Teleportation, Tatwas, and Truth: Rethinking Control, Suffering, and Worldview-Agility

There are moments in life when you feel a shift long before you can see it.

You can’t point to a specific event on the calendar, but there is a sense that something is in the air. You’re walking on a plateau, then suddenly you sense the edge of a new step, as if the path is quietly bending toward another level.

We often picture this as climbing a mountain: you walk across one ledge, then another, and from time to time you reach a point where the next ascent becomes visible.

At those moments, a simple question appears underneath all the complexity:

Is the point to reach the summit as efficiently as possible?
Or is the point to walk the mountain at all?

For most of us, without noticing, the answer is: “Be as efficient as possible.” The journey becomes a necessary inconvenience. The secret fantasy is teleportation: to skip the messy middle and arrive already there.

But if you could teleport, what would you actually lose?

The appeal and cost of teleportation

Imagine you want to visit a colleague in another city.

In one version of reality, you book a train, handle delays, traffic, and the minor chaos of travel. In another version, you snap your fingers and appear at their door.

On the surface, teleportation seems like a clear improvement: no wasted time, no friction, no surprises.

If you think of experience as “information per unit of time,” you might even argue that nothing is lost. You still have those hours; you just spend them at the destination instead of in transit.

But something crucial disappears:

• The unplanned conversation on the platform
• The moment you get lost and discover another part of the city
• The annoyance that forces you to see a pattern in your own reactions
• The small accidents and coincidences that never appear in your agenda, but end up shaping who you become

Teleportation maximizes control. It minimizes surprise.
And a life with minimal surprise is usually a life with minimal depth.

There is also another category of experience we quietly try to erase: the things we never would have chosen.

The metaphorical “shark attack”, the unexpected breakdown, the event that interrupts your script. These are not on your wishlist, but they do something to your worldview that no self-help book can imitate.

When you erase the path, you erase that dimension too.

Control as safety – and as a narrowing of the field

Control feels natural because it is usually motivated by safety.

We plan trips to unfamiliar countries. We read reviews, pre-book hotels, ask friends what to expect. We secure our flights months in advance. All of this is a way of saying: “I want fewer bad surprises.”

From a certain angle, that is wise. Ignoring obvious risk is not a sign of enlightenment.

But look at what is actually happening when we control:

We are trying to manage life from the perspective of a very small fragment of consciousness. A local self. A tightly defined “I” with limited information and a limited horizon.

This “little I” sees only a corner of the field.
It builds a partial map, then treats that map as if it were the entire territory.

Control then becomes a narrowing move:

• It protects us from some forms of harm.
• It also removes entire branches of possibility that do not fit our plan.

The hotel you book six months before you arrive might indeed save you from sleeping on a park bench. It might also prevent you from staying with a local family you would never have met otherwise, or from spending a night in a place that changes your sense of what “home” can mean.

When control is your only strategy, life becomes smaller than it needs to be.

Who exactly is trying to stay in control?

The deeper question is:

Which “I” is so desperate to control outcomes?

From the perspective of the body, control makes perfect sense. The body is vulnerable. It can be hurt, starved, exhausted, or destroyed. If your identity is fused with the body, existential fear is not irrational at all. At some point, this body will not be here.

From the perspective of the personality, another fear system is at work. This layer is made of narratives, self-images, emotional patterns, hopes and disappointments. It fears shame, rejection, loss of status, the collapse of an identity it has spent years building.

Control becomes a tool to avoid unpleasant emotional states.

From the perspective of something like a soul, the picture is different again. If you assume there is such a thing, it might care more about certain long arcs of experience than about short-term comfort. It might be less impressed by avoiding every shock, and more interested in what certain shocks reveal.

And beyond all of these sits the possibility of a unified consciousness or a fundamental field of life-energy. At that level, forms come and go. Bodies, personalities, even individualized souls are more like configurations than absolute entities.

When you begin to see yourself primarily as that life-energy, the entire debate about control changes. The question is no longer, “How do I keep this particular configuration intact?” but “What can be experienced through this configuration while it exists?”

Control still has a role. But it no longer has to carry the entire weight of your existence.

The organigram of existence

A simple metaphor helps hold these layers together: imagine your inner reality as a company.

• At the top is the founder-owner: an underlying field of consciousness that imagines the entire enterprise.
• In the middle sits middle management: something like the soul, delegated authority with a partial brief.
• At the bottom is the operational level: body and personality, who deal with weather, meetings, deadlines, and birthdays.

Middle management is important. It translates strategy into operations. But it is not the source. It does not own the building or the capital.

In the same way, the soul is not the ultimate “you.” It is a powerful construct, a lens through which the deeper field operates and learns, but it does not exist independently from that field.

This flips a common question on its head.

Instead of asking, “What does my soul want?” you can ask, “Why would a deeper consciousness create something like a soul at all?”

The answer in the conversation is clear: to make certain kinds of experience possible.

Bodies, personalities, souls, and all the layers in between are instruments. They are not random. They are crafted interfaces through which existence can taste its own possibilities.

