Living on Different Floors: Adult Development, Love, and the Leadership of Self

From the outside, you might look like a successful, modern leader.

You handle complex projects.
You navigate stakeholders.
You manage family, work and a constant stream of information.

Underneath, though, there are deeper questions running:

• What do I actually believe about reality?
• Where does my worth come from?
• What kind of stories about God, guilt, and power am I still carrying?
• How many of my inner tools have I actually unpacked?

Working with these questions is less about learning new techniques and more about learning to live on different floors of perception.

Floor 1: Rules, guilt, and external gatekeepers

Most of us grew up in a culture shaped by a particular religious story, whether we identify as religious or not.

That story often sounds like this:

• There is a powerful being outside you.
• You are separated from that being.
• You were born flawed and in debt (sin, original sin, karmic backlog, etc.).
• There is a list of things you must not do.
• If you do them, you are guilty and may be punished.
• Certain institutions can mediate, forgive, or protect you.

Put simply: you are on one side of a door. Value, safety, and belonging are on the other. Someone else owns the door.

That story does things to people:

• It creates chronic guilt.
• It justifies hierarchies that claim to own access to the divine.
• It conditions you to look “upward” for permission.

From a leadership perspective, it’s not hard to see how this logic sneaks into organisations:

• Leaders act as gatekeepers to opportunity and worth.
• Followers internalise guilt and dependency.
• “Rules” become instruments of control more than pathways to growth.

Re-reading the “rules” from a different floor

The Conversations with God books propose a different reading of familiar religious elements.

Take the Ten Commandments. Instead of reading:

“You must not kill, steal, lie…”

you read:

“When you notice you no longer want to kill, steal, or lie, that is a sign you are aligning with your deeper nature. These are indicators of awakening.”

Under this lens:

• The “commands” become milestones, not threats.
• Guilt becomes less central.
• Growth, not conformity, is what matters.

You can feel how different this is in your body:

• Floor 1: “If I break this rule, I am bad and deserve punishment.”
• Higher floor: “If I notice my behaviour changing in this direction, I am maturing.”

Same words on the page, completely different energy.

Floor 2: Belonging to an information field

Now consider a second narrative:

• Reality is grounded in an information field, a unified consciousness.
• You are an expression of that field, not an outsider.
• There is no ultimate judge handing out eternal sentences.
• There are consequences and learning, but not cosmic guilt.

In this model:

• There is no door between you and the source.
• Gatekeepers lose their structural role.
• Practices (meditation, prayer, ritual) are not tickets to re‑entry; they are tuning practices: ways to remember what you already are.

Suddenly, you are not an outsider begging for entry.
You are a participant learning to use the tools you’ve been given.

From this floor, the question is no longer:

“Am I good enough to be let in?”

It becomes:

“How responsibly can I use the power I already have?”

Floors are not mutually exclusive

You don’t have to pick one worldview once and for all.

Worldview-Agility is about:

• Recognising that you are living from a story,
• Choosing that story more consciously,
• Letting it evolve as you grow, and
• Being able to move between interpretive floors as needed.

For example:

• On one floor, you honour a particular tradition and its symbols.
• On another, you see those symbols as metaphors for an underlying information field.
• On another, you step back and see all traditions as different languages trying to describe the same depth.

Adult development is, among other things, learning to inhabit more floors without collapsing into confusion.

Travel and blue beings: experience catching up with knowing

Reading books and having intellectual conversations will take you only so far. At some point, experience catches up.

You might:

• Travel to India, immerse yourself in Hindu practice and iconography.
• Meditate with mantras and suddenly feel a powerful energy build in your body.
• See a blue, Shiva‑like presence and feel deeply affected, without rushing into simplistic “conversion”.

The event doesn’t prove a theology. It proves something else:

• You are more plastic than you thought.
• Your inner world responds to outer exposures.
• There are layers to reality you will only discover through direct participation.

Floor by floor, your “map of what’s possible” expands.

Microbes, ants, and highly evolved beings

It’s easy to assume that:

• Humans here and now are the finished product.
• There are no more evolved beings anywhere.
• What we can perceive is all that exists.

But scale and perception argue against that.

A microbe on your skin likely doesn’t perceive you as a person.
An ant probably experiences you as an obstacle or terrain.

By analogy:

• There may be forms of intelligence and being we rarely, if ever, perceive in our ordinary state.
• Our “normal” floor of awareness is partial by design.

From this angle, the question isn’t “Do higher beings exist?” in a dogmatic sense. It’s:

“What am I currently blind to because of the floor I’m standing on?”

That question alone shifts how you hold your certainty.

The radio metaphor: tuning your inner receiver

Reality could be full of “broadcasts” you are not currently tuned into:

• Like radio waves and mobile signals you don’t see, yet depend on.
• Different states of consciousness as channels.

Sleep and dream phases already give you access to qualitatively different worlds without any special practice.
Meditation, contemplation, and certain disciplines of attention allow you to:

• Intentionally shift state.
• Tune your inner receiver.
• Perceive patterns and insights that are not available in default mode.

From a leadership perspective, this is not just mystical curiosity. It’s a practical question:

“Am I willing to develop my perceptual bandwidth, or am I content to lead from one narrow floor?”

