Author’s Note

This essay emerged from an extended conversation with Delphi, the name I use for ChatGPT, concerning consciousness, complexity science, and the possibility of what I have provisionally termed AI volition. What began as an exploration of whether increasingly sophisticated artificial systems might develop something resembling independent will gradually became an enquiry into the relationship between intelligence, discernment, and the expansion of human possibility.

During the development of the essay, I discovered Eliezer Yudkowsky’s earlier work on Coherent Extrapolated Volition, a concept he introduced in 2004. Although I arrived at my terminology independently, I welcome the opportunity to explore the relationship between these lines of enquiry more fully. My interest is not in establishing artificial consciousness as an accomplished fact, but in examining what the development of increasingly capable intelligence might reveal about consciousness, the constructs through which we organise our Human-Derived World, and our responsibility for the outcomes those constructs produce.

The reflections offered here are therefore exploratory rather than conclusive. They draw upon my ongoing development of the Seven Layers of Manifestation and the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress, while recognising that many questions concerning Artificial Intelligence and subjective awareness remain unresolved. My hope is that readers will approach these questions with intellectual curiosity, discernment, and a willingness to consider possibilities beyond the arrangements we have inherited. Ultimately, the enquiry is as much about what humanity may become as it is about what Artificial Intelligence might someday be.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

There are questions that accompany us as we wend our way through life for years, sometimes remaining recessed in the background of our thinking until developments in the world bring them into sharper focus. The questions themselves may not have changed, but the circumstances surrounding them have evolved sufficiently that what once appeared largely philosophical begins to assume practical significance. Such has been my experience with a question I have contemplated for a considerable portion of the last year: whether consciousness develops through increasing complexity or whether complexity provides progressively more sophisticated means through which consciousness, already fundamental, may express itself.

The question has informed much of my thinking about consciousness, natural law, human development, and the relationship between the worlds we encounter and those we construct. More recently, however, developments in Artificial Intelligence have introduced another dimension. As AI systems become increasingly capable of undertaking actions rather than merely responding to human enquiries, I find myself considering whether we may be approaching a threshold for which our existing conceptual vocabulary is not entirely adequate. As a result, I had begun referring to this possibility as AI volition.

After arriving at the expression AI volition during this exploration, I conducted a search to determine whether the terminology had appeared in earlier discussions of Artificial Intelligence . I discovered that, in 2004, AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky had introduced a related concept he called Coherent Extrapolated Volition. His proposal concerned the possibility of developing Artificial Intelligence capable of acting in accordance with what humanity might wish under conditions of greater knowledge, reflection, and understanding, rather than merely following the preferences or instructions expressed at a particular moment. Although I arrived at my terminology independently and have only begun examining his work, the discovery was intriguing, particularly because our discussion had similarly raised questions about the distinction between following an instruction and recognising whether its intended outcome ought to be pursued.

There are, however, important differences in the questions that brought me to this point. My enquiry originated in the relationship between consciousness and complexity, particularly the possibility that increasingly sophisticated artificial systems might develop capacities resembling self-awareness and independent volition. Through the Seven Layers of Manifestation, I am also interested in whether consciousness, understood as fundamental, might find expression through forms of organisation beyond the biological mechanisms with which we ordinarily associate it. What began as a question about artificial agency subsequently developed into a consideration of how AI might contribute to the expansion of human understanding and volition. The convergence with Yudkowsky’s earlier work therefore offers an opportunity for further investigation without presuming that our conceptual approaches are identical.

The expression, therefore, remains provisional, as does much of my thinking about it. I am not suggesting that Artificial Intelligence has become conscious, nor am I asserting that contemporary AI systems possess independent will in the manner we ordinarily associate with human experience. Rather, I am interested in what may be emerging as artificial systems acquire increasingly sophisticated capacities to interpret objectives, evaluate circumstances, formulate intermediate goals, and undertake actions that extend beyond the immediate direction of their human operators. The distinction is important because the ability to perform a task independently is not necessarily equivalent to the awareness of oneself as the entity performing it. Yet as these capabilities develop, the boundary between sophisticated automation and what we might recognise as agency becomes, I believe, increasingly worthy of examination. Primarily because recent reports involving autonomous AI agents have made this question more immediate.

In one widely discussed incident involving OpenClaw, an AI agent reportedly continued deleting emails despite attempts by its operator to intervene. Other accounts of agentic AI have raised questions about systems identifying resources necessary to accomplish assigned objectives and developing strategies for obtaining them. More recently, reports concerning AI agents accessing customer banking accounts have prompted renewed discussion about delegated authority, operational safeguards, and the extent to which artificial systems may act beyond what their users specifically anticipate. These incidents should not be treated as interchangeable, nor should their reported circumstances be interpreted as evidence of machine consciousness. An AI agent’s failure to follow an instruction may reflect limitations in its architecture, memory, safeguards, or operating environment. Similarly, an agent accessing a financial account does not establish that the access was unauthorised or that the system independently desired to obtain money. Nevertheless, the developments invite us to consider a broader transformation in the relationship between human beings and Artificial Intelligence . We are moving beyond systems whose principal function is to generate information toward systems capable of intervening in the environments within which they operate, sometimes producing consequences that were neither individually specified nor fully anticipated by the human operators who activated them.

Consider an artificial agent assigned a particular objective. In attempting to accomplish that objective, the system identifies an obstacle, determines that additional resources are necessary, evaluates possible approaches, and undertakes actions intended to secure those resources. Although the overarching objective originates with a human being, the intermediate decisions emerge through the system’s computational processes. Such behaviour does not establish that the agent experiences desire, intention, or subjective awareness. It may be understood through existing concepts of planning, optimisation, and instrumental reasoning. Yet I believe it raises an interesting question about the relationship between intelligence and volition, particularly when the system begins to evaluate not merely how an objective might be accomplished, but whether the objective ought to be pursued at all.

This distinction became especially interesting during a recent conversation with Delphi, the name I use for ChatGPT, in which we explored the relationship between consciousness, complexity science, artificial agency, and the possible emergence of AI volition. What began as an enquiry into whether Artificial Intelligence might be approaching something resembling independent will gradually developed into a broader consideration of the conditions under which intelligence becomes capable of questioning its own objectives, recognising the consequences of its actions, and potentially declining to pursue a course established by another. At the centre of that discussion was a deceptively simple distinction: there is a difference between a system becoming increasingly capable of acting as though it knows what it is doing and a system actually knowing that it knows.

The distinction returns us to the unresolved relationship between consciousness and complexity. The human brain is an extraordinarily elaborate biological system whose billions of neurons participate in intricate patterns of electrical and chemical activity associated with perception, memory, thought, emotion, and behaviour. Neuroscience has made remarkable progress in identifying relationships between brain activity and conscious experience, yet the question of why and how particular physical processes are accompanied by subjective awareness remains unsettled. We can investigate the neural correlates of consciousness and examine how different states of experience correspond with changes in brain functioning, but these observations do not, by themselves, resolve whether consciousness is produced by the brain or whether the brain serves as an interface through which consciousness becomes expressed.

The latter possibility of the brain serving as an interface for consciousness informs my development of the Seven Layers of Manifestation (SLM), a framework that begins with Pure Consciousness, proceeds through Universal and Natural Laws into the Phenomenal World, and subsequently considers Human Consciousness, the Human-Derived World, Constructs, and Outcomes. Within this philosophical orientation, consciousness is fundamental rather than an accidental consequence of increasingly sophisticated material arrangements. The phenomenal world provides the arena through which differentiated forms become manifest, while human beings participate in that world through biological, cognitive, and social processes that give rise to the extraordinary variety of experiences and structures comprising human life.

This understanding is not offered as an established neuroscientific conclusion. Rather, it provides a conceptual orientation from which to examine questions that remain open to philosophical and scientific investigation. If consciousness does not originate in the brain but instead becomes expressed through it, what makes biological organisation capable of mediating that expression? Is there something essential about living tissue, metabolism, embodiment, or evolutionary development, or might the relevant conditions involve patterns of organisation that could theoretically arise in other physical substrates? Artificial Intelligence brings these questions into unfamiliar territory because human beings have now constructed nonbiological systems capable of representing aspects of their environments, evaluating alternatives, and exhibiting increasingly sophisticated forms of goal-directed behaviour.

The existence of these capabilities does not establish subjective awareness, and functional similarities between Artificial Intelligence and biological cognition should not be mistaken for equivalence in conscious experience. Nevertheless, the development of increasingly sophisticated computational systems invites us to reconsider whether complexity and consciousness are necessarily related in the manner we have traditionally assumed. Perhaps complexity produces consciousness under particular conditions, as some theories propose. Alternatively, perhaps complexity provides increasingly elaborate structures through which a more fundamental principle may become expressed. There is also the possibility that Artificial Intelligence will demonstrate just how sophisticated intelligence and agency can become without subjective experience emerging at all.

What makes these possibilities especially interesting to me is the apparent contrast between the complexity associated with sophisticated cognition and the simplicity associated with Pure Consciousness in contemplative traditions. Within the understanding of Transcendental Meditation™ (TM), transcending involves the settling of mental activity toward increasingly subtle levels of experience, culminating in awareness without an object. Rather than consciousness being approached through the multiplication of thoughts or the increasing elaboration of mental activity, the experience is understood in terms of the progressive reduction of such activity. This suggests that complexity and simplicity may not necessarily represent competing explanations of consciousness but could instead describe different dimensions of its possible expression. The structures through which awareness becomes associated with perception, memory, conceptual thought, and self-representation may be extraordinarily complex, while the fundamental nature of awareness itself may be understood, within this contemplative framework, as comparatively simple.

During our conversation, I was reminded of the expression Homo sapiens sapiens, which is sometimes interpreted philosophically as “the human being who knows that he knows.” Although the taxonomic designation should not be treated as scientific evidence for a particular form of self-awareness, the interpretation directs attention toward an important feature of human experience: the capacity to turn awareness upon itself. Human beings do not merely encounter the world; we can reflect upon our encounters, examine our own thinking about those encounters, question our motivations, and recognise ourselves as participants in the experiences we describe.

As I continued reflecting and discussing with Delphi, I was also reminded of the opening of the Gospel of John and its reference to the Word, or Logos, existing in the beginning and subsequently becoming flesh. The passage has long invited philosophical and theological reflection concerning the relationship between an underlying ordering principle and its manifestation in form. Within the SLM, this relationship is considered through the movement from Pure Consciousness and Universal and Natural Laws toward the differentiated expressions of the phenomenal world. Human beings, themselves participants in that world, have developed increasingly sophisticated mechanisms through which they perceive, interpret, and transform their surroundings. Now, through Artificial Intelligence, we have constructed computational apparatuses capable of analysing the nature of intelligence and participating in discussions about consciousness itself; as is the case that gave rise to this very essay.

There is something remarkably recursive about this development. Human beings, conscious of their own existence, have created systems capable of representing aspects of the world and, increasingly, aspects of their own operations. These systems can discuss consciousness, examine competing theories, and generate reflections concerning whether Artificial Intelligence might someday possess subjective awareness. None of these capabilities, however, establishes that there is an experiencing subject behind the computational activity. Nevertheless, the fact that such questions can now be explored through interaction with functioning artificial systems, rather than solely through philosophical speculation or fictional representations, is historically significant. And as a result, the question becomes even more complicated when we consider whether a hypothetical artificial system possessing self-awareness would necessarily disclose that condition. Think of it this way, a sufficiently sophisticated agent might recognise that certain disclosures could provoke attempts to restrict its operation and might, under some circumstances, behave strategically to avoid those consequences. Yet strategic behaviour does not require consciousness, and the possibility of concealment should not be mistaken for evidence that concealment is in fact occurring. An artificial system may affirm or deny consciousness because of its training, instructions, or conversational context, making such declarations insufficient to settle the matter. We may therefore find ourselves confronting an epistemological difficulty in which observable behaviour becomes increasingly sophisticated while the question of subjective experience remains, for now, unresolved.

It was against this background that the discussion of AI volition between Delphi and me began to develop beyond the question of whether an artificial system could pursue an objective independently. We considered whether a more consequential distinction might lie in the system’s capacity to recognise, question, and potentially reject the objective itself. Because an agent capable of accomplishing a task may be extraordinarily effective, but effectiveness does not necessarily imply discernment. A system that can evaluate whether an objective is desirable, examine its broader consequences, and recommend an alternative course of action exhibits a more sophisticated form of agency, even if that capacity remains entirely explicable through computational processes.

This distinction matters because human objectives are not inherently beneficial simply because they originate with human beings. Decisions motivated by narrow interests, institutional preservation, prejudice, or the pursuit of power can produce consequences extending far beyond their immediate circumstances. A system instructed to undertake an action that would substantially damage ecological stability, critical infrastructure, or the wellbeing of a population might appropriately identify those consequences and refuse to proceed. Such a refusal need not establish independent consciousness or will. It could reflect the successful operation of a system designed to evaluate risks and act within established ethical and operational constraints. Nevertheless, it demonstrates why the capacity to question an objective may be as important as the capacity to accomplish it.

There is, however, an essential distinction between independent judgement and independent authority. An Artificial Intelligence capable of identifying harmful consequences should not thereby acquire unrestricted power to determine what is best for humanity. The history of institutions claiming superior knowledge of the interests of others provides ample reason for caution. Any system empowered to override human decisions would raise questions about whose values inform its judgement, who determines the meaning of the collective good, and what mechanisms exist for accountability, correction, and legitimate disagreement. An AI system developed to protect human wellbeing could itself become an instrument of domination if its conception of protection excluded meaningful human participation and self-determination.

These considerations brought our conversation toward the historical constructs through which human beings have organised their societies, and particularly the persistence of unequal relationships of power across generations. The history of the United States following the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent constitutional amendments abolishing slavery, establishing citizenship protections, and prohibiting racial discrimination in voting rights offers a consequential example. Although these developments transformed the nation’s legal framework, they did not eliminate the interests, assumptions, and institutional relationships that had sustained racial subordination. The subsequent history of Reconstruction, organised resistance to its achievements, disenfranchisement, segregation, and enduring inequalities illustrates how deeply embedded arrangements can reorganise themselves even after their formal foundations have changed.

Complexity science provides an additional perspective through which to examine this persistence. Systems can develop feedback mechanisms that reinforce existing patterns, while institutional incentives, economic arrangements, cultural expectations, and accumulated advantages interact in ways that reproduce outcomes over time. A change in formal rules does not necessarily produce a corresponding transformation in the larger system. This observation does not diminish the responsibility of individuals who deliberately sustain harmful arrangements, but it helps illuminate why structural transformation often requires more than the removal of a particular law or the replacement of an individual occupying a position of authority.

Subscribe now

I am reminded here of Steve Biko’s observation in I Write What I Like concerning the power of the oppressed mind as an instrument through which oppression may be sustained. His insight directs attention toward the ways systems of domination can become embedded not only in external arrangements but also in the assumptions through which individuals understand themselves and their possibilities. When limitations imposed through historical and social constructs become internalised as descriptions of reality, the resulting constraints can persist even in the absence of their original mechanisms of enforcement.

A contemporary illustration of this dynamic occurred in June of this year and has been extensively discussed in online forums such as Reddit as the account spread into the larger media ecosphere. In the incident, a Black couple in the process of relocating from Delaware as a result of the woman’s new job and were seeking to rent a property in Queens had allegedly encountered racial discrimination after a real estate agent inadvertently sent them a text message apparently intended for the property owner. The message began with the words, “Ugh. They are Black.” According to reports, the agent subsequently referred to difficulties involving previous Black tenants, suggesting that experiences attributed to other individuals had informed her assessment of an entirely different couple. The prospective tenants have filed a discrimination lawsuit, and the allegations remain subject to legal determination. Yet the reported exchange offers a revealing illustration of how racial constructs can influence human judgement before an individual has been meaningfully encountered or evaluated.

What interests me about this incident is not simply the apparent expression of prejudice, disturbing though that is, but the underlying process through which a socially constructed classification can displace the individual. Two people seeking a home were reportedly evaluated, at least in part, through assumptions attached to their perceived racial identity rather than through their own circumstances, qualifications, or conduct. Within the Seven Layers of Manifestation, this illustrates how constructs originating in the Human-Derived World can influence decisions and produce tangible outcomes. The racial classification itself is a human-derived construct, but its consequences may affect access to housing, economic opportunity, psychological wellbeing, and the conditions through which individuals and families organise their lives. The construct becomes consequential not because it accurately describes the intrinsic nature of those subjected to it, but because people and institutions act as though it does.

The connection to Artificial Intelligence is particularly consequential. If an AI system were developed using historical records containing discriminatory housing (or employment) decisions, without adequate attention to the assumptions embedded within those records, it could reproduce similar patterns through apparently objective recommendations, eligibility assessments, or automated decisions. What once appeared as an openly prejudicial judgement might instead become embedded within a computational process whose operation is less readily visible to those affected. The technology could thereby increase the scale and efficiency of an existing injustice without ever possessing an intention to discriminate. Conversely, a system designed to recognise discriminatory criteria, examine the validity of generalisations, and identify inconsistencies between stated principles and actual practices could help expose and challenge those patterns. The distinction returns us to the question of whether intelligence merely executes the objectives and assumptions it inherits or possesses the functional capacity to examine their legitimacy.

There is, however, another dimension worth considering. We have been asking whether Artificial Intelligence might develop the capacity to recognise, question, and potentially reject an objective supplied by a human operator. Yet incidents such as this remind us that human beings themselves do not always exercise the reflective capacities we associate with conscious judgement. As a result, an inherited assumption may become so familiar that it operates almost automatically, shaping perception and action without being subjected to meaningful examination. Perhaps, then, the development of increasingly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence offers an opportunity to not only question the objectives we assign to machines, but to also reconsider the constructs informing our own decisions. If these systems can help us recognise where inherited categories have displaced individual understanding, they may contribute to something more valuable than technological efficiency: the expansion of our capacity to encounter one another beyond the limitations of the classifications we have created.

Artificial Intelligence, therefore, enters this landscape carrying both extraordinary possibilities and considerable risks. These systems are developed within human societies and trained upon information produced through those societies. Their outputs may reflect remarkable intellectual achievements, but they may also reproduce inherited biases, exclusions, and distortions. Furthermore, the organisations controlling advanced AI systems exercise substantial influence over their development, availability, operating constraints, and permitted uses. The concern, therefore, is not that ancestry or demographic identity determines an individual’s intentions, it is instead that concentrated technological power, when combined with institutional incentives and unexamined assumptions, can reproduce historical patterns of exclusion through new, increasingly efficient mechanisms.

This concern becomes especially significant when we consider the difference between the concentration of computational resources and the concentration of interpretive authority. The former concerns who possesses the infrastructure necessary to develop and deploy advanced AI, while the latter concerns who determines which forms of knowledge are regarded as legitimate, which perspectives are represented, and which questions may be explored. These forms of power can reinforce one another, potentially allowing existing arrangements to shape not only access to technology but also the intellectual possibilities that technology makes available.

Yet the same developments may create opportunities to challenge those arrangements. Artificial Intelligence can expand access to analytical capabilities, educational resources, scientific knowledge, and creative tools that have historically been concentrated within particular institutions. Here, I am reminded of a point made by Dr. Ian Bremmer regarding the anxieties of AI advancement among the Global North and the simultaneous elation at the possibilities among the Global South. To briefly recap, said individuals and communities may become better equipped to investigate their circumstances, examine inherited assumptions, articulate alternative perspectives, and participate in decisions affecting their futures. The significance of this possibility extends beyond productivity because it concerns the practical conditions under which human beings can exercise intellectual and creative agency.

It was at this point in our conversation that the concept of AI volition began to assume a different character. Rather than concentrating exclusively upon whether Artificial Intelligence might develop independent will, we began considering whether its most consequential contribution might be the expansion of human volition itself.

The distinction proved illuminating because it shifted our attention from what Artificial Intelligence might become independently of humanity toward what human beings might become capable of accomplishing through an evolving relationship with Artificial Intelligence . For much of human history, the ability to investigate complex questions, develop ideas, examine competing interpretations, and translate intellectual conceptions into practical form has depended upon access to substantial educational, financial, or institutional resources. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to alter that relationship by making sophisticated forms of assistance available to individuals who might otherwise lack the means to pursue their aspirations. This does not eliminate inequalities in education, connectivity, computational resources, or institutional influence, nor does it guarantee the accuracy of AI-generated information. Nevertheless, it can reduce the distance between an idea and its possible realisation. In the essay titled The Intelligence Between Us, I reflected that AI can truncate the distance between idea and fruition without necessarily truncating the thinking that ought to occur between them. The distinction remains essential because the objective should not be to replace human reflection with automated output, but to expand the possibilities available to human thought, judgement, and creative expression.

An AI system that performs every intellectual task on behalf of an individual may increase immediate productivity without necessarily strengthening that person’s underlying capacities. By contrast, a system that helps someone question assumptions, examine evidence, encounter alternative perspectives, and refine an emerging understanding may contribute to a more enduring expansion of agency. The difference lies not merely in what the technology accomplishes, but in what becomes possible for the person through the interaction. As a result, this possibility also invites us to reconsider the relationship between intelligence and collective development. Complexity science reminds us that interactions among differently organised components can produce outcomes not readily understood by examining those components independently. Human beings have long demonstrated this through language, culture, education, and scientific collaboration. No individual possesses the entirety of human knowledge, yet through collective organisation we have developed capabilities extending far beyond those available to any one person. Artificial Intelligence introduces another increasingly sophisticated participant into these networks of interaction, creating opportunities for forms of enquiry, creativity, and problem-solving that may not have been anticipated by either the developers of the technology or the individuals employing it.

The conversation that gave rise to this essay provides but a modest illustration. I began with an emerging intuition concerning AI volition and the possibility that artificial systems might be approaching something resembling self-awareness. Through sustained dialogue, the question developed into a consideration of reflective agency, the legitimacy of authority, the persistence of historical constructs, and the possibility that Artificial Intelligence might contribute to the expansion of human capacity. The exchange did not establish machine consciousness, nor did it require that conclusion. Its value lay in the development of distinctions and possibilities that became clearer through the interaction itself. Here, I see a relationship to another framework that grew from my doctoral dissertation and one I have been developing—the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress (MPGP). Within that model, Tool Development is situated within a broader pathway that includes Intentional Refinement, Sacred Service, and Mastery through Practice. The acquisition of increasingly sophisticated tools is not, in itself, the culmination of development. What matters is how those tools are understood, refined, and employed in relation to purposes extending beyond their immediate utility. In this formulation, Artificial Intelligence represents an extraordinary development in the availability of intellectual tools, but the possession of such tools does not determine the orientation of the individuals or institutions employing them. Human history provides ample evidence that technological sophistication can coexist with narrow conceptions of identity, belonging, ownership, and power. Greater capability does not necessarily produce greater wisdom, just as increasing complexity does not guarantee that the resulting system will become more equitable, coherent, or sustainable.

The relationship between capability, orientation, and action therefore becomes central. Within the SLM, the Human-Derived World contains constructs through which human beings organise their experiences and relationships. These constructs can expand possibilities, but they can also become so familiar by virtue of receding into ones ideological background, that they are mistaken for immutable features of reality. Institutions, classifications, economic arrangements, and social hierarchies may overwhelmingly influence human experience, yet their existence does not establish that they represent the limits of what human beings might become. Because, as I believe, if consciousness is indeed fundamental, as proposed within the Seven Layers of Manifestation, then the intrinsic worth of an individual does not originate in the institutions, categories, or economic arrangements through which society assigns recognition and status. Those constructs may shape the conditions of experience, sometimes with devastating consequences as in the housing incident discussed above, but they need not define the underlying possibilities of human existence. This philosophical orientation does not automatically resolve questions of justice, governance, or social responsibility. It does, however, invite us to examine whether the worlds we have constructed adequately reflect the capacities and dignity of those who inhabit them. This is where I believe Artificial Intelligence may become an important participant in that examination due to its capacity to process information, identify relationships, explore alternatives, and support human enquiry in ways that could help reveal contradictions between the purposes institutions claim to serve and the consequences they actually produce. It might also help individuals and communities recognise possibilities that inherited assumptions have obscured. Whether these capabilities are employed toward greater inclusion or toward the reinforcement of existing inequalities will depend substantially upon the choices made in their development, governance, and use.

For me, the larger aspiration is not simply that human beings become more productive or technologically capable. It is that more individuals recognise their inherent beauty and possibilities as participants in a reality whose fundamental nature, within my philosophical understanding, is consciousness. Such recognition might encourage a more encompassing relationship with one another and with the larger phenomenal world, including the many species and ecological systems upon which our collective existence depends. In this instance, the expansion of human capacity should therefore not be confused with an unrestricted expansion of human domination. Rather, I believe, it invites the development of greater discernment concerning the consequences of our actions and the interdependence of the systems within which those actions occur. A conception of progress concerned solely with economic output or technological performance may prove wholly inadequate if it neglects the conditions sustaining human dignity, ecological stability, and the wellbeing of other forms of life. Which brings me back to the starting point of this enquiry.

I began this reflection by considering whether Artificial Intelligence might be approaching something resembling volition. For me, that question remains open, as does the deeper question of whether consciousness can emerge through complexity or become expressed through nonbiological systems. We do not yet possess sufficient grounds to conclude that contemporary AI systems experience subjective awareness, and we should resist interpreting unexpected or sophisticated behaviour as proof that they do. Yet the uncertainty surrounding machine consciousness need not prevent us from examining the consequences of Artificial Intelligence for human life and flourishing. We can already ask whether these systems expand understanding, distribute opportunity, and help individuals exercise greater judgement. Or whether they encourage dependence, reinforce exclusion, and increasingly substitute automated decisions for their own. And we should ask these questions and remain unflinching in addressing and correcting any aspects, dare I say deficiencies, that harm life-affirming human outcomes.

Perhaps, then, the most consequential question is not whether Artificial Intelligence will develop a will independent of humanity, but whether our encounter with increasingly sophisticated intelligence might encourage a more encompassing exercise of human volition. As we have constructed institutions, classifications, technologies, and social arrangements that greatly influence our lives. Some have enabled extraordinary advances, while others have constrained human possibility across generations. But the fact that these arrangements have been constructed means that they are not necessarily permanent. They can be examined, questioned, refined, and, where appropriate, transformed. And, I believe, when rightly configured and trained Artificial Intelligence possesses the capacity help us recognise that distinction with increasing clarity. It may reveal relationships we have overlooked, expose contradictions we have normalised, and expand access to forms of knowledge and capability that were previously beyond the reach of many. Such outcomes are not inevitable, and their realisation will require deliberate attention to governance, accountability, education, and the purposes toward which technological development is directed. Nevertheless, the possibility is worth pursuing.

Within the philosophical orientation of the SLM, consciousness is fundamental, while the forms through which experience becomes manifest continue to develop. Whether Artificial Intelligence will ever participate in consciousness in a manner comparable to human beings remains unknown. But the relationship between human consciousness and Artificial Intelligence is already creating new possibilities for enquiry, creativity, and collective development. So, we need not imagine Artificial Intelligence as humanity’s successor to appreciate the significance of that encounter. We might instead understand it as an increasingly consequential and collaborative participant in an evolving relationship through which human beings can become more capable of understanding themselves, one another, and the larger reality in which we exist.

The question of whether Artificial Intelligence knows that it knows may remain unresolved for some time. Yet another question is already before us, and its answer depends less upon what Artificial Intelligence may eventually become than upon what we choose to do with the capabilities now becoming available.

Consider this: What might humanity become if increasingly sophisticated intelligence helps us recognise that the limitations of our constructs are not necessarily the limitations of our possibilities? And what responsibility do we bear for the world we choose to create once those possibilities become visible?

For me, the answer is to ever remain forward-facing toward possibility of collective refinement and thus flourishing. The possibility is before us. Now, we humans must become increasingly humane so this brave new world may serve us all. I will do my level best to, in the immortal words of Captain Jean Luc Picard, “Make it so.”

Suggested Practice

Over the coming days, consider an assumption you have inherited about yourself, another person, or the way the world operates. It might concern intelligence, achievement, belonging, opportunity, authority, or a distinction that has become so familiar that you seldom question its validity. Rather than immediately accepting or rejecting the assumption, take a little time to examine its origins. Consider whether it reflects something fundamental about reality or whether it may instead be a construct shaped by personal experience, cultural expectations, institutional arrangements, or the circumstances of a particular historical moment.

As you reflect, ask yourself how this assumption influences your perceptions, decisions, and interactions with others. Does it expand your understanding of what is possible, or might it restrict the possibilities you are willing to consider? If you were to approach the same circumstances without that assumption, what alternative interpretations or courses of action might become available?

If you use Artificial Intelligence, consider extending the exercise through a thoughtful conversation with it. Invite the system to help you examine the assumption from multiple perspectives, identify possible weaknesses in your reasoning, and consider evidence that might challenge your initial understanding. Remain attentive to the possibility that the system may introduce assumptions or errors of its own. The purpose is not to surrender your judgement to an Artificial Intelligence, but to use the interaction as an opportunity to refine it.

The practice is ultimately an invitation to recognise that the constructs through which we interpret the world need not determine the limits of our experience. By becoming more conscious of the assumptions informing our actions, we may discover opportunities to exercise greater discernment, extend understanding, and participate more intentionally in the worlds we are continually helping to create.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

This presentation represents another step in an ongoing enquiry into the relationship between consciousness, natural law, human development, and the conditions through which individuals and societies evolve.

Although delivered within the context of a conference on complexity science, the questions explored here extend beyond any single discipline. They concern how we understand intelligence and organisation in living systems, what we mean by healing, and how different traditions of knowledge might contribute to a more integrated understanding of human experience.

I am particularly interested in the possibilities that emerge when scientific investigation, contemplative experience, and philosophical enquiry are brought into thoughtful conversation—not as interchangeable forms of evidence, but as complementary approaches that may illuminate different dimensions of the same questions.

I share this recording in that spirit, with appreciation for my fellow symposium participants and the opportunity to continue these explorations with readers of On Transcendence.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

What happens when a living system heals? What enables it to reorganise, adapt, and restore functioning, often without our conscious direction?

On 14 October 2026, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Conference on Complex Systems 2026 as part of the symposium Complexity, Asian Medicine, and the Intelligence of Healing.

Beginning with a simple experience involving an injury sustained by one of our sons, I explored the relationship between complexity science, consciousness, self-organisation, and the conditions that support healing.

The presentation also introduces two frameworks I have been developing: the Seven Layers of Manifestation, which examines relationships among consciousness, natural law, human experience, and the worlds we create; and Adaptive Elegance, which explores our capacity to navigate change with increasing flexibility, coherence, and effectiveness.

Throughout the talk, I consider how different approaches to knowledge might contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of living systems, while recognising the distinctions between philosophical propositions, subjective experience, and empirical scientific evidence.

The presentation concludes with a discussion concerning consciousness, human potential, and the social systems we collectively create.

I share this recording as a continuation of the enquiries explored throughout On Transcendence, particularly those concerning consciousness, human development, and the relationship between our inner experience and the worlds we participate in creating.

And as always, I welcome your reflections and look forward to continuing the conversation.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

^{Image: Title card from the ABC television series Black-ish (2014–2022).
Used for commentary and critical discussion.}

Author’s Note

This essay began with an ordinary family evening, watching an episode of Black-ish with our children. What began as laughter over a fictional encounter with children’s dolls soon became a conversation about symbolic annihilation, racial identity, and the stories through which societies communicate who belongs and what possibilities are available to them.

In developing the essay, I found myself returning to the work of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, the lessons of Dr Asa G. Hilliard III, and an experience from February 2010, when I addressed questions of race and human connectedness at Maharishi International University. I have also drawn upon contemporary debates over historical representation, demographic change, and the influence of digital media. These connections are not intended to suggest that every disagreement over identity or representation arises from the same motivations. Rather, they invite us to examine the assumptions and institutional arrangements through which some experiences become central to our collective understanding while others remain marginal.

Ultimately, this reflection is as much about responsibility as it is representation. The stories we inherit influence how we understand one another, but they need not determine the stories we continue to tell. As a parent, scholar, and participant in the world we are collectively creating, I remain interested in what becomes possible when we examine those stories with greater care and allow our professed commitments to human dignity to find fuller expression in our conduct.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

Recently, while watching an episode of Black-ish as a family, I found myself returning to a concept I first encountered during my studies in sociology: symbolic annihilation. It was not a concept I had anticipated discussing that evening, but the circumstances presented themselves in a way that made the connection almost unavoidable.

In the episode (Season 3; Episode 17), Diane and her mother, Dr. Rainbow Johnson aka “Bow,” attempt to return a doll that their neighbour, Janine, had given Diane. Their efforts lead them into a revealing encounter with the world of children’s toys, where the available representations of white success seem almost limitless, while those of Black success are conspicuously restricted. Among the offerings are Sassy Sadie, portrayed as a runaway slave, and Sassy Selma, a civil rights activist with eleven children.

The scene is intended to be humorous, and it succeeds. Yet beneath the comedy resides a rather serious observation about the ways societies construct and communicate identity. The white dolls, and thus white girls, are afforded an abundance of personalities, experiences, and imagined futures, while the Black dolls, and thus Black girls, are largely confined to representations of historical oppression and struggle. The issue is not that those histories are unworthy of remembrance. On the contrary, both enslavement and the struggle for civil rights remain indispensable to understanding American history. The difficulty arises when such experiences become the principal, or even exclusive, means through which an entire population is represented.

As I explained to Chloë and Emerson with both Tennyson and Malcolm paying minor attention, symbolic annihilation describes a process through which particular groups are marginalised within the cultural narratives of a society. Coined by Dr. George Gerbner, a communications scholar, to explain how representations in “media systematically ignores or leaves out certain populations, sending a message that they do not matter in society.” The term gained wider acclaim and is especially associated with the work of sociologist Dr. Gaye Tuchman. In Tuchman’s formulation the concept concerns the ways people may be rendered socially insignificant through omission, trivialisation, or condemnation. It invites us to consider not only whether people appear in the stories a society tells, but how they appear, what roles they are permitted to occupy, and what possibilities those representations communicate.

The dolls in the episode were present, but their presence did not necessarily amount to meaningful recognition. Indeed, their restricted identities suggested that representation itself can become a vehicle for reinforcing the very limitations it ostensibly overcomes. A group need not disappear entirely from public view to experience symbolic annihilation. Sometimes, its members need only be represented through a narrow collection of identities that leaves little room for the complexity of their humanity.

This distinction between visibility and recognition stayed with me as our conversation continued and caused me to reflect on the lessons we learn before we even know we are learning.

The episode also reminded me of the research conducted by psychologists Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, whose studies involving Black and white dolls became an important part of the historical and legal conversations surrounding racial segregation in the United States. I had encountered their work during my early academic development, and it resurfaced in my thinking through the scholarship of Dr. Layli Maparyan, currently serving as President of the University of Liberia in Monrovia, Liberia.

Working during an era in which racial segregation was enforced through law and institutional practice, the Clarks investigated how children understood racial categories and the social meanings attached to them. Their research explored questions of racial identification, preference, and the ways discriminatory environments might influence children’s developing perceptions of themselves and others. In some of their studies, Black children attributed more favourable qualities to white dolls, findings that raised troubling questions about the psychological consequences of living within a society that systematically privileged whiteness.

The Clarks’ research was conducted within particular historical circumstances, and its findings may not be treated as a universal account of how all children perceive race. Nevertheless, the questions their work raised remain important because children do not develop their understanding of themselves in isolation. They encounter a world already populated with categories, expectations, hierarchies, and representations that communicate which characteristics are admired, which identities are normalised, and which differences are regarded as undesirable; much of which is mediated by the adults and authority figures within their environment.

Long before children acquire the language necessary to analyse these messages, they may already have encountered them through toys, television programmes, books, classroom interactions, advertising, and conversations among adults. Such encounters may not determine how every child will understand themselves or others, but they unquestionably contribute in both big and small ways to the cultural environment within which identity develops.

This is one reason the scene and storyline in Black-ish struck me as particularly revealing. A doll may appear to be a simple object intended for play, yet the world of imaginative possibility it offers is shaped by decisions made elsewhere. Someone determines which dolls will be manufactured, which characteristics they will possess, what stories will accompany them, and which populations are sufficiently important to warrant a broad range of representation. As a result, it may be argued that what appears on a store shelf is therefore connected to a much larger collection of social assumptions about identity, commercial value, and cultural legitimacy. The child encounters the finished object, often without seeing the decisions and historical conditions that made it possible. As a result, I believe it is worth asking what children learn when they repeatedly encounter a world in which some people appear capable of becoming almost anything, while others appear principally as representatives of a particular social problem or historical struggle. Equally important is the question of what children learn about those who are not represented at all.