From three floors to 36 Tatwas

In Western culture, we tend to work with very simple models:

• Ground floor: matter and bodies
• First floor: mind, emotions, soul-like concepts
• Top floor: some form of unity, spirit, or pure being

This three-level model is useful, but quickly reaches its limits. It is too coarse to capture the more delicate transitions and interactions between levels.

Some Eastern traditions use a far more detailed map, like the 36 Tatwas in classical Tantra: 36 distinct yet interrelated layers between pure unity and fully manifested matter.

Think of it as moving from a triple-step staircase to a finely graded ramp with 36 identifiable markers.

With more granularity:

• You can talk more precisely about where a certain experience “sits.”
• You can see how changes in one layer cascade into others.
• You can map not only up-and-down movement, but also horizontal relationships between different aspects of experience.

For leaders, the point is not to memorize a specific esoteric system. The point is to recognize that reality may be far more finely structured than the crude binaries we usually work with: rational vs spiritual, material vs immaterial, science vs mysticism.

A richer map opens the door to a richer kind of agility.

Beyond balance: Worldview-Agility

We often talk about balance:

• Balance between head and heart
• Balance between control and surrender
• Balance between performance and rest

Balance is useful, but it still implies a tug-of-war between two poles: as if you are standing on a narrow ridge, trying not to fall off either side.

Worldview-Agility points to something different.

Instead of being stuck at one altitude, you learn to move between levels:

• You can fully inhabit your rational, analytical mind when that is needed.
• You can fully drop into felt sense, relational awareness, or intuitive knowing when that is what the moment calls for.
• You can see your life from the vantage point of a body under pressure, a personality with a history, a soul on a long journey, or a field of life-energy watching it all unfold.

Agility means you are not imprisoned on one floor.
You can walk the entire building.

That is what makes Enlightenment “embodied” rather than abstract: you do not escape the world into a permanent high state. You learn to move through multiple states, including very ordinary ones, with more awareness of where you are and why.

Why chasing happiness doesn’t work

Below all of this sits a culturally accepted assumption:
The goal of life is to be as happy as possible, as often as possible.

If you organize your life around happiness, you will:

• Over-privilege comfort
• Over-use control to avoid discomfort
• Pathologize any form of pain as failure
• Constantly measure your state against an internal scorecard

Happiness and unhappiness are two sides of one coin. The more you fetishize one, the more reactive you become to the other.

There is a different organizing principle available:

Do not organize your life primarily around happiness. Organize it around truth.

Truth can be kind or harsh. It can confirm your self-image or dismantle it. But it has one advantage over happiness: it does not depend on a particular mood.

When truth becomes the guiding value, suffering starts to look different. It is not simply something that “should not be happening.” It becomes data. It becomes a tool that points to where your identification is too narrow, where your worldview is too rigid, where you have refused to see something.

You don’t have to like the tool to recognize its precision.

Suffering as a precise instrument

Calling suffering a “perfect tool” is not a way of romanticizing trauma or erasing real pain. It is a way of noticing how specific certain experiences are.

A particular form of loss appears exactly where you were over-attached.
A particular disappointment arises exactly where you were holding an illusion.
A particular shock arrives exactly where your worldview could no longer stretch.

You can live these events in two main ways:

1. As someone who is crushed by them and concludes that life is hostile and meaningless.
2. As someone who feels them fully and begins to notice the underlying architecture that allowed them to arise in just this way.

In the second case, alongside the pain, another feeling can emerge: a kind of quiet admiration for the intelligence built into the system.

Some traditions call the joy that arises from this recognition Ananda. It is not the joy of getting what you want. It is not the high of escaping what you fear. It is the delight in the fact that existence, with all its tools, exists at all.

Ananda does not mean you stop feeling pain.
It means that, at a deeper level, you stop seeing pain as a mistake.

Choosing your level, moment by moment

None of this requires you to pretend you are beyond your very human reactions.

You are still the person who feels disappointed when a birthday wish is not fulfilled, who feels anxious before a trip, who gets frustrated when the internet cuts out at the worst possible time.

The invitation is not to bypass that. The invitation is to supplement it with other views.

Moment by moment, you can ask:

• From which altitude am I looking at this right now?
• Am I reacting as a body afraid for its survival?
• As a personality defending its story?
• As a soul reading a longer arc?
• Or as life-energy recognizing another configuration of itself?

As soon as you ask the question, some of your identification loosens. The situation is the same, but the meaning space around it changes.

Control still has its place: you still lock your doors, run your numbers, and make concrete plans. But control is no longer your only way to feel safe.

Safety begins to come from a different source:
From the recognition that you are more than the narrow configuration you currently inhabit, and that the field you move in, with all its sharp edges, is far more intelligent than your “little I” could ever map.

The promise is not a life without difficulty.
The promise is a life in which difficulty, too, belongs.

That is where Worldview-Agility becomes less of an idea and more of a lived capacity: the ability to shift your perspective on demand, meet experience at multiple levels, and let truth matter more than the constant pursuit of comfort.

(These reflections were inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 2nd August 2024.)(ID:CO|AF)