you can.
• The “system” (call it life, field, universe) balances in ways you cannot predict.
• Sometimes it seems to withhold obvious rewards, as if to see whether you will keep doing what feels right without immediate payoff.

From a victim perspective, this is frustrating.
From a creator perspective, this is training.

Victim vs creator: control, trust, and the Red vs Green Worldview

In the victim stance, life looks like this:

• Things happen to you.
• You are subject to forces you cannot influence.
• Others are to blame when things go wrong.
• Control feels like the only available form of safety.

In the creator stance, life looks different:

• Many things still happen outside your conscious choice.
• But you recognise that how you relate to them is not predetermined.
• You see yourself as a co-participant in what unfolds.
• Trust starts to replace the obsession with control.

Link this to worldviews:

• The Red Worldview is tied to separation, scarcity, and blame. It’s easy to associate it with being a victim.
• The Green Worldview sees the self as an expression of a larger, omnipresent identity. From there, creatorhood and manifestation are natural implications.

If you truly inhabit the Green Worldview, the victim stance becomes harder to maintain:

• You can no longer plausibly say “this has nothing to do with me”.
• You begin to experience yourself as part of the process, not just a target of it.

This is not about blaming yourself for everything.

It is about recognising a different level of participation.

The bittersweet comfort of being the victim

Leaving the victim role is harder than it sounds.

Victimhood has a bittersweet comfort:

• You do not have to take responsibility for your circumstances.
• You can point to others, systems, or events as the cause of your pain.
• You get to form “victim alliances” with people who share your complaint.

These alliances feel like validation:

• “See, you feel the same. So our view must be objectively true.”
• The more people join, the more “objective” the belief feels.

From there, a loop forms:

1. We share and amplify a belief: “We are helpless because of X.”
2. Each new story and piece of news confirms it.
3. We interpret new evidence through that belief.
4. We feel justified and increasingly powerless.

It is comfortable because it removes responsibility.
It is destructive because it removes agency.

ROI of a worldview shift

Changing your worldview is not free.

It costs:

• Effort
• Emotional discomfort
• Letting go of old certainties
• Willingness to see your own contribution

You could think of it like an investment with a “prospectus”:

• Investment: time and energy to rethink your assumptions and test a new lens.
• Return package includes:
• Less time stuck in victimhood
• More experience of creatorhood
• Fewer “sand in the gearbox” experiences
• A different relationship to uncertainty and luck

This “return package” is a side effect of moving towards a Green Worldview, not the only reason to do it.

But from a leadership perspective, it is a significant one.

Victims of our own beliefs (and alliances)

We are not only victims of external events like wars, policy changes, or market swings.

We are often primarily victims of:

• Our own beliefs (“I’m not good enough”, “I can’t do that”, “luck is for others”)
• Beliefs inherited from family and culture
• Group echo chambers that amplify those beliefs

Consider a simple belief:

“I’m not good enough.”

Once that is on your internal “hard drive”:

• Neutral questions (“Did you already do X?”) are interpreted as attacks.
• Ordinary oversights become proof of your inadequacy.
• You scan for evidence that confirms the belief and give it extra weight.

Over time:

• The “drawer” labelled “not good enough” fills up with examples.
• It becomes heavier.
• It becomes a preferred lens for interpreting events.

You are not just a victim of circumstance.

You are also a victim of your own confirmation process.

And you can change that.

Resonance and alliances: victim or creator

The dynamics at play here are not inherently negative.

They are resonance dynamics:

• You put out a frequency (a belief, story, emotional tone).
• Others who carry similar patterns resonate with it.
• That resonance amplifies itself and can form an alliance.

This can create:

• Victim alliances:
• “We are all powerless because of X.”
• The more we talk about it, the stronger it feels.
• Creator alliances:
• “We all experience challenges, and we also have capacity to respond creatively.”
• The more we share, the more courage we have to act.

The mechanism is the same.

What changes is what you resonate around.

Left turn vs right turn: discovering another road

Picture a familiar intersection:

• For as long as you remember, you have always turned left.
• Everyone you know turns left.
• You assume that is the only way to go.

Then, one day, you notice:

• A car in front of you turns right.
• You think: “They’re lost. There is no road there.”
• Later, you arrive at the destination and see that car already parked, shopping done.

Next time, you see several cars turning right.

At some point, curiosity wins:

• “What if there is another road? Maybe I should ask. Maybe I should try it.”

In this metaphor:

• Left turn = the Red Worldview and victim stance
• Right turn = the Green Worldview and creator stance
• The sign for the right turn had fallen over; now some people are putting it back up.

The core point:

Others can put the sign back up and show that a right turn is possible.
They can’t force you to take it.

Whether you stay a knower (“There is only left”) or become a learner (“Tell me about that right turn”) is your move.

Knower vs learner: two mindsets

The knower says:

• “I already know how this works.”
• “Anyone doing it differently is wrong or foolish.”
• “The only valid data is what confirms what I know.”

The learner says:

• “I have a view, and I’m open to being wrong or incomplete.”
• “If someone reaches the goal faster by another route, I want to understand how.”
• “New data may expand my map.”

In leadership, this shows up in subtle ways:

• How you respond when a team member challenges your view.
• Whether you only listen long enough to reply, or long enough to be changed.
• Whether you treat your current worldview as a finished product or a work in progress.

Worldview-Agility is, at its core, a learner stance applied to the deepest assumptions you carry.

Attention as your greatest currency

All of this hinges on one resource: attention.

Attention (and consciousness) is:

• Limited
• Highly sought after
• Continuously under attack from stimuli and notifications

Modern conditions make it harder to:

• Sustain focus
• Reflect deeply on beliefs
• Hold complex topics in mind long enough to see through their surface complexity

Every push notification is a tiny knock on the door of your attention.

Most of us answer automatically:

• Phone vibrates → we look
• New feed item → we scroll
• New outrage → we react

If you cannot decide when and whether to open that door, your attention is being spent for you.

Old wisdom traditions understood this, long before social media existed:

• Meditation is a structured way of saying “for now, nothing gets through this door.”
• It turns attention into a deliberate act rather than an automatic reaction.

From that vantage point:

• You can notice your own beliefs as they “knock”.
• You can decide whether to feed the victim drawer or the creator drawer.
• You can listen more carefully for the quiet path indicators, like the first car turning right.

Formulas vs insight: the mosquito problem

There is one more metaphor that helps to tie this together.

A formula says:

• “Do A, B, C and you will get D.”

Insight says:

• “Here is how the forces work. Use that understanding wisely in your context.”

When leaders ask for formulas (“Give me the 5 steps to trust”):

• They are often still in a victim mindset, wanting certainty from outside.
• They may even use the formula to avoid the discomfort of genuine responsibility.

It is like trying to swat a mosquito with a rulebook:

• You might get lucky.
• But the map is not the territory.

Worldview-Agility invites a different approach:

• Learn how resonance, attention, belief, and identity work.
• See the mechanisms behind victim and creator loops.
• Recognise that no formula can replace the need for living insight.

The good news:

• Insight grows as you test your worldview in real life.
• Micro-turbulences, not just big dramas, become your practice ground.
• Over time, the right turns start to feel less like risky detours and more like obvious options.

This is not a promise that everything will become easy.

It is an invitation to stop being the passive object of your own beliefs and to start acting as an active participant in how they are formed, reinforced, and transformed.

(This article was inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 9th May 2025.)(ID:CO|AF)