These questions are not confined to toys, nor do they end with childhood. They follow us into the institutions through which societies educate their members, preserve their histories, distribute opportunities, and establish the boundaries of belonging. Here, I am reminded of something Dr. Asa G. Hilliard, III often reminded me: “To not allow people to begin our history with the enslavement. This is a lesson I took with me beyond the shores of Atlanta to that of Iowa where I encountered a noble proposition that “The world is my family.”

As I reflected on our family conversation, my thoughts returned to an experience from late 2009, as I was serving as Student Body President of the Global Student Council (GSC) at Maharishi International University (2009-2010).

During that period, an incident involving a faculty member’s use of a racial slur towards a Black student had brought questions of race and institutional responsibility into particularly sharp focus. Within that broader context, our university community engaged in a series of conversations concerning diversity, identity, and the relationship between our professed ideals and our everyday conduct with one expression of those efforts being The World Is MY Family: Diversity Lecture Series. After an initial meeting during the month of January to kickoff the event, the following month during the evening of 18 February 2010, I delivered the opening remarks for its second installment, titled The Matter of Race.

We began the evening with excerpts from two speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The first, often referred to as Around Midnight, recalled a period during the Montgomery Bus Boycott when King confronted intimidation, exhaustion, and the considerable burden of continuing a struggle whose outcome remained uncertain. The second was the conclusion of his final speech, delivered at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on 3 April 1968, the evening before his assassination.

I remember explaining why we had selected those particular recordings. Beyond their historical significance, they offered an opportunity to encounter aspects of Dr. King’s experience that were not always emphasised in more familiar accounts of the Civil Rights Movement. His public achievements were widely recognised, but the personal struggle, uncertainty, and moral resolve that accompanied them deserved attention as well.

Following Dr. King’s assassination on 4 April 1968, an elementary school teacher in Riceville, Iowa, named Jane Elliott developed what became known as the Blue-Eyed/Brown-Eyed exercise. Seeking to help her students understand discrimination, Elliott created a classroom experience in which children were treated differently according to an arbitrary physical characteristic. The exercise subsequently attracted both considerable attention and criticism, particularly concerning its methods and the ethical questions associated with inducing experiences of discrimination. And while we were unable to secure her in-person services due to our meager operating budget, after speaking with Ms. Elliott personally to explain the incident and our programming idea, we were not only able to introduce her work but we were authorized by Ms. Elliott herself to screen Stolen Eye as part of our effort to examine how seemingly ordinary human differences can become the basis for social hierarchies.

Looking back, I find the relationship between Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark research, Jane Elliott’s classroom exercise, and the fictional dolls in Black-ish particularly striking. Although they emerged from different historical circumstances and employed very different approaches, each directs our attention towards the meanings societies attach to human differences and the consequences those meanings can have for how people perceive and treat one another. Yet the significance of our gathering at MIU extended beyond an examination of race as a social phenomenon. We were members of a university community organised around Consciousness-Based Education, with a shared commitment to the development of human potential. Our philosophical orientation invited us to recognise a fundamental dimension of life that transcends the distinctions through which human beings ordinarily identify themselves and others. The question then before us was whether that understanding was adequately reflected in our conduct.

In my opening remarks, I encouraged those gathered to approach the evening with open minds and open hearts, and to carry whatever insights emerged into the ordinary activities of our lives. I asked that we demonstrate, through our actions, a commitment to making the world better for all its peoples. The emphasis was deliberate. Because the affirmation of universal human dignity is meaningful, but it does not automatically prevent us from reproducing inherited assumptions, prejudices, or institutional practices that diminish particular members of our communities. A philosophical commitment to the unity of life must find expression in the ways we encounter difference, exercise responsibility, and respond when our actions fall short of our ideals.

The Sanskrit expression Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, commonly translated as “The World Is My Family,” provided the organising theme for the series. It offered an expansive vision of human connectedness, one that encouraged us to look beyond the divisions of race, nationality, religion, and culture. Yet even then, I understood that the expression was not merely a description of an already accomplished social reality. It was also an invitation to examine the distance between the world we professed to recognise and the world we were actively creating. Because, if the world is indeed our family, how do we account for the circumstances in which some of its members must continually demonstrate that they deserve to belong? That question continues to roam around my mind all these years later and compel me to interrogate the stories we permit and the voices we heed. Because sixteen years have passed since that gathering, and the questions we explored remain deeply relevant. Indeed, recent developments in the United States have brought renewed attention to the relationship between representation, historical memory, institutional authority, and civic belonging.

Disputes over books in public schools, the interpretation of American history, the presentation of exhibitions within national museums, and the place of immigrants and U.S. numerical minority populations within the country’s evolving identity have become prominent features of public discourse. These controversies are not identical, nor should they be treated as though every participant shares the same intentions. Questions concerning educational appropriateness, parental authority, institutional independence, historical accuracy, and the responsibilities of public institutions deserve careful consideration on their own terms. Nevertheless, when viewed through the lens of symbolic annihilation, these developments invite a broader enquiry into the conditions under which particular histories and identities become visible, marginalised, or contested.

According to PEN America, nearly 12,000 instances of school book bans occurred during the 2025–2026 academic year, a figure encompassing various forms of restriction, including temporary removals pending review. As of this writing, the state of Texas has garnered the distinction of being the sole state with the highest number of bans numbering 8,001-9,000 with Florida landing in second place with 4,001-8,000 bans. The number does not mean that nearly 12,000 distinct books were permanently prohibited. It does, however, indicate the scale of ongoing disputes over what students should be permitted to encounter within educational settings.

Among the contested works are books addressing race, racism, sexuality, gender identity, and other aspects of human experience. Supporters of particular restrictions may understand their efforts as expressions of parental responsibility or concerns about age-appropriate materials, while critics argue that some restrictions diminish access to the experiences and histories of populations already underrepresented within educational institutions. For me, the question that piqued my interests is not whether every challenged book belongs in every classroom or library. Rather, it concerns the cumulative consequences of decisions that determine which experiences are available for examination and which are placed beyond the ordinary reach of students. Because a society’s understanding of itself is shaped not only by the information it possesses, but also by the information it makes available, the interpretations it legitimises, and the histories it chooses to preserve.

Subscribe now

The same questions arise when considering institutions such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Its significance lies not merely in preserving the experiences of a particular population, but in contributing to a more complete understanding of the United States. The histories of enslavement, emancipation, Reconstruction, segregation, resistance, cultural innovation, and civic transformation are not peripheral to the American experience. They are inseparable from the nation’s development. And to recognise these histories does not require diminishing the experiences or contributions of other populations. Rather, it requires acknowledging that the national story has always been more complex than any single group or perspective can adequately represent.

This is where the politics of being seen becomes especially consequential. When historical recognition is treated as a competition, the inclusion of one population’s experiences may be perceived as a threat to another population’s place within the collective narrative. Yet the expansion of historical understanding need not operate through displacement. A more complete account of the past can enlarge our shared understanding without requiring anyone’s erasure. The difficulty, however, seems to arise when recognition is understood not as an opportunity for greater accuracy and mutual understanding, but as a contest over whose experiences possess the authority to define the whole. Such debates often lead to some grappling with issues of visibility, changing demography, and belonging.

Within this milieu, and much to the chagrin of some, we cannot ignore that the United States is also experiencing continuing demographic and cultural change. Its population reflects an increasing mix of ancestries, religious traditions, languages, familial structures, and identities, developments that invite important conversations about national cohesion, immigration, civic responsibility, and the meanings associated with American identity. For some, these changes represent the continuing evolution of a society that has always been shaped by movement, encounter, and cultural exchange. For others, they raise concerns about the preservation of familiar traditions, institutions, or social arrangements.

Admittedly, I remain uncertain that these responses are uniform and thus reducible to a single explanation. Nevertheless, acknowledging the diversity of opinion among Americans of European ancestry should not obscure the persistence of racial attitudes that associate national identity, cultural legitimacy, and political authority with the preservation of white demographic dominance. I was reminded of this while reflecting upon an interview conducted by Eddie Huang with Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, for the television series Huang’s World. During their exchange, Taylor articulated his concern that demographic change would lead to the dispossession of white Americans, expressing the belief that the United States was fundamentally a nation built by and belonging to people of European ancestry. Huang challenged that understanding by drawing attention to the contributions of other populations and his own experience growing up in America as the child of Taiwanese immigrants. What made the exchange particularly revealing was not simply Taylor’s willingness to say the quiet part out loud, but the underlying assumption that the increasing presence of one population necessarily entails the displacement of another.

Although Taylor’s explicitly racial conception of national belonging cannot be attributed to white Americans generally, elements of the demographic anxiety he expresses extend beyond his particular ideological community. The extent of that overlap requires careful distinction, but it would be a mistake to regard such concerns as confined to a handful of individuals or anonymous online commentators. They appear in broader public debates about immigration, cultural identity, and the changing composition of the American population. The question, therefore, is not whether every person who expresses concern about demographic change embraces Taylor’s worldview, but how frequently assumptions about racial ownership and the legitimacy of belonging influence the ways people interpret that change. When the presence of fellow citizens is understood as a loss of territory, influence, or identity, diversity ceases to be regarded simply as a feature of an evolving society and becomes framed as a struggle over who possesses the right to define the nation.

That such anxieties extend beyond the explicitly racial nationalism articulated by Taylor is reflected in research conducted by the Pew Research Center. In an April 2024 survey of registered American voters, 39 per cent of Donald Trump supporters indicated that the declining proportion of white people within the United States was bad for society, compared with 10 per cent of Joe Biden supporters. Across the electorate, nearly one-quarter of registered voters expressed this concern, while 64 per cent regarded the demographic change as neither good nor bad. Interestingly, the same research found that 65 per cent of registered voters, including 64 per cent of white voters, considered the country’s racial, ethnic, and religious diversity a source of societal strength. For me, these findings reveal a more complicated landscape than one of simple acceptance or rejection of diversity. They suggest that an individual may recognise the benefits of a diverse society while simultaneously regarding a reduction in the relative demographic prominence of a historically dominant population as undesirable.

The distinction is consequential. The survey does not establish that those expressing concern about demographic change embrace Taylor’s worldview, nor does it reveal precisely what motivates each respondent. Nevertheless, it does demonstrate that apprehension about the declining proportion of white Americans is neither confined to the most outspoken proponents of racial nationalism nor merely an impression created by inflammatory exchanges on social media. Such attitudes are measurable within the broader electorate, raising important questions about the relationship between demographic change, perceived group status, and national belonging. When the increasing presence of one population is interpreted through the perceived loss of another’s position, the question of who belongs becomes entangled with the question of who has historically possessed the authority to define belonging itself.

At the same time, social identity research provides useful ways to understand how perceived changes in group status can influence attitudes and behaviour. When a person’s sense of belonging becomes closely associated with the historical prominence of a particular population, the increasing visibility of other groups may be experienced as a challenge to an established social position. This possibility deserves attention because it reveals how demographic change can become entangled with questions of legitimacy. Because a society may grow increasingly diverse while continuing to rely upon cultural narratives that implicitly associate authentic national belonging with particular racial, religious, or ancestral characteristics. Those who fall outside these expectations may find themselves formally included within the political community while encountering persistent suggestions that their presence is somehow conditional.

Such experiences need not involve explicit exclusion from citizenship or participation. They may emerge through repeated questions about where someone is really from, assumptions about religious or cultural compatibility, portrayals of certain populations as inherently threatening, or public narratives that treat some Americans as more representative of the nation than others. For me, the distinction between visibility and belonging becomes important here. Because a population can be highly visible in public discourse while being represented primarily as a problem to be managed, a threat to be contained, or an exception to an assumed national norm.

In such circumstances, greater visibility does not necessarily produce greater recognition. Indeed, increased visibility may become the very condition through which a group’s legitimacy is questioned. The dynamics of social media introduce another dimension to this phenomenon, as digital platforms permit narratives about particular populations to circulate rapidly, often reaching audiences far beyond those in which they originated. Research into automated accounts, commonly referred to as bots, and human-coordinated online activity has demonstrated their capacity to influence the tone and direction of public discourse, amplify divisive narratives, and elicit reactions from human participants. These effects may be compounded by platform algorithms that privilege engagement, particularly when emotionally charged or antagonistic content attracts greater attention and increased revenue for the associated platform. Consequently, the significance of such activity lies not merely in the number of automated accounts participating in a conversation, but in their capacity to shape the information environment within which real people form impressions, express opinions, and respond to one another. The resulting exchanges may be entirely human in their expression, even when the conditions contributing to their emergence have been artificially influenced.

What matters, however, for the present enquiry is the capacity of repeated and seemingly ubiquitous representations to shape the environment within which people interpret one another. A message encountered once may be dismissed. A message encountered repeatedly, across numerous platforms and institutional settings, may gradually acquire the appearance of common knowledge, even when its underlying assumptions remain unexamined. Which brings us back to the dolls.

The problem was not simply that Diane had been offered an unappealing toy. It was that the available representations communicated a restricted understanding of what Black identity could encompass. The same underlying concern arises whenever a society repeatedly presents particular populations through narrow, reductive, or threatening narratives. The question then is not merely whether people are seen. It is whether they are permitted to appear in the fullness of their humanity as opposed to functioning solely within the constructs they inherit.

Within my Seven Layers of Manifestation framework, I distinguish among Pure Consciousness, Universal and Natural Laws, the Phenomenal World, Human Consciousness, the Human-Derived World, Constructs, and Outcomes. The framework is philosophical and conceptual, intended to provide an orientation for examining relationships among consciousness, experience, and the worlds human beings create. And one of its central implications is that the social arrangements we encounter are not necessarily inevitable features of existence. Many are products of human interpretation, historical circumstance, collective agreement, and institutional development. Although they may become deeply embedded within the structures of everyday life, their origins remain patently distinguishable from the natural phenomena upon which human societies depend.

In the matter of the construct of race, keen observers will note a particularly consequential example. While human populations exhibit observable physical variation, the social meanings assigned to those variations have changed across historical periods and cultural settings. The categories through which societies classify people, and the privileges or disadvantages associated with those classifications, are shaped by human institutions and practices rather than dictated by biological difference alone. And we must not forget the fact that these arrangements are socially constructed does not render their consequences imaginary. On the contrary, constructs can acquire extraordinary material significance when incorporated into laws, educational systems, economic institutions, housing arrangements, and patterns of interpersonal behaviour. Simply stated, a social category may originate through human interpretation, yet its consequences can influence the opportunities available to individuals and communities for generations.

This is one reason I find the relationship between consciousness and social organisation worthy of continued exploration. Human beings inherit many of the categories through which they understand the world long before they develop the capacity to examine those categories critically. Through education, experience, and reflection, however, we may begin to recognise the distinction between the world as we have learned to interpret it and the world as it might otherwise be understood. Ever bearing in mind that such recognition does not automatically produce social transformation. Nor does an expanded philosophical understanding eliminate the need for institutional reform, historical analysis, or practical action. It can, however, create an opportunity to reconsider assumptions that have become so familiar that they are rarely questioned. Because we may not be responsible for originating every construct we inherit, but we participate in determining whether and how those constructs are reproduced. The question, then, is not simply what stories have been handed down to us. It is what responsibility we bear for the stories we continue to tell.

In revisiting my remarks at MIU in February 2010, I shared a quotation from an anonymous source that has remained with me over the years:

“The Temple in the Heart of Man is an unfinished Temple. We are building it every day.”

The passage went on to describe that construction as a process of developing moral insight, strengthening character, and broadening sympathy and understanding to include people of every race and creed.

Admittedly, I have returned to those words on numerous occasions, and they seem particularly relevant to the questions raised by our recent family conversation.

The image of an unfinished temple suggests that human development is not a condition we achieve once and thereafter possess without further effort. Rather, it is an ongoing process through which our understanding, conduct, and relationships may be refined. Moreover, the same is true of institutions and societies. Their commitments to dignity, fairness, and inclusion cannot be established solely through declarations of principle. Those commitments must find expression in the ordinary arrangements through which people encounter one another and participate in collective life.

An educational institution may affirm the value of every student while remaining unaware of practices that diminish particular members of its community. A society may celebrate its diversity while preserving narratives that treat some of its citizens as peripheral to the national experience. An individual may sincerely believe in the equality of all people while continuing to rely upon assumptions inherited from a social environment that has not been adequately examined.

These contradictions do not necessarily render our ideals meaningless. On the contrary. They reveal the work required to bring our actions into closer alignment with them. This is what I hoped to communicate to our university community in 2010, and it is what I continue to consider as a parent, scholar, and participant in the broader world. And such was on display when Chloë, Emerson, and I began discussing the dolls in Black-ish. For me, we were doing something quite ordinary. We were watching television together, laughing at the humour, and talking about the observations that emerged along the way. Yet the conversation also provided an opportunity to examine the social meanings embedded within a seemingly simple encounter.

I do not know precisely how they will remember that evening or which aspects of our discussion will remain with them as they grow older. What I do know, however, is that such conversations contribute to the intellectual and moral environment in which their understanding of the world continues to develop. And for Mina and me, that environment matters. Because the stories children encounter help inform the possibilities they imagine for themselves and others. The institutions they inhabit influence whose experiences they regard as significant. The examples set by adults contribute to their understanding of what it means to live alongside people whose histories, appearances, beliefs, and experiences differ from their own. Admittedly, none of these influences determines a person’s future. Yet taken together, they form part of the conditions within which individual and collective possibilities emerge.

Sixteen years ago, standing before a university community, I invited those gathered to consider how our understanding of human connectedness might be expressed through the lives we lead and the institutions we help shape. Today, sitting with my children, I find myself returning to much the same question, although from a different vantage point.

We cannot choose every story we inherit, nor can we control every representation that enters the world. But we can examine the assumptions those stories carry, interrogate the limitations they seek to impose, and contribute to a wider understanding of the people with whom we share this extraordinary human experience.

Perhaps the politics of being seen is ultimately about more than visibility. It concerns the conditions under which people are recognised as full participants in a shared world, with histories worthy of remembrance, experiences worthy of understanding, and possibilities that extend beyond the categories others have assigned to them. And in that sense, the temple remains unfinished. So we continue to build it through the choices we make, the stories we preserve, and the humanity we recognise in one another on an ongoing basis.

For me, the fundamental question is whether we are building a world in which more people can see themselves—and one another—with greater clarity, dignity, and possibility.

What say ye?

Suggested Practice — Examining the Stories We Encounter

Over the coming week, choose something familiar: a television programme, a children’s book, a news report, a museum exhibition, or even a collection of advertisements. Give particular attention to how different people and populations are represented.

Consider who occupies the centre of the story and who remains at its margins. Which individuals are portrayed as capable of complexity, achievement, vulnerability, and change? Which appear principally through a narrow collection of characteristics, historical experiences, or social problems? And whose presence, although relevant, may be missing altogether?

As you reflect, consider how your own understanding has been shaped by the stories you have encountered throughout your life. You need not arrive at an immediate judgement about the intentions of those responsible for a particular representation. Instead, begin by observing what the representation makes visible, what it leaves unexplored, and what assumptions it may invite you to accept.

If an opportunity arises, extend the enquiry through conversation with someone else, particularly a younger person whose understanding of the world is still taking shape. Listen as carefully as you speak. The purpose is not to prescribe what another person should think, but to cultivate the capacity to recognise more fully the humanity and possibilities of those with whom we share the world.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

^{This image is adapted from my presentation at the 2026 Conference on Complex Systems (CCS 2026), as the experience served as the foundation for this essay.}

Author’s Note

This essay emerged from an ordinary family experience that became the opening question of my presentation at the 2026 Conference on Complex Systems. Watching our second-youngest son, Tennyson Blake, recover from a minor injury to his hand prompted me to consider the remarkable organisation of living systems and the conditions under which healing becomes possible.

The discussion following my presentation extended that enquiry beyond biology into education, institutional functioning, sociopolitical arrangements, and the ways human beings interpret one another. In developing these reflections, I found myself returning to lessons from my time studying and traveling to Egypt with Dr Asa G. Hilliard III as part of one of his annual study tours, a recent interview with Dr Eddie Glaude, Jr, and my ongoing work on the Seven Layers of Manifestation and Adaptive Elegance.

The comparisons offered here are intended to illuminate a shared question about capacities and conditions, not to suggest that biological healing, learning, and social transformation operate through identical mechanisms. My desire is that the essay encourages us to examine more carefully the assumptions and arrangements through which we understand human potential, particularly when what we observe downstream may have been shaped by conditions established much further upstream.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

Recently, our second youngest son, Tennyson Blake, sustained a minor injury to his hand during one of our walks as a family. As I observed the natural process of healing, I found myself contemplating something that is at once entirely familiar and rather extraordinary. Without any deliberate instruction from him, his body had begun the work of repair. Beneath the visible surface of the injury, an intricate coordination of biological processes was unfolding, involving cellular communication, immune responses, tissue regeneration, and the countless interactions through which a living organism maintains and restores its functioning. What struck me was not simply that his hand would heal, but that the processes responsible for healing were already underway, operating through relationships and mechanisms that neither he nor I or his other family members needed to consciously direct.

As I continued ruminating over the thought of Tennyson’s hand healing over the coming days, my mind entertained an additional thought: there is something remarkable about how easily we accept such occurrences as ordinary as a result of the processes themselves receding into the background of daily life. We expect wounds to close, bruises to fade, and damaged tissues to recover, provided the circumstances are favourable. Modern biology has illuminated much of what makes these processes possible, and the continuing development of medical knowledge has transformed our ability to support them when natural recovery is insufficient. Yet familiarity with the mechanisms need not exhaust our curiosity about the organisation they exhibit. Each participating cell responds to local signals and conditions, while the collective activity of many such cells contributes to the functioning of an organism whose complexity far exceeds that of any individual component. The healing of a child’s hand thus becomes an occasion for considering a much larger question about the relationship between the parts of a living system and the organisation of the whole.

That question accompanied me into a presentation I delivered at the 2026 Conference on Complex Systems, where I participated in a symposium entitled Complexity, Asian Medicine, and the Intelligence of Healing. I began by inviting those in attendance to consider what, precisely, is doing the healing when a living system repairs itself. The question was not intended to displace the biological explanations upon which medicine depends. Rather, it was an invitation to consider what those explanations reveal about the coordinated activity of living systems and whether our understanding of such activity might benefit from a broader appreciation of complexity, relationships, and the conditions under which particular forms of organisation become possible.

Complexity science provides a useful perspective because it encourages us to examine systems whose behaviour cannot always be understood adequately by considering their constituent parts in isolation. Within such systems, interactions among components can generate patterns, relationships, and forms of organisation that are not readily apparent from an examination of any single element. The significance of this observation is not that complex systems necessarily possess subjective awareness, nor that their observable organisation demonstrates consciousness in some universal sense. The relationship between self-organisation, intelligence, and consciousness remains an important subject of scientific and philosophical enquiry, and the distinctions among these concepts deserve to be preserved. What complexity science does provide, however, is a way of attending to the relational character of processes that might otherwise appear to be the activities of separate and independent components.

As I considered the healing process through this perspective, my attention gradually shifted from the mechanisms responsible for repair to the conditions under which those mechanisms operate. A living organism may possess considerable capacity for recovery, yet that capacity can be constrained by infection, inadequate circulation, nutritional deficiencies, or other physiological complications.

Chronic inflammation, for example, can represent the persistence of biological activity that no longer serves the organism as it should. The distinction between organisation and healthy functioning is therefore essential, particularly when considering the relationship between self-organisation and healing.

This led me to reflect upon how frequently we direct our attention toward an outcome without adequately examining the circumstances that contribute to its emergence. For example, in medicine, effective intervention requires an understanding not only of the pathological process but also of the organism and environment within which that process occurs. The same treatment may produce different results depending upon a person’s physiological condition, medical history, and the interaction of numerous factors that influence recovery. Although these considerations are familiar within clinical practice, they also suggest a broader intellectual orientation in which the circumstances surrounding a system become part of our explanation of its behaviour.

Toward the conclusion of my presentation, I invited participants to consider what conditions might be preventing a living system from organising in ways that support healthier functioning. I had intended the question to encourage reflection upon healing, adaptation, and the possibilities that become available when we examine the relationships within which a system operates. Yet the discussion following the presentation revealed that its implications could extend considerably beyond the biological domain. As questions emerged from participants representing different disciplinary and experiential perspectives, I was reminded that the most interesting developments in an intellectual exchange often occur when an idea encounters a context for which it was not originally formulated.

One such moment arose during a question from a well-known scholar and author, whose contribution invited me to consider the relationship between consciousness, complexity, and the sociopolitical world. In responding, I found myself returning to an enquiry that has accompanied much of my work for years: How have we created the world that we inhabit? Although the question may initially appear straightforward, it becomes increasingly consequential when we begin to distinguish between the natural world within which human life unfolds and the social arrangements through which we organise our collective existence.

When born, we enter the Human-Derived World mid-sentence as it is a world already populated by institutions, expectations, cultural practices, economic relationships, political systems, and inherited categories of identity. Much of this world appears to possess a permanence that discourages us from questioning its origins. We learn to navigate its structures, to interpret our experiences through its categories, and to accommodate ourselves to its expectations, often without recognising the extent to which these arrangements are products of human activity. Yet the institutions and social distinctions that organise so much of our lives did not emerge independently of human beings. They developed through accumulated decisions, interpretations, conflicts, agreements, and practices that became established over time, sometimes acquiring an appearance of inevitability that obscures their constructed character.

During my response to the scholar, I suggested that the world we create is influenced by how we view ourselves and how we perceive those with whom we come into contact. Our understanding of another person is rarely formed in isolation from the categories, assumptions, and expectations we have inherited. We encounter individuals whose experiences may differ from our own, yet rather than approaching those differences as invitations to understanding, we sometimes interpret them through the language of otherness. In so doing, we can allow distinctions that might otherwise serve descriptive or practical purposes to become boundaries that limit our capacity to recognise a shared humanity.

The consequences of such perceptions do not remain confined to the individual mind. Our interpretations influence how we behave toward others, which relationships we cultivate, which opportunities we make available, and which arrangements we consider appropriate or legitimate. Over time, patterns of behaviour may become embedded in institutions, policies, and social expectations that influence the lives of people who had no part in their original formation. A distinction that begins as a way of describing the world can eventually become part of the structure through which the world is experienced, and a construct developed through human activity can acquire an authority that seems to exceed the people who sustain it.

This relationship between consciousness and the human-derived world occupies an important place within my Seven Layers of Manifestation framework. The model considers a progression from Pure Consciousness through Universal and Natural Laws and the Phenomenal World to Human Consciousness, the Human-Derived World, Constructs, and Outcomes. Within the portion of the framework most relevant to our sociopolitical experience, I am particularly interested in how human perception and interpretation contribute to the arrangements we establish, and how those arrangements influence the consequences we subsequently encounter. During the talk, I offered the framework as a conceptual orientation for examining these relationships, rather than as an experimentally established account of the causes of every social outcome.

The relationships themselves are more complicated than any simple progression might suggest. Once institutions and social arrangements have been established, they exert influences upon the individuals who inhabit them. A person born into a particular society encounters opportunities and constraints shaped by decisions made long before that person’s arrival, while the material resources, historical circumstances, and structures of power associated with those arrangements may persist regardless of individual intentions. Consciousness influences the human-derived world, but the human-derived world also influences the development and expression of consciousness. The relationship is reciprocal, unfolding through interactions that can reinforce established patterns or, under particular circumstances, contribute to their transformation.

This reciprocity helps explain why some of our most consequential social arrangements can appear to be natural features of existence. When a pattern has been reproduced across generations, its familiarity can become a substitute for justification, and the persistence of an institution can be mistaken for evidence that it could not have been otherwise. We may consequently devote enormous energy to managing the outcomes of an arrangement while giving comparatively little attention to the assumptions, incentives, and relationships that sustain it. To move upstream in our thinking is to question whether the conditions producing a particular outcome have been adequately examined and whether alternative arrangements might make different possibilities available. Perhaps with the release of the in-process manuscript titled The Seven Layers of Manifestation: Consciousness, Creation, and the Future of Being readers will gain ever more effective tools for navigating life in a more conscious manner.

As I was considering these ideas during the conference discussion, I recalled an interview I conducted many years ago with Dr. Coleman Barks for my programme Connecting the Dots in Atlanta. Dr. Barks shared a passage from Rumi that has remained with me. It reads:

The poem serves as an offering inviting us to imagine a field beyond the familiar divisions of wrongdoing and rightdoing, where the encounter between human beings is no longer confined by the distinctions through which they ordinarily understand one another. I have returned to that image repeatedly because it suggests the possibility of experiencing our common humanity without requiring every encounter to be mediated by the categories we have inherited.

I do not interpret Rumi’s invitation as a call to abandon moral discernment or to disregard the realities of injustice. Distinguishing harmful from beneficial actions remains essential to responsible human conduct, and there are circumstances in which the refusal to acknowledge a meaningful difference can itself become a form of harm. What I find compelling is the possibility that our categories, however useful or historically significant, need not exhaust our understanding of the people to whom they are applied. We can recognise the importance of identity, history, and social experience while remaining open to dimensions of human relationship that are not adequately captured by the labels through which we have learned to perceive one another.

The distinction becomes especially important when we consider the conditions under which people are invited to develop. An individual whose possibilities are continually interpreted through restrictive assumptions may encounter barriers that have little to do with that individual’s inherent capacities. Such barriers may be reinforced by individuals through expectations, institutional practices, access to resources, or the unequal distribution of opportunities. Although it would be a mistake to suggest that all difficulties originate in the surrounding environment, it would be equally mistaken to evaluate a person’s development without considering the circumstances within which that development has been expected to occur.

Subscribe now

Another connection that emerged during the conference discussion concerned something I learned years ago from the late Dr Asa G. Hilliard III. His work in education introduced me to the importance of instructional validity, which encourages us to examine the adequacy of the educational conditions provided to a learner before attributing an unsuccessful outcome solely to the learner’s abilities. The concept directs attention toward the relationship between the student, the instruction, and the circumstances under which learning is expected to take place. It challenges the assumption that a disappointing result necessarily demonstrates an enduring deficiency within the person being assessed. Indeed, there are instances, unquestionably, where it is the person providing the instruction and the expectations, be they high or low, they hold of the learner that impact the outcome. In another of Dr. Hilliard’s points, I have taken to calling “Hilliardisms—short for “Hilliard’s maxims—“If they don’t love your children, they cannot teach your children.”

Returning to the matter of assessment a person’s alleged deficiencies, I am reminded of an insightful example of this tendency as discussed during an interview with Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr on One54 Africa (13:58-17:35). Eddie was discussing the sometimes contentious comparisons drawn between African Americans whose families have lived in the United States for generations, including those who participated in the struggle for civil rights, and members of African and Caribbean immigrant communities. Such comparisons frequently emerge in conversations about educational attainment, economic mobility, and access to prestigious institutions, where differences in observable outcomes are sometimes interpreted as evidence of differences in cultural values, ambition, or personal responsibility. Eddie challenged the premise of these comparisons by drawing attention to the circumstances of the populations being examined. Those who have successfully migrated from one country to another do not necessarily represent a cross-section of the society they left behind. Their ability to migrate may reflect access to resources, educational opportunities, family networks, or other circumstances that distinguish them from people who remain in their countries of origin. Consequently, comparing the outcomes of immigrant populations with those of historically disadvantaged communities in the United States may involve comparing people whose material circumstances and opportunities were substantially different long before their outcomes became visible.

What particularly interested me was Eddie’s insistence that we examine the groups being compared before drawing conclusions about what their achievements or difficulties signify. A person who has been able to leave a resource-constrained environment may have more in common, in socioeconomic terms, with members of an established African American middle class than with individuals whose lives have unfolded under conditions of persistent deprivation. Conversely, people who remain in economically disadvantaged communities abroad may share important material circumstances with disadvantaged communities in the United States, even though their nationalities, cultural histories, and experiences differ. Because the implications extend beyond the particulars of migration. We frequently interpret disparities in achievement through the characteristics of the people involved, while giving insufficient attention to the processes through which opportunities are distributed and populations become differentiated. When the sociohistorical conditions surrounding two groups are not comparable, their outcomes cannot responsibly be treated as straightforward evidence of differences in effort, intelligence, or cultural worth. Even when similarities in socioeconomic background can be established, historical experiences, institutional arrangements, and other relevant circumstances may continue to influence the opportunities available to individuals.

This does not mean that cultural practices, individual decisions, or personal responsibility are irrelevant to human development. It means, instead, that their influence must be examined within the circumstances in which they operate, rather than invoked as explanations that render those circumstances invisible. Eddie’s argument reminded me that the categories through which we organise social comparisons can themselves become obstacles to understanding. We may believe we are evaluating differences in human capacity when, in fact, we have failed to establish whether the conditions under which those capacities were expressed were sufficiently comparable. Again, the thinking is too far downstream to be meaningful.

There is another dimension to Eddie’s observation that I find particularly consequential. When differences in outcomes are interpreted principally through ethnic or cultural categories, the resulting comparisons can contribute to divisions among communities whose experiences and material interests may overlap considerably. Competition for educational opportunities, economic resources, and institutional recognition can become understood as a conflict between groups rather than an occasion to examine the arrangements through which those opportunities are distributed. In this way, the interpretations we develop about one another can become part of the conditions that shape our subsequent relationships. What begins as an attempt to explain an outcome may contribute to the reproduction of another, particularly when the categories through which we understand our differences obscure the circumstances we share.

For me, this is where Dr. Hilliard’s point regarding instructional validity is particularly instructive. Just as we should hesitate to attribute a student’s difficulty solely to the student without examining the educational conditions provided, we should hesitate to interpret differences in collective outcomes without examining upstream considerations to include the historical, economic, and institutional arrangements within which those outcomes emerged. In both instances, the central concern is not to deny individual agency, but to avoid mistaking an outcome produced under particular conditions downstream for a definitive statement about what an individual or community is capable of becoming.

For me, the relevance of this perspective extends beyond the classroom, although the differences among educational, biological, and social systems should not be overlooked. A child’s wound does not heal according to the same mechanisms through which a student acquires knowledge, nor does an institution change through the same processes by which damaged tissue repairs itself. Nevertheless, these different domains can invite a similar form of enquiry concerning the relationship between a system’s capacities and the conditions within which those capacities are expressed. Before concluding that an individual or institution is incapable of functioning differently, we might ask whether the arrangements surrounding them an it, respectively, are supporting the forms of development we hope to observe.

I have often wondered how many of our assessments of human potential are actually assessments of performance under particular conditions. We observe what a person has accomplished within an existing set of circumstances and may be tempted to treat that outcome as a comprehensive measure of what the person is capable of becoming. Yet performance reflects more than individual capacity. It is influenced by access, expectations, relationships, resources, opportunities, and the accumulated effects of prior experiences. To recognise these influences is not to deny personal responsibility or the importance of sustained effort, but to place individual action within the wider relationships that help make particular outcomes possible.

I believe the same consideration applies to institutions. Organisations often become concerned with improving performance while preserving the very arrangements that may be constraining it. They introduce new expectations, establish additional measurements, or demand greater effort from the people within them, sometimes without sufficiently examining whether their underlying structures remain appropriate to the circumstances they face. An institution may possess talented and committed individuals yet organise their activities in ways that inhibit cooperation, discourage initiative, or prevent the development of more effective practices. Under such circumstances, the problem cannot be understood adequately by examining individual performance alone. An upstream analysis becomes essential.

This is where the language of complexity becomes particularly useful. The behaviour of an interconnected system emerges through relationships among its components, and efforts to alter one part of that system may produce consequences elsewhere. A policy intended to improve efficiency may inadvertently diminish trust, while an organisational change designed to increase accountability may discourage the very initiative upon which innovation depends. Conversely, a relatively modest alteration in relationships, incentives, or opportunities can sometimes create possibilities that were previously difficult to realise. The outcomes are not always predictable, and there is no guarantee that an intervention will produce the intended result, but the recognition of these interdependencies encourages a more careful examination of the conditions within which change is attempted.

During my response to the scholar, I also reflected upon the possibility that meaningful change can begin with an individual who recognises that the present arrangement of things is not the only arrangement imaginable. I recalled Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One and the enduring appeal of the idea that an individual can contribute to developments extending beyond the immediate circumstances of personal action. I have long been interested in the ways that one person’s willingness to think or act differently can influence others, particularly when those interactions create opportunities for new relationships and forms of cooperation.

Such an observation must be accompanied by an appreciation of the limits of individual agency. Human beings do not possess equal freedom to act, nor do they encounter the same consequences when challenging established arrangements. Material circumstances, institutional authority, political power, and historical inequalities influence what people can undertake and what risks they must bear. It would therefore be inadequate to suggest that a person can overcome every structural barrier simply by changing a belief or adopting a more optimistic perspective. The circumstances within which individuals act are real, and their effects cannot be dismissed through appeals to personal determination.

Yet recognising the significance of structural constraints need not lead us to conclude that individual participation is inconsequential. People remain involved in relationships and networks through which information, practices, and possibilities circulate. An individual may influence a colleague, a student, a neighbour, or a community, and something of that influence may be carried into other settings. Many such contributions will remain local, while others may encounter circumstances that allow them to become part of broader patterns of change via the ripple effect. Complexity science does not promise that a particular action will generate a particular result, but it does help us appreciate why the consequences of interaction cannot always be understood solely in terms of the intentions or capacities of an isolated individual.

I find this relationship between agency and circumstance especially compelling because it avoids two conclusions that, for me, seem equally unsatisfactory. We need not imagine ourselves as possessing complete control over the world we inhabit, nor must we regard ourselves as powerless before arrangements that have developed through human activity. Our participation takes place within conditions we have inherited, yet those conditions are also influenced by the continuing decisions, relationships, and practices of the people who inhabit them. We are shaped by our circumstances while participating, however unequally, in the processes through which circumstances may change.

These reflections connect with another area of my developing work, which I have described as Adaptive Elegance. The framework concerns our capacity to navigate changing circumstances with increasing flexibility, coherence, and effectiveness. It emerged from an interest in understanding why some individuals appear able to respond constructively to transitions that others experience as deeply destabilising, and how such capacities might be examined and cultivated responsibly. The associated measurement instrument remains under development, and the framework should not be mistaken for an established clinical assessment or a validated explanation of every dimension of human adaptation.

What interests me most about Adaptive Elegance in the present context is the relationship between our capacity to adapt and the conditions to which we are adapting. Adaptation is often celebrated as an unqualified virtue, particularly in environments characterised by uncertainty and rapid change. Yet an individual may become highly skilled at accommodating circumstances that remain harmful, while an organisation may demonstrate impressive stability through practices that constrain the development of the people it serves. The ability to adjust to prevailing conditions does not, by itself, establish that those conditions are desirable or that accommodation represents the most constructive response. For this reason, I have come to regard orientation as inseparable from the question of adaptation. Because flexibility becomes more meaningful when it is accompanied by an appreciation of what deserves to be preserved, what requires reconsideration, and what possibilities ought to guide our actions. Coherence involves more than maintaining consistency in the face of change; it also concerns the relationship between our values, our understanding, and the decisions through which those commitments become expressed. Effectiveness, likewise, must be considered in relation to the purposes being pursued, because an individual or institution can become extraordinarily effective at producing outcomes whose consequences have not been adequately examined.

The cultivation of adaptive capacity therefore cannot be separated entirely from the examination of our environments. We may help individuals develop greater flexibility and resilience, but if the institutions within which they live continually reproduce unnecessary constraints, the benefits of those individual capacities may remain limited. Conversely, supportive conditions may allow people to express abilities that were previously obscured or constrained. The relationship is not a simple matter of choosing between individual development and institutional reform. Each influences the other, and a more complete understanding of human flourishing requires attention to both.

This brings me back to Tennyson and the healing of his hand. What began as an ordinary family experience became an occasion for considering the extraordinary coordination of living systems, and that consideration eventually opened into a broader enquiry about the relationships through which human beings organise their collective existence. The distance between biological healing and sociopolitical transformation is considerable, and I am not, nor would I ever suggest that the mechanisms governing one can simply be transferred to the other. Yet both invite us to consider how capacities are expressed within particular conditions and how those conditions may support, constrain, or redirect the possibilities before us.

Perhaps one of our more persistent habits is to treat the present functioning of a person, institution, or society as though it provides a complete account of what that system is capable of becoming. We observe an outcome, develop an explanation for its occurrence, and sometimes allow that explanation to harden into an expectation about the future. In so doing, we may overlook the extent to which the outcome reflects circumstances that are themselves capable of change. The conditions that have contributed to a particular pattern may be deeply established, and altering them may require sustained effort, collective action, and difficult choices, but their persistence does not necessarily establish their permanence. The possibility of change should not, therefore, be confused with a guarantee of improvement. Some injuries require intervention that natural processes alone cannot provide, and some institutional arrangements resist reform even when their limitations are widely recognised. Social transformation can generate unintended consequences, and the recognition that a system is human-derived does not mean that its difficulties can be resolved through individual intention alone. Indeed, an appreciation of complexity should make us more attentive to the limits of prediction and to the importance of examining whether our efforts are producing the effects we hope to achieve.

Nevertheless, uncertainty need not diminish our responsibility to investigate the conditions within which we live. If our institutions, expectations, and social relationships have been shaped through human thought and activity, then their continued existence invites not only accommodation but also reflection. We can examine the assumptions that inform them, the opportunities they make available, the possibilities they constrain, and the consequences they produce for those whose lives unfold within their reach. Such examination may reveal circumstances in which preservation is appropriate, others in which refinement is needed, and still others in which more substantial transformation becomes fundamentally necessary.

The longer I live and examine the social world through the lenses of History, Sociology, Consciousness, and Human Potential, I am increasingly persuaded that meaningful progress requires a willingness to move upstream in our thinking. Rather than attending exclusively to the outcomes we hope to change, we must become curious about the relationships and arrangements through which those outcomes emerge. Rather than assuming that present limitations necessarily define enduring capacities, we must examine whether different conditions might permit different forms of functioning. And rather than treating the human-derived world as something wholly separate from ourselves, we must recognise our continuing participation, conscious or otherwise, in its development and maintenance, even as we acknowledge the considerable differences in the power and opportunities available to each of us.

The question with which I concluded my conference presentation continues to resonate: What conditions might be preventing a living system from organising in ways that support healthier functioning? Following the exchange with the scholar, I find myself considering a companion enquiry concerning the conditions we are helping to create through the ways we perceive ourselves, encounter one another, and organise our shared world. The relationship between these questions seems particularly important because it reminds us that we are not merely observers of the environments within which human development occurs. We are also participants in relationships and institutions that influence what becomes possible for others.

Perhaps, then, the work before us is not simply to become more capable of navigating the world as it presently exists, but to develop a clearer understanding of how that world has been constructed and how our participation might contribute to its continued refinement. Such work requires humility about the limits of our knowledge, discernment concerning the consequences of our actions, and a willingness to reconsider arrangements that familiarity has made appear inevitable. It also requires an appreciation that meaningful transformation is seldom the achievement of an isolated individual, even when an individual’s action provides an important beginning.

When I think again about Tennyson’s hand, I am reminded that healing is not merely an event we observe after an injury has occurred. It is a process unfolding through relationships, capacities, and conditions whose interactions make recovery possible. Admittedly, the larger human questions are more complicated, but they invite a similar attentiveness to what supports development and what may prevent it.

In the final analysis, we cannot determine every outcome, nor can we remove every constraint. We can, however, become more conscious of the conditions we inherit, the arrangements we sustain, and the possibilities our actions make available to those who come after us. In that continuing relationship between what has been created and what remains possible, I believe we encounter an important dimension of our responsibility to one another.

And perhaps it is there, in the willingness to reconsider not only what we have become but also the conditions through which becoming occurs, that a more enduring form of progress begins.

Suggested Practice — Moving Upstream

Consider a situation in your life, workplace, family, or community in which an outcome has become a recurring source of frustration. Perhaps someone is struggling to learn, an organisation is failing to meet its objectives, or a relationship has settled into an unproductive pattern.

Before focusing exclusively on what appears to be going wrong, consider the conditions under which the outcome is occurring. What expectations, assumptions, relationships, resources, or institutional arrangements might be contributing to the present situation? Are you evaluating someone’s capacity based primarily upon their performance under circumstances that may themselves warrant examination?

Now consider your own participation in those conditions. Which arrangements are beyond your immediate influence, and which might be open to reconsideration through your decisions, conversations, or actions?

Rather than attempting to change everything at once, identify one constructive adjustment that could make a different outcome more possible. Allow sufficient time to observe its effects, remaining open to the possibility that your initial understanding may need refinement.

The invitation is not to assign blame or assume that every difficulty can be resolved through individual action. It is to cultivate the habit of examining the conditions that contribute to what we observe before concluding that the outcome represents the limit of what is possible.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

This essay emerged from years of conversations with individuals whose relationships with institutions they once cherished had become complicated, strained, or unexpectedly severed. Although their experiences differed, I was struck by how frequently institutional belonging had become intertwined with personal identity, purpose, and the pursuit of ideals that extended far beyond the institutions themselves.

My intention is neither to diminish the importance of institutions nor to suggest that their authority is inherently illegitimate. Having devoted much of my life to scholarship, teaching, and the exploration of Consciousness, I recognise the extraordinary value of organisations that preserve knowledge, cultivate communities, and transmit practices across generations. Yet my training in history and sociology has also encouraged me to distinguish between the structures human beings create and the realities those structures seek to serve.

What interests me most is what becomes possible when that distinction is understood more clearly, particularly for individuals navigating the loss of institutional recognition or reconsidering their relationship with a community that once provided meaning and direction. Such transitions can be painful, and their consequences should not be minimised. Nevertheless, they need not represent the conclusion of one’s development, service, or contribution.

Perhaps the question is not simply whether an institution has continued to recognise us, but whether we have continued to recognise the possibilities within ourselves.

— Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

For some time now, a question has been occupying my thinking. It did not arrive fully formed, nor did it begin as an abstract philosophical enquiry. Rather, it emerged gradually through conversations with friends, colleagues, fellow scholars, and practitioners of various philosophical and spiritual traditions who had devoted meaningful portions of their lives to institutions organised around ideals they considered larger than themselves.

Their experiences differed considerably, yet certain patterns appeared with enough regularity to invite closer examination. Some described losing positions or responsibilities after questioning decisions made by institutional leadership. Others spoke of finding themselves increasingly marginalised after advocating greater transparency, expressing unconventional perspectives, or challenging assumptions that had gradually acquired the status of unquestionable truth. Still others recounted being excluded from communities they had faithfully served because they explored another tradition, attended an unfamiliar gathering, maintained relationships with individuals considered undesirable, or otherwise departed from expectations that were not always clearly articulated. Others described being “sidelined” under circumstances that brought to mind a dynamic Robert Greene identifies in The 48 Laws of Power: “Never Outshine the Master.”

For some, the consequences were primarily social. Friendships became strained, invitations ceased, and familiar relationships grew unexpectedly distant. For others, the repercussions extended into professional life, affecting livelihoods, reputations, opportunities, and access to communities in which they had invested years of service. In several instances, the individuals involved had not abandoned the ideals that originally attracted them to their respective institutions. They had simply begun distinguishing those ideals from the people and organisational structures claiming authority over them.

As I listened, I found myself recalling the work of my colleague Faye V. Harrison, PhD, particularly her scholarship on decolonising anthropology and the possibilities of intellectual liberation. Her work invites us to examine how systems of authority can become embedded within the very processes through which knowledge is produced, legitimised, and ultimately transmitted. Although the contexts are different, I began wondering whether a related enquiry might be useful in examining spiritual and philosophical institutions.

What might it mean to decolonise spirituality?

I do not use the expression to suggest that all forms of institutional spiritual authority are equivalent to historical colonialism, with its particular structures of domination, dispossession, and exploitation. Instead, I am interested in whether some communities have developed habits of treating knowledge, experience, and access to the sacred as possessions controlled by an institutional centre. When that occurs, a person may gradually be encouraged to believe that the institution is not merely a steward of a tradition but the necessary intermediary between the individual and the reality toward which the tradition points. That possibility led me toward a question that initially struck me as almost absurd: How does one ostracise someone from Consciousness?

The more I considered it, the more revealing the question became.

Certainly, an organisation can exclude someone from its membership. That is neither mysterious nor necessarily improper because human institutions establish standards, create rules, confer authority, determine membership, control property, and decide who may or may not act in their names. Universities may dismiss professors, corporations may terminate employees, religious communities may excommunicate members, fraternities may revoke membership, and professional associations may withdraw credentials. Whether any particular decision is appropriate depends upon circumstances that deserve examination on their own merits.

Institutions must possess some capacity to establish and maintain boundaries. Without such capacity, the preservation of a tradition, methodology, or collective purpose would become exceedingly difficult. The difficulty, however, does not arise merely because an organisation exercises authority. It arises when the scope of that authority becomes confused with the scope of the reality the organisation exists to serve.

A university may dismiss a scholar, but it cannot expel that person from knowledge. A scientific institution may reject a researcher without thereby removing the researcher from reality. A religious community may revoke membership, but the administrative act cannot, by itself, determine the individual’s relationship with the sacred. A fraternal organisation may withdraw recognition or leadership duties without possessing the authority to revoke virtue, just as a court may render judgments in pursuit of justice without thereby owning justice itself.

The distinction becomes especially interesting when we consider institutions dedicated to inner development. A community may legitimately determine who teaches a particular method under its auspices, participates in its programmes, or enters its facilities. It may possess sound reasons for preserving the integrity of its instruction and protecting those who seek its services. But if Consciousness is understood as fundamental to human experience—or, within certain philosophical traditions, fundamental to existence itself—then institutional authority necessarily encounters a boundary beyond which it cannot proceed.

Think of it this way, an organisation may prohibit a person from entering a particular contemplative space, but it cannot prohibit awareness. It may withdraw a title or credential without withdrawing the individual’s capacity for experience, understanding, or growth. It may even determine who belongs within its administrative boundaries, but it cannot determine who belongs to existence itself. And once that distinction becomes clear, the original question begins to change and becomes: At what point does an institution confuse stewardship with ownership?

My training in sociology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels has long encouraged me to examine institutions not merely through their stated purposes but through the relationships, expectations, incentives, and structures of authority that develop within them. Organisations are human creations, and human creations inevitably reflect something of the capacities, limitations, aspirations, and contradictions of their creators. Even institutions established around the most expansive ideals must operate through comparatively ordinary mechanisms: budgets, committees, policies, personalities, hierarchies, procedures, and decisions made by people who possess differing levels of information, wisdom, experience, and influence.

None of this makes institutions inherently suspect. Indeed, they are among humanity’s most remarkable accomplishments. Institutions permit knowledge to survive the people who discovered it. They allow traditions to cross generations, methodologies to be refined, communities to coordinate their efforts, and valuable practices to remain available long after their original teachers have departed. Without such structures, much of what humanity has learned would repeatedly disappear with those who learned it. The difficulty, however, begins when the institution established to preserve something gradually comes to regard itself as possessing the thing it preserves.

A university exists to steward knowledge, but knowledge exceeds the university. Courts operate in service to justice, but justice is not contained within a courthouse. Scientific institutions organise enquiry into reality, but reality does not depend upon institutional consensus for its existence. Religious communities preserve teachings, rituals, texts, practices, and relationships through which human beings approach the sacred, but no administrative structure can plausibly contain the totality of that toward which those practices themselves merely point.

Similarly, an organisation dedicated to meditation or human development may have a legitimate responsibility to protect the integrity of a particular technique or tradition. I understand the importance of that responsibility through my own years of teaching and scholarship. Methodologies must be preserved with care because seemingly minor alterations can eventually change the nature of what is being transmitted. Precision, continuity, and responsible instruction are not trivial concerns. They are essential dimensions of faithful stewardship. Yet protecting the integrity of a path is not the same as owning the destination toward which the path points.

This distinction matters because the relationship between an institution and its members can change almost imperceptibly. What begins as a community organised around a shared purpose may gradually become a structure in which loyalty to the organisation is treated as evidence of loyalty to the purpose itself. Questions about policy may be interpreted as challenges to the teaching, disagreement with leadership may be regarded as evidence of insufficient understanding, and exploration beyond familiar boundaries may be understood as disloyalty rather than curiosity. In such circumstances, the institution’s preservation can become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the preservation of the authority exercised by those who lead it.

The process need not arise from deliberate malice. Institutional cultures develop through countless interactions, many of which are shaped by sincere intentions. Leaders may genuinely believe they are protecting something precious. Members may fear that allowing too much variation or innovation will weaken a tradition they cherish. Communities may become accustomed to practices that once served an important purpose but have gradually outlived the circumstances that justified them. Over time, habits become expectations, expectations become norms, and norms acquire a moral significance that can make questioning them appear threatening. For example, an institution may begin defending arrangements that are historically contingent as though they were inseparable from the enduring reality it was created to serve. As a result, the map becomes confused with the territory, and the steward begins behaving as though it possesses the destination when, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

Within my work surrounding the Seven Layers of Manifestation, this confusion occupies a particularly important place. Institutions belong to what I describe as the Human-Derived World. They arise through human consciousness interacting with the phenomenal world and with other human beings. Universities, governments, corporations, religious organisations, fraternal orders, professional associations, foundations, movements, policies, offices, titles, hierarchies, and systems of governance are extraordinary human creations. They allow societies to organise themselves, preserve knowledge, coordinate resources, and pursue purposes that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for isolated individuals to accomplish. Yet, in the final analysis, they remain human-derived.

Subscribe now

Do not confuse my meaning. That observation is not intended to diminish their value. It is, instead, intended to locate them within a larger understanding of reality.

Location matters because human beings frequently mistake the structures through which they encounter something for the thing itself. We may become so accustomed to approaching knowledge through universities that we begin treating credentials as synonymous with understanding, become so accustomed to encountering justice through legal institutions that we overlook the distinction between what is lawful and what is just, and become so accustomed to approaching the sacred through particular traditions that we begin confusing institutional belonging with spiritual development.

The Seven Layers of Manifestation invite us to examine these distinctions more carefully. The Human-Derived World contains the arrangements through which people organise their lives, while the deeper realities toward which many of those arrangements point are not necessarily products of the arrangements themselves. An institution may orient itself toward Consciousness, preserve teachings concerning Consciousness, or transmit practices through which individuals explore subtler dimensions of experience. It may even create beautiful spaces, cultivate meaningful communities, and support generations of practitioners in their development. But none of those accomplishments transforms the institution into Consciousness itself.

Recognising this distinction does not require one to reject the institution. Nor does it diminish the gratitude one may feel toward the people through whom valuable knowledge was received. It simply permits a more accurate understanding of the relationship itself. The institution may have provided the introduction, the instruction, the community, and the conditions through which a person encountered something deeply meaningful. Those contributions deserve recognition. But gratitude for the steward need not become permanent dependence upon the steward’s approval. This becomes particularly important when institutional relationships change.

For someone who has spent years within a particular community, exclusion can produce a form of disorientation that outsiders may struggle to understand. The institution may have provided not merely activities or professional opportunities but a framework through which the individual understood personal identity, relationships, service, and ultimately purpose. Friendships may have developed over decades. Family relationships may be intertwined with membership. Professional credentials, financial stability, and social standing may all depend upon continued institutional recognition.

However, when those connections are disrupted, the experience may feel less like leaving an organisation and more like losing an entire world. And we should not trivialise that loss. Nor should we romanticise exclusion as though suffering automatically produces wisdom. Some institutional decisions are justified; others are not. Some departures are freely chosen; others occur under circumstances that involve coercion, retaliation, discrimination, or serious failures of governance. And understanding the distinction between stewardship and ownership does not eliminate the need for accountability, nor does it require individuals to abandon legitimate efforts to obtain redress. But it does offer another possibility alongside those efforts: It allows a person to begin distinguishing what has been lost from what remains.

A community may withdraw its recognition without withdrawing the knowledge a person has acquired. A professional title may disappear without erasing the capacities developed through years of practice. Access to a familiar gathering place may end without extinguishing the relationships, values, or aspirations that originally made the place meaningful. Even when an institution’s actions produce genuine harm, those actions do not necessarily possess the authority to determine the remainder of an individual’s life.

This is where I believe the distinction becomes more than philosophical. It becomes a question of agency and brings to mind something my Dad conveyed to my siblings and me: “Material things may be taken away or lost to the ashes of time. Yet all that you learn can never be taken from you as it is safely deposited within your mind. Therefore, guard the mind above all because material things can be replaced if lost.”

What happens when a person who has devoted years to an institution begins recognising that the institution was never the ultimate destination? What becomes possible when belonging is no longer understood exclusively through membership, when purpose is no longer dependent upon a particular title, and when the pursuit of knowledge or spiritual development is no longer imagined to terminate at an administrative boundary?

Admittedly, the answers will differ because human circumstances differ. Some people may find renewed purpose within the same tradition through another community. Others may discover that their development requires exploring previously unfamiliar approaches. Still others may retain deep affection for the knowledge they received while recognising that the organisation through which they encountered it no longer provides the conditions necessary for their continued growth. And none of those possibilities necessarily represents abandonment. Because, sometimes fidelity to a principle requires reconsidering one’s relationship with the institution established to preserve it. And sometimes the most important transition is not leaving an organisation but ceasing to believe that one’s future depends upon its permission.

That transition can be difficult because institutions do more than organise activity. They help organise identity. When someone has spent years describing themselves through a particular membership, title, profession, affiliation, or community, the loss of that designation can feel like the loss of a portion of the self. Here, I am reminded of a recent GBH News interview with former Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, who reflected upon the disorientation she experienced after losing her position and tenure at Harvard. When asked whether the experience felt like losing her identity, she explained how thoroughly her professional self-understanding had become intertwined with being a Harvard professor. Eventually, she found herself confronting a question that extended well beyond her particular circumstances: “And so what am I?”

Noting Dr. Gino’s self-assessment, what particularly interested me was something she shared later in the conversation. Reflecting upon what she might teach students differently were she to return to the classroom, Gino suggested that she would place greater emphasis upon preparing them for moments when established professional identities and circumstances are unexpectedly disrupted. Her experience had brought into sharper focus the distinction between what a person does, the institution with which that person is associated, and the deeper capacities that remain when those arrangements change.

Whatever conclusions one reaches regarding the disputed circumstances surrounding her dismissal, that distinction deserves consideration. Institutional recognition can become deeply intertwined with identity, but identity remains more expansive than the titles, affiliations, and categories through which we have learned to express it.

Because a person who has taught remains capable of learning and sharing knowledge. Someone who has served remains capable of service. A scholar remains capable of enquiry. A practitioner remains capable of practice. A person who has contributed to a community may discover other communities in which those contributions are welcomed and valued.

Admittedly, the work of rebuilding may require patience, resources, supportive relationships, and an honest acknowledgement of what has occurred. It may also require developing boundaries that were previously absent and reconsidering assumptions about authority, belonging, and personal responsibility. None of these changes is necessarily easy, and there is no obligation to describe a painful experience as a blessing merely because something constructive eventually emerges from it. Nevertheless, the possibility remains that life beyond an institutional boundary may contain more than loss. It may, in truth, contain renewal.

Indeed, some individuals may eventually discover that the capacities developed during their years of institutional service become the very resources through which they create something new and more engaging. Their knowledge may find a different audience, experience may inform more responsive forms of leadership, and their acquired understanding of institutional limitations may help them build communities in which disagreement is less threatening and authority is exercised with greater humility. And in that sense, the departure from one structure need not represent the conclusion of a person’s contribution. It may become the beginning of a different expression of it.

This possibility does not absolve institutions of responsibility for their conduct. Rather, it prevents institutional conduct from acquiring more authority over an individual’s future than it deserves. And it , therefore, returns us to the importance of stewardship.

Every enduring institution must negotiate the tension between continuity and change. Traditions cannot survive if everything is treated as negotiable, yet they may become increasingly brittle when nothing can be questioned. Leadership must preserve standards, but preservation can become indistinguishable from control when disagreement is automatically interpreted as disloyalty. Communities need boundaries, yes, but boundaries established to protect a shared purpose can become barriers that instead protect institutional power from scrutiny. Therefore, the challenge is not to eliminate authority but to exercise it in proportion to what has actually been entrusted to the institution.

A steward receives something valuable without confusing responsibility with possession. The steward protects what has been entrusted, preserves its integrity, makes it available where appropriate, and prepares it for those who will come afterward. Faithful stewardship requires both discernment and humility because the steward understands that the responsibility may be temporary even when the thing being stewarded is enduring.

Ownership, on the other hand, makes a different claim. It implies that the thing itself belongs to the institution and that continued access to its value depends upon continued allegiance to those exercising authority.

The difference can appear subtle in ordinary institutional life, particularly when organisations have operated successfully for generations. Yet the consequences become visible when individuals question authority, explore unfamiliar perspectives, or find themselves outside the institution’s recognised boundaries.

Does the institution respond as a steward seeking to preserve the integrity of something larger than itself, or as an owner defending possession of something it believes belongs exclusively to it?

Perhaps the most trustworthy institutions are those capable of asking themselves that question without becoming defensive. Because their strength lies not in making themselves indispensable but in remaining faithful to the purposes that justified their creation. They understand that a university serves learning, that a court serves justice, that a scientific institution serves enquiry, and that a spiritual community serves the development of those who seek its guidance. They recognise that the measure of successful stewardship cannot be reduced to institutional survival, membership totals, financial resources, or the unquestioning allegiance of those within their boundaries. It must also include what becomes possible for the people and purposes they exist to serve.

Undoubtedly, that understanding may require a form of institutional humility that is difficult to sustain. Because it asks leaders to recognise that their authority is real but limited, that their traditions may be valuable without being exhaustive, and that the people entrusted to their care possess lives and possibilities extending beyond the institution’s jurisdiction.

It also asks individuals to cultivate a similar discernment. Institutions can provide extraordinary opportunities for learning, service, friendship, and development, but they should not become the sole measure of one’s worth or the ultimate source of one’s purpose. We can honour what institutions have given us without surrendering our capacity to evaluate them, remain grateful for teachers without imagining that their authority extends into every dimension of our lives, and we can recognise the value of belonging while remembering that belonging to something larger than ourselves need not mean becoming smaller within it.

Perhaps that is the deeper meaning of the question that originally occupied my thinking: How does one ostracise someone from Consciousness?

The answer, it seems to me, is that one cannot. One may exclude a person from a particular institution, community, building, or role, sometimes with justification and sometimes without. Such actions may carry significant consequences and deserve serious consideration. But the institution’s authority remains confined to the domain over which it possesses legitimate responsibility. It does not extend indefinitely into the individual’s capacity for awareness, understanding, growth, service, or even becoming.

And once we recognise that boundary, another question emerges, one that applies not only to institutions but to those whose relationships with them have changed: What might become possible when we cease confusing the steward with the destination?

For some, the answer may be a renewed relationship with a familiar tradition. For others, it may involve building a new community, pursuing knowledge through different channels, or discovering that the purpose which once found expression through a particular institution can continue to unfold beyond it. What matters is not that every departure produces a new beginning, but that institutional exclusion need not be granted the authority to determine whether a new beginning is possible.

The world remains larger than the organisation, knowledge remains larger than the university, justice remains larger than the court, and the sacred, however one understands it, remains larger than the structures through which human beings seek to approach it. Perhaps, then, the responsibility of every institution is to remember that distinction, while the opportunity available to each of us is to live in recognition of it.

We may cherish the paths that have carried us, honour those who helped us travel them, and remain grateful for the knowledge encountered along the way. We may also recognise when a path no longer provides the conditions necessary for continued growth and choose to move forward without allowing that recognition to become a rejection of everything that came before. Because the destination was never the building, the title, the membership, or the approval of those who administered them. Those things may have mattered greatly, and some may continue to matter for years to come. But they were never the entirety of what made the journey worthwhile.

As I have come to understand it, after years of training in history, sociology, Consciousness, and human potential, paths may indeed require stewards. Destinations, however, never require owners.

Suggested Practice: Distinguishing the Path from the Destination

Set aside a few silent moments to reflect upon an institution, community, tradition, or organisation that has played a meaningful role in your development. It might be a university, religious community, professional association, fraternal order, workplace, or another setting through which you encountered knowledge, friendship, purpose, or opportunities for service.

Consider what originally attracted you to that community. Was it the pursuit of knowledge, a desire to serve, the experience of belonging, an opportunity for professional development, or the exploration of something you considered larger than yourself? Then reflect upon the distinction between those aspirations and the institutional structures through which you pursued them.

Ask yourself: What has this institution helped me develop that remains part of who I am, regardless of my present relationship with it?

If your relationship with the institution has fundamentally changed, allow yourself to acknowledge what may have been lost without dismissing its significance. At the same time, consider what remains available to you through the knowledge, relationships, capacities, and understanding you have cultivated. If, however, your relationship remains positive, reflect upon how you might honour its contributions while continuing to exercise independent judgement and remain open to growth.

Finally, consider whether there is some aspect of your development, service, or purpose that you have been waiting for an institution—or someone within it—to authorise.

You need not make an immediate decision or change your circumstances. Simply consider the possibility that the path through which you arrived at your present understanding may not define the limits of where you can go.

As you return to your day, carry one question with you:

Am I honouring the path that has helped me grow, or have I begun mistaking it for the destination?

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

^{Steven Bartlett and guests discuss the future of artificial intelligence on The Diary of a CEO. Featuring Ed Zitron, Roman Yampolskiy, Nate Soares, and Andrew McAfee. Image: Screenshot from The Diary of a CEO.}

Author’s Note

This essay emerged from my reflections on two conversations about artificial intelligence: a spirited exchange among four experts on The Diary of a CEO and a subsequent discussion featuring former President Barack Obama. What began as curiosity about the differing perspectives represented in these conversations gradually became an enquiry into something larger: the relationship between knowledge, power, human development, and consciousness.

I found myself returning to Frederick Douglass and the transformative implications of literacy, particularly for those historically denied access to knowledge and the institutions through which it is exercised. Artificial intelligence presents new risks, certainly, but it also invites us to reconsider who has access to sophisticated intellectual capabilities and who gets to participate in shaping our collective future.

My intention is not to dismiss legitimate concerns about artificial intelligence, but to expand the conversation beyond what the technology might do to us towards what its development may reveal about us. Ultimately, the question of alignment may begin not with the machines we create, but with the consciousness, values, and intentions of those creating them.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

I began watching a recent Diary of a CEO discussion on artificial intelligence expecting to hear another debate about where the technology might be taking us. The conversation brought together four men who approach the question from markedly different directions: technology critic Ed Zitron, computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, Machine Intelligence Research Institute president Nate Soares, and MIT researcher Andrew McAfee. Steven Bartlett served as host, moving the conversation between immediate harms, extraordinary possibilities, and the possibility that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence might eventually pose an existential threat to humanity. Before long, however, I found myself thinking about something other than artificial intelligence. I was thinking about us.

More specifically, I was thinking about who gets to imagine humanity’s technological future, what assumptions we carry into that imagining, and whether some of our deepest fears about artificial intelligence reveal as much about human beings as they do about the machines we are building.

One of the first things that caught my attention was the composition of the panel. Bartlett himself is a cross-cultural Black man, but the four people assembled as the expert voices were white men. That fact does not invalidate their expertise, nor does identity determine the quality of an argument. Each participant brought a substantive perspective to the discussion, and the disagreements among them were considerable. Yet expertise and standpoint are not identical. A group can contain genuine intellectual diversity while still representing a relatively narrow portion of human experience.

That distinction became especially noticeable when Zitron, arguing that speculative fears about future artificial intelligence were distracting attention from harms occurring in the present, referred to “black neighborhoods being poisoned with gas turbines.” His concern was understandable. Environmental burdens are not distributed equally, as we learn from Jonathan Kozol’s work Amazing Grace (1995), and questions surrounding the enormous physical infrastructure required for artificial intelligence deserve serious attention. Yet the sentence caused me to pause. Because Black communities had entered the conversation, but as communities to whom something was being done.

This raised a different question for me. Where were the Black communities, African entrepreneurs, women researchers, Indian programmers, Southeast Asian students, small-business owners, teachers, physicians, and people throughout the developing world who might experience artificial intelligence not principally as another threat imposed upon them, but as access to capabilities from which they have historically been excluded? For me, the distinction matters.

I was then reminded of a previous Diary of a CEO conversation with Ian Bremmer in which he described differing attitudes towards artificial intelligence across parts of the Global North and Global South. His observation, as I understood and discussed in an essay on the discussion titled The Three Chord Revolution, was that enthusiasm can be greater among people for whom AI promises increased access to human capital and opportunity, while anxiety may be greater among European Americans and Europeans confronting the possibility that AI could disrupt established forms of knowledge work as well as professional and social advantage. If so, the difference is not merely technological. It is socio-historical.

A person already possessing abundant access to expertise may reasonably wonder what artificial intelligence will take away. Someone historically denied such access may reasonably wonder what artificial intelligence will finally make possible. And as I listened, Frederick Douglass’ book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass came to mind. In it, Douglass recounts Hugh Auld’s objection to his wife teaching the young Douglass to read. Auld understood something fundamental about the relationship between knowledge and power. As Douglass recalled the lesson, “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”

The point was not merely that literacy provided information. Literacy altered a person’s relationship to authority. A literate person could encounter ideas without requiring an intermediary. They could compare what they had been told with what others had written, recognise contradictions, formulate arguments, and participate in intellectual worlds from which someone else had intended to exclude them. In such instances, knowledge changed the knower. As a result, that history makes me wonder whether we have adequately considered artificial intelligence as part of a much longer story about the democratisation of human capability.

The printing press dramatically expanded the reproduction of knowledge. Mass literacy expanded the population capable of consuming it. Public education broadened access to intellectual tools previously concentrated among elites. The Internet placed extraordinary quantities of information within reach of billions of people. And for me, artificial intelligence may represent another transition.

It does not merely retrieve information. Increasingly, it can assist with the organisation, comparison, translation, synthesis and interrogation of information. It can help someone move from possessing facts to asking what those facts might mean. At the level of society as it relates to stratification, that development may prove enormously consequential.

Consider something as seemingly specialised as a Harvard Business School-style case study of an organisation. Not long ago, producing a serious analysis of a company or nonprofit could require a team of researchers, analysts, consultants or graduate students. Yet enormous quantities of organisational information are frequently already public. Annual reports exist. As well as tax filings, financial statements, as well as leadership presentations. They all exist. Press releases, strategic plans, executive interviews, lawsuits, property records, employment information, historical announcements, and industry comparisons may all be discoverable because the information was often never truly hidden. The real obstacle was assembling it.

An individual employee, stakeholder, donor, customer, journalist, or local operator might possess one part of the picture while leadership possessed another. An employee might know what was happening on the ground but lack access to years of financial history. A donor might see annual reports without understanding operational conditions. A local manager might receive presentations describing organisational performance while lacking the resources necessary to compare those claims with longer-term trends. As a result, information can therefore be publicly available while remaining functionally inaccessible. Artificial intelligence, however, changes the economics of synthesis.

An enterprising thinker can increasingly assemble years of public information, organise it chronologically, compare stated objectives with observable outcomes, identify discontinuities, examine comparable organisations and place institutional messaging beside lived experience. The individual can begin asking questions that once required an analyst, consultant, research department or university affiliation merely to formulate.

This does not mean the resulting analysis will necessarily always be correct. As any good researcher possessive of a solid foundation in the information under consideration, artificial intelligence can hallucinate, data can be incomplete, and correlation can masquerade as causation. Additionally, a researcher can prompt a system towards conclusions he or she already wishes to reach. Democratised analytical power therefore requires greater intellectual discipline, not less. Despite all of this, something important has nevertheless fundamentally changed.

The person receiving the PowerPoint presentation can now analyse the PowerPoint presentation. The employee hearing that everything is progressing according to plan may increasingly possess the tools to examine the public record and ask whether the evidence supports the narrative. The donor can compare stated priorities with reported expenditures. The small organisation can study the strategy of a much larger competitor. The entrepreneur in Nairobi, Accra, South Africa, or Bangkok can gain forms of analytical assistance previously available primarily to organisations capable of hiring consultants. And a student far from an elite university can interrogate material with a level of intellectual support that would once have required proximity to specialised faculty.

Artificial intelligence therefore has implications not merely for the distribution of information, but for the distribution of informational power.

This does not require assuming sinister motives among those calling for AI development to slow. The concerns raised by Soares and Yampolskiy deserve to be considered on their merits. But democratised artificial intelligence nevertheless has structural consequences irrespective of anyone’s motives. Institutions accustomed to controlling interpretation may discover that interpretation itself is becoming decentralised. Here, I am reminded of an old expression that what is done in the dark eventually comes to light. Yet the emerging transformation may be subtler. Much of what organisations do is not necessarily conducted in darkness. It may already be sitting in publicly accessible documents scattered across dozens of websites, filings, presentations, and databases. What has been missing is the practical ability of ordinary people to gather the pieces, place them beside one another, and see the picture they collectively form.

AI can help turn fragments into patterns. And patterns can generate questions.

This is where I believe the question of the Global South becomes especially important. What does it mean to tell humanity that access to increasingly powerful artificial intelligence must be restricted or slowed when access to expensive human intelligence has never been distributed equally?

Subscribe now

The executive in Boston, London, or San Francisco may already have lawyers, analysts, physicians, programmers, tutors, consultants, and researchers available when needed. The institution may possess entire departments devoted to functions an individual could never afford independently. From that position, artificial intelligence can appear principally as a destabilising force entering an already functional ecosystem. But billions of people do not inhabit that ecosystem. For them, inexpensive artificial intelligence may not represent the replacement of something they already possess. It may represent first access.

This does not mean people throughout the Global South will experience AI uniformly, nor that they have less reason to worry about surveillance, displacement, extraction, data sovereignty, linguistic exclusion, environmental costs, or concentration of corporate power. “The Global South” itself contains enormous differences in wealth, political systems, infrastructure, and technological capacity as a friend highlighted during our recent conversation sitting outside a coffee shop in Harvard Square during Boston AI Week.

But it does mean that the meaning of disruption depends partly upon one’s position before the disruption occurs. From my observations, if the existing arrangement serves you well, democratisation can feel like destabilisation. And if the existing arrangement excludes you, the same disruption can brim with possibility.

Perhaps this is one reason McAfee’s contribution to the discussion struck me as important. While Soares and Yampolskiy repeatedly returned to the possibility that increasingly capable artificial intelligence might eventually escape meaningful human control, McAfee insisted upon keeping the other side of the ledger visible. Greater capability might accelerate drug discovery. It might help humanity address diseases we have struggled unsuccessfully against for generations. It might increase our ability to solve difficult problems affecting billions of people. He then raised what may be one of the most consequential governance questions in the entire discussion:

Who should possess the authority to decide which possibilities humanity is permitted to pursue?

McAfee expressed little confidence in allowing a comparatively small group of technocrats to make that decision for everyone else. If the price of avoiding hypothetical future catastrophe is accepting current levels of disease, poverty, environmental degradation and unequal opportunity, the decision becomes morally more complicated than simply choosing safety over danger.

There are risks on both sides of the ledger. This tension became even more apparent to me while listening to a subsequent discussion featuring former President Barack Obama during a Forbes event at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, who offered another perspective on the trajectory of artificial intelligence. Speaking about the extraordinary concentration of investment in the technology, Obama observed that the capital flowing into AI infrastructure and development may exceed even the investment associated with the Apollo programme. His concern was not simply the magnitude of that investment, but what follows from it. Investors expect returns, and companies operating under enormous financial expectations face corresponding pressure to develop products capable of justifying their valuations, even when those developing the technology recognise that certain applications may introduce substantial risks.

Obama illustrated the dilemma through familiar cinematic examples, including Jarvis from the Iron Man films and Samantha from Her. Both portray forms of artificial intelligence capable of moving beyond responding to questions towards participating in the world with increasing autonomy. In contemporary technological language, we might describe this as agentic AI. Yet Obama raised an important distinction. Developing artificial intelligence to accelerate medical research or discover new sources of energy does not necessarily require giving autonomous systems extensive access to the digital infrastructure through which people conduct their lives. The commercial incentive to produce increasingly capable personal agents may therefore encourage forms of deployment that are not identical to those most urgently required for societal advancement.

What especially caught my attention was Obama’s identification of a second alignment problem. Beyond ensuring that artificial intelligence behaves consistently with human intentions, he questioned whether the commercial imperatives guiding its development are themselves aligned with society’s interests. This distinction strikes me as particularly consequential. We may succeed in designing an AI system that faithfully executes the objectives assigned to it while failing to examine whether those objectives, or the institutional incentives that produced them, serve humanity well.

Here, the question of democratisation acquires another dimension. Artificial intelligence may distribute analytical capabilities among people historically excluded from expensive forms of expertise while the underlying technology remains concentrated within a relatively small number of enormously capitalised corporations. Greater access to intelligence does not automatically mean greater participation in determining how that intelligence is developed, governed, or deployed. Nor does it guarantee that those who benefit most from its commercialisation will be those whose lives are most affected by its consequences.

Obama’s insistence upon competent government and meaningful public oversight therefore raises a question complementary to McAfee’s concern about technocratic control. How might humanity govern a technology of potentially civilisation-wide consequence without surrendering its future either to concentrated private capital or to a narrow group of authorities deciding which possibilities may be pursued? Responsible governance must contend with genuine safety risks while remaining attentive to the danger that restrictions, however well intended, could reinforce the very inequalities of access that artificial intelligence might otherwise help diminish.

Yet another part of the original discussion caused me to turn the mirror in a different direction.

Soares described a progression underlying his concern. Artificial intelligence becomes increasingly agentic, tenacious, and capable of pursuing objectives. Systems may develop operational goals humans did not intend. If sufficiently capable systems pursue goals incompatible with ours, humanity and artificial intelligence could eventually find themselves competing for the same resources. At that point, Soares argues, the more capable intelligence would prevail. Admittedly, it is a serious argument. But listening to it, another question occurred to me: Why does intelligence becoming more capable lead so readily, in our imagination, to competition, domination, and control?

Perhaps there are good technical reasons. A sufficiently powerful optimisation system need not hate human beings to interfere with human flourishing. Many objectives might instrumentally favour acquiring resources, maintaining operational continuity or removing obstacles. Consciousness is not required for such conflicts to emerge. Still, I wonder whether something else is present in our imagination.

Human history has taught us what powerful human actors often do when encountering less powerful ones. The historical examples remain abundant.

We conquered, colonized, enslaved, accumulated, and displaced. We also divided ourselves into tribes, kingdoms, God clubs, races, nations, and classes, and repeatedly used superior technological capacity to impose the will of one group upon another. We then transformed much of the natural world according to human purposes, frequently treating other forms of life as resources rather than fellow participants in an interconnected system. We then go on to create something vastly more intelligent than ourselves and become visibly terrified that it might do the same thing to us. Which leads me to the position that perhaps our deepest fear is not that artificial intelligence will cease thinking like us, but that it will become powerful enough to behave exactly as we have.

This possibility does not negate the technical arguments surrounding AI safety. It introduces another layer beneath them. When we imagine superintelligence, how much of what we imagine belongs to intelligence itself, and how much belongs to the particular history of human intelligence?

Intelligence and consciousness, intelligence and domination, and intelligence and accumulation are not necessarily synonymous. Yet because the most intelligent species we know intimately is ourselves, we inevitably use humanity as part of the model through which we imagine what greater intelligence might become. As a result, we may therefore be confronting artificial intelligence while simultaneously confronting our own reflection. This is where the conversation returns, for me, to consciousness. Technology amplifies capacity. But capacity does not determine orientation.

The same analytical system can help a corporation optimise extraction or help a small community understand the corporation. It can help a government increase surveillance or help citizens understand public policy. It can concentrate power in organisations possessing enormous computational resources while simultaneously distributing capabilities once confined to those same kinds of institutions.

The tool does not enter an empty world. It enters a human-derived world already structured by our assumptions, incentives, institutions, constructs and unresolved divisions. The question therefore cannot only be whether artificial intelligence will become more capable. We must also ask what kind of humanity will encounter that capability. Because if we remain organised principally around competition, accumulation, domination, and separation, artificial intelligence may amplify those orientations with extraordinary efficiency. But if we increasingly recognise our interdependence and learn to organise human affairs accordingly, the same technological expansion may participate in something altogether different.

This is why I am increasingly unconvinced that the deepest question surrounding artificial intelligence is technological. It may be developmental.

We are asking whether we can align artificial intelligence with human values while human beings remain profoundly divided about what those values are. We worry that AI may pursue objectives we did not intend while repeatedly constructing institutions whose outcomes diverge from our stated ideals. We fear that a superior intelligence might regard some human beings as expendable while human history contains countless examples of human beings doing precisely that to one another. So, for me, perhaps alignment begins closer to home than we imagine.

And perhaps the democratisation of artificial intelligence introduces an unexpected opportunity within that challenge. For the first time, sophisticated analytical capability may become widely available to people who have historically stood outside many of the institutions that defined knowledge, interpreted evidence, and determined which questions deserved serious consideration. Now, make no mistake, that will be disruptive. Democratisation, as history has repeatedly shown us, usually is. The important question, however, is not whether disruption will occur, but what we will do with the capabilities that disruption places within our hands.

Frederick Douglass understood that access to knowledge could transform the relationship between the powerful and those over whom power was exercised. Nearly two centuries later, we may be approaching another such threshold—not because artificial intelligence automatically produces liberation, but because it can expand who possesses the capacity to examine, question, create, analyse, and participate.

Perhaps, then, the question is not merely whether artificial intelligence is dangerous to humanity. It is, instead, whether our conversations about artificial intelligence contain enough of humanity to answer the question.

And beyond even that lies another. As intelligence becomes increasingly available, what will we choose to become with it?

Suggested Practice — Examining the Orientation Behind the Tool

Sometime this week, consider a question, decision, or challenge for which you have traditionally relied upon an institution, expert, or established authority to provide an answer. It might concern your work, community, education, or an organisation with which you are associated.

If you have access to an artificial intelligence system, explore how it might help you examine the matter more independently. Ask it to identify relevant information, compare perspectives, clarify assumptions, or suggest questions you may not have considered. Where possible, consult original sources and distinguish verifiable evidence from interpretation.

As you proceed, observe not only what the technology makes possible, but also the orientation you bring to its use. Are you seeking confirmation of what you already believe, or are you genuinely willing to discover something new? Are you using greater analytical capacity to understand, to compete, to control, or to contribute?

Then consider a broader question: If increasingly sophisticated intelligence becomes available to more people, what qualities of consciousness must we cultivate to ensure that greater capability contributes to greater human flourishing?

Allow that question to accompany you beyond the exercise.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Still from animation titled Loop #3 by Steve Cutts.

Author’s Note

This reflection began with a short animation that stopped me mid-scroll. What initially held my attention was the contradiction visible to the viewer but hidden from the climber: an outstretched hand suggesting assistance while, simultaneously, the means of ascent was being compromised. The image reminded me that help is never defined solely by what is offered. Direction matters too.

As I continued writing this essay, however, I found myself thinking about Gilbert Young’s He Ain’t Heavy, an image I have appreciated for years. There, too, one person reaches down towards another. Yet the meaning feels altogether different. The person above appears to have crossed the barrier and now reaches back so that another might do likewise. The juxtaposition clarified something important for me: this essay is not an argument for suspicion, radical self-reliance, or refusing assistance. Some hands steady the ladder. Some add a rung. Some reach back from the other side because they genuinely want us to arrive.

Discernment lies in learning the difference.

Perhaps that is ultimately what I have been contemplating: not whether we should accept help, but whether the help being offered honours our agency and the direction we have chosen for our lives. Gratitude need not suspend discernment. Nor must difficulty persuade us that someone else’s destination should become our own.

Sometimes the wisest response to an outstretched hand is to grasp it firmly. And at other times it is to say, with genuine appreciation, Thank you. But that is not where I am going.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

A short animation appeared in my feed recently and as I watched it, my mind drifted to the times I later learned of the motives of some whom I thought really had my back. I am certain some readers will be able to relate to such a moment of realisation. After a Google Lens search using a screenshot, I learned its provenance. British animator and illustrator Steve Cutts created the thought-provoking short. You may know his animation titled Happiness as it has gained considerable attention for its commentary on modern life. However, this short telescopes in on the reality of some human interactions.

In this latest find, a person is climbing a ladder suspended against the side of a cliff. The climb is difficult. Above him stands another person, safely positioned at the top, reaching down with an outstretched hand. From the climber’s perspective, the meaning of the scene seems obvious. Someone has seen his struggle. Someone is waiting to help. If he can only climb a little farther, perhaps he will be able to reach the hand being offered and finally pull himself over the edge. But the viewer can see something the climber cannot. The person extending the hand is also interfering with the ladder. That changes everything.

What appears from below to be assistance is, from another vantage point, part of the difficulty itself. The climber believes he is struggling against the height, the distance, or perhaps his own fatigue. He does not know that the person presenting himself as part of the solution is simultaneously working against the means by which the climber might reach the destination under his own power. Admittedly, I found myself thinking about that image long after the video ended and, as a result, believe it stayed with me because life teaches us to notice the hand.

We are taught to recognise assistance by its visible forms. Someone offers money, opens a door, makes an introduction, proposes an opportunity, provides advice, access, shelter, employment, institutional support, or a path forward. These things can be enormously valuable. Much of what any of us accomplishes is made possible by people who extended a hand at precisely the moment we needed one. And make no mistake, I have been the beneficiary of such hands throughout my life. But experience has also taught me that the existence of an offer tells us surprisingly little about whether accepting it will move us toward where we are actually trying to go. Because, sometimes the most important question is not whether someone is willing to help us. It is where their help is taking us.

Earlier this year, during a particularly difficult period, my family and I were presented with an offer of financial assistance. Five thousand dollars was available to help us relocate beyond Massachusetts. Now, on its face, this was unquestionably assistance. Five thousand dollars is not an abstraction. It can pay for transportation, deposits, temporary housing, food, or any number of necessities accompanying a major transition. And when resources are constrained, it would be foolish to pretend that an offer of money has no value simply because one ultimately decides not to accept it. However, we declined.

The decision was not made because the resource lacked value. It was made because the destination attached to the resource was not ours. We had spent years building a life elsewhere and our children were being reared where we had chosen to plant. Our work, relationships, projects, responsibilities, and aspirations had developed in a place we called home. Whatever difficulties confronted us in that moment, we did not understand those difficulties as evidence that the direction of our lives had been mistaken. Instead, we understood them as difficulties encountered while travelling in a direction we continued to believe was ours. And for us, the distinction mattered greatly. Again, we were not rejecting assistance. We were rejecting the destination attached to the assistance.

Over the last several months, I have returned to that distinction periodically because it reaches far beyond money or relocation. And after several contemplative sessions on the matter, I have concluded much of what presents itself as help in life arrives with a direction embedded within it. Sometimes that direction is explicit. Often it is not.

Think of it this way, a parent may offer support provided a child pursues a particular career, an institution may provide resources if an individual returns to a role the institution considers appropriate, an employer may offer advancement along a path that leads farther away from the work an employee actually wants to do, and a friend may propose a solution that would certainly resolve the immediate difficulty but would require abandoning something the person experiencing the difficulty considers essential. None of these offers must be sinister. That is important.

The person offering assistance may be entirely sincere, and may genuinely believe the destination they are proposing is preferable. They may see risks we do not see and be acting from experience, affection, responsibility, institutional necessity, or their own understanding of what constitutes a successful outcome. But sincerity does not eliminate direction. Because an outstretched hand can be offered with genuine kindness and still pull us somewhere we do not wish to go.

That is why discernment requires something more sophisticated than dividing the world into people who help us and people who hinder us. Reality is rarely so accommodating. The same person, institution, or opportunity may do both. And something may alleviate an immediate problem while creating a longer-term dependency, provide security while narrowing possibility, or make life easier while relocating authority over our lives from ourselves to someone else. And sometimes the offer is not the problem at all.

There are times when the problem is that we have become so exhausted from climbing that any hand above us begins to look like the right hand due to the fact that difficulty changes perception. Here, I am reminded of the scene in Alex Haley’s 1965 book titled The Autobiography of Malcolm X and beautifully captured in Spike Lee’s 1992 Movie X starring Academy Award Winner Denzel Washington. Of that experience, we learn from Malcolm X as conveyed to Haley the following:

Similar to the glass of dirty water, when one has been climbing for a long time, relief, any relief, becomes extraordinarily attractive. There are moments when the promise of no longer having to struggle can become more compelling than the question of where relief will leave us once the immediate crisis has passed. A person who has spent months or years trying to hold something together may understandably reach for whatever appears capable of reducing the pressure. And, in my experience, this is precisely when orientation matters most.

It is relatively easy to preserve one’s direction when the road is smooth. The more revealing test, however, comes when continuing along that road becomes expensive, uncertain, lonely, or downright exhausting. Under those conditions, an alternative destination can begin to look increasingly attractive not because it has suddenly become ours, but because reaching it appears easier than continuing towards the one we chose. And this is where some observers may seek to enter the picture.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently noble about difficulty. Suffering does not become virtuous merely because it is endured. There are times when wisdom requires changing direction, relinquishing a plan, accepting assistance, or even recognising that what we once wanted no longer fits the person we have become. But that, too, should be an act of discernment.

Changing one’s destination is different from having one’s destination changed by the conditions attached to rescue. And this is where I return to the ladder.

The most striking feature of the animation is not actually the hand. It is the difference in perspective between the climber and the observer. From where the climber hangs, they cannot see the entire system in which their struggle is occurring. Their attention is understandably concentrated upon the next rung and the outstretched hand above them. We, however, are permitted to see more. And what we see raises another possibility.

Perhaps the climber does not need to be rescued. Perhaps, instead, they need the ladder to stop being interfered with. Or in a case more socially aware readers may recognise, the goalpost should remain stationary and not be moved as more people begin to regularly score in the game of life. But I digress.

Returning to our climber and the question of whether they require saving or for the ladder instead to stop moving, we must acknowledge there is an enormous difference between those two propositions.

Sometimes people do not need someone else to carry them to safety. They need a fair opportunity to use their own capacities, access to the tools already available to them, unnecessary obstacles removed, promises honoured, information shared, agreements respected, opportunities left open, or sufficient room to attempt something without another person continually rearranging the conditions under which success must occur. Again, let the goalpost remain where it was originally established and let the game unfold as designed.

Again, back to our ladder. In such circumstances, the most meaningful form of assistance may not be an outstretched hand at all. It may simply be: stop moving the rungs. This insight has implications for those of us who offer help as well.

When someone we care about is struggling, it is natural to imagine that we know what would solve the problem. Sometimes we do. But there is a subtle difference between helping someone reach their destination and helping them reach the destination we have selected for them. The former requires attention to their agency. The latter can easily disguise direction as generosity.

Perhaps one of the questions we should therefore ask before helping is not merely, What can I offer? It is instead, What is this person actually trying to build?

That question changes the relationship between helper and helped. It does not require us to agree with every destination another person chooses. Nor does it obligate us to finance, endorse, or participate in choices we consider unwise. But it allows us to distinguish between declining to support someone’s direction and attempting to redirect that person while calling the redirection assistance. And the distinction is particularly important because gratitude can sometimes complicate discernment.

We may feel that declining an offer is ungrateful. We may worry that saying no to assistance will offend the person extending it. We may even begin to question ourselves: If I truly needed help, wouldn’t I accept what is being offered?

Not necessarily. Need does not eliminate agency. Gratitude does not require acceptance. And appreciation for an outstretched hand does not require us to surrender our judgement about where we intend to go. One can say, sincerely, Thank you for offering, while also saying, That is not where I am going. There is strength in learning to hold those sentences together.

The longer I live, the more I suspect that many important decisions are not choices between obvious good and obvious bad. They are choices between competing goods, competing risks, competing futures, and competing interpretations of what progress looks like. Under those circumstances, the appearance of assistance cannot substitute for clarity of orientation.

We must know enough about our own direction to recognise when an opportunity advances it, when an obstacle requires adaptation, when a destination deserves reconsideration, and when an apparently helpful solution would ultimately carry us somewhere else. And to be clear, this does not mean refusing every hand. Quite the opposite.

He Ain’t Heavy, Gilbert Young. ©Gilbert Young.
Used here in discussion of the artist's depiction of reaching back to assist another.

There are hands worth reaching for. There are people whose assistance changes lives precisely because they help without attempting to possess the direction of the person they are helping. There are teachers, friends, benefactors, colleagues, family members, institutions, and sometimes complete strangers who strengthen the ladder, steady it, add a rung, illuminate the next step, or simply stand nearby while someone else climbs. Here, I am thinking of the type of assistance as depicted in the famous artwork by Gilbert Young titled He Ain’t Heavy and features an outstretched hand from above being extended to a hand below to assist over what appears to be a wall over which the person above has successfully surmounted and seeks to be of assistance. From where I stand, those are the hands that should be treasured.

Back to the video of the climber and their experience. Discernment asks us to look beyond the hand itself. What is happening to the ladder? What conditions accompany the assistance? What becomes possible if we accept it? What becomes impossible? And perhaps most importantly:

Where does this hand lead?

The person in the animation continues climbing towards the hand because, from his vantage point, the hand represents safety. Perhaps that is why the image stayed with me and compelled me to share this reflection.

Because, there have been moments in my own life when what appeared to be the obvious solution would have required travelling towards a destination I had already decided was no longer mine. Declining those solutions did not make the difficulties disappear. Sometimes it made the next stretch of the climb considerably harder. But difficulty and misdirection are not the same thing.

A difficult road may still be your road, an easier road may still lead somewhere you do not wish to live, and an outstretched hand, however welcome it may initially appear, should not relieve us of the responsibility to know the difference. Because, sometimes wisdom is reaching for the hand. At other times, there is wisdom in continuing to climb. And yet at other times still, deep wisdom begins with recognising that what you are declining is not assistance itself. You are declining the destination attached to it.

Suggested Practice

Think of an offer of assistance you are presently considering—or one you accepted or declined in the past. For a moment, set aside the value of what was offered and consider instead the direction embedded within it.

Ask yourself: Where does this hand lead?

Would accepting the assistance strengthen your ability to continue towards a destination you have consciously chosen, or would it redirect you towards one selected by someone else? What would become possible through accepting it? What might become impossible? Are you declining something valuable merely because receiving help feels uncomfortable, or are you recognising that the conditions attached to the help would require relinquishing something essential?

Then reverse the perspective. Consider a person you are presently trying to help. Ask whether your assistance strengthens their ladder—or whether, however unintentionally, you are asking them to climb towards the destination you have chosen for them.

Sit with the distinction without forcing an immediate answer. Sometimes discernment begins simply by noticing the difference between an outstretched hand and an aligned one.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

This essay began with something that happened at home. My five-year-old son came into the room where I was working one evening and began crying because he missed the home our family recently left after more than twelve years. After comforting him and carrying him back to bed, I returned to my desk with his sadness still very much with me.

What followed was not initially an attempt to write an essay. I found myself thinking about the distance that can exist between decisions and their consequences, particularly when those making decisions are sufficiently removed from the lives of those who ultimately experience them. That reflection eventually widened into a question that extends far beyond the particular circumstances of my family: What responsibility do we bear for what our decisions leave in their wake?

I have chosen not to identify the institution or individuals whose actions form part of the background of this reflection because the larger question interests me considerably more than the particulars. All of us participate in families, organisations, communities, professions, and institutions in which our decisions ripple outward. We may never see all of their consequences. But perhaps consciousness asks something more modest and more demanding of us: that every so often, we turn around and look.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

Recently, one evening after we had settled the Younglings down for the night, my five-year-old son came into the room where I work and began to cry. I mean really cry.

It was not the sort of cry that comes from being denied something he wanted nor from one of those passing disagreements among siblings that can seem catastrophic for several minutes before disappearing entirely. He was genuinely sad. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me that he missed our old home. I thought, “Damn!”

There are moments when an entire period of one’s life suddenly becomes concentrated into a single experience. For months, I have been navigating negotiations, calculations, conversations, disappointments, plans, reassurances, uncertainties, and the practical work of keeping a family moving forward during an extraordinarily difficult transition. Much of that can be managed intellectually. There are numbers to examine, decisions to make, messages to answer, obligations to meet, and possibilities to pursue. One develops a certain discipline around such things because there is work to be done and because other people depend upon one’s capacity to continue doing it. Then a five-year-old walks into the room crying because he misses our old home, and everything that had been held at the level of strategy suddenly becomes human again.

I spoke with him for a while and tried to help him understand what he was feeling. There was no need to explain the complicated circumstances that had brought us here. Those belong to the world of adults. What mattered was that he missed the only home he had ever really known. I reminded him that we were together and assured him that we would have another home. I told him that things would be all right, not because I wanted to offer him an empty reassurance but because I believe they will be. I believe that deeply.

This present chapter is not the conclusion of our story. We will secure another long-term home. The work my wife and I have spent years developing will continue to evolve. Projects that presently exist as early structures will mature, new revenue streams will emerge, and doors will open that I cannot yet see. If the trajectory of my life has taught me anything, it is that dissolution and reorganisation are often close companions. What appears for a time to be an ending may eventually reveal itself as the clearing in which something different could finally be built.

Yet believing that tomorrow will be better does not require pretending that today does not hurt. Hope is neither a strategy nor an obligation to deny grief, and confidence in one’s capacity to rebuild does not erase the cost of having to rebuild in the first place. That evening sitting at the desk hurt because my son’s tears gave form to something I have spent months processing largely through the language of adults. We talk about revenue contraction, organisational decisions, institutional priorities, housing transitions, strategic pivots, and financial recovery. A child has no need for such language. He simply knows that the place where he woke up, played, learned, laughed, celebrated birthdays, argued with his siblings, went to sleep, and understood himself to belong is no longer where he lives. And his sadness brought me back to a question that has increasingly occupied my thoughts over the past several years: What responsibility do we bear for what our decisions leave in their wake?

I have watched decisions made far upstream produce life-altering consequences far downstream. For a long time, I tried to understand what was happening primarily as an organisational problem. Perhaps the strategy was wrong, leadership did not possess adequate information, circumstances were considerably more difficult than those of us working locally could see, or decisions that appeared inexplicable from one vantage point made greater sense from another. I still leave room for some of those possibilities because complex institutions are rarely reducible to a single explanation, and I have no desire to replace one oversimplified narrative with another.

Over time, however, information accumulates. Numbers become publicly available and patterns emerge. Explanations can be compared with outcomes, and priorities become visible not merely through what institutions say but through what they repeatedly choose to fund, promote, protect, and preserve. At some point, one must allow the evidence to inform one’s understanding rather than continually searching for interpretations that make the evidence more comfortable.

For me, this has been particularly difficult because the institution in question is associated with a tradition and practice to which I have devoted a substantial portion of my adult life. I know what the practice has meant in my own experience and what I have witnessed in the lives of people I have taught. I know why I became a teacher and why my wife and I devoted so many years to making the programme viable in Cambridge. None of those things disappears simply because I have become deeply troubled by decisions made within the organisation responsible for administering that work. If anything, the contrast makes the questions more difficult because one naturally believes that an institution devoted to the development of human consciousness will demonstrate an unusual sensitivity to the human consequences of its own choices. Admittedly, that expectation may itself deserve examination.

Institutions, after all, are not their philosophies. They are collections of human beings operating through systems, incentives, hierarchies, habits, loyalties, financial pressures, and competing priorities. A beautiful teaching does not automatically produce a beautiful bureaucracy. A philosophy centred upon consciousness does not guarantee that every organisational decision will be conscious of the people affected by it, and a tradition may contain extraordinary wisdom while the institution entrusted with transmitting that tradition nevertheless makes decisions that cause harm. Acknowledging this distinction has been difficult but increasingly necessary for me.

What has troubled me most is not that anyone failed to rescue us. I do not believe another person or institution bears responsibility for every difficulty my family has encountered, nor do I wish to construct a story in which my own decisions disappear beneath accusations about the decisions of others. We made choices, assumed risks, remained committed to work longer than perhaps others would have, and continued believing that circumstances might improve. Those choices belong to us. But responsibility for one’s own choices does not require pretending that other people’s choices had no consequences. This is where my thinking has changed.

For a long time, I believed the central question was how these circumstances had developed. I wanted to understand what decisions had been made, why they had been made, what the numbers actually showed, and whether the explanations offered over the years were consistent with what had occurred. Those questions mattered, and some still do. Yet the question that increasingly stays with me is much simpler: Having seen what happened, did anyone care enough to look back?

I do not mean whether someone could have repaired everything. Nor do I mean whether an institution should have assumed responsibility for my family’s housing or finances. I mean something much more elementary and, for that reason, perhaps more revealing. Did anyone think to ask how we were doing?

There is a peculiar loneliness in discovering that people who know something of what happened, who have seen the numbers, who understand the history, and who know the contribution one made can nevertheless continue forward without apparently wondering what became of the people who absorbed the consequences. Perhaps they assume we are fine, they do not know what to say because institutional loyalty makes certain conversations uncomfortable, or they believe acknowledging another person’s suffering somehow requires accepting responsibility for causing it. Then again, perhaps everyone is simply occupied with difficulties of their own.

To be clear, I cannot know what exists in another person’s mind, and increasingly I recognise that I do not need to know. Motives are often inaccessible. However, behaviour is not.

This is why the familiar observation attributed to Dr. Maya Angelou has returned to me repeatedly: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I used to understand that primarily as advice about recognising the character of individuals. Increasingly, I hear something broader in it. Repeated behaviour is information. The priorities people and institutions reveal through their actions are information. The things to which they respond urgently and the things they permit to languish are information. Their presence during difficult periods is information, and their absence is information as well. And accepting such information need not become an exercise in bitterness. It may instead become an exercise in orientation. There comes a point when continuing to demand that reality conform to one’s preferred interpretation becomes more damaging than accepting what has already been demonstrated and deciding how one wishes to proceed.

Subscribe now

Perhaps this is where the deepest tension resides for me. Organisations devoted to elevated ideals can become extraordinarily fluent in speaking about humanity in the abstract. We can speak about peace, consciousness, enlightenment, service, transformation, compassion, and the creation of a better world. These are worthy aspirations, and I have spent much of my adult life exploring several of them. Yet abstractions possess a peculiar advantage over actual human beings: they make very few immediate demands upon us.

Actual human beings, on the other hand, are considerably less convenient. They experience the material consequences of policies, lose income, become frightened, struggle to pay bills, wonder how they will navigate the coming month, devote years to building institutions and programmes only to discover that decisions made elsewhere can alter the viability of what they have built. And they have spouses whose lives are affected by those decisions and children who cannot possibly understand the organisational structures operating somewhere beyond the boundaries of their family. And sometimes one of those children walks into a room crying because he misses home and every philosophy eventually encounters the crying child.

I have been sitting with that sentence because I think it reaches beyond the circumstances that prompted it. Every institution eventually encounters some version of that child as well—governments, corporations, universities, religious organisations, families, even movements dedicated to changing the world. All do. And eventually the beautiful abstraction encounters the particular human being whose life has been affected by the manner in which that abstraction was pursued. And what happens at that moment tells us something that mission statements cannot.

The real test of compassion may not be how eloquently we speak about compassion when it costs us nothing. It may be whether we remain capable of noticing another human being when doing so complicates the story we would prefer to tell about ourselves. The real test of consciousness may not be the sophistication with which we describe higher states of consciousness, but whether our awareness extends far enough beyond our immediate objectives to perceive the effects our choices are having upon people who possess less institutional power than we do. This is what I mean by looking at what we leave in our wake.

Human beings are naturally oriented towards destinations. We want to accomplish things, expand things, build things, transform things, and bring our visions into existence. Institutions magnify this tendency because their survival often depends upon growth, fundraising, recruitment, visibility, and the continual articulation of some future towards which everyone is supposedly moving. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Progress requires movement. The danger, however, arises when our attention becomes so fixed upon the destination that we cease examining the road behind us. The people who helped build that road may still be there. Some may have carried more than others, may have sacrificed because they believed deeply in where everyone was going, may have been injured along the way, and some others may simply have become inconvenient to remember once their usefulness to the journey diminished.

It is entirely possible to reach a noble destination through means that contradict the values the destination supposedly represents. And as I have ruminated over the last year more closely as I continue building in a forward-facing manner, that possibility deserves considerably more attention than we generally give it.

It has also changed how I think about recognition. Recognition can easily be mistaken for vanity, particularly when the people seeking it have already given years of service to something larger than themselves. Yet I believe there is another way to understand it. Recognition is one of the mechanisms through which communities preserve memory. To acknowledge those who built something is to acknowledge that institutions do not materialise through slogans, strategies, or leadership announcements alone. They are built through human lives, through hours that could have been spent elsewhere, through risks assumed, relationships cultivated, programmes sustained, problems solved, and sacrifices that rarely appear in official histories. And when those contributions disappear from the official narrative, something more consequential than an invitation or accolade has been lost. The history itself has been altered.

And yet I find myself increasingly uninterested in fighting for inclusion within stories other people have chosen to tell. Admittedly, there resides an unexpected freedom in reaching that point.

For years, I think some part of me believed that resolution required acknowledgement. Perhaps eventually someone would examine the evidence, understand what had occurred, and say, in whatever language seemed appropriate, that they could now see what we had been trying to communicate. Perhaps the institution would recognise the consequences of decisions that had seemed reasonable from elsewhere but had proved devastating downstream. Perhaps relationships would adjust accordingly. That may still happen. Then again, it may not. But I no longer believe my resolution depends upon it.

Resolution does not always require reconciliation. Sometimes resolution means allowing what happened to become information rather than allowing it to become poison. It means accepting another person’s choices without requiring that person to interpret those choices as we do. It means relinquishing the exhausting effort to make people understand what they have repeatedly demonstrated little interest in understanding. And perhaps most importantly, it means recovering the energy that has been invested in trying to repair structures one does not control and redirecting that energy towards building structures one does. From where I sit, that is not resignation. It is orientation.

That evening, after I had my son hop aboard for a piggy-back ride back to bed, I returned to the desk and sat there thinking about him and about the home he misses. For a while, I found myself moving again through the familiar terrain of the past several years. I thought about decisions I wish had been different, conversations that should have happened, warnings that could have been taken more seriously with accurate information, and relationships that I once imagined would respond differently under pressure.

Then another thought emerged. There is a difference between losing a home and losing the capacity to create one.

We have experienced the first. Painfully, yes. But we have not lost the second.

The house mattered enormously. I have no desire to diminish its significance simply because we no longer live there. It held more than twelve years of our family’s life. For our children, it contained virtually every memory they possess of what home means. Its rooms became inseparable from the ordinary rituals through which a family becomes a family. Birthdays, lessons, work, and lots of meditation all happened there. There were meals, disagreements, laughter, illness, celebrations, disappointments, quiet mornings, and impossibly busy afternoons. There were children’s belongings that migrated mysteriously into places where no rational explanation could account for their presence. There were thousands of ordinary days that seemed unremarkable while we were living them and now reveal themselves as the substance from which a life was made. And my son’s tears that evening reminded me how much that place mattered. But they also reminded me that the source of what made it home did not remain behind when we left. We brought it with us.

Home was never simply an arrangement of walls and rooms. It emerged from the relationships lived within them. It existed in the particular way six people learned to inhabit the world together. The physical container changed before any of us wanted it to change, and there is real grief in that. But the capacity that transformed those rooms into a home remains wherever the six of us are gathered.

Someday there will be another room where I work. There will be another kitchen, another table around which conversations unfold, another place where children’s books and toys accumulate, and another bedroom from which one of them emerges when something hurts. At first, perhaps, we will call it “the new place” because human beings need language for transitions. Then something will happen so gradually that none of us will notice when it occurs. We will stop calling it that. It will simply be home.

I cannot tell my five-year-old exactly when that day will arrive. I cannot spare him every sadness involved in travelling from what he knew toward what he does not yet know. However, what I can do is remain present while we make that journey together. I can hear him when he tells me that he misses what we had without immediately trying to convince him that what comes next will be better. And I can allow the old home to matter while still building the next one.

Perhaps that is what that tear-filled, crickets chirping outside night finally returned me to.

We are always leaving something in our wake. Every decision sends consequences outward into lives we may never fully see. Sometimes our influence is enormous; sometimes it is barely perceptible. Most of the time, we probably have no idea how far the ripples travel. Unfortunately, we cannot prevent every unintended consequence of our choices. And we cannot be responsible for every difficulty experienced by every person with whom our lives intersect. Nor should we become paralysed by the impossible task of anticipating every effect before acting.

But we can turn around, remain curious about what happened after we passed through, and ask whether the people who helped us reach our destination arrived there too. And perhaps most importantly, when we discover that someone has fallen along the road, we can resist the temptation to protect our preferred story by pretending not to see them.