The toolbox with hidden floors

Imagine your inner capacities as tools in a toolbox.

On the top tray:

• Analytical thinking
• Speech
• Basic emotional regulation

Underneath, under hidden floors:

• Intuition
• Deep states of calm and presence under pressure
• Multiple perspectives and “floors” of awareness
• Subtle ethics and sensitivity to the information field

Two key ideas:

1. You already have all these tools in potential.
2. Which ones are visible and usable depends on your maturity and willingness to look.

If you “flip the toolbox” at 20, you’ll see a set of tools appropriate to your then‑stage.
If you do it again at 30, 40, 50, more tools will be visible.

The box didn’t change.
Your access did.

The knife and the three-year-old

Not all tools are equal.

Some are like a sharp butcher’s knife:

• When used by a trained, ethical person, they can do a great deal of good.
• When given to a three-year‑old, they are an accident waiting to happen.

Humanity now collectively has:

• Nuclear capability
• Artificial intelligence
• Global data and surveillance infrastructures
• High‑impact psychological and spiritual practices available to everyone

Our problem is not lack of tools.
It’s our collective level of maturity relative to the tools we hold.

In many domains – politics, economics, technology, even spirituality – we behave like children wielding weapons.

As a leader, the question is:

“Which knives am I currently playing with, and am I mature enough to hold them?”

That applies as much to organisational power, influence and money as to advanced practices.

The internet blew the filters away

In older wisdom traditions:

• Teachers acted as maturity filters.
• Certain teachings and practices were only passed on when you were ready.
• Inner growth and outer power were given in tandem.

Now:

• Almost everything is available online to almost everyone.
• That democratises growth potential.
• It also removes many guardrails.

You cannot rebuild the old gates.
You can choose how you relate to what you find:

• With humility and respect for consequences, or
• With entitlement and impatience.

Floor by floor, you decide who you want to be with the tools you have.

Different floors of perspective: from panic to poise

There’s a dark joke:

Two planets meet. One says, “I’m not feeling well, I’ve got Homo sapiens.”
The other: “Don’t worry, it will pass.”

On the human floor, our self-destructive tendencies are terrifying.
On a larger floor, they’re one experiment among many.

Seeing the larger floor doesn’t mean you stop caring.
It means:

• You no longer act as if the entire universe hinges on your next move.
• You can take responsibility without panic.
• You can hold tragedy and possibility in the same frame.

That shift in floor shows up immediately in how you lead:

• Less reactivity, more response.
• Less victimhood, more agency.
• Less collapse into “we’re doomed”, more “we have work to do and tools to use.”

Knowing, experiencing, being: stabilising the upper floors

You might have known for years, intellectually, that “everything is one” or that “everything is perfect as it is.”

Then you have a deep meditative experience:

• An intense energetic build‑up.
• A blue being appearing in your inner field.
• A sense of being taken into a “universal control room” where all experiences are coordinated.
• A message landing in your bones: “Everything is perfect as it is.”

Once is not enough to build a life on.
But it’s enough to shake your previous certainty.

Over time:

• Such states recur more often.
• They last longer.
• They begin to inform your day‑to‑day reactions.

Development then looks like this:

• Knowing – “I can explain the concept.”
• Experiencing – “I have directly felt it.”
• Being – “I consistently act from it.”

At that point, you aren’t visiting the upper floors occasionally.
You are living on them, even while working, arguing, parenting, and building things.

What this means for the leadership of self

Self‑leadership is the foundation for all other leadership. It asks:

• Which story am I living from?
• Which floor am I operating on most of the time?
• Which tools am I using by default, and which am I neglecting?
• How am I relating to the knives I’ve been given?

Some practical invitations:

1. Name your current floor
• When you face a challenge, write down how you’re seeing it:
• “I’m helpless” (victim floor).
• “I have tools but need to grow up to use them well” (adult floor).
• “This is part of a perfect, larger pattern, even if I don’t like it” (field floor).
• Just naming the floor loosens its grip.
2. Audit your inherited stories
• Write down the core messages about God, worth and power you absorbed growing up.
• Ask: “Do these stories still deserve to run my life?”
• Notice where guilt and fear are still quietly pulling strings.
3. Check your tool misuse
• Identify one situation where you keep using intellect as the only tool.
• Ask: “What other tools might be available here – intuition, different perspective, deeper calm – and how could I practise them?”
4. Respect the knives
• Before adopting a powerful new tool (AI stack, radical transparency, advanced practice), ask:
• “What level of maturity and ethics does this require?”
• “Am I and my team there yet?”
• If the answer is “not yet”, treat that as a developmental project, not a reason to never use the tool.
5. Intentionally change floors once a day
• Once a day, take a situation and view it from:
• Your personal floor.
• A collective human floor.
• A wider field floor.
• Watch how your available actions change with each shift.

Living on different floors is not about escaping the ground floor.
It is about including more of reality in your field of view and acting from the deepest level you can access right now.

From there, adult development, love, and the leadership of self stop being abstract ideas and start becoming the way you walk through the world.

(This article was inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 27th December 2024.)(ID:CO|AF)