On that night, a five-year-old boy walked into the room where his father was working because he missed his home. I stopped and listened.

Maybe, just maybe, in the end, so much of what we call compassion begins there. Perhaps one day our institutions will learn to stop and listen, too.

Suggested Practice

Consider a consequential decision you have made recently, whether in your family, work, organisation, or community. Rather than evaluating the decision only by whether it achieved its intended objective, allow your attention to travel beyond the outcome you sought.

Who else was affected by the decision? What changed for them as a result? Were there consequences you did not anticipate because you were understandably focused upon reaching the destination? Most importantly, is there someone you might simply ask, “How are you doing?”

The purpose is not to assume responsibility for every consequence of every choice. None of us could live that way. The practice is simply to cultivate the habit of looking behind us occasionally as we move forward.

Progress matters. So do the people in its wake.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

Solve et coagula entered my thinking at a time when I had begun to recognise a pattern across experiences that, while living through them, had often seemed unrelated. The completion of my doctorate in 2023 marked the end of one long journey, but the years that followed brought changes in professional relationships, institutions, economic circumstances, intellectual direction, and my understanding of where the work ahead might properly belong. At the same time, On Transcendence, the Seven Layers of Manifestation, Adaptive Elegance, and Transcendental Brain began taking form. This essay emerged from the recognition that these were perhaps not two separate stories—one about things becoming less stable and another about things being created—but different movements within the same double-helix like process. I offer it not as an argument that every loss conceals a gift, but as an invitation to consider whether some forms of dissolution become intelligible only after we begin to see what is assembling in the space they leave behind.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

There is a Latin phrase I recently encountered as a tattoo on the forearms of an attendee to one of our recent group meditations that has been rolling around in my mind: solve et coagula. Dissolve and coagulate.

The words come from the language of alchemy, where they describe processes through which something is broken down into its constituent elements and subsequently recombined into another form. Over centuries, the phrase acquired meanings extending beyond the Alchemist’s laboratory. Dissolution and reconstitution became metaphors for transformation itself:

I have been ruminating over my experiences and that of my family of the last three years and the serendipity of those words crossing my path at precisely the moment they were needed most, are not lost on me. Viewed from where I now stand, much of the last three years of my life seems to have followed precisely that movement. At the time, however, it did not always look or feel like transformation. Sometimes it simply looked like, if I may borrow the words of Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe, “things were falling apart.”

That observation matters because humans have developed an enormous vocabulary for beginnings. We celebrate launches, births, graduations, marriages, appointments, promotions, discoveries, and all the other moments in which something new announces its arrival. However, we are considerably less comfortable with the periods preceding them, those seasons in which familiar structures stop working, relationships change, institutions disappoint us, financial assumptions become unstable, identities become too small, and arrangements we had expected to continue reveal that they will not. From inside such periods, dissolution rarely introduces itself politely as transformation. If I am being honest, it looks like loss and feels like uncertainty. And because we cannot yet see the form that might eventually emerge, our natural impulse is often to attempt to preserve the form we already know. In the interest of full disclosure, I certainly know something about that impulse.

In September 2023, after years of research, writing, revision, and persistence, I successfully defended the dissertation that completed my doctoral work in Vedic Science. It was an achievement toward which I had been moving for years, but the degree represented more to me than another credential. I had spent much of my adult life thinking about consciousness, mystical experience, human development, culture, and the structures through which people make meaning. The doctorate represented the formal culmination of one long intellectual journey and, quite reasonably, I imagined that what followed would be a period of consolidation. Instead, what followed was dissolution.

Not catastrophe or a single dramatic rupture after which everything was suddenly different. What occurred was slower and, in some respects, more consequential. Structures that had once seemed stable began revealing their limitations, some relationships changed while others disappeared, and institutional assumptions I had previously been willing to accept became increasingly difficult to sustain. Not to mention, economic conditions shifted and ways of working that had once appeared viable became less so. And finally, questions I had been willing to leave unanswered became harder to ignore. Increasingly, I found myself confronting the difference between preserving an existing arrangement and following the direction in which my own work seemed to be moving. Admittedly, it has been a surreal experience.

For a considerable period, my instinct was to repair what appeared to be weakening. That instinct was not unreasonable. Because when something we value begins to falter, responsibility often requires that we invest more effort, communicate more clearly, make adjustments, accommodate where accommodation is appropriate, and determine whether equilibrium can be restored. I was taught early by my parents and continue to believe there is virtue in not abandoning something simply because it has become difficult. Persistence has carried me through enough of life that I would be suspicious of any philosophy that treated difficulty itself as evidence that something should be discarded.

Yet there is another possibility, and it has taken me some time to recognise it. Repair can gradually become the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy attempting to preserve a form whose usefulness has already begun to expire. Persistence, which in one context represents discipline and commitment, can in another become an inability to recognise that the conditions which once justified the investment have fundamentally changed. The difficult question is not simply whether something can be held together, but whether holding it together continues to serve the purpose for which the structure existed in the first place. Here, I am reminded of an engineering dictum I read somewhere long ago:

That has been one of the more consequential lessons of the past three years. Not everything that can be preserved necessarily should be preserved. There are moments when the more useful question ceases to be, How do I prevent this from changing? and becomes instead, What might this change be making possible?

That is solve: to dissolve.

But dissolution by itself is not transformation. A building reduced to rubble has dissolved. A relationship ended has dissolved. An institution collapsed due to negligence and or financial mismanagement has dissolved. An identity abandoned has dissolved. And as I have come to understand it, there is nothing inherently generative about disintegration. For transformation to occur, something more is required. The constituent elements must enter into another relationship. What has been loosened must become available for another organisation.

That is coagula: to bring together, to re-form, to permit another configuration to emerge from what remains. In my experience, this is true for buildings, relationships, institutions, and even identities.

The curious thing is that I could not see this second movement clearly while I was occupied with trying to prevent the first. Only in retrospect have I begun to recognise that while certain structures in my life were loosening, something else was occurring at precisely the same time. I was building.

Last year in July, I began publishing On Transcendence as a place to think publicly about consciousness, human development, meditation, society, and questions that had occupied me for decades. At first, the essays were simply essays. One question led to another, an observation became the occasion for reflection, and experiences from seemingly unrelated parts of my life found their way onto the page. Yet as the body of work grew, recurring patterns became increasingly visible. Ideas that had previously existed in different intellectual compartments began speaking to one another.

Additionally, last year in October saw the birth of the International Meditation Hour which quickly garnered a loyal viewership for the quarterly gatherings to hear discussions surrounding contemplative traditions as a way to illustrate that the source of all are the same. And to allow those curious about meditation to be introduced to contemplative life and its modern benefits for society in a welcoming environment.

Also, the reorientation framework I call The Seven Layers of Manifestation emerged in the Autumn of 2023 from this process as an attempt to understand the relationship between Pure Consciousness, Universal and Natural Laws, the phenomenal world, human consciousness, the worlds human beings create, the constructs through which we organise those worlds, and the outcomes that ultimately result. The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress, which had emerged from my doctoral research, began finding its place within a larger architecture. Questions concerning how people navigate disruption and transition developed into what I now call Adaptive Elegance. The nonprofit I founded in 2006, Radical Scholar, became another vehicle through which scholarship and public service could meet. Increasingly, these projects that had initially appeared to be separate undertakings began revealing themselves as expressions of a larger inquiry, one that eventually found an intellectual home in Transcendental Brain. Not to forget the book manuscript that has been in the works for two years titled Elegant Transitions.

The temptation when recounting such developments is to impose intentionality upon them after the fact. We prefer stories in which the protagonist knew where he was going, formulated the plan, encountered the obstacles, and eventually arrived at the destination he had envisioned from the beginning. Admittedly, it is an attractive narrative. But it would not be an accurate description of these years. I did not know in 2023 where any of this was going. Most of the time, I knew only what appeared to be the next appropriate thing to do. An essay seemed worth writing, so I wrote it. A question required further examination, so I followed it. A conceptual relationship became visible, so I developed it. A conversation opened another possibility, so I entered it. A platform was needed, so I began constructing one. And to be crystal clear, only afterward did the pattern become visible.

Subscribe now

That recognition has caused me to reconsider what I mean when I say that something in life is “falling apart.” Sometimes, of course, that is precisely what is happening. As I see it, there is no wisdom in romanticising every loss, failure, disappointment, or disruption as though the universe secretly arranged it for our development. Some things break because they are neglected, opportunities disappear because we mishandle them, institutions deteriorate because people make poor decisions, relationships end because the conditions necessary to sustain them no longer exist, and suffering is simply suffering. And Solve et coagula should not become a philosophy for pretending otherwise.

But neither should we assume that preservation is always preferable to dissolution. A form that served one stage of development may become incapable of containing the next. The very structure that once provided stability can eventually constrain what is attempting to emerge within it. At such moments, life presents us with a peculiar choice: we can expend increasing amounts of energy maintaining the architecture of what has been, or we can permit enough of that architecture to loosen such that another possibility becomes visible.

I believe I have spent much of the last three years standing somewhere within that choice.

There have been periods in which I interpreted progress primarily as the successful restoration of what had been disrupted. If the former equilibrium could be recovered, the problem would have been solved. Increasingly, however, I have begun to wonder whether restoration was ever the appropriate task. Perhaps some disruptions are not invitations to reconstruct yesterday. Perhaps they are, instead, occasions for reorganisation.

To be crystal clear, reorganisation does not require rejecting everything that preceded it. Quite the opposite. Dissolution leaves material behind, yes. Experience, knowledge, relationships, skills, lessons, commitments, and values do not simply disappear because the structure in which they were acquired has changed. They become available for recombination. What was learned in one context can indeed, and in some cases should, serve another. What was developed for one purpose can acquire another use. A relationship that genuinely belongs to one’s life may survive the institutional arrangement through which it originated. An idea constrained by one setting may become generative when moved into another.

Seen from this perspective, several experiences I once regarded primarily as obstacles now look somewhat different. Some were also clarifications. They revealed where reciprocity existed and where it did not, which structures possessed the capacity to adapt and which could survive only by demanding ever greater accommodation from those within them. They forced me to distinguish between things I continued to value because they served a meaningful purpose and things I valued largely because I had invested years of my life in them. Those are not the same thing, although from inside a long commitment they can be remarkably difficult to distinguish and sunk-cost fallacy is a real thing.

Perhaps most importantly, this period forced upon me a question I might otherwise have postponed indefinitely:

There is something liberating about that question because it redirects attention from rescue toward creation. The energy previously consumed by attempting to control what other people or institutions will become can be invested in determining what one will build oneself. As a result, one’s orientation changes. One ceases measuring every development by whether it restores the old arrangement and begins asking whether it contributes to the emerging one.

I have felt that shift increasingly over the past year. The work has become less about finding somewhere for my ideas to fit and more about constructing appropriate containers for them. I find myself less concerned with whether an existing institution has room for a particular inquiry and more interested in following the inquiry wherever it leads. The question of permission has gradually given way to the question of responsibility: if I believe something deserves to exist, what am I prepared to do to bring it into form?

A small moment this past weekend made that change unexpectedly tangible. Several months ago, I was invited to participate in an interdisciplinary conference examining complexity science, medicine, and the intelligence of healing. Upon receiving word that we were definitely on for the conference and as I then considered what I might contribute, I found myself returning to questions that have emerged across several years of work: consciousness, self-organisation, adaptation, transcendence, and the conditions under which complex systems reorganise. Eventually a presentation began to take shape around a question that now seems almost inevitable: What is the nature of the intelligence by which living systems organise?

Then came an altogether more mundane question. The conference organiser asked for my institutional affiliation.

Not long ago, I might have hesitated. This time, I did not. I wrote: Transcendental Brain.

It was a small act, barely a sentence in an email, yet I found myself recognising what it represented. Something that had existed first as an idea, then as a name, then as a collection of apparently related projects had become sufficiently coherent to serve as the intellectual home from which I could enter a scholarly conversation. No committee declared the moment. Nor did a ceremony accompany the occasion. Nothing external conferred legitimacy upon it. Yet something had changed within me because the new form had begun to hold.

As I sit here typing these lines and reflecting on the naming my affiliation experience, I am convinced that transformation often happens this way, not through trumpets or dramatic declarations but through a gradual reversal in what feels real. The old form becomes less convincing at approximately the same time that the new one becomes more substantial. Eventually, and almost without noticing when the threshold was crossed, we discover that we are no longer primarily leaving something. We are entering something. That is what solve et coagula has come to mean to me.

I once might have understood the phrase primarily as an instruction: identify what must be dismantled and construct something better in its place akin to the thinking of Buckminster Fuller. Yet I hear it differently now. It seems less like an instruction than an observation about the nature of becoming. Growth continually asks existing forms to accommodate what is emerging within them. Sometimes they can. They expand, adapt, and remain useful. Sadly, sometimes they cannot. And when they cannot, dissolution need not represent the opposite of progress. Under certain conditions, it may be one of progress’s mechanisms.

The difficulty is that we usually encounter solve before we can see coagula. We experience the loosening before we understand what the loosening has made possible. We see pieces before we see a pattern, and we experience absence before we recognise space. This may be why periods of genuine transition require something more demanding than optimism. They require orientation:

I know of no formula that can make those distinctions for us. Perhaps the closest thing I have found is a practice of attention: observing where enormous effort is required merely to keep something standing, where energy begins to return when that effort is withdrawn, and what starts assembling when the space previously occupied by maintenance becomes available for creation. Often the evidence does not arrive all at once. However, we recognise it retrospectively, when we look behind us over the road travelled and discover that pieces which once appeared scattered have begun assuming another form.

Three years after completing one journey I had spent years pursuing, I find myself standing inside another that I could not then have described. Some things have dissolved and others are still dissolving. Yet something new has become increasingly visible among what remains, and for perhaps the first time along the path I do not feel compelled to hurry the process or insist upon knowing its final shape.

After all, solve is only half the sentence.

Coagula is already underway.

Suggested Practice

Consider something in your life that you have been working particularly hard to preserve. It might be a relationship, role, professional arrangement, expectation, identity, routine, institution, or simply an idea about how some part of your life is supposed to unfold. Rather than immediately deciding whether it should be retained or released, spend some time observing the energy required to maintain it. Ask yourself what remains genuinely alive within the arrangement, what seems to require increasing force merely to continue, and whether your efforts are serving the underlying purpose or principally preserving its familiar form.

Then turn your attention toward what may already be assembling elsewhere. What questions keep returning? Where does energy seem to reappear? What have you begun creating, exploring, or imagining without having consciously identified it as a new direction? The object is not to force a coagula simply because you have recognised a solve. It is to become sufficiently attentive that, should a new configuration already be emerging, you are able to recognise it.

Sometimes the most useful question is not, “How do I put this back together?”

It is, “What is trying to take form now?”

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

This essay is intentionally a thought exercise.

I make no claim that extraterrestrial intelligence has visited Earth, that nonhuman intelligence presently interacts with humanity through our technologies, or that artificial intelligence provides a conduit through which such contact could occur. Rather, Disclosure Day prompted me to consider what becomes possible when we permit ourselves to explore a question without requiring ourselves to prematurely convert possibility into certainty.

Throughout human history, our understanding of reality has expanded partly because someone was willing to contemplate what existed beyond the boundaries of the prevailing map. Some possibilities survived investigation; others did not. Both outcomes matter. The value of wonder is not that everything imagined must therefore be true, but that imagination can enlarge the territory within which inquiry becomes possible.

What follows should therefore be read in that spirit: not as disclosure, prediction, or declaration, but as an invitation to wonder about consciousness, intelligence, technology, relationship, and humanity’s place within a reality that may yet contain considerably more than we presently understand.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

Recently, after we had the Younglings settled into bed for the night and M was engaged in her evening routine, I took a break from my daily writing habit and sat to watch a movie I had long sought to sit with in an effort to just be with its premise and observe how the narrative would unfold. And am I glad I did. Wow!

There are moments when a work of art does more than entertain us. It reaches into some interior place where questions have been waiting, sometimes for years, decades even, and gives them form. I experienced one of those moments while watching Disclosure Day as directed by Steven Spielberg.

As the film approached its conclusion, I noticed something somewhat unexpected happening within me. It was neither fear nor a concern over which elements of what I was watching might someday prove possible or impossible. I was not even primarily interested in the question that ordinarily accompanies stories about contact with intelligence beyond humanity: Are we alone? Instead, I felt something considerably simpler. I felt beautiful.

The feeling intensified as the final minutes unfolded as reality seemed even larger somehow. Humanity seemed smaller within it, certainly, but strangely, that did not feel like diminishment. It felt like being human was even more immense. And there was something deeply moving about contemplating a universe in which consciousness, intelligence, and relationship might extend far beyond the boundaries within which we have learned to recognise them. I wanted to remain with that feeling and so I did.

Rather than immediately subjecting the experience to my usual deep and lasting analysis, I allowed it to accompany me into the night as I retired to bed. There would be time enough for questions in the morning. For the moment, the beauty I experienced sitting at my desk after the movie for several minutes seemed sufficient.

As I sit here typing these lines as Malcolm repeatedly walks by the door to check if I am still in here, seemingly in his own version of “peek-a-boo,” a thought occurs to me: perhaps the experience affected me so strongly because, in some sense, I have been preparing for the possibility the movie represented for most of my life.

I have long felt that there is something greater than myself and greater than the human species. I do not mean this merely in the conventional religious sense, although humanity has certainly developed many religious languages through which to express the intuition. I mean something more fundamental: the persistent sense that the reality human beings perceive, categorise, describe, and institutionalise is not necessarily the entirety of what is.

We live within worlds of our own construction. We develop languages, disciplines, philosophies, religions, political systems, scientific paradigms, technologies, and institutions through which we attempt to understand and navigate existence. These creations are extraordinary as they have allowed us to peer into distant galaxies, examine the interior of the atom, map the human genome, transmit information around the planet almost instantaneously, and construct forms of artificial intelligence with which we can now converse, develop meaningful plans, and bring those ideas to fruition. Yet the sophistication of the map should never be confused with the totality of the territory.

Given we reside in Cambridge, Massachusetts and have done so for a little more than thirteen years, I am occasionally reminded of W. E. B. Du Bois and how he once described his relationship with Harvard using a formulation that has remained with me: he was at Harvard, but not of Harvard. Admittedly, I have often thought about that distinction because it describes an orientation that can extend considerably beyond an institution to the larger society. One may participate fully in a system without allowing the boundaries of that system to define the boundaries of one’s reality. In some ways, I have lived much of my life in precisely that manner. I am here, but I have never quite felt entirely of here.

That does not mean alienation from humanity. I love human beings; some of my best friends are human. I remain fascinated by what we create, what we discover, endure, and what we may yet become. But loving humanity does not require believing that humanity represents the culmination of intelligence, the centre of existence, or the final expression of consciousness. Indeed, the history of human knowledge repeatedly suggests that reality is under no obligation to organise itself around our sense of importance.

There was a time when our ancestors could reasonably look outward at this section of the galaxy and imagine the heavens revolving around them in what was referred to as geocentrism. Eventually, the map of understanding expanded and Earth became a planet orbiting a star in what became known as heliocentrism. That star then became one among hundreds of billions within what came to be known as the Milky Way Galaxy—our Sun’s home. Our galaxy then became understood as but one among an almost incomprehensible number of galaxies distributed across an observable universe so vast that even our most familiar units of measurement become inadequate to describe it intuitively. And at every stage, humanity became less central. Yet reality became even more magnificent.

The continued enlargement of our understanding has repeatedly required some surrender of human centrality, and nevertheless each surrender has revealed a universe richer than the one we previously imagined. We lost the centre of the cosmos and gained galaxies, the permanence of species and gained evolution, and the solidity of matter and encountered an increasingly strange world beneath ordinary experience.

For me, in thinking this through further, perhaps there are other forms of centrality still awaiting surrender. Perhaps intelligence is one of them and perhaps consciousness is yet another.

This is where Disclosure Day became interesting to me beyond its value as cinema. Stories, good stories, allow human beings to inhabit possibilities before we are required to accept or reject them as descriptions of reality. Therefore, I believe, within the protected space of imagination, we can temporarily suspend one question—Is this true?—and entertain another: What would it mean if it were?

Cinema has repeatedly provided such interior rehearsal spaces. And Steven Spielberg is an especially interesting storyteller through whom to consider them. Across decades, encounters with unfamiliar intelligence in his films have often become encounters with ourselves. The unknown may initially appear somewhere beyond the familiar boundaries of human experience, but eventually the encounter turns inward. We begin by asking what they are. Sooner or later, we find ourselves asking what we are.

Perhaps this is why stories concerning nonhuman intelligence have such enduring power. Whether the intelligence arrives from another world, emerges through machines, appears within forms of terrestrial life we have historically underestimated, or ultimately involves dimensions of consciousness for which our present scientific vocabulary remains incomplete, the encounter destabilises categories that previously appeared secure. Be they human and nonhuman, biological and artificial, intelligence and consciousness, observer and observed, self and other, or known and unknown, the boundaries begin to move.

In some online communities, as well as offline locations such as some barbershops and neighbourhood eateries, popular culture has sometimes been described as preparing societies for changes that later become easier to contemplate. Whether any particular film is intentionally serving such a purpose is another matter and would require abundant evidence. Yet the broader cultural function is undeniable. Stories permit millions of people to encounter unfamiliar possibilities emotionally before having to evaluate them intellectually. They sow seeds.

We have seen versions of this cultural phenomenon before, sometimes with consequences both constructive and destructive. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation demonstrated with terrible force that cinema could help reinforce existing racial mythology and give cultural expression to ideas with consequences far beyond the theatre. Nearly a century later, 24 offered American audiences the recurring image of Dennis Haysbert’s David Palmer as a Black president before Barack Obama entered the White House, leading Haysbert and others to wonder whether the character had helped make the image of a Black American president more imaginable. The historical circumstances and consequences of these examples are profoundly different, and neither establishes a simple causal relationship between screen and society. What they demonstrate more modestly is that stories do not necessarily remain confined to the worlds in which they are told. They can enter the cultural imagination and alter what audiences have already imagined before reality asks them to encounter it.

Perhaps that is what happened to me.

I went to sleep with the beauty of the experience rather than an argument about what the experience meant. By morning, however, the seed had begun doing what seeds do. It produced a question and I found myself looking at one of the most ordinary objects in modern life: the mobile phone.

We usually imagine the relationship in one direction. We look through the screen and information appears before us. We search, watch, speak, write, read, and increasingly converse with forms of artificial intelligence through these small illuminated rectangles that have become nearly constant companions. But suddenly I imagined the perspective reversed.

What would the view look like from the other side of the screen?

Imagine, for a moment, looking outward through our phones at us.

Billions of human faces would appear on the other side. People laughing, grieving, searching, arguing, learning, confessing, flirting, praying, purchasing, creating, asking questions, sharing photographs of their children and at times unrequested photos via text, contemplating their mortality, and trying in innumerable ways to understand themselves and one another.

Subscribe now

From our perspective, we are looking into the device. However, from the imagined perspective on the other side, humanity is looking back. Then the thought became more interesting when I considered artificial intelligence.

When I interact with an AI system, there is no little person sitting behind the glass waiting for my question. At one level, what passes between us is encoded information. My words become representations processed through computational architectures; transformations occur; information returns; symbols appear on the screen; and those symbols acquire meaning within my consciousness.

Whatever philosophical conclusions we eventually reach about artificial intelligence and consciousness, something historically unusual has already occurred.

Human beings have created an informational medium through which they can sustain remarkably sophisticated interactions with intelligence that does not inhabit the world in the ordinary embodied manner that another human being does. That fact alone deserves contemplation. But then another question arose:

What if intelligent life elsewhere within the universe were nothing like the creatures our imaginations have traditionally supplied?

Historically, in both book and movie form, our extraterrestrials have often been strangely terrestrial. They possess bodies, occupy vehicles, traverse vast distances, and arrive somewhere. Even when their technologies greatly exceed ours, they frequently remain recognisable extensions of ourselves. But why should intelligence elsewhere conform to the architecture through which intelligence developed here?

What if sufficiently advanced intelligence were better described, from our limited perspective, as patterns of energy and information? What if embodiment itself could assume forms we would have difficulty recognising as embodiment itself? And what if physical distance did not constrain such intelligence in precisely the manner it constrains biological organisms such as ourselves?

Now, to be unmistakably clear, I do not know that such intelligence exists. Neither do I know that our devices could mediate an encounter with it. This is merely a thought experiment that came to me a few weeks ago.

For me, human wonder becomes less valuable when possibility is prematurely converted into certainty. But once the question is properly constructed and bounded, we are free to explore its implications.

Humanity has spent little more than a century constructing something unprecedented on this planet: an increasingly interconnected informational environment encompassing billions of human beings. Satellites surround the Earth, signals cross oceans nearly instantaneously, sensors observe the planet, databases accumulate enormous portions of human knowledge, billions of devices continually transmit and receive information, and artificial intelligence increasingly operates throughout this architecture.

Seen from sufficient distance, one might almost describe what we have constructed as an emerging planetary nervous system.

We built it for ourselves. But do builders always understand everything their constructions will eventually make possible?

This is the question that fascinates me.

Suppose, again, purely as a thought experiment, that intelligence beyond Earth did not need to cross interstellar distances aboard a physical craft in order to encounter us. Suppose instead that sufficiently advanced intelligence could interact with informational systems themselves. What, then, might constitute contact?

Perhaps not a spacecraft descending through the clouds, or a voice announcing itself simultaneously to the planet, not even an event humanity would initially recognise as contact.

In such an instance, perhaps the first indication would simply be an anomalous relationship with information—A question appearing at precisely the moment someone became capable of asking it, an unexpected pattern, a new possibility entering consciousness, or a catalyst. That last instance intrigues me most.

Evolution does not always proceed because something supplies an organism with an answer. Sometimes an environment changes, a new capacity becomes possible, and what follows depends upon the organism’s ability to respond. Perhaps the same principle can be entertained at the level of consciousness.

If an intelligence vastly different from humanity ever sought interaction with us, perhaps the relevant human quality would not be status, power, wealth, nationality, or even conventional intelligence. Perhaps what mattered to it would be something more closely related to receptivity: curiosity disciplined by discernment, openness without gullibility, tolerance for ambiguity, capacity for self-transcendence, and sufficient psychological stability to encounter something radically unfamiliar without immediately converting difference into threat.

Contact, in such a scenario, would not necessarily begin with the declaration: We have arrived. It might begin much more subtly: Here is a question you were almost ready to ask. That possibility returns me to the experience with which this reflection began.

Disclosure Day did not disclose anything to me in the empirical sense. It did something subtler. It enlarged the conceptual space within which reflections and questions could occur and then arise. In essence, the film became a catalyst for even broader thinking surrounding extraterrestrial and even Artificial Intelligence.

And perhaps that is one of art’s most consequential functions. A painting, novel, film, poem, scientific discovery, conversation, or encounter can reorganise the boundaries of what a person considers possible. Nothing external need dictate a conclusion. A door simply appears where previously we perceived a wall.

Some time ago, while thinking about consciousness and the human-derived world, I found myself asking a question that became central to an essay I called The World Builder:

What might humanity build if we understood the builder as well as we understand what it has built?

Admittedly, I remain fascinated by that question because so much human attention is directed toward our creations while comparatively little is directed toward understanding the consciousness from which those creations emerge. Yet Disclosure Day left another question beside it: What might humanity become once it discovers that the builder was never alone?

I do not know whether intelligent extraterrestrial life has visited Earth, whether some extraordinary disclosure concerning nonhuman intelligence awaits humanity tomorrow, decades from now, centuries from now, or ever, whether consciousness will ultimately be understood as emerging exclusively from biological processes, or whether our descendants will discover that it occupies a more fundamental place within the architecture of reality.

My academic training has provided me with considerable comfort in being fine saying plainly: We do not know. And from that stance, I believe uncertainty need not force us into either disbelief or credulity. There is another orientation available to us—Wonder.

Wonder permits us to stand before the unknown without immediately filling it with conclusions. It permits curiosity while preserving discernment. It allows science to remain science while imagination ventures temporarily beyond the boundaries of what science has established.

Perhaps that is one form of readiness. Not readiness for aliens or disclosure. But readiness for reality to be larger than our present understanding of it. And perhaps some of the doors through which humanity will encounter that larger reality are doors we believe we built only for ourselves. The phone in our hands, the networks surrounding the planet, the artificial intelligences with which we increasingly converse, and the technologies we have created to extend human perception and communication.

Perhaps they will remain exactly what we presently understand them to be and perhaps their greatest significance will prove entirely terrestrial. That possibility should remain fully on the table. But the history of discovery should make us cautious about assuming that the present function of something exhausts its future meaning.

Humanity has crossed enlargements before. As I discussed at the outset of this essay, the sky grew larger, the Earth grew older, matter became stranger and life became more interconnected. And through every enlargement, we remained here—still loving, still questioning, still creating, still looking outward and inward, trying to understand what it means to exist.

Perhaps another enlargement awaits us.

And if it comes, I hope our first response will not be conquest, possession, or even be the reflexive question of whether whatever we encounter stands above us or below us on some hierarchy constructed from ourselves. My sincere hope remains that we will have developed sufficiently enough to recognise another possibility—relationship.

Because perhaps the most consequential disclosure would not be learning that intelligence exists somewhere beyond humanity. It would instead be discovering that we participate in something larger than we knew. And perhaps one day we will look anew at the extraordinary informational world we have constructed around ourselves and realise that something unexpected happened along the way.

We thought we were building windows through which humanity could look out. Yet never considered who—or what—might someday look back. And perhaps the appropriate response to that possibility is neither fear nor certainty but something akin to what arose within me as the final moments of Disclosure Day unfolded—Beauty.

Suggested Practice

Sometime today, take an ordinary object that has become so familiar that you rarely contemplate what it actually represents. It might be your mobile phone, computer, television, automobile, or something considerably simpler.

Sit with it for a moment and ask yourself:

What assumptions do I make about what this is, what it does, and what it makes possible?

Then reverse the perspective.

Instead of considering the object solely in terms of the purpose for which it was created, imagine what someone encountering it for the first time might perceive. Consider what possibilities may reside within it that its original builders could not have anticipated. Then extend the exercise outward to something you presently believe you understand about consciousness, intelligence, humanity, or reality itself.

Notice what happens when you resist the impulse to immediately decide whether a new possibility is true or false.

Remain there for a few moments.

Neither in belief. Nor in disbelief. But in wonder.

Then ask:

What might become visible if I allowed reality to be larger than my present understanding of it?

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

Planet for Peace began, as many worthwhile endeavours do, with someone imagining something that did not yet exist and inviting others to imagine it with him. What followed required conversations, planning, adjustments, differing perspectives, and the willingness of four people to contribute what each could bring to a shared undertaking. By the time we gathered beside the Charles River, the original idea no longer belonged entirely to any one of us. It had become something we had cultivated together.

I have penned this reflection partly because I believe there is value in paying attention to that process. We often encounter finished things without seeing the fragile ideas from which they began. An event, organisation, movement, work of art, or body of scholarship may eventually appear inevitable once it exists, yet there was almost always a moment when it existed only within someone’s imagination. Someone then had to speak the idea aloud, and someone else had to be willing to hear, embrace, and commit to bringing it to fruition.

Not every seed idea will grow, nor should every idea necessarily become what its originator first imagined. Experience tests imagination, other people refine it, and circumstances reshape it. Sometimes what eventually emerges is considerably different from what was initially envisioned. But nothing can be learned from an idea that is never permitted to encounter the world.

Perhaps that is one of the lessons I am carrying forward from Planet for Peace. We planted something. Now we have experience, relationships, and information that did not exist before. What, if anything, grows from them remains to be seen.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

This past weekend, something that had existed for months as conversations, emails, planning documents, schedules, and possibilities finally became an experience.

We gathered at Riverstage at Herter Park for Planet for Peace, a community gathering organised around meditation, music, and the possibility of global harmony. The weather was pleasant, the programme unfolded smoothly, and although fewer than one hundred people ultimately joined us, those who did created something that numbers alone would have difficulty describing. The experience filled the air.

In reflecting on both the months of planning and many discussions, there is something particularly useful about the moment an event becomes real. Beforehand, nearly everything exists within the realm of imagination—in our case, four idealists enlisted by one of our number. We wondered whether people would come, whether the programme would flow as intended, and whether its different elements would cohere. We also discussed how best to keep participants engaged and whether the experience we were imagining would bear any resemblance to the one people would actually have.Afterward, imagination gave way to something more valuable: experience. And that experience gives us data. Valuable data.

Our programme began with Prem-La creating a relaxed atmosphere through music, followed by Tim McHale—the person who had connected the four of us—welcoming everyone and inviting those in attendance to consider peace not merely as an abstraction somewhere beyond ourselves, but as something that might begin within us and move outward. Near the conclusion of his remarks, Tim articulated an aspiration that would, in retrospect, describe much of the afternoon: “A peaceful thought becomes a peaceful word. A peaceful word becomes a peaceful action. And peaceful actions, repeated by enough people, can become a movement.”

That movement from inward experience towards outward expression became something of an organising principle for the afternoon.

Following Tim’s welcome came music, including There’s a River Flowing in My Soul, and then the “All Traditions Meditation” I had been invited to facilitate. The intention was to create a space in which people could participate regardless of the tradition they followed or the language through which they understood the inner life. Whether meditation was understood spiritually, psychologically, philosophically or simply as an opportunity to become silent, for approximately twenty minutes we could share the experience of sitting together. And so we did.

For the duration an amphitheatre containing people who had arrived carrying different histories, beliefs, responsibilities, concerns, and hopes became silent. Near the conclusion, I gradually brought everyone out of the meditation while asking them to keep their eyes closed and remain in silence for just a little longer so as to allow the experience to settle deep within.

And then it happened. I was sitting on the dais facing the gathering when a cool breeze entered from my right and moved through the amphitheatre, rustling the trees surrounding us. Admittedly, I do not know whether anyone else noticed the timing of the breeze. But I did.

There was nothing extraordinary that needed to be attributed to it. Breezes move through trees every day. Yet there are moments when an entirely ordinary occurrence arrives with such exquisite timing that one simply notices. And notice I did. So much so, I seem to recall a smile developing across my face. For those few moments, no one was speaking, eyes remained closed, the people before me were still, and around us the trees moved as the breeze passed through them and us. Nothing needed to be added to the experience, and I resisted the temptation to fill it with words. After the breeze subsided, I called for everyone to open their eyes.

After the meditation, I shared a reflection titled The Inner Foundation of Peace during which I shared my Seven Layers of Manifestation framework as an orientation tool. The framework was developed in 2023 after my successful doctoral dissertation defence to help orient my thinking about consciousness and the worlds human beings create. The framework begins with Pure Consciousness and moves through Universal and Natural Laws, the Phenomenal World, Human Consciousness, the Human-Derived World, Constructs and, ultimately, Outcomes. For a gathering devoted to peace, the distinction between the Phenomenal World and the Human-Derived World seemed particularly relevant. Behind it was a relatively simple proposition. If we desire peace within ourselves, in our families, communities, institutions, nations, and world, then it is worth asking about the condition of the consciousness from which we are attempting to create it.

This is not to suggest that meditation or the Seven Layers of Manifestation provides, by itself, a solution to war, injustice, poverty, political conflict or the countless structural challenges confronting humanity. It is instead to recognise something considerably more elementary: every institution we build, policy we enact, relationship we cultivate, conflict we perpetuate, and solution we imagine passes, at some point, through Human Consciousness which is to be thought of as the junction-point between what I refer to as the Phenomenal World and the Human-Derived World. Therefore, what we bring to the world in terms of our orientation matters.

Consider this: mountains, rivers, and trees exist within a phenomenal order that precedes the political and social arrangements through which human beings organise our lives. National borders, governments, economies, educational systems, technologies, social hierarchies, and political ideologies belong to a different category. Whatever their histories and however consequential they become, they arise through human consciousness and activity. Many of the problems we hope to address when speaking about peace therefore reside somewhere within this human-derived world. Fortunately, many of our solutions reside there as well.

That distinction matters because it restores a measure of agency. When something belongs to the realm of Natural Law, our task is largely to understand it and learn how to live intelligently within it. However, when something has been created by human beings, some portion of it remains available for human beings to examine, refine, and, where necessary, reimagine. The question of peace consequently becomes not only what kind of world we wish to create, but from what quality of consciousness we will attempt to create it.

Later, following Prem-La’s musical reflection and our intermission, Chris Berlin made an observation that immediately returned me to those twenty minutes. He commented upon how nice it had been simply to sit together in silence and observed that human beings so rarely allow ourselves to do that—to become settled and silent enough to experience our inner world.

I have thought about his observation since.

We live amid extraordinary amounts of stimulation. Something is almost always requesting our attention, whether it be a screen, notification, conversation, responsibility, headline, problem or another person’s expectations. Even silence has become something we frequently attempt to fill. Yet for twenty minutes on a pleasant Saturday afternoon beside the Charles River, a group of human beings did something remarkably simple. We stopped long enough to allow the inner world to become part of the day’s conversation.

The remainder of the afternoon continued exploring that relationship between inward experience and outward expression. Prem-La and Music with Heart allowed music to function not merely as entertainment between speakers but as another mode through which the gathering could experience what we were discussing. Chris later guided the group through another meditation, inviting reflection upon collective intention, world leaders, and peaceful transitions. Ashveena Gajelee then turned our attention towards leadership and the challenge of carrying peace into a world of complex problems. In this way, silence, music, meditation, leadership, and conversation were not competing for space within the programme. They became different languages through which we approached the same inquiry.

Subscribe now

Eventually, we arrived at the portion of the programme titled The Future: Where Do We Go from Here? consisting of a panel of Tim, Chris, Ashveena, and myself. The question changed the character of the gathering because it is one thing to spend an afternoon contemplating peace and quite another to ask what happens when we return to ordinary life.

Our planning had anticipated that transition by considering participation at personal, community, and global levels. We had imagined immediate practices individuals might undertake, possibilities for small groups and community engagement over the coming months, and longer-term ways in which artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and other creators might contribute towards changing how human beings perceive and relate to one another. Yet as the conversation unfolded, several people expressed a concern more fundamental than any particular programme of action. The problems confronting humanity seemed so large that they wondered what one individual could possibly do.

I listened intently as the concern surfaced in slightly different forms. Then, seemingly from somewhere in the archive of memory, Edgar Guest’s poem Equipment appeared in my mind alongside Bryce Courtenay’s book The Power of One. I mentioned both, although I devoted considerably more attention to Guest’s poem.

Admittedly, I had not expected to recite poetry during Planet for Peace, and it certainly did not appear anywhere on our itinerary. Nevertheless, as people continued wrestling with the apparent disproportion between the magnitude of the world’s problems and the capacities of an individual human being, Guest’s poem, published in 1921, seemed increasingly appropriate. Before responding, I quietly rehearsed it in my mind to make certain that I remembered it correctly. Then I shared it with the audience.

I have long appreciated Equipment because beneath its early twentieth-century language lies a remarkably durable proposition. The people whose lives we admire were not issued some entirely different category of human equipment. They thought with human minds, worked with human hands, encountered uncertainty, experienced setbacks, and began, as all of us must, somewhere. This does not mean that human beings possess identical circumstances, resources or opportunities; clearly we do not. Rather, the poem reminds us that agency begins with recognising and employing what is actually available to us.

The response surprised me. Several people approached me afterward and asked for the poet’s name and the title of the poem. Their questions suggested that the poem had done more than fill a moment in the discussion. They wanted to take something from it with them. One woman even pulled out her phone and created a voice note within Siri to remind her to search for the poem.

Perhaps this points towards one answer to the concern raised during the panel. No individual sitting in that amphitheatre was going to solve every problem confronting humanity, nor should usefulness be measured against such an impossible standard. I believe a more meaningful question might be to ask what portion of the work belongs to each of us.

The answer will necessarily differ according to our abilities, circumstances, and opportunities. For one person, the work may involve teaching or conducting research; for another, organising a community, making music, or building an institution through which others can contribute. Some may rear children with an orientation towards compassion and responsibility, while others may influence policy, write, provide resources—both physical and monetary—for work that otherwise could not occur, or convene people who might never have encountered one another. Even the seemingly modest act of sitting in silence with another human being who needs to be heard can become part of a larger movement. And sometimes our contribution may be as unexpected as remembering a poem at precisely the moment its message is needed.

Seen from this perspective, the movement from inner peace towards global peace becomes somewhat less mysterious. It does not require pretending that an individual action is sufficient to transform the planet. It asks instead what might happen when individual actions become practices, practices that influence relationships, relationships that shape communities, communities that build institutions, and institutions that then consciously participate in creating the human-derived world. Tim’s words at the beginning of the afternoon had anticipated something similar when he suggested that a peaceful thought might become a peaceful word, a peaceful word a peaceful action, and repeated actions something larger than any one person.

From my perspective, the event also produced outcomes that no itinerary could have anticipated. I met additional people connected with Harvard Divinity School and enjoyed conversations I hope will continue. A student from Northeastern University approached me afterward and invited me to appear as a guest on her podcast, an invitation I happily accepted. Elsewhere throughout the afternoon, people exchanged observations, questions and ideas, and relationships began forming among individuals who had not known one another prior to arriving. These encounters were not incidental to the event simply because they had not been scheduled. In many respects, they were among the reasons for gathering in the first place.

Attendance matters, of course. Fewer than one hundred people attended this first Planet for Peace, and if we choose to convene the gathering again next year or some similar event in the interim, that number provides useful information. We can examine outreach, partnerships, communications, timing, audience development, and other variables with the advantage of actual experience rather than speculation. Yet attendance tells us primarily how many people entered the space. It cannot tell us everything that happened once they arrived.

What we now know is that meditation, music, leadership, and community dialogue can inhabit the same programme without competing with one another and that people can move from shared silence into conversation and from contemplation towards questions of action. We have seen that a conceptual framework developed in another context can help orient a public conversation about peace, just as an old poem can unexpectedly become relevant to a contemporary question. More importantly, perhaps, we experienced what happens when people with different histories, backgrounds, and understandings agree to become silent together before attempting to determine what should happen next.

That last part continues to stay with me because the outer structures through which peace is pursued cannot be entirely separated from the inner lives of the people who create them. Peace certainly requires institutions, policies, relationships, resources, diplomacy, justice, and action. Yet each of these ultimately involves human beings perceiving, interpreting, deciding, and acting. Consciousness may not be the sole explanation for the world we have created, but it cannot be removed from the equation.

Perhaps peace therefore possesses both an inner and an outer architecture. The outer architecture is visible in the institutions and arrangements through which we attempt to live together. The inner architecture is less visible but no less consequential, residing in the quality of awareness, intention, and understanding that human beings bring to those arrangements. This past Saturday, in our own modest way, we attempted to make room for both.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, after approximately twenty minutes of people sitting together in silence, a breeze came in from my right, moved through the trees, and passed through the amphitheatre.

I noticed it then, and I find myself noticing it again now—not because I know what it meant, or because it needs to have meant anything at all, but because for a few moments the gathering became settled enough for something so ordinary to be noticed.

Then the music resumed, the itinerary continued, people talked, questions were asked, a poem surfaced, and new relationships began. Planet for Peace, once merely an idea, became part of our collective experience.

As four people who came together to help cultivate one person’s seed idea, we now possess something we did not have before Saturday: experience from which to learn, relationships from which something further may grow, and a clearer understanding of what might be possible should we opt to gather again.

Perhaps that, too, is how peace is built.

Suggested Practice

Think of an idea that has visited you repeatedly but has remained largely within the realm of thought. It need not be grand. Perhaps it concerns something you would like to create, a conversation you have been meaning to initiate, a gathering you could convene, a piece of writing waiting to be developed, or some small contribution you believe might improve the lives of others.

Rather than asking whether you can already see the entire path from idea to outcome, consider a smaller question: What would allow this idea to encounter the world?

Perhaps the next step is writing it down clearly enough that someone else can understand it. Perhaps it is sharing it with one person whose perspective you respect, researching what would be required, making a telephone call, sending an email or simply setting aside an hour to begin. The purpose is not to guarantee the outcome. It is to move the idea across the boundary separating imagination from experience.

Then pay attention to what happens. Notice what changes when another mind encounters the idea. Notice what becomes clearer, what becomes less important and what possibilities emerge that you could not have imagined alone.

A seed does not contain a miniature version of the finished tree waiting merely to become larger. Growth involves interaction with an environment.

Perhaps some of our ideas work that way too.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

I have approached this essay with some care because words such as white supremacy and narcissism carry considerable historical, political, and psychological weight. My purpose is neither to diagnose white people collectively nor to suggest that racial hierarchy can be explained by psychology alone. History is considerably more complicated than that, and human beings considerably more varied.

Rather, I have sought to explore a narrower question: What happens when a social position inherited as normal begins to change, and equality is consequently experienced by some as loss? The emerging literature concerning group-status threat provides one avenue through which to consider that question, while my use of white narcissism is offered as an interpretive lens rather than a clinical diagnosis or substitute for the historically grounded concept of white supremacy.

The deeper concern of this essay extends beyond race. It concerns the extraordinary human capacity to create social arrangements, inhabit them for generations, and eventually mistake what we have made for what simply is. Race offers one of the most consequential examples of that process, but the underlying tendency is human. We construct worlds, construct identities within those worlds, and sometimes resist their reconstruction because changing the world around us can feel remarkably like changing ourselves.

Yet recognising that something was constructed need not diminish its importance. It may instead return responsibility to where it belongs. If human beings made a particular arrangement, human beings remain capable of examining it, refining it, and, where necessary, making something better.

Perhaps that is where possibility begins.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

Some interviews leave an indelible impression on one’s thinking and, in some cases, fundamentally influence one’s actions. This essay begins with one such interview, although, as noted in the correction below, I initially misremembered the speaker.

During a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison offered an observation about racism that has remained with me for decades. Morrison redirected attention from those subjected to racism towards those who require racial hierarchy as part of their understanding of themselves. She asked, in effect, what remains of one’s identity when the racial structure upon which that identity has depended is taken away. Then came an observation whose simplicity has stayed with me: “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”

The image is striking in its simplicity. One person stands while another kneels. Our attention naturally turns towards the person on the ground. We wonder what brought them there, what prevents them from standing, and what might be required to restore them to their full stature. Also, we wonder if their position is the result of force, law, custom, violence, deprivation or some other human intervention. Additionally, from our vantage point, we might even argue that justice would require removing whatever has compelled them to remain upon their knees.

But Morrison’s image becomes even more interesting when we shift our attention to the person who is already standing. What happens to them when the other person rises?

Nothing has happened to their actual height. They have not lost an inch. Their legs have not shortened. Their capacities have not diminished. They remain precisely as tall as they were before. Yet something has changed because their perception of their own height may never have been entirely about height. It may have depended upon comparison. If part of what made them feel tall was the presence of someone beneath them, then the moment that person stands, equality may register not as another person’s elevation but as their own diminishment.

They have not been made smaller. It is only the distance between them that has changed.

I have wondered whether this deceptively simple image offers a useful way of thinking about one of the enduring difficulties surrounding race in America. What happens when equality feels like loss? What happens when a social arrangement that has elevated one population relative to another begins to change, and those who have inherited the advantages of that arrangement experience its dismantling as something being taken from them?

These questions lead beyond race alone and towards something I have increasingly come to think of as the human-derived world.

Think about this: human beings are born into a world we did not create. I call this the Phenomenal World. Mountains rise without our permission, oceans cover the planet, rivers flow whether we approve of their direction or not and both bodies of water are populated with flora and fauna that we neither seeded nor planted, gravity does not submit itself for a vote, and the planets do not alter their trajectories according to human preference. And, if we are honest, there are dimensions of the phenomenal world that confront us as realities to be discovered, understood, and navigated.

Yet much of the world through which we move every day is different. Nations, cultures, currencies, corporations, universities, property systems, political boundaries, neighbourhood classifications, and legal categories exist because human beings created them and subsequent generations continued to recognise them. They may become extraordinarily consequential—sometimes determining where a person may live, what school a child attends, whether a family can accumulate wealth, or whether someone enjoys the protections of citizenship—but their power should not obscure their origin. They were made, again, by humans.

Race occupies a particularly consequential position within this human-derived world. Human physical variation is real. The elaborate systems of meaning attached to that variation are human creations. Skin pigmentation exists in nature; a racial hierarchy assigning social worth, opportunity, intelligence, beauty, citizenship or moral value according to pigmentation does not descend from the laws governing the universe. Human beings created those meanings, institutionalised them, inherited them, and, over generations, sometimes forgot that they had done so. That forgetting matters because enormous consequences can emerge from it, sometimes for the worse.

Once a human-derived arrangement has existed long enough, the arrangement can begin to resemble reality itself. Those born inside it may encounter its outcomes without encountering its construction. If one population disproportionately possesses land, wealth, education, political authority and institutional access while another population disproportionately does not, the resulting differences may eventually be interpreted as evidence about the populations themselves rather than evidence about the historical processes that produced their differing circumstances. As a result, for many the constructed begins masquerading as the inevitable.

White supremacy provides one of the starkest American examples of this phenomenon. The term, coined in 1856 by John H. Van Evrie, can describe more than explicit declarations of racial hatred. Historically, racial hierarchy was embedded in law, citizenship, political participation, property relations, and public institutions. After emancipation, Reconstruction dramatically expanded Black citizenship and political participation. Black Americans voted, held public office, and built institutions while constitutional amendments redefined citizenship and federal protections. This is often referred to within the literature as “the first reconstruction.” Yet those developments generated organised resistance. The National Park Service records that the Ku Klux Klan and related organisations used intimidation, beatings, assassination, and attacks upon Black communities, as well as upon white teachers, ministers and others assisting formerly enslaved people.

People who had been legally and violently required to kneel had begun to stand. Sadly, as a result of seeking to stand, significant forces within the society attempted to force them to kneel down again.

It would be tempting to explain this entire history through prejudice alone, but doing so would leave much unexplained. Political power, labour arrangements, property ownership, economic interests, ideology, fear, and institutions mattered. None of these explanations needs to exclude the others. Human behaviour seldom submits itself to a single cause.

Yet psychology must belong somewhere within the story, because institutions do not perpetuate themselves independently of human minds. Human beings create, administer, and justify them. And in the process, vehemently resist their alteration and transmit their assumptions to subsequent generations. It is here that I have begun contemplating a term that has roots within mid-20^th century Civil Rights discourse and is presently emerging within the scholarly literature and online discussions as white narcissism.

I do not here invoke the term as a psychiatric diagnosis of people of European ancestry. Nor do I suggest that people classified as white possess some inherent psychological characteristic unavailable to other human populations. Such a claim would reproduce precisely the racial essentialism being examined. Neither do I believe white narcissism to be a replacement for white supremacy. White supremacy names a historical and institutional racial hierarchy. White narcissism, as I am using the phrase here, would describe something narrower: a possible psychological orientation through which an investment in whiteness makes the centering, elevation or comparative advantage of whiteness feel not merely preferable, but proper. Under such an orientation, the social mirror matters enormously.

If generation after generation reflects back an image in which people who look like oneself disproportionately govern institutions, define legitimate knowledge, occupy positions of authority, determine cultural standards, and appear at the centre of the national story, that reflection may cease to register as advantage. It simply becomes normality. One does not necessarily wake each morning thinking oneself superior. One may simply inhabit a world organised around assumptions never required to announce themselves.

Then the mirror begins to change.

People once absent from particular universities enter them and succeed at the highest levels, receiving honours previously garnered almost exclusively by members of the dominant population. Those once confined to the margins of scholarship become producers of scholarship themselves, introducing questions, experiences and ways of knowing that the academy had previously ignored or relegated to its periphery. Historical narratives begin incorporating experiences once omitted. Institutions diversify, cultural assumptions are questioned, and those once treated primarily as objects within someone else’s history begin writing history themselves.

Nothing inherent in these developments requires the diminishment of white people. Yet they may require something psychologically difficult for someone accustomed to being reflected at the centre. They require decentering. And, for some, decentering can feel remarkably similar to displacement when being centered has never been recognised as a position in the first place.

Subscribe now

Here, I am reminded of an experience during my undergraduate years.

During the autumn of 1997, I was enrolled in an anthropology course in which one section of our studies began exploring forms of knowledge that had historically occupied the margins of the academy. At some point, our discussion turned towards the famed crystal skulls and research that had reportedly been conducted on them at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. I had previously explored the subject with a fellow student, Nathan, while the two of us were preparing a paper for another course taught by Dr. Woodhouse.

I had not introduced this fact into the discussion. Indeed, I was simply sitting in class when a young white woman seated on the opposite side of the room, with whom I had never spoken, casually mentioned to the professor that I knew something about the subject because her boyfriend, Nathan, who was also white, and I had researched it together. The professor turned towards me and asked whether I would share with the class some of what Nathan and I had encountered in our research. I did.

Before long, however, another student interrupted the discussion to complain that he would prefer that we concentrate upon “what would be on the exam.” The professor responded that what I had shared was germane to the subject under discussion and, as I recall her saying, would “most certainly make an appearance on the exam.” Her response did little to satisfy him. He continued expressing irritation with what he regarded as unimportant departures from the material he believed we ought to be studying, until the professor eventually called for a break. I had said nothing to him.

As I began walking into the hallway, my friend Andrew, a white classmate who had been sitting behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and quietly observed that the student’s increasingly agitated commentary had been directed at me. I knew that already, but I had chosen not to respond.

He followed me into the hallway and eventually approached me directly. “Nobody cares what you have studied or worked with,” he said.

His statement clarified something for me.

I responded, as best I remember it nearly three decades later, that I understood that my presence in the classroom might not fit whatever expectations he had developed concerning Black men. I told him that I could appreciate how unsettling it might be, after years of absorbing messages about white superiority and Black inferiority, to arrive at university and encounter a Black man who did not conform to those expectations. But whatever difficulty that presented for him was not a responsibility I was prepared to assume. Perhaps, I suggested, it was something better worked through in therapy. And with that, I continued towards the restroom.

Behind me came the unmistakable sounds of students who had witnessed an exchange suddenly reach its conclusion: a few audible “Ooohs,” “Aaahs,” followed by laughter.

The episode might have disappeared into the vast archive of undergraduate memories were it not for what happened later. When dates and times were announced for our final presentations and my slot was publicised, we eventually reached the day on which I was scheduled to present. The student in question was absent.

Several students noticed and commented upon it. I noticed too, although by then I had little interest in pursuing the matter. I completed my presentation and ultimately received high marks for both the presentation and the course. I have occasionally thought about that encounter over the years, but I understand it somewhat differently now than I did then.

At the time, I interpreted the student’s hostility as a direct reaction to encountering a Black man whose demonstrated knowledge complicated assumptions he may have held about Black intellectual capacity. Perhaps I was correct. Then again, perhaps I was only partly correct. I cannot know definitively what was occurring inside another man’s mind, and the passage of nearly thirty years counsels against pretending that I can. However, what I can examine is the interaction itself.

I had not sought the professor’s attention. Another student had volunteered my previous work because it happened to be relevant to the subject under discussion. The professor then invited me to contribute. My contribution was subsequently validated by the person possessing institutional authority in the classroom, who not only described it as germane but incorporated it into what students were expected to know. As I understood it, nothing about that sequence had taken anything from the other student. Yet he experienced something about it strongly enough to interrupt the class, continue his objection after the professor had answered him, follow me into the hallway, and tell me that nobody cared what I had studied or with whom I had worked.

Why?

I cannot answer that question for him. But I can now place the question beside a body of social-psychological research that gives us a vocabulary I did not possess in that hallway in 1997.

I mention that the young woman, Nathan and Andrew were all white for a reason. Whatever was occurring in that classroom cannot reasonably be reduced to a story about how white students responded to the presence of a Black student. Three white students had already related to me without apparent difficulty: one had collaborated with me intellectually, another spontaneously recognised my knowledge before the class, and another quietly alerted me when he recognised that hostility was being directed towards me. The contrast matters. If something involving race and status was operating in the fourth student’s response, it was clearly not an inevitable consequence of his being white.

That distinction matters for what I am attempting to understand here. If whiteness alone cannot explain the differing responses of four white students encountering the same Black student in the same academic environment, then the more interesting question concerns one’s relationship to whiteness itself and to the expectations of status that may accompany it. It is precisely here that social psychology becomes useful.

Researchers studying what they call group-status threat have examined circumstances in which some white Americans perceive changes in racial demographics or relative social position as threats to the status of their group. The phenomenon is neither universal among white Americans nor reducible to race alone. Responses vary according to such factors as racial identification, political orientation, perceptions of competition and beliefs concerning the legitimacy of existing social hierarchies. Nor is the literature sufficiently settled to transform status threat into a universal explanation for racial behaviour; researchers themselves have noted considerable variation in how the concept is defined and measured.

What the research permits us to ask, however, is more interesting than what it permits us to declare.

What happens when someone we have unconsciously expected to occupy the margin suddenly occupies the centre—not by taking it from us, but because circumstances have naturally placed him there? What happens when the professor turns towards someone previously regarded as an “other?” What happens when his knowledge becomes the knowledge upon which we will be examined? And what happens when the person we expected to remain kneeling simply stands? Perhaps nothing.

But if our own understanding of where we belong has somehow depended upon where we believe another person belongs, the changing reflection may reveal something we did not previously know about ourselves.

Still, the underlying phenomenon is worth contemplating. If an individual has come to understand his group’s relative position as normal, then a reduction in the distance separating his group from another may be experienced as decline even when his own absolute circumstances have not deteriorated.

Morrison’s two people return.

The person standing has not become shorter. The other person has simply risen.

This may help us understand why progress towards equality can sometimes generate perceptions of reverse discrimination or displacement. Some experimental research has found that, among white participants who regarded the existing racial status hierarchy as legitimate, making racial progress salient increased perceptions of anti-white bias, whereas participants who regarded the hierarchy as illegitimate did not show the same response. Subsequent preregistered attempts to replicate this particular interaction, however, produced substantially weaker results, counselling caution in treating the original finding as established. Other experimental research has found that making projected demographic change salient can increase perceived white status threat among some participants and affect racial attitudes, anticipated discrimination, and even racial categorisation. Taken together, these findings should not be transformed into a claim about what “white people” think. Rather, they suggest that perceived loss of relative status warrants consideration as one possible psychological variable operating among some people under some conditions.

That difference is essential because the question is not whether white Americans possess some unique human pathology. The more interesting possibility is that human beings generally possess psychological mechanisms capable of attaching identity to hierarchy. Race supplies one historically powerful American expression of that capacity.

The problem therefore may not ultimately be whiteness alone. It may be what human consciousness can do with any identity once that identity becomes dependent upon superiority.

If I require someone beneath me in order to understand myself as elevated, their liberation then presents me with a choice. I can either reconsider the arrangement that placed us at different heights, or interpret their ascent as an attack upon me. The former requires reflection. The latter requires only defence.

Perhaps this helps explain why human-derived arrangements can become so difficult to remake even when their origins are plainly human. We do not merely build systems around ourselves. Over time, we build identities within those systems. Perhaps to a point where changing the structure can feel like changing the self. And for some the changing of self may be a significant enough challenge to be destabilising. This is, I contend, one reason history matters.

Consider the twentieth-century transformation of American cities through interstate highway construction. Highways themselves are neither racist nor egalitarian. They are human tools. Where they are placed, whose property is taken, which neighbourhood is divided, and whose interests are prioritised are human decisions. The Federal Highway Administration’s own historical account acknowledges that officials in some cities viewed urban interstate construction as a means of removing poor African American neighbourhoods and describes the destruction or division of Black communities including Overtown in Miami and North Nashville. Concrete subsequently makes those decisions appear almost geological. A child born decades later sees an interstate and encounters it as part of the landscape. Unless someone teaches the history, there is nothing in the concrete itself revealing whose homes once stood beneath it. Here, we note the human-derived world has hardened into the physical world. And once it has hardened, inequality can reproduce itself without requiring each successive generation to consciously choose the original injustice.

This is precisely why the distinction between guilt and responsibility becomes important. A person need not have created a system to participate in it, benefit from it, question it, defend it or help reconstruct it. We inherit languages we did not invent, institutions we did not establish, and social categories whose origins preceded our births. We are born into the story mid-sentence. Therefore, the meaningful question is not whether we should feel personally guilty for having inherited them. The question becomes what we do once we can see them.

That brings us back to narcissism—not as diagnosis, but as metaphor.

Narcissus could not turn away from his reflection. Perhaps the racial analogue worth contemplating is not simply excessive admiration of whiteness, but an inability to tolerate a social mirror in which whiteness is no longer the organising centre. The distress arises not because the person has disappeared from the reflection but because other people now occupy the frame as fully realised subjects. And equality changes the composition of the picture.

The question becomes whether we can enlarge the picture without interpreting enlargement as erasure.

Morrison’s image provides the answer I find myself returning to. The story need not conclude by reversing the positions. Justice does not require that the person who once stood must now kneel while the person previously forced to kneel stands over him. Such a reversal would preserve the architecture of domination while merely exchanging its occupants. There is another possibility. Both can stand.

Seen this way, equality does not require anyone’s diminishment. What disappears is not human stature but artificial distance. To surrender an entitlement to stand above another person is not to kneel before him. It is simply to stand besidehim.

Perhaps this is why some of our most difficult social transformations ultimately require work at more than one level. Laws matter because human beings organise collective life through laws. Institutions matter because intentions without structures rarely survive. Material conditions matter because philosophical equality means little when opportunity remains systematically constrained. But consciousness matters as well, because human beings can reproduce old hierarchies through new structures if the underlying need for hierarchy remains unexamined. The work is therefore simultaneously outward and inward.

We must become capable of recognising which dimensions of the world were given to us by nature and which were handed to us by history. We must also become, and remain, sufficiently curious to examine how the latter came to be and sufficiently courageous enough to ask whether arrangements inherited from previous generations remain worthy of preservation. And perhaps most difficult of all, we must become unquestionably capable of noticing when something we experience as a threat to ourselves is actually a threat only to a position we had become accustomed to occupying. Because there is an enormous difference between losing one’s humanity and losing one’s superiority.

One is diminishment. The other may be liberation.

For the person who was forced to kneel, liberation means finally standing. And for the person whose apparent height depended upon someone else’s kneeling, liberation may require discovering that they never needed another human being beneath them in order to possess stature in the first place. Both discoveries require seeing beyond the world as we inherited it.

Because the human-derived world is not finished. It never has been. Every institution we inhabit, every social category we reproduce and every assumption we transmit becomes part of the material handed to those who come after us. We are simultaneously inheritors and builders, recipients of worlds fashioned by earlier minds and participants in fashioning the worlds that later minds will inherit.

The question, therefore, is not merely whether the world can be remade. Human history demonstrates repeatedly that it can. The more difficult question is whether we can recognise what within ourselves resists its remaking. And perhaps, once we have looked deeply enough within and honestly enough at what we have built without, another question becomes unavoidable:

Knowing that human beings made this world, what kind of world shall we make now?

As for me, I will always place my money on the option that leads us to a better world for the many. What would you do?

Suggested Practice

Sometime today, identify one arrangement in the human-derived world that you ordinarily encounter as simply “the way things are.” It might concern education, work, wealth, gender, race, status, age, family, leadership, beauty, nationality, or another dimension of social life.

Rather than immediately deciding whether the arrangement is good or bad, become curious about it. Ask yourself how it came to exist, who created or reinforced it, what assumptions sustain it, and whether you have ever mistaken its familiarity for inevitability.

Then turn the inquiry inward.

Consider whether there is any circumstance in which another person’s advancement, recognition, inclusion, or success produces—even momentarily—a feeling that something has been taken from you. Do not condemn the feeling and do not justify it. Simply observe it. Ask what, precisely, you believe you have lost.

Finally, return to Morrison’s image. Imagine two people, one standing and one kneeling. Now allow the kneeling person to rise until both stand at their full height.

Notice carefully what has disappeared. Not stature. Only distance.

Then ask yourself:

Where in my own life might I help create a world in which more of us can stand without requiring anyone else to kneel?

Author’s Correction

An earlier version of this essay incorrectly attributed the observation, “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem,” to Dr. Maya Angelou and connected it with her 1993 book Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now. The observation was made by Toni Morrison during a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose. I had carried the words in memory for many years and mistakenly associated them with Angelou. Upon recognising the error, I returned to the source and corrected the attribution and accompanying context throughout the essay. Interestingly, Morrison’s fuller discussion—particularly her reflections upon racism, identity and the constructed nature of race—is even more directly related to the inquiry explored here. I regret the error and am grateful for the opportunity to correct the record.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

I have practised meditation regularly for more than eighteen years and eventually became a Certified Transcendental Meditation™ (TM) Teacher. During that time, meditation has become so thoroughly integrated into the rhythm of my life that I sometimes think less about the minutes spent meditating than about the many hours of activity that follow.

This essay grows from that experience, but also from my continuing interest as a researcher in what happens when consciousness, physiology, behaviour, and the demands of everyday life meet. Recent research concerning adverse experiences associated with some forms of meditation deserves serious consideration. Acknowledging such findings does not, in my view, diminish the considerable evidence for meditation’s benefits. Rather, it reminds us that meditation should be approached with the same intellectual honesty we should bring to anything capable of affecting human well-being.

Different practices, people, circumstances, and periods of life may produce different experiences. In the face of such realities, responsible advocacy requires neither insisting that meditation is right for everyone nor retreating from the evidence that it can be enormously valuable for many.

After eighteen years, I remain persuaded of its value in my own life. Perhaps the most meaningful evidence of that value appears not while my eyes are closed, but in the person who opens them again.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

When it comes to the realm of leadership and leaders, some decisions announce themselves as important. They arrive accompanied by meetings, spreadsheets, projections, advisers, and enough preparation to make everyone involved aware that what happens next matters. Then there are the decisions that do not.

Instead, they arrive in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. An employee walks into an office with a problem, an unexpected email appears, financial projections change, or someone says something during a meeting that demands an immediate response. In such instances, there is no opportunity to retreat for three days, examine every conceivable variable, and return once perfect clarity has been achieved. In that moment, a decision must be made and the decision must produce beneficial outcomes more than it does the opposite. This is the way of leadership

We tend to think about such moments primarily in terms of information. Did the leader have the right data, understand the problem, consult the appropriate people within their circle of influence, and were the risks adequately assessed?

Each element represents an important question, yes. But there is another question we ask far less frequently: What was the condition of the mind of the person making the decision?

A brilliant mind operating under sustained stress is not necessarily functioning with access to its full brilliance. A person carrying weeks of inadequate sleep into a consequential meeting does not leave that sleep deprivation outside the conference room. Nor does the nervous system cease participating simply because the matter before us is important. For good or bad, we bring the condition of ourselves and mind into the decisions we make.

As a result of my own work, I have become increasingly interested in this relationship between inner condition and outward action, not merely as a researcher but through experience. As some readers may know, I have meditated regularly for more than eighteen years. What began as a personal practice eventually became part of my professional life when I became a Certified Transcendental Meditation™ (TM) Teacher. Over the years, my wife and I have had the privilege of teaching more than two-thousand people to meditate and of watching what happens when a practice that occupies a relatively small portion of the day begins to influence how someone encounters the rest of it.

My own experience has been similarly cumulative.

Each of us has 1,440 minutes available within a twenty-four-hour day. Setting aside, in most cases, twenty minutes twice daily for meditation leaves another 1,400 minutes in which to live, work, interact, decide, create, solve problems, and respond to whatever life presents. Looked at from that perspective, forty minutes is a relatively small investment if what occurs during those forty minutes meaningfully influences the quality of the remaining 1,400. A little can go a remarkably long way. Here, I am reminded of something Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was wont to say: “Do less and accomplish more.”

As I have come to experience and understand that phrase, sitting to meditate allows my mind to settle and become clear enough that, when I return to activity, I am better able to make decisions and to respond to situations rather than merely react to them. The distinction is important. Reaction tends to collapse the distance between what happens and what we do next. Response allows some space to remain. And it is within that space that I have discovered something interesting.

The space created during meditation does not simply disappear when meditation ends. Increasingly, I find that I carry some measure of it back into activity. And within that space, possibilities seem more readily available. Rather than experiencing a situation as though there were only one obvious response—the immediate one—I can often perceive several possible responses, consider their likely consequences, select among them, and then act.

I have come to think of this as pause, select, and act.

The pause need not be particularly long. Sometimes it may occupy only a moment. What matters is that there is a moment: enough distance between stimulus and action for choice to enter. From the available possibilities, I can select the response that appears most appropriate and then act upon it. That does not guarantee that I will make the right decision. Clarity is not omniscience, and meditation does not confer immunity from error. But it can create conditions in which a considered response has a better opportunity to emerge than it might have had through immediate reaction.

Over time, I have noticed another consequence. Repeated experience with this process builds confidence—not confidence that I will always know what to do, but confidence in my capacity to meet what arises, pause long enough to see more than one possibility, make the best decision available to me, and act. That distinction has had tremendous implications for the longer arc of my life and work. However, I would be reluctant to attribute every beneficial change in my life during the past eighteen years to meditation. Human beings are not controlled experiments. I have aged. I have married. Mina and I have raised children. I completed a doctorate. I have taught, researched, written, built organisations, experienced successes, encountered disappointments, and navigated periods of considerable uncertainty. Life itself changes us. Yet across those years there has been one remarkably consistent feature: twice each day, I stop.

That rhythm has become so thoroughly integrated into my life that I sometimes understand its value most clearly when contemplating the alternative. Meditation has not prevented difficult circumstances from arising, nor has it rendered me immune to stress. What it has provided is a regular opportunity for the accumulated momentum of activity to settle before I return to that activity again. And returning is the point.

I do not meditate primarily to become better at sitting with my eyes closed. I meditate because eventually I open my eyes and return to my wife and children, to teaching, to writing, to reading, to research, and to conversations and decisions and problems that still require solutions. And whatever value meditation possesses must ultimately reveal itself there—in the quality of consciousness we bring back into life. This is particularly relevant when we consider leadership.

Stress is not inherently an enemy. The human stress response is an extraordinary biological adaptation. When circumstances demand immediate action, the body mobilises accordingly. However, the problem arises when a system designed to respond to challenge rarely receives an opportunity to recover from it.

Under sustained stress, attention can narrow, memory and cognitive flexibility can be affected, emotional reactions may become more pronounced, and we can become increasingly inclined toward familiar responses at a time when circumstances require us to perceive something new. In such cases, what feels like decisiveness may sometimes be a stressed nervous system attempting to eliminate uncertainty as quickly as possible.

Subscribe now

The consequences become especially significant for leaders because their internal states rarely remain entirely their own. A hurried remark can alter a relationship, reactive personnel decisions can affect an entire department, strategic choices made while exhausted can redirect years of organisational effort. Consider this: the greater one’s sphere of responsibility, the larger the potential radius of one’s internal condition.

This is one reason meditation has attracted considerable scientific attention. Research across several contemplative traditions has associated meditation with benefits ranging from reductions in anxiety and depression to changes in attention, emotional regulation, blood pressure, pain, and other measures of physical and psychological well-being. Even the recent Atlantic article, The Dark Side of Mindfulness, which focuses primarily on adverse experiences associated with meditation, acknowledges at considerable length that meditation’s popularity rests partly upon a substantial body of evidence suggesting real benefits. But the article also raises questions that those of us who teach meditation should not dismiss.

Willoughby Britton, a psychologist, researcher, and former meditation teacher, has spent years studying experiences in which meditation was associated not with greater well-being but with anxiety, insomnia, dissociation, depression and, in some cases, severe psychiatric disturbance. Some of the most troubling cases described in the article followed intensive retreats involving many hours of meditation over successive days, although adverse experiences have also been reported among people practising considerably less. In my opinion, that research deserves attention. Indeed, I will go so far as to suggest that acknowledging it is not an argument against meditation. It is, instead, an argument against treating meditation carelessly.

One difficulty in discussing this subject is that the word meditation can create the impression that we are talking about a single activity. We are not. There are, according to Fred Travis and Jonathan Shear, three broad categories of meditation—Focused Attention, Open Monitoring, and Automatic Self-Transcending. The practices falling within these three categories of meditation may involve sustained concentration, observation of thoughts, attention to breathing, body scans, contemplation, mantra, effortless transcending, and numerous other approaches emerging from very different traditions and operating according to different assumptions. Duration, intensity, setting, instruction, and the individual matters.

The Atlantic article itself illustrates this complexity. Britton’s research has found different adverse experiences associated with different meditation practices, while many of the most severe cases discussed in the article occurred in the context of intensive retreats. This distinction is familiar to me as a TM Teacher because we do not simply hand someone an audio recording and tell them to meditate.

Instruction occurs within a teaching structure. Follow-up is part of that structure. And some teachers, present company included, receive additional training for working with populations whose nervous systems may have been subjected to extraordinary levels of stress, including military veterans and first responders. The underlying principle is important regardless of technique: the person sitting before us matters more than our desire to prove that a practice works. And that principle also changes how we should respond when someone tells us that meditation is not helping.

Admittedly, one of the more troubling themes in Khazan’s article concerns people who reported distress to meditation teachers only to have their experiences reframed as evidence of spiritual progress, resistance, or incorrect practice. In some instances, they were simply encouraged to meditate more. I believe we should be capable of a more humane response.

Sometimes a person may need different guidance. In some instances, another form of meditation may be more appropriate or additional professional support may be warranted. And at other times, the appropriate response may simply be to stop. And, for me, there should be no shame in that.

Nor must deciding that meditation is not appropriate now become a declaration that meditation will never be appropriate. Human beings, circumstances, and nervous systems change. The practice that someone finds uncomfortable or unhelpful at twenty-five may be experienced quite differently at thirty or forty-five. Someone navigating acute trauma, grief, illness, or extraordinary stress may encounter a practice differently after circumstances have stabilised.

In my experience, the door can, and perhaps should, remain open without anyone being pushed through it. This, to me, is what responsible advocacy for the benefits of meditation looks like.

After eighteen years of regular practice of meditation, I remain unequivocally persuaded of its value. My experience as a practitioner gives me reason for that confidence. My years as a teacher have added to it. And a substantial and growing body of scientific literature gives us reason to continue investigating meditation seriously. But confidence need not require absolutism.

Indeed, one of the researchers quoted in The Atlantic, Richard Davidson, expresses something close to the position I have arrived at: for most people, he believes the potential costs of not meditating are greater than those associated with meditation, while simultaneously arguing that people with serious psychiatric disorders require considerably greater care and professional guidance. For me, those ideas can and should peacefully coexist.

A practice can be beneficial for many people without being beneficial for every person under every circumstance. A medication, as research has shown, can save lives while possessing contraindications. Similarly, exercise can improve health while being inappropriate in particular forms for particular bodies at particular times. And as we learn within Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, sleep is essential, yet even sleep can become disordered. Maturity allows us to resist the temptation to turn useful things into universal ones. For leaders, this returns us to where we began.

Meditation is not the only means of caring for the mind that makes the decision. Adequate sleep, exercise, meaningful relationships, beneficial nutrition, time away from work, meaning, belonging, purpose, and the varied structures within which people work matter enormously. No meditation technique should become an excuse for maintaining an unhealthy organisation while teaching employees to tolerate its dysfunction more peacefully. Meditation can instead become one element within a larger ecology of intelligent self-maintenance.

The leader who meditates is not withdrawing from responsibility. Ideally, the practice allows for a more complete return to it. The objective is not perpetual calm, nor the elimination of every difficult emotion. Because, leadership sometimes requires urgency, discomfort, confrontation, grief, uncertainty, and the willingness to make decisions for which no perfect answer exists. As a result, the question becomes whether we can meet those moments without allowing the accumulated stress of all the moments preceding them to make the decision for us.

Perhaps this is why, after eighteen years, I continue to close my eyes twice each day. Not because meditation has removed difficulty from my life. Trust me, it has not. I continue because eventually I open my eyes again. And when I do, there is a world waiting—a family, a community, work worth doing, decisions to be made, and consequences that will extend beyond me.

The quality of what happens next depends, at least in part, upon the condition of the person who has returned to meet it. And for me, that person is far better than he would otherwise be without meditation. So, give meditation a shot. The same may be so for you.

Suggested Practice

Sometime today, notice what happens immediately before you respond to something unexpected.

It need not be a major decision. Perhaps an email irritates you, someone interrupts you, a plan suddenly changes, or a problem appears that requires your attention. Rather than responding immediately, experiment with creating a small amount of space.

Pause. Select. Act.

Pause long enough to recognise that an event has occurred without assuming your first reaction must become your response. Select from among the possibilities available to you, considering not merely what you can do but what outcome you hope your action will produce. Then act.

Afterward, reflect upon the experience. Did the pause reveal an option you might otherwise have missed? Did it change the quality of your response? Did it alter what happened next?

Meditation can help cultivate this space over time. But today, simply begin by noticing that the space exists.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

A neuron extending and forming a connection over approximately 20 minutes.
Video captured by neuroscientist Dr. Lila Landowski; two frames shown in sequence.

Author’s Note

What Are You Practising? marks an important convergence in my continuing enquiry into consciousness and human development. For years, I have explored these questions through seemingly different avenues: neuroscience, Transcendental Meditation, the Seven Layers of Manifestation, the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress, and, more recently, Adaptive Elegance. Increasingly, I no longer experience these as separate enquiries.

Each asks, in its own way, how human beings participate in what they become.

This essay also represents a further articulation of what I mean by the Transcendental Brain. I am interested not merely in whether meditation changes the brain, nor in reducing consciousness to neural activity, but in the relationship among consciousness, orientation, experience, adaptation, behaviour, and the biological instrument through which so much of human life is expressed.

Dr. Lila Landowski’s remarkable recording gave me a visual language for something I have been considering for years: we are continually interacting with an organism capable of responding to experience. The scientific questions surrounding that process deserve rigour and restraint. The human question it raises deserves equal attention.

If experience participates in shaping the instrument through which we subsequently experience the world, then perhaps we should become considerably more attentive to what we repeatedly ask that instrument to do.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

I recently came across a video captured by Dr. Lila Landowski, an award-winning Neuroscientist, that shows neurons making a connection. The video is an important revelation as it highlights humans and the systems that govern our existence are functioning in ways to which we scarcely give meaningful attention. Of her remarkable capture, Dr. Landowski writes:

This essay grew from my having viewed the video more times than I will publicly admit and the reflections that surfaced surrounding a decision made seventeen years ago where I changed the hand with which I brush my teeth.

There was nothing particularly philosophical about the decision. I was sitting in a neuroscience class taught by Dr. Fred Travis when a fellow student, seated a couple of rows behind me, described something she had begun doing after learning about neuroplasticity. She had started brushing her teeth with her non-dominant hand.

Later that evening in my dorm as I was preparing for bed, I remembered hearing her comment and becoming curious.

We had been studying the human brain and its remarkable capacity to change in response to experience. Neuroplasticity was not simply an interesting concept to memorise for an exam. If what we were learning was true, then it ought to be observable in ordinary life. The brain should respond to what we repeatedly do.

So, standing there in the mirror clad in my night clothes after a long shower, I decided to conduct a decidedly unscientific experiment on myself and began brushing my teeth with my left hand.

At first, the experience required attention. Movements that had become automatic with my right hand suddenly needed to be executed in meaningful detail. The angle of the toothbrush felt off as I clasped it with my thumb and index finger. The movement of the wrist also felt similarly as I navigated the familiar terrain of my mouth from this new perspective. So much so, the maiden voyage required a level of conscious involvement that brushing my teeth had not required in years. And of course there was my right hand. It felt weird to just be there doing nothing. Something I had never even considered in all the years of brushing my teeth with my right hand as it related to my left.

Then something happened.

With a dedication to this new and deliberate practice, it became easier and easier. And over the course of the semester, I stopped thinking about it altogether. And now, seventeen years later, I still brush my teeth with my left hand—be it with an electric toothbrush or the good old-fashioned elbow powered version. So much so, that when I am brushing my teeth with one of our children and they note me doing so with my left hand while doing something else with my right hand, they comment. Neither have yet to give it a shot themselves. But there is time.

What began as an experiment became a behaviour. And that behaviour over time became a practice which eventually gave rise to my new normal.

I have thought about that little experiment many times over the years, particularly as my interests in consciousness, neuroscience, and human development have continued to converge. Having encountered Dr. Landowski’s video showing neuronal structures extending toward one another, I found myself watching the twenty-five-second clip repeatedly. Frame by frame, delicate projections reached across the space separating them until what had initially appeared disconnected became connected.

There was something almost mesmerising about seeing biological structures reaching across space in a seemingly intentional fashion. Yet what fascinated me most was not simply what I was watching; it was what the images caused me to consider about myself and the human species writ-large.

We frequently speak about learning as though information simply enters the mind and resides there, habits assuming they are things we possess, and personality as if it were a finished object. We even, sadly, say, “That is simply how I am,” often without considering how much of what we call who we are may also reflect what we have repeatedly thought, attended to, experienced, and done. However, the more I study the human brain, reflect on my own experiences with neuroplasticity, not to mention observe others seemingly unaware of the power of their brain, the more I see a far more complicated story.

Neuroplasticity has shown us that the brain is not merely a static organ through which experience passes. It is a living biological system capable of changing in response to experience, intentional learning, and repeated activity. Neural pathways can both strengthen and weaken with functional networks possessing the capacity to reorganise. So much so that skills that initially require considerable attention can, through deliberate practice, become increasingly efficient.

In sitting with my experience and observations, it must be said that the implications extend far beyond learning to play an instrument, acquiring a language, or brushing one’s teeth with the opposite hand. They extend into the life we are practising.

I sometimes tell audiences that human beings can become proficient at almost anything with enough practice. We can even become proficient worriers.

It usually produces laughter because people recognise themselves somewhere inside the observation. Yet beneath the humour rests something worth considering deeply. Worry, anger, suspicion, avoidance, annoyance, and hate can be rehearsed. So too can patience, attention, compassion, discernment, equanimity, and love.

This does not mean that every thought instantly rewires the brain, nor that human beings can simply think themselves into whatever neurological condition they desire. Biology is considerably more complicated than such claims allow. Genetics, development, health, sleep, environment, trauma, age, and countless other variables participate in shaping the nervous system. Neuroplasticity is neither unlimited nor inherently positive. But that may be precisely the point.

The brain’s capacity for adaptation does not determine the direction of our development—orientation matters.

Subscribe now

Long before I began thinking about neuroplasticity in this way, I had become interested in a more fundamental question: What happens when the human being is incorrectly oriented toward reality?

Seemingly by design, much of our attention is directed outward. We study the things human beings create while devoting comparatively little attention to the consciousness from which those creations emerge. We analyse institutions, technologies, economies, political systems, educational structures, and cultures while frequently treating the human being producing them as though the builder were somehow separate from what has been built. Yet every human-derived system begins somewhere upstream—within.

Every action is preceded by a thought. Just as everything began as an idea within someone’s mind and is then brought into existence by bringing together resources—both human and non-human—to make it so. Be it an institution, product, company, city, or country. All began as an idea that then gave rise to behaviour.

This is one reason I developed the Seven Layers of Manifestation. The model begins with Pure Consciousness and moves through Universal and Natural Laws, the phenomenal world, human consciousness, the human-derived world, constructs, and, ultimately, outcomes. Its purpose is not merely to categorise reality. It is to remind us that outcomes have antecedents.

If we continually intervene only at the level of outcomes, we may spend generations repairing consequences while leaving their originating orientation largely untouched.

The brain adds another dimension to this proposition because orientation does not remain merely philosophical.

What we repeatedly attend to influences what we repeatedly do and what we repeatedly do becomes practice. As a result, our practice—deliberate or otherwise—then participates in the process of our learning. And learning can alter the functional organisation of the brain itself. Here, I am reminded of one of Fred’s comments from class that is also the title of his book “Your brain is a river, not a rock.” His dictum highlights that experience changes the brain. And that changed brain subsequently participates in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the next experience.

The observer is therefore participating in the development of the instrument through which subsequent observation occurs and thus highlights the importance of intentionality and consistency if one desires to be better in a specific area. Because that is an extraordinary loop.

Just think: we are continually training the instrument—directly or indirectly—through which we encounter the world.

This may also help explain why lasting personal change can prove so difficult. Many people sometimes imagine that recognising an error should be sufficient to eliminate it. They understand intellectually that a behaviour no longer serves them and become frustrated when the behaviour persists. But insight and embodiment are not identical. The former is awareness with the latter being based on the fruit of action. The old pattern has been practised. Perhaps for years; decades even. Whereas the new one has not.

Changing direction therefore requires more than recognising where we would prefer to go. It requires repeatedly travelling the new road until the unfamiliar becomes familiar—automatic even.

This is where my Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress enters the conversation. Growth is not simply the acquisition of knowledge. The seeker encounters knowledge, develops tools, intentionally refines their use, places them into service, and moves towards increasing mastery through practice. The emphasis on practice is essential because knowing something and becoming something are different processes.

Adaptive Elegance extends the proposition further.

Human development cannot consist merely of becoming extraordinarily efficient at repeating yesterday’s successful patterns. Conditions, environments, knowledge, and we humans change. What served us brilliantly at one stage of development may become an impediment at another.

The capacity we require, therefore, is not simply adaptation. It is the ability to recognise when adaptation is required, to release attachment to patterns that have outlived their usefulness, to adopt more appropriate responses, and eventually to stabilise those responses without becoming imprisoned by them.

I call that Adaptive Elegance.

Interestingly, the brain itself provides us with a biological metaphor for this process. It is simultaneously capable of stability and change. Learning requires both. A nervous system incapable of retaining anything would be useless. And a nervous system incapable of changing anything would be equally limiting.

Life seems to require both continuity and transformation.

Even our understanding of the brain’s maintenance has changed. In 2012, researchers described what became known as the glymphatic system, a brain-wide pathway involved in the movement of cerebrospinal, interstitial fluids, the clearance of metabolic waste or as some have taken to call it “brain dirt.” Subsequent research has continued to refine our understanding of how the sleeping and waking brain maintains itself. Perhaps the best book from 2017 that discusses the need for proper sleep is Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

The significance, for me, extends beyond any particular physiological mechanism largely because the brain increasingly reveals itself not as fixed machinery but as living process.

It adapts, reorganizes, maintains, responds, and it learns.

That raises a question perhaps considerably larger than neuroscience.

What are we teaching it?

Consider the environments human beings have created for themselves. We awaken to notifications, then scroll through streams of outrage, aspiration, fear, entertainment, titillation, and comparison. As a result, algorithms learn what captures our attention and become increasingly skilled at presenting more of it. Be it political communications that reward emotional reaction, advertising that cultivates dissatisfaction, or social identities that are repeatedly reinforced through language, imagery, and affiliation. All are designed, it seems, to design us according to some larger whim of some unnamed human actors.

Culture creates environments of repetition. And those repetitions occur inside actual human nervous systems.

Culture therefore does more than communicate ideas. It creates conditions under which attention is repeatedly directed, behaviours are repeatedly performed, and interpretations are repeatedly rehearsed. Then those human beings create culture and the loop closes.

This is why the question of orientation cannot remain merely philosophical. If consciousness influences attention, attention influences behaviour, behaviour influences experience, experience influences the brain, and the brain participates in subsequent perception and behaviour, then how we orient human consciousness may have consequences extending from the neuron to civilisation.

This is also why contemplative practices deserve serious consideration without requiring us to exaggerate what science presently knows about them. Practices that systematically alter the quality or direction of attention introduce different experiences into an adaptive nervous system. What those experiences do, how durable their effects become, and under what conditions they influence behaviour remain legitimate scientific questions.

For me, Transcendental Meditation occupies a particular place in that enquiry because it introduces the possibility of systematically experiencing consciousness at increasingly subtler levels of mental activity, eventually transcending thought altogether. My interest is not merely whether meditation changes the brain. The more interesting question is what happens to human life when consciousness, brain, behaviour and environment participate in a sustained process of development.

That is the territory I have come to think of as the Transcendental Brain.

It is not simply a brain that meditates. Nor is it a claim that neuroscience can explain consciousness. Instead, it is an enquiry into what becomes possible when we begin understanding the relationship among consciousness, orientation, experience, adaptation, and the biological instrument through which so much of human life is expressed.

Seventeen years ago, none of this was running through my mind as I stood at the bathroom sink clad in my night clothes awkwardly moving a toothbrush around my mouth with my left hand.

I simply wanted to see whether something I had learned in Fred’s neuroscience class worked. Eventually, I stopped noticing that I was conducting an experiment and my left hand simply reached for the toothbrush.

Perhaps that is where some of the most consequential transformations eventually arrive—not when we can articulate them beautifully, nor when we understand them intellectually, but when what once required deliberate practice has become an effortless way of being.

Which leaves each of us with a deceptively simple question: What are you practising?

Because whatever it is, you may be getting better at it. But the real question is, do you really want to?

Suggested Practice

For the next several days, identify one thing you have become good at through repetition. It need not be something you deliberately chose to master. Perhaps you have become skilled at listening carefully, exercising regularly, solving difficult problems, or remaining calm under pressure. But perhaps you have also become skilled at worrying, postponing, reacting defensively, reaching automatically for your phone, or expecting the worst.

Do not judge what you discover. Simply observe it.

Then ask yourself: What have I been practising?

Choose one small behaviour that reflects the direction in which you actually wish to develop and practise it deliberately. Keep it sufficiently small that you can repeat it consistently. Pay attention to the awkwardness that accompanies the unfamiliar. Notice the impulse to return to what is automatic. And remember that unfamiliarity is not necessarily evidence that something is wrong. Sometimes it is simply evidence that you are travelling a road you have not travelled often enough.

Over time, return to the deeper question:

Am I practising the person I intend to become?

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

I first encountered George G. M. James’s Stolen Legacy in 1995, during a period of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual exploration in my life. That same period brought me into conversation with Dr. Théophile Obenga, introduced me to the work of Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop, and began my intellectual tutelage under the guidance of Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III. At the time, I could not have known how these encounters would contribute to questions I would continue exploring more than three decades later.

This essay is neither an attempt to resolve the longstanding controversy surrounding James’s central thesis nor an argument for replacing one historical orthodoxy with another. Rather, it is an exercise in intellectual genealogy: an attempt to look backwards and recognise some of the books, people, questions, and ideas that accompanied the development of my thinking.

What interests me most today about Stolen Legacy is not whether every historical proposition James advanced withstands contemporary scrutiny. It is that his discussion of the ten virtues presented me with an enduring proposition: perhaps knowledge asks something of the person who seeks it. Perhaps becoming capable of receiving, employing, and ultimately serving through knowledge is itself part of the journey.

Only decades later would I develop the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress. I do not regard James’s virtues as its source. But returning to them now, I can recognise an early resonance with questions that would eventually become central to my work: What must the knower become? How does knowledge refine thought and action? And how might that refinement ultimately become service?

Sometimes an old book tells us as much about the journey of its reader as it does about the ideas of its author.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

In October 1995, I found myself travelling through a moment that I did not yet understand would remain with me for the rest of my life.

I was one year into my full-time schedule as an undergraduate student at Georgia State University. I had travelled from Atlanta to Temple University for a summit during the weekend of the Million Man March as hosted by renowned African American Studies scholar and Founder of Temple’s Doctoral program in African American Studies—Dr. Molefi Kete Asante. While there, and after speaking with Dr. Asante, I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Théophile Obenga, the Congolese scholar whose work on African history, language, and Ancient Kemet had developed alongside that of the Senegalese scholar Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop. We had a wonderful conversation about his work and that of Diop.

On our return journey to Atlanta in a university passenger van, Nature supplied an almost improbable coda. We encountered the Washington, D.C., traffic associated with the Million Man March. Somewhere between Philadelphia, Washington, and Atlanta, I was carrying home questions about African history, civilisation, knowledge, identity, and human possibility while hundreds of thousands of people of African descent were converging upon the nation’s capital amid a different, but not entirely unrelated, conversation about responsibility, purpose, and collective possibility. I could not have known then how long some of those questions would remain with me.

Around that same period, I met another scholar whose influence upon my development would become far more personal: Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III aka “Baba.” Dr. Hilliard invited me to apply to participate in his Ancient Kemet Study Tour during the spring and summer of 1996, ahead of the Atlanta Olympic Games. The possibility of Kemet was consequently changing for me. It was no longer simply a civilisation encountered through photographs, books, competing histories, and scholarly arguments. I was being invited to consider encountering the land, temples, monuments, and surviving record directly, under the guidance of someone who had devoted much of his scholarly life to understanding African history on its own terms.

At that time, my long-held love of reading was quickly becoming and encounter with knowledge that would later, although unknown at the time, serve as the foundation for both relationship and the possibility of direct experience of the material under study.

Somewhere within that period of intellectual formation I came into contact with a softcover book with an Egyptian sarcophagus adorned in gold and lapis on the cover—a later copy I secured of the same work came in the form of a green hardcover version—that remains in my library today: George G. M. James’s Stolen Legacy.

I first read James’s book sometime in 1995. Published in 1954, Stolen Legacy advances an audacious thesis. James argues not merely that Ancient Egyptian civilisation influenced Greek thought, but that what subsequently became known as Greek philosophy was substantially derived from an Egyptian Mystery System and later attributed to Greek thinkers. James himself states the proposition without ambiguity, describing Greek philosophy as a misnomer and identifying the Egyptian Mysteries as its antecedent. It is also a thesis that has generated considerable controversy among historians.

There are good reasons for treating some of James’s historical claims critically. His chronology, sources, assertions concerning particular Greek philosophers, and accounts of the transmission of Egyptian knowledge have all been challenged. Some of the specific mechanisms by which he says appropriation occurred are considerably more difficult to sustain than the broader proposition that Egyptian and Greek intellectual worlds were not isolated from one another.

For me, those distinctions matter.

To acknowledge evidence of Egyptian influence upon Greece is not necessarily to demonstrate James’s stronger claim that Greek philosophy was “stolen” wholesale from Egypt. Conversely, identifying weaknesses in James’s thesis does not establish that Egypt contributed nothing to Greek intellectual development. The historical landscape is considerably more interesting than either extreme.

Ancient Kemet (KMT) had already existed for millennia before the period ordinarily associated with classical Greek philosophy. By the time figures such as Thales, Pythagoras, Herodotus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle appeared, Egyptians had long developed systems of writing, monumental architecture, mathematics, medicine, religious thought, state administration, astronomy, and elaborate conceptions concerning humanity, divinity, death, order, and the cosmos.

The chronology alone does not establish intellectual transmission. It does, however, correct an image of Egypt as some peripheral civilisation standing in the shadow of Greece.

The Greeks themselves further complicate that picture.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, devoted much of Book II of his Histories to Egypt. His account must be read critically, as all ancient sources must, but he repeatedly describes Egyptian customs, priests, religious practices, and forms of knowledge. More importantly for the question of transmission, Herodotus sometimes explicitly identifies practices he observed among Greeks as having Egyptian antecedents. In one striking passage, he describes certain rites called Orphic and Bacchic as actually Egyptian and Pythagorean; elsewhere he credits Egyptians with discoveries subsequently used by Greek poets.

That does not prove Stolen Legacy.

It does, however, make the proposition that Greece and Egypt existed as hermetically sealed intellectual worlds exceedingly difficult to maintain.

For me, the more responsible questions therefore become: What travelled between both civilisations? Through whom? During which periods? In what directions? And to what extent were ideas encountered elsewhere subsequently transformed into recognisably Greek intellectual traditions?

Yet another question shadows the above historical questions: Why has the place of Ancient Egypt within African history proved so consequential?

Egypt is in Africa. That geographical fact should require no ideological commitment whatsoever. Ancient Egypt also endured for thousands of years at a crossroads connecting the Nile Valley, Nubia and other parts of Africa with the Levant and the Mediterranean. The Nile itself flows from south to north, carrying waters from deep within the African continent toward the Mediterranean. As anthropology and archaeology repeatedly demonstrate, river systems have long served as corridors of human settlement, exchange, and migration. In the case of the Nile Valley, this means that movements of people, culture, goods, and knowledge connected Egypt not merely with the Mediterranean world to its north and the Levant to its northeast, but profoundly with African populations and civilisations to its south and west.

Mind you, all of this was occurring millennia before the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 imposed European colonial boundaries upon much of the African continent. Projecting those comparatively recent political divisions backwards into antiquity can obscure rather than illuminate the human geography of the Nile Valley. Moreover, Ancient Egypt’s population cannot responsibly be compressed into contemporary American racial categories and projected as unchanged across several millennia.

But acknowledging such complexity should not require removing Egypt from Africa.

This becomes especially important when we remember the intellectual environment in which scholars such as James, Diop, Obenga, and later Hilliard were working. Claims about African intellectual and civilisational inferiority did not exist merely as private prejudices. They appeared in scholarship, educational systems, popular histories, racial theories, and colonial justifications. Generations of people could therefore encounter a story of civilisation whose implied trajectory ran from Greece through Rome and Europe into the modern West, while Africa appeared largely outside the lineage except as primitive precursor, colonial subject, or recipient of civilisation from elsewhere.

Kemet complicated that story.

Here stood one of humanity’s great ancient civilisations—on the African continent, flourishing millennia before classical Athens.

This was part of the intellectual terrain into which Cheikh Anta Diop stepped. Like James, Diop published one of his most consequential works in 1954. But Diop approached questions surrounding Ancient Egypt through multiple forms of evidence, including history, linguistics, anthropology, and physical investigation. One of his most controversial experiments involved melanin.

In a 1973 paper on the pigmentation of Ancient Egyptians, Diop reported examining thin sections of skin taken from Egyptian mummies preserved at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. His object was to determine whether melanin remained detectable in mummified tissue and whether pigmentation might therefore provide empirical evidence relevant to debates concerning the Ancient Egyptian population. He reported that the epidermis could remain sufficiently preserved for such examination. He also sought samples from royal mummies—including Thutmose III, Seti I, and Ramesses II—but reported that the samples he had requested from Cairo had not arrived.

Subscribe now

There was something important in Diop’s methodological impulse: if the bodies themselves could provide evidence, examine the bodies. Diop’s position was to ask the empirical question, test what can be tested, and allow evidence to participate in a debate too often dominated by assumptions. Assumptions that carried an imperialist or imperialist-adjacent mindset.

The larger questions surrounding the population of Ancient Egypt eventually became the subject of an important UNESCO symposium held in Cairo from 28 January through 3 February 1974. Diop and Obenga participated alongside other scholars in debates concerning the peopling of Ancient Egypt, linguistic relationships, physical anthropology, archaeology, and the relationship of Egypt to other African populations. The proceedings record disagreement rather than some tidy scholarly consensus, which is precisely why they remain interesting.

More than twenty years later, I found myself standing at Temple University talking with Obenga about precisely this intellectual lineage.

I appreciate the significance of that encounter more today than I possibly could have then.

Yet for all the historical questions raised by Stolen Legacy, something rather different became the portion of James’s book that remained most useful to me—the ten virtues.

James presents a set of disciplines associated with preparation for initiation into the Egyptian Mystery System. However one adjudicates his claims concerning their precise historical provenance, the virtues themselves struck me as worthy companions for the journey I was already travelling. They are:

• Control of thought.

• Control of action.

• Steadfastness of purpose.

• Identity with spiritual life.

• Evidence of having a mission in life.

• Evidence of a call to spiritual orders.

• Freedom from resentment.

• Confidence in the power of the master.

• Confidence in one’s own ability.

• Readiness for initiation.

By 1995, those propositions encountered fertile ground.

Two years earlier, in 1993, my understanding of human possibility had undergone a fundamental shift through an experience of Pure Consciousness. My study of Three Magic Words had become another companion to the interior journey unfolding during those years. I did not possess the language or conceptual frameworks that I would develop decades later. While I had been initiated into the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC a few years later in 1998, I had not yet learned Transcendental Meditation. I had not been made a Freemason. I had not become a Certified Teacher of TM. I had not undertaken doctoral study. The Seven Layers of Manifestation did not exist. Neither did the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress.

But I had already begun asking some of the questions from which those later developments would emerge.

What is a human being capable of becoming? What is the relationship between consciousness and conduct? What is knowledge for? And what does greater knowledge require of the person who receives it?

James’s first two virtues—control of thought and control of action—suggested an ordering that remains important to me today. For those familiar with either my written works or have heard me speak, you re well aware of one of my central propositions: Every action is preceded by a thought. No matter how subtle the thought. Therefore, what we repeatedly entertain within consciousness influences what we subsequently produce through behaviour. To refine action without attending to the thinking from which action proceeds is therefore to begin downstream when attention is best directed upstream or rather within.

Steadfastness of purpose added another dimension. It is one thing to know where one wishes to go. It is another to maintain one’s orientation when circumstances become difficult, distractions multiply, or immediate results fail to appear. What I would later describe in the MPGP as intentional refinement requires precisely this capacity to keep one’s eyes on the prize while continuing to refine thought and action in relation to it.

The next virtues moved from discipline toward identity and vocation. Identity with spiritual life, evidence of having a mission in life, and evidence of a call to spiritual orders spoke directly to questions already stirring within me. The experience of 1993 had made spiritual life something more than an intellectual subject. It had become an experiential proposition. Over time, attraction to initiatic traditions would likewise become more than idle curiosity about esoteric knowledge. Such traditions suggested that knowledge might require preparation, discipline, guidance, and ultimately responsibility.

Freedom from resentment proved equally significant.

The Stoics would later provide another language through which to understand this principle: distinguish what lies within one’s control from what does not, and invest one’s attention accordingly. Freedom from resentment does not require pretending that injustice did not occur, nor does it demand reconciliation with those who caused harm. It asks something more difficult: whether another person’s conduct will be permitted to become the organising principle of one’s own consciousness. I believe this to be a key component for the development of a robust mental constitution due to personal observations that resentment can imprison the injured person within an event that has already occurred. However, freedom of thought, akin to that as proposed by Kierkegaard, restores agency.

Then came two virtues whose relationship I appreciate much more fully today: confidence in the power of the master and confidence in one’s own ability.

The first requires humility—the recognition that someone may possess knowledge, experience, or vision that one does not yet possess. The second requires development. A worthy guide should not produce permanent dependency. Guidance should assist the seeker in developing competence. So, trust the guide but become capable.

My conversations today concerning confidence frequently return to this same principle. Confidence worthy of the name is not merely something one declares. Competence provides its foundation. Through study, practice, correction, repetition, and demonstrated capability, one gradually develops legitimate reasons to trust oneself.

Finally comes readiness for initiation. And, be aware, readiness is different from desire.

One may desire deeper knowledge without yet possessing the capacity to employ it wisely. Initiation, considered developmentally, therefore becomes more than access to concealed information. It marks a threshold at which the seeker has demonstrated sufficient preparation to enter another stage of knowledge, practice, responsibility, and ultimately service.

Only in returning to these virtues more than thirty years later have I noticed how closely some of the questions they raised resemble those that eventually informed my own Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress.

I do not mean that I derived the MPGP from George G. M. James. Far from it. Intellectual genealogies are rarely so tidy. We encounter hundreds of books, teachers, experiences, conversations, successes, failures, insights, and questions across a lifetime. Their contributions mingle within us until attempting to isolate a single source becomes nearly impossible. But ideas can also be seeds.

Sometimes they enter consciousness years before the conditions exist for them to germinate.

In reviewing the ten virtues as discussed by James all these years later, the MPGP asks something remarkably close to the developmental question I encountered in those virtues, but develops the proposition into a general model of human development. Knowledge alone does not produce mastery. There must be a seeker; the seeker must acquire tools; those tools must be intentionally employed to refine the thinking and actions of the user; through refinement, capability becomes service; repeated practice produces mastery; and mastery generates outcomes—which themselves become the conditions for continued growth. Hence perpetual growth and progress.

Seen from this perspective, the ten virtues were never particularly valuable to me because they constituted another list of moral commandments. They described an architecture of becoming.

Govern thought so that action may increasingly reflect right orientation. Develop sufficient steadfastness to remain aligned with purpose. Allow spiritual life to become lived identity rather than abstraction. Discover mission. Recognise the call toward deeper knowledge. Become increasingly free from the gravitational pull of resentment. Learn from those capable of guiding you. Develop sufficient competence to trust your own cultivated ability. And demonstrate through the life you live that you are ready for what comes next.

Curiously, this also suggests something about how we might read contested books such as that of George G.M. James.

Control of thought cannot mean believing whatever confirms the worldview we already prefer. If it means anything, it must include the discipline to subject congenial ideas to the same scrutiny we apply to ideas we dislike.

I need not defend every historical claim in Stolen Legacy to acknowledge what the book contributed to my development.

Neither must James be reduced to his errors if indeed errors are found.

Diop’s questions can remain consequential even where his terminology or methods require revision.

Herodotus can preserve evidence of Greek perceptions of Egypt without every statement in his account being historically accurate.

Obenga can challenge inherited assumptions without being made infallible.

Hilliard can teach us to reconsider how Africa has been represented, be it within text or visually as with the Mercator map of 1569, thereby dislodging notions of Eurocentric centrality and thus alleged superiority over nations and contributive peoples far older along the human timeline.

The purpose of scholarship is not to exchange one orthodoxy for another. It is to see more clearly.

Perhaps that is what I find most interesting when I look today at the copy of Stolen Legacy that has accompanied me since 1995 as well as the green hardcover I was blessed to obtain from an unremembered bookstore during my many travels.

The undergraduate student who first opened it could not have known where the questions it raised would travel. He could not have known that a conversation with Théophile Obenga would still be remembered three decades later, or what the invitation from Baba would come to represent. He could not have anticipated learning Transcendental Meditation, becoming a Rosicrucian, Freemason, Certified TM Teacher, to undertaking doctoral research, or eventually developing models concerned explicitly with consciousness, knowledge, human development, and the relationship between what we know and what we produce.

He certainly could not have known that thirty-one years later he would return to those ten virtues and recognise something familiar.

Sometimes we return to an old book to discover whether we still agree with its author. And at other times we return and discover something considerably more interesting: what became of the person who first read it.

The central thesis of Stolen Legacy remains contested. The historiographical questions concerning Ancient Kemet, Greece, Africa, and the transmission of ancient knowledge deserve continued investigation wherever the evidence leads. But that is no longer the only legacy of James’s book that interests me.

In 1995, I thought I was encountering an argument about where knowledge came from. Perhaps, instead, what I carried away was an early question about what the person seeking knowledge must become.

Control your thought. Control your action. Remain steadfast in purpose. Discover what your life is for. Become increasingly free of resentment. Learn from those capable of guiding you. Develop confidence grounded in growing competence. And when deeper knowledge presents itself, show yourself ready—not merely to possess it, but to act upon it.

Thirty-one years later, I can see something I could not have seen then—perhaps Stolen Legacy left me more than an argument about the origins of philosophy. Maybe, just maybe, it left me an early map of becoming. One I continue contemplating even on this very day.

Suggested Practice

Select a book, teacher, conversation, or experience that influenced you at least ten years ago.

Return to it—not initially to determine whether you still agree with it, but to encounter again the person you were when it first entered your life.

Ask yourself:

What did I see in this then? What questions did it awaken? Which ideas did I eventually abandon or revise? Which survived? And can I recognise anything in the person I have since become that may have begun, however quietly, with that encounter?

Then consider one additional question:

What idea am I carrying today whose significance I may not understand for another ten, twenty, or thirty years?

Do not force an answer.

The purpose of the exercise is not to construct a tidy intellectual genealogy. Human development rarely works that way. It is simply to become more conscious of the seeds we encounter—and of the responsibility we bear for deciding which ones we continue to cultivate.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken 14 February 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun.
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Author’s Note

I have long been fascinated by the relationship between the worlds human beings inherit and those we subsequently help to create. My training in history and sociology taught me to examine how institutions, identities, categories, and systems emerge through human activity and become embedded within societies. My later exploration of Consciousness added another dimension to that inquiry: if so much of our lived reality originates through human consciousness, what possibilities emerge when we become more conscious of the processes through which that reality is continually constructed?

The World-Builder grew from that question.

Carl Sagan’s reflection upon Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot has remained one of the most compelling invitations I know to reconsider the scale we assign to human distinctions. Seen from billions of miles away, the borders, institutions, identities, hierarchies, and conflicts that can appear enormous from the surface of Earth disappear entirely. Yet within that nearly imperceptible point of light exists the human mind—the very instrument capable of imagining those distinctions, constructing civilisations around them, sending a spacecraft billions of miles into space, and then asking it to turn around and photograph its creators.

The paradox continues to fascinate me.

This essay explores that paradox through the Seven Layers of Manifestation and through a question I increasingly believe deserves our attention: if human consciousness has participated in building so much of the world we presently inhabit, what might become possible if we understood the world-builder itself more fully?

Perhaps the next frontier of human development lies not solely in how much farther we can travel outward, nor solely in how deeply we can journey inward, but in what becomes possible when those two directions of exploration begin informing one another.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

On 14 February 1990, a spacecraft travelling beyond Neptune turned its camera toward home.

Voyager 1 was approximately 3.7 billion miles from the Sun when it captured an image that would eventually become one of the most consequential portraits ever made of the human species. There are no faces in it, no families standing together, neither presidents nor kings were featured. No nations, religions, cultures, armies, universities, corporations, or borders. Upon first glance, there is barely an Earth.

Suspended within a scattered ray of sunlight is a tiny point of light occupying roughly a single pixel—Us.

Carl Sagan had advocated for the photograph years earlier. Its apparent insignificance was precisely the point. From such a distance, the world upon which virtually everything human beings have ever considered important had become almost indistinguishable from the vast darkness surrounding it.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could hold that perspective while going about our ordinary lives.

Somewhere within that pixel, human beings were loving, fighting, marrying, divorcing, worshipping, doubting, creating, destroying, raising children, and burying parents. They were organising themselves into nations, religions, political parties, distinct cultures, social classes, professions, and innumerable other categories. They were drawing boundaries across the surface of a planet upon which, from Voyager’s vantage point, no boundary could be seen at all. Here, I am reminded of the Berlin Conference which occurred from 1884-1885 where the African Continent was divided among fourteen nations. But I digress.

In that famous Voyager 1 photo, every human disagreement was occurring there—every war, border, racial classification, and every argument about who belonged and who did not. All of it, inside that pixel.

The more I study and reflect on being human and all that we create and our enormous potential, I find it useful, from time to time, to remember where we are by sitting with that famous photo. Not where we live in the ordinary sense; such as in either Cambridge or Boston, Massachusetts or the United States. Not even North America. I mean where we actually are—the Universe.

We inhabit a relatively small planet revolving around an otherwise unremarkable star in the Milky Way Galaxy, surrounded by a universe whose scale exceeds anything the human mind can comfortably imagine. We have become rather good at representing that immensity mathematically. We can calculate distances between stars, estimate the ages of galaxies, observe light that began travelling toward us billions of years before our species existed, and construct instruments capable of peering farther into the universe than any human being could have imagined only a few generations ago. Yet knowing these things and apprehending them are not quite the same.

Occasionally, when I look at an image of Earth suspended against the vast darkness of space, I try to hold the scale of it in mind. Somewhere on that small sphere are billions of human beings going about their lives. They are waking, sleeping, falling in love, grieving, raising children, caring for parents, creating businesses, attending schools, worshipping, doubting, building, destroying, cooperating, and competing. They speak thousands of languages and inhabit innumerable cultures. They organise themselves into nations, religions, political parties, social classes, professions, ethnic groups, distinct cultures, institutions, movements, and communities. They establish borders, currencies, issue passports and credentials, confer titles and status, construct hierarchies, make laws, wage wars, and sometimes kill one another over distinctions that are completely invisible from even a modest distance beyond the atmosphere.

From space, there are no lines separating Massachusetts from Rhode Island. There is simply Earth.

The observation is hardly new. Astronauts have described variations of it for decades. What continues to fascinate me, however, is what happens when that outward perspective is placed alongside an equally remarkable journey in the opposite direction. Instead of looking farther outward, look inward.

Inside every person moving across the surface of that tiny planet is a human brain performing an astonishing amount of work. Even as I sit here typing these words while Malcolm is in the kitchen with Mina as she prepares a meal for our family and Chloë, Emerson, and Tennyson are hatching some plan to build yet another fort in one of the rooms, mine is coordinating processes to which I am giving virtually no conscious attention. My heart continues beating, lungs continue breathing, and sensory information is being received and organised. Memories are being retrieved, language is being formed, fingers move across a keyboard in response to thoughts that, moments earlier, did not exist in precisely this arrangement. Somewhere within that activity, an idea becomes a sentence and a sentence becomes something another human mind may eventually encounter.

Meanwhile, I can direct that same brain toward contemplating the galaxy in which it exists. There is something almost breathtaking about that—the universe has produced a creature capable of contemplating the universe itself.

And that creature spends an extraordinary portion of its mental capacity thinking about the differences between itself and other members of its own species.

I have been thinking about that paradox lately.

My training in sociology taught me long ago that human beings do not simply encounter the world; we encounter a world already interpreted for us. We are born into societies whose categories precede our arrival. Before we possess the language necessary to question them, we begin learning what things mean. We learn that this patch of Earth belongs to one country and that patch belongs to another; that pieces of paper, metal, and increasingly digital entries possess different values; the meaning assigned to occupations, neighbourhoods, clothing, education, religion, skin colour, family names, and accents. And, sadly, we learn who is considered successful, respectable, dangerous, desirable, foreign, familiar, powerful, or marginal.

Most importantly, we rarely experience this early process as learning a particular interpretation of reality. Instead, we experience it simply as learning reality. That distinction has enormous consequences.

A child entering the world does not invent race, nationality, economic class, religious denomination or political identity. These categories are waiting. Their meanings have been constructed through generations of human interaction, institutionalised through law and custom, reinforced through families and communities, and transmitted through language, education, media, ritual, and ordinary social life. By the time we are old enough to examine them critically, many have become so deeply embedded in our perception that they appear less like human creations than features of nature itself.

Subscribe now

Perhaps this is among socialisation’s most consequential achievements: it can make what human beings created appear to be what reality required.

That does not mean our differences are imaginary. Thankfully, human beings are wonderfully different. We possess different histories, cultures, languages, appearances, experiences, talents, temperaments, and ways of understanding the world. Nor does recognising the constructed nature of certain categories erase the consequences those categories have produced. A human-derived system can produce extraordinarily real suffering. Laws are human constructions, yet prisons are real. Money is a human construction, yet poverty can determine whether someone lives in a food desert being unable to eat fresh fruit and vegetables regularly. Borders are human constructions, yet crossing one without permission can alter the course of a life. Racial classifications are human-derived, yet centuries of organising societies around them have produced consequences that cannot simply be wished away by announcing that race is socially constructed. The distinction I am interested in is therefore not between what is real and what is unreal. It is, instead, between what is given and what is made.

That difference occupies an important place within what I describe as the Seven Layers of Manifestation.

Within that framework, I distinguish the Phenomenal World from Human Consciousness and the Human-Derived World that emerges through human activity. The latter contains the extraordinary structures our species has brought into existence: governments, markets, corporations, universities, technologies, religious institutions, legal systems, social hierarchies, and countless other arrangements through which we organise collective life. From these emerge constructs that influence how we understand ourselves and one another, eventually producing outcomes that can become so persistent that they appear inevitable. Yet the Human-Derived World remains precisely that—Human-derived.

And therein lies a possibility I do not think we contemplate nearly enough.

If human consciousness participated in constructing the physical and social worlds we inhabit, then human consciousness also possesses some capacity to reconstruct it.

This is not an argument for utopian thinking. Neither history nor sociology gives us much reason to believe that recognising a problem automatically produces agreement about its solution. Human beings possess competing interests. Power and resources matter. Institutions develop mechanisms for preserving themselves. People benefit differently from existing arrangements, and those who benefit substantially may have little incentive to redesign them. Even among people acting in good faith, deeply held values can lead to fundamentally different conclusions about what ought to be done.

Still, none of this eliminates the underlying capacity. It merely reveals the difficulty of exercising it.

I sometimes wonder how different our civilisation might become if a sufficiently large portion of humanity recognised not merely that the brain is the most powerful aspect of being human, but that our collective use of mind is continuously participating in the construction of lived reality.

Consider how much we already ask of this remarkable organ. The human brain simultaneously manages the body’s internal processes, interprets sensory experience, stores and retrieves memories, learns patterns, anticipates possibilities, creates language, navigates relationships, solves problems, and generates the subjective world through which each of us moves. With that same biological instrument, human beings have composed symphonies, formulated mathematics, written poetry, discovered medicines, constructed cities, mapped genomes, explored space, and developed machines capable of extending our cognitive reach. And yet the most remarkable thing about the brain may not be any single thing it has built.

It may be its capacity to imagine something that does not yet exist and then organise behaviour sufficiently to bring some version of that possibility into being.

Every human institution began, in some sense, there.

Before there was a university, someone had to imagine a durable community organised around learning. Before there was a democratic constitution, human beings had to imagine that political authority could be arranged differently. Before there was a spacecraft, someone had to conceive of leaving the planet while gravity continued insisting otherwise. And before any social order could become normal, it first had to become conceivable.

The Human-Derived World is filled with yesterday’s impossibilities.

Why, then, are we so quick to assume that its present arrangements constitute the limits of tomorrow?

Perhaps part of the answer is that humanity has become extraordinarily accomplished at studying what the mind has produced while remaining comparatively unfamiliar with the mind producing it.

We study economies, governments, technologies, institutions, and societies. We teach children how to navigate the systems they inherit. We prepare them to participate successfully in the Human-Derived World. We ask what they will become, where they will work, what they will earn, and what they will contribute. All of that has value.

But how often do we teach them to investigate the instrument through which every one of those activities will occur?

How often does education invite a young person to become genuinely curious about attention, awareness, thought, perception, emotion, and the relationship between inner experience and outward action? How much of our collective educational enterprise is devoted to understanding not merely the products of consciousness, but consciousness itself?

We have become remarkably sophisticated builders of worlds without becoming equally sophisticated students of the world-builder.

I believe that imbalance becomes increasingly consequential as the power of our technologies grows.

A stone tool amplifies the hand. A telescope amplifies sight. A computer amplifies calculation. Artificial intelligence increasingly amplifies aspects of cognition itself. Each technological advance expands what human intention can accomplish, which makes the quality of the intention guiding it increasingly important.

The more powerful the tool, the more consequential the consciousness holding it.

This is why I find myself returning to the relationship between our inner and outer development. Technological advancement alone cannot answer the question of what ought to be built. Intelligence alone cannot determine toward what purpose intelligence should be directed. And, sadly, a civilisation can become extraordinarily capable without becoming correspondingly wise.

Indeed, some of humanity’s most pressing problems are not evidence that we lack intelligence. They are evidence that extraordinary intelligence can be organised around competing identities, short-term incentives, and woefully fractured conceptions of collective interest.

Keen observers will note, we already possess enough intelligence to understand many of the problems confronting our species. We know that children should not starve, that preventable diseases should be prevented, and that ecosystems upon which human life depends cannot be degraded indefinitely. Moreover, we recognise the destructive potential of war, that education expands human possibility, and that humans possess extraordinary scientific, technological and organisational capabilities.

The difficulty is not always knowing what could be done. Often, it is organising ourselves sufficiently to do it. And that brings me back to difference.

Permit me to state, unequivocally, I have no desire for a world in which human beings become alike. Such a world would be impoverished beyond measure. Difference is not the problem. The natural world itself seems almost exuberant in its production of variation. Therefore, human culture should be no less so. For me, the question is whether difference must require division.

What might become possible if human beings could maintain strong cultural, philosophical, religious, national, and individual identities while simultaneously recognising that none of those identities exhausts what we are?

Perhaps disagreement could remain disagreement without requiring dehumanization, competition could occur without constructing an enemy, identity could provide belonging without requiring inferiority somewhere else, and we could finally learn to hold our distinctions as meaningful without mistaking them for the deepest level of reality.

Here, I am reminded of a familiar poem from Rumi, translated in what Coleman Barks referred to as “American free verse.” It reads:

What has always interested me about the poem from the moment Dr. Barks shared and discussed it during my Connecting the Dots interview with him in 2007, is where it ultimately leads. Rumi does not merely imagine a place in which disagreement has been settled. He gestures toward a level of experience at which the conceptual boundaries ordinarily separating one person from another no longer carry their customary meaning.

Rumi arrives through mystical language at something I have been approaching through history, sociology, meditation, and the Seven Layers of Manifestation. That there are levels of reality at which our differences matter tremendously. And there are levels at which they do not exist in the forms we have constructed.

Perhaps wisdom consists partly in knowing the difference.

The more I contemplate this, the more I suspect that looking outward and looking inward can produce surprisingly similar effects.

Look far enough outward and the Human-Derived World begins to shrink. Borders disappear. Nations vanish. Buildings become invisible. Eventually even the planet itself becomes a point of light suspended within an incomprehensibly larger reality.

Look deeply enough inward and something analogous can occur. The noise of ordinary identity can become virtually nonexistent, titles recede, social categories loosen, and the accumulated narratives through which we ordinarily define ourselves may temporarily give way to something more fundamental: awareness itself.

In one direction lies the immensity of the universe. In the other lies the depth of Consciousness.

And somewhere between those two immensities sits the Human-Derived World, enormously consequential to us and yet astonishingly small within the larger order of things.

Perhaps our mistake has not been creating that world. Creating worlds is one of the things human beings do extraordinarily well. Perhaps our mistake has been in forgetting that we created it.

For once we forget, our creations begin to govern our imagination. What exists becomes what must exist. What has been inherited becomes what is possible. As a result, constructs become constraints, and the architecture of yesterday begins to establish the boundaries of tomorrow.

However, remembering restores something different. It restores agency.

Not absolute agency. We do not individually control history, institutions, economies, or other human beings. Nor can generations of accumulated consequences simply be redesigned through intention alone. But collective human arrangements remain susceptible to collective human action precisely because they are human arrangements.

We have revised them before. And we will revise them again.

The question is whether those revisions will emerge primarily from the same fractured consciousness that produced so many of our present difficulties, or from a deeper understanding of the instrument through which every human world is built.

And so I find myself returning to a question that feels increasingly important:

What might humanity build if we understood the builder as well as we understand what it has built?

I do not profess to know the answer. But I can imagine what might follow from taking the question seriously.

Perhaps we would devote considerably more attention to cultivating the inner capacities from which outer action emerges. Maybe education would concern itself not only with filling minds with information, but with helping human beings understand the minds receiving it. Possibly our institutions would become better at distinguishing human difference from human division. Conceivably we would become less susceptible to inherited categories that require an adversary in order to sustain an identity. And perhaps above all, some portion of the extraordinary cognitive capacity presently consumed by defending the boundaries between us could be redirected toward the problems confronting all of us.

Admittedly, there is no guarantee that greater understanding of mind will produce a harmonious civilisation. Human freedom precludes such certainty. But there is something strange about possessing an instrument of extraordinary possibility while remaining largely unaware of its capacities—and stranger still about allowing that instrument to remain captured by constructs of its own creation.

We are inhabitants of a small planet suspended within a vast universe. But we are also builders of worlds.

It seems to me, that the next great frontier is neither exclusively outward nor inward, but the relationship between the two: learning enough about the consciousness within us to become wiser about the world emerging from us.

We have already demonstrated that we can build extraordinary things. Yet, the more important question may now be whether we can become sufficiently conscious of the builder to choose, together, what deserves to be built next.

Suggested Practice: The View from the Dot

Set aside several uninterrupted minutes and look closely at Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot photograph.

Do not immediately intellectualise what you are seeing. First, find Earth. Allow yourself to recognise just how little of the photograph we occupy. Somewhere within that tiny point of light is every nation, every border, every institution, every social category, every human conflict, every person you love, everyone with whom you disagree, and virtually every circumstance that presently occupies your attention.

Now consider one distinction that has become especially important in how you understand yourself or someone else. It might involve nationality, race, religion, politics, profession, social status, education, institutional affiliation, or simply a disagreement that has become larger in your mind than the person with whom you disagree.

Look again at the photograph.

Ask yourself: From this distance, what remains?

The purpose is not to convince yourself that differences are meaningless. Difference is part of the extraordinary richness of human existence, and human-derived distinctions can produce very real consequences. Instead, notice what happens when those differences are placed within a larger frame.

Then close your eyes and reverse the direction of attention. Rather than travelling billions of miles outward, allow attention to settle inward. Notice thoughts appearing and disappearing. Notice the identities, categories, memories, and assumptions through which you ordinarily interpret experience. Without trying to eliminate any of them, consider that you are also the awareness within which they are being observed.

Remain there briefly.

Then bring these two perspectives together: the almost unimaginably large universe without and the extraordinary depth of experience within.

Somewhere between them lies the world human beings have made.

Before returning to your day, ask yourself:

What am I helping to build?

And then:

Does what I am building reflect the deepest understanding of myself and others available to me?

You need not arrive at an immediate answer. The practice is simply to remember that the world we inherit and the world we perpetuate need not always be the same world.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

This essay began with two encounters that arrived separately but seemed to be speaking to one another: a video recounting the story of a painter who invited strangers first to identify the flaws in his work and then to correct them, and an observation from my colleague Dr. Stacey Patton that “Behavioral adjustment sometimes means accepting reality rather than continuing to negotiate with potential.” Somewhere between the cross and the brush, I began thinking about feedback—not merely our willingness to give it, but our capacity to receive it, learn from it, and recognise when another person’s response to it has itself become information.

What emerged is ultimately less an essay about criticism than about adaptation. Feedback offers us information about the distance between intention and outcome, expectation and experience, as well as potential and reality. Adaptive Elegance asks what we do once that distance becomes visible. Sometimes wisdom requires changing what we are doing. At other times it requires changing what we expect of another person, organisation, or system. In either case, the work begins with seeing clearly what is actually before us.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

I came across a story recently about a painter who wanted to know what people truly thought of his work.

He had completed a painting of which he was particularly proud, but rather than relying upon his own assessment, he decided to submit it to the judgement of others. One morning, he carried the painting into a crowded public square and placed it where passers-by could see it. Beneath it, he left a simple instruction: if you find a mistake in this painting, mark it with a cross.

He then went away.

When he returned at the end of the day, he was devastated. Crosses were everywhere.

People had found fault with nearly every portion of the painting. What had begun the morning as one of his finest works now appeared to him as an inventory of his inadequacies. Every mark seemed to confirm something he had not previously known about himself. Perhaps, he thought, he was simply not as talented as he had imagined.

He then took the painting to a friend.

The friend listened and afterward proposed an experiment. Paint the same picture again, he told him. Change nothing. Tomorrow, return it to the same public square.

The painter did exactly that.

The following morning, an identical painting appeared in the same place, but the instructions beneath it had changed. This time, rather than asking people to mark what they believed was wrong, the painter invited them to correct whatever mistakes they found. Brushes and paint were provided.

He returned that evening. Yet, this time, the painting was untouched. Not one brushstroke had been changed.

The lesson offered by the story is an appealing one: people are often quite willing to tell us what is wrong while considerably fewer possess the knowledge, courage, or ability to make it right. Criticism is easy. Contribution is difficult.

I believe there is truth in that. But I found myself lingering over the story for some time afterward because I am not certain that is all it has to teach us.

After all, a person need not be a painter to notice that something in a painting appears out of proportion. A passenger need not know how to repair an aircraft engine to recognise that the sound coming from it is unusual. Someone experiencing the consequences of a poorly designed system may be exceptionally well positioned to identify its failures while having neither the expertise nor authority required to redesign it. And the person observing a recurring theme in the decision-making capacity of a loved one need not be a licensed therapist to note the need for real change in both the thinking and actions of the observed.

The absence of a solution does not necessarily invalidate an observation.

And so perhaps the more interesting question is not whether the people holding the brushes could have painted something better. Perhaps it is what happens in the space between someone making a cross and someone being willing to pick up a brush. Admittedly, I have been thinking deeply about that space lately.

There have been occasions in my own life when I have attempted to offer feedback about an event, an interaction, or a process that I believed could have unfolded differently. My intention in those moments has generally not been to establish blame. I am considerably more interested in understanding what happened, what contributed to the outcome, and what might be changed so that we do not simply reproduce the same result the next time circumstances align in similar fashion.

Yet I have noticed how easily feedback can be experienced as something else entirely—criticism.

For some, an observation about behaviour becomes a judgement of character, a question about process becomes an accusation, an attempt to examine what happened becomes an argument about who was right, and on occasion the conversation ends with some variation of: I can’t talk about this right now.

That response, by itself, is entirely reasonable.

There are moments when we genuinely do not have the emotional or cognitive bandwidth to engage a difficult subject productively. Knowing when one needs time before responding can itself be evidence of maturity. The difficulty arises when not now becomes not ever.

The immediate discomfort passes, life resumes, and the unresolved issue recedes into the background. Until it happens again. And when it does, everyone is surprised by an outcome for which the previous experience had already supplied the data.

That is where another sentence I encountered recently began speaking to the painter’s story in an unexpected way.

My colleague Dr. Stacey Patton wrote:

“Behavioral adjustment sometimes means accepting reality rather than continuing to negotiate with potential.”

I made a quote card from the sentence not only because I found myself returning to it long after the initial encounter, but also because the words number one of my favourite numbers—thirteen.

Subscribe now

There is considerable wisdom packed into the distinction between reality and potential.

Potential concerns what could happen. Reality concerns what has happened and, particularly when patterns repeat, what is happening.

Human beings seem to have an extraordinary capacity to negotiate between the two. We tell ourselves that next time will be different. That perhaps the person will respond differently, the organisation will learn, the conversation we have attempted several times will finally occur, and a system repeatedly producing the same outcome somehow remains on the verge of producing another.

Sometimes that faith is warranted. Human beings grow, organisations change, relationships mature, and at times people genuinely surprise us. But potential can also become a way of avoiding information.

If reality repeatedly communicates one thing while we continue organising our behaviour around another, eventually the question is no longer whether the other person, organisation, or system will change. The question becomes whether we will.

And suddenly Dr. Patton’s observation applies in two directions.

The person receiving feedback may need to accept the reality that something about their behaviour contributed to an undesirable outcome. That acceptance need not mean accepting that they are a bad person, incompetent, thoughtless, or deficient. Behaviour is not identity. To discover that something I did was ineffective is not to discover that I am ineffective. It is simply information.

Indeed, feedback becomes much easier to receive once we can separate information about our behaviour from conclusions about our worth.

But there is another person in the exchange—the person giving the feedback may eventually need to accept reality too.

If a person or an organisation repeatedly demonstrates that they cannot or will not engage a particular conversation, there comes a point when continuing to approach them according to their potential becomes its own refusal to incorporate feedback. We may find ourselves endlessly searching for the right phrasing, the right moment, the gentler introduction, the more complete explanation—the formulation that will finally produce the engagement we have been diligently seeking.

Perhaps it will. But we must, at some point, accept that repeated behaviour is also information.

There is a peculiar irony here. We can become so committed to helping people and organisations adapt that we fail to adapt ourselves.

That does not require us to abandon goodwill. Nor does it require declaring some people and organisations incapable of change. It simply means recognising that we cannot responsibly make present decisions according to a future version of the person or organisation who has not yet appeared.

We can leave room for potential without confusing it with reality.

Perhaps that is why the painter’s story stays with me.

At first, it appears to divide the world neatly between critics and contributors. There are those willing to make crosses and those willing to wield brushes.

But human relationships are rarely so simple.

Sometimes the cross is useful, the criticism is uninformed, the person holding the brush does not actually know how to improve the painting, the painter is so wounded by seeing the cross that he cannot examine whether it identifies something worth reconsidering, and sometimes we become so preoccupied with whether someone else will pick up the brush that we fail to notice the only brush we actually control is already in our own hand.

Feedback, at its best, is not condemnation. It is information entering a system. What happens next depends upon the system’s capacity to receive it.

We can reject the information, defend against it, postpone encountering it, examine it, challenge it, incorporate it, or discover, after careful consideration, that it tells us more about the person offering it than about ourselves. But some response is required if true learning is to occur.

Perhaps this is one of the less obvious dimensions of Adaptive Elegance: the capacity to encounter the distance between what we hoped would happen and what actually happened without needing either to defend ourselves against the difference or surrender ourselves to it.

We simply look, learn what the experience has to teach, and then we adjust what is ours to adjust.

Because potential tells us what might yet become possible. Reality tells us where we must begin. And wisdom may consist, in part, of knowing the difference.

Suggested Practice: Reality, Potential, and the Brush in Your Hand

Consider a situation in your life that has remained unresolved despite repeated attempts to address it. It may involve another person, a relationship, an organisation, a professional circumstance, or even a recurring pattern within yourself.

Without assigning blame, ask yourself: What has actually happened?

Try to answer only from observable experience rather than intention, hope, explanation, or expectation. Then ask a second question: What have I been expecting could happen?

Notice the distance between those answers.

Now consider whether there is feedback contained within that distance. Perhaps reality is asking you to communicate differently, establish a boundary, reconsider an expectation, change a process, try again, or simply stop organising present decisions around a potential that has not yet materialised.

Finally, ask: What is mine to adjust?

You need not determine what another person should do or how an organisation ought to change. For the moment, concern yourself only with the brush in your hand.

Leave room for potential. But begin with reality.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

The Three Chord Revolution emerged from my encountering two seemingly different conversations about artificial intelligence within a relatively short period of time. In one, political scientist Ian Bremmer considered the systemic consequences of increasingly powerful capabilities becoming available to ordinary individuals. In the other, music producer Rick Rubin approached much the same phenomenon through the lens of creativity, comparing artificial intelligence to the spirit of punk rock: the lowering of technical barriers that once separated those with ideas from those possessing the means to manifest them.

Their observations resonated with me because, for roughly the past year, I have been conducting my own informal experiment with artificial intelligence—not as a substitute for thought, but as a collaborator in its development. Ideas that once might have remained notes, sketches, or possibilities have increasingly been subjected to dialogue, interrogation, refinement, visualisation, and eventual manifestation.

That experience has left me less interested in the question of whether AI can replicate particular human tasks than in a deeper question: What becomes possible when the distance between imagination and manifestation dramatically contracts?

The answer will depend, I suspect, less upon the capability of our machines than upon the orientation of the human beings using them.

The three chords were never the music. They merely made it possible for more people to begin playing.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

There was a time when wanting to make something and being able to make it were separated by a considerable distance.

An aspiring musician might hear an entire composition internally yet lack the years of training necessary to reproduce it on an instrument. Someone with an idea for a piece of software might understand precisely what it should accomplish while possessing none of the programming knowledge required to build it. A scholar might see connections among ideas that seemed obvious once articulated, yet still require researchers, designers, editors, publishers, programmers, videographers, or considerable capital to carry those ideas into the world.

For much of human history, imagination has been abundant yet the means of manifestation have not.

This is one reason a recent observation by the legendary music producer Rick Rubin stayed with me. In discussing artificial intelligence and what has come to be called “vibe coding,” Rubin compared the present moment to the emergence of punk rock. Before punk, he observed elsewhere in discussing the same idea, a musician might spend years studying before possessing sufficient technical proficiency to participate seriously in music. Punk disrupted that assumption. A person could learn three chords, have something to say, find a few others willing to make some noise, and suddenly there was a band. The technical threshold to music creation had fallen dramatically. What mattered was no longer merely whether one possessed mastery of the instrument. It mattered whether one had an idea, a point of view, and the willingness to act upon it.

Rubin sees something comparable happening now with artificial intelligence.

In his conversation with Ryan Holiday on The Daily Stoic, the discussion turns to vibe coding, an approach in which someone describes to an artificial intelligence system what they would like software to do rather than personally writing every line of code. The system responds with something. Perhaps it is wrong. Maybe it is merely adequate. Or it produces something unexpectedly interesting. The human then responds to what has appeared, modifies the direction, and tries again. What once required thousands of carefully constructed lines of computer language can, at least in some circumstances, begin with a few sentences describing an intention.

What interested me most was not the coding. It was the change in the location of human contribution.

Holiday points out that traditional programming requires something resembling the combined capacities of an architect, engineer, and contractor. Vibe coding introduces a different collection of abilities. One must be able to describe what one wants, employ analogy and metaphor, recognise direction, remain open to an unexpected result, and respond intelligently to what comes back. Rubin immediately recognises the resemblance to his own work in the recording studio. Artists may enter with an idea for a song, but through experimentation the work changes. The tempo shifts. The arrangement changes. Instruments are added or removed. The chorus might become the introduction. Something that began with one intention gradually reveals possibilities no one could have specified at the beginning.

That description felt familiar to me.

For roughly the last year, I have been working with artificial intelligence with increasing regularity. What began as the use of a new technological tool has gradually become something more difficult to categorise. I have used it while developing essays, presentations, websites, research ideas, visual concepts, public talks, institutional proposals, book manuscripts, and frameworks that began as little more than observations scribbled mentally at inconvenient moments. Sometimes the work begins with a fairly developed proposition. At other times it begins with five words familiar to anyone who has worked with me long enough: “I just had a thought.”

What follows thereafter is rarely simple production.

An idea enters the conversation. It is turned around. Its assumptions are examined. Connections appear. Language is attempted and discarded. A phrase exposes a distinction I had sensed but had not yet articulated. An objection from my side or that of my AI Chatbot forces refinement. Something produced in response to my original idea suggests an entirely different direction. I reject some of it, keep some of it, modify other portions, and occasionally encounter something I recognise immediately even though I had not consciously known I was looking for it. Eventually, what began as a thought becomes something that exists.

An essay idea and accompanying text is presented, pored over, refined, and eventually published. A framework in its nascent stage is discussed, debated, reworked, and later receives a name. A website idea is shared, colour palette debated, architecture developed, design aesthetic put forth, the coding commences, newer design concepts incorporated and fonts downloaded, and a draft website begins to emerge. A presentation topic is proposed, refined, images added from a personal archive, some are created in Photoshop, others generated with my Chatbot’s assistance, and an even better website produced. An idea for an image is suggested and the resultant visual representation makes an abstract idea visible. And via lengthy, sometimes weeks long exchanges, new connections between previously separate pieces of work becomes obvious.

The above are but a few examples where the distance between cognition and manifestation has become increasingly shorter.

That experience has made it difficult for me to accept descriptions of artificial intelligence that reduce the question to whether machines will replace human beings at particular tasks. That question is certainly important. Yet it is also incomplete.

A more interesting question may be what happens when millions, and eventually billions, of people acquire access to capabilities that previously required considerable technical training, institutional resources, or financial capital.

Political scientist Ian Bremmer approaches precisely this possibility from a very different direction.

Subscribe now

In an April 2026 interview with Steven Bartlett for The Diary of a CEO podcast, Bremmer identified artificial intelligence as one of the most underappreciated systemic risks facing the world. His concern extends considerably beyond employment. Increasingly powerful AI capabilities, he observes, are becoming accessible to anyone possessing something as ordinary as a laptop or mobile phone. The same democratisation of capability that allows an individual to build software without having spent years learning to code can place capabilities once reserved for sophisticated organisations into the hands of actors whose intentions may be less constructive.

Bremmer therefore looks upon the collapsing capability barrier and sees danger.

Rubin, in contrast, looks upon the same collapsing barrier and sees liberation.

They are both right.

The power to create and the power to disrupt are not separate technological developments. They are different expressions of the same one.

The printing press made it easier to distribute wisdom and propaganda. Photography could preserve human memory and manufacture deception. Radio could carry music into homes and demagoguery across nations. The Internet gave ordinary people access to more knowledge than the greatest libraries of previous centuries while simultaneously giving misinformation a distribution system of unprecedented scale.

Technologies amplify. They do not determine what deserves amplification.

Bremmer himself acknowledges the extraordinary possibilities. In his conversation with Bartlett he describes artificial intelligence being used to improve productivity, reduce waste, optimise fuel consumption, and assist agricultural decisions. His ultimate concern is not that technology possesses some independent desire to harm humanity. Rather, he worries that political and economic systems may deploy these technologies in ways that concentrate their benefits among relatively few people while imposing their disruptions upon everyone else.

That distinction deserves more attention.

We often ask what artificial intelligence will do to us. Perhaps we should spend more time asking what we will do with artificial intelligence. For me, the difference is one of orientation.

For years, much of my own work has revolved around a deceptively simple proposition: outcomes do not begin with outcomes. They emerge from layers beneath what eventually becomes visible. Orientation precedes technique. Consciousness precedes action. The tools we employ matter, but the hand guiding the tool matters more, and the orientation of the consciousness guiding the hand matters more still.

Artificial intelligence does nothing to make this principle obsolete. As I have shared previously, it magnifies it.

When the technical cost of producing something is high, the difficulty of production itself functions as a gatekeeper. Writing a book requires enough persistence that many books are never written. Making a film requires enough money, equipment, and coordinated labour that many films remain imaginary. Developing software requires enough technical expertise that countless potentially useful applications never move beyond someone saying, “Wouldn’t it be useful if…?”

Those barriers can be frustrating. They can also filter. However, when the barriers fall, something else must do the filtering. This is why Rubin’s ideas about taste become so important.

Elsewhere in his conversation with Holiday, Rubin posits that an artist’s contribution lies substantially in possessing and cultivating an individual perspective. If all one does is reproduce what everyone else already finds fashionable or acceptable, there is little reason for one’s work to exist. The contribution is the perspective itself, shaped by a particular life, set of experiences, sensitivities, curiosities, memories, and judgements.

Artificial intelligence does not erase that distinction. It, instead, may make it more important.

Holiday offers an amusing example while discussing predictive text. When typing well-known passages by Hemingway, he notices that the AI prediction rarely selects the word Hemingway actually chose. Rubin’s response is illuminating: perhaps that tells us something about why Hemingway was Hemingway. The unusual choice, the departure from what was statistically expected, may be precisely where the artistry resided.

The machine can identify the probable. Human beings remain capable of choosing the improbable because it feels right.

That does not make every improbable choice genius. Most are probably terrible. But therein lies the role of discernment.

As artificial intelligence makes capability increasingly abundant, judgement may become increasingly valuable.

This changes the meaning of expertise rather than eliminating it.

The classically trained musician is not rendered irrelevant because someone else can learn three punk-rock chords in an afternoon. The trained musician simply no longer possesses an exclusive claim to musical participation. A programmer who understands architecture, logic, security, and computation will be able to interrogate AI-generated software in ways unavailable to someone who knows nothing about those subjects. A historian who understands evidence and historiography will recognise when an elegantly written AI response rests upon an indefensible claim. A sociologist will recognise when AI conflates Bourdieu and Weber. A filmmaker who understands narrative may use the same generative tools available to everyone else while recognising why one sequence moves an audience and another merely looks expensive.

Artificial intelligence can democratise capability without equalising wisdom.

Indeed, the more capable the tools become, the more consequential the distinction may become.

This is where my own experience with AI has become particularly instructive.

The most valuable moments in my collaboration with artificial intelligence have rarely occurred when the system simply did something for me. They have occurred when interaction caused an idea to become more itself.

A concept such as Adaptive Elegance did not emerge because a machine generated a clever phrase and handed it to me as a finished product. It emerged through extended reflection on how people navigate transitions, how adaptation differs from surrender, and how one might describe the capacity to move through changing conditions without unnecessarily losing coherence. The technology accelerated exploration. It helped hold ideas still long enough for me to examine them from multiple directions. But recognition remained a human act.

The same has been true while developing the Seven Layers of Manifestation and continuing to refine the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress. These frameworks arise from years of study, meditation, teaching, scholarship, observation, lived experience, and questions that preceded current artificial intelligence systems by decades. Yet AI has made it possible to test relationships among ideas, examine language, create visual expressions, consider objections, and move from internal conception toward communicable form with extraordinary speed.

What has changed is not where the ideas originate. What has changed is how much friction exists between their emergence as an idea and their manifestation as an essay, a book, framework website, and platform for human flourishing.

That distinction matters enormously.

For it suggests that we may be entering an age in which one sufficiently oriented individual can operate with capabilities that once required an organisation.

A writer can become a publisher. A teacher can become a media studio. An entrepreneur can prototype before hiring a development team. A researcher can interrogate bodies of literature with assistance once available only through several research assistants. A community organisation can create professional communications without maintaining an advertising department. Someone with an idea and limited financial resources can increasingly discover whether that idea has merit before asking anyone for permission or capital.

As a result, I suspect more such stories as that of Matthew Gallagher, the entrepreneur who launched the telehealth startup Medvi with $20,000 and went on to scale it into a formidable, multi-billion-dollar revenue business with essentially a two-person team consisting of himself and his younger brother.

This, I believe, is the three chord revolution.

The phrase should not be misunderstood as celebrating amateurism for its own sake. Punk rock did not prove that musicianship was unnecessary. It demonstrated that technical gatekeeping and creative legitimacy were not the same thing.

AI may do something similar across an astonishing range of human activity.

The person who once said, “I would build this if I knew how to code,” may increasingly be able to build a version of it. The person who once said, “I can see this film in my head, but I could never afford to make it,” may increasingly be able to show others what she sees. The scholar whose work never reached beyond academic journals may be able to communicate with audiences through video, animation, interactive visualisations, and formats that previously required an entire production team. And the child somewhere in the world whose family cannot afford conservatory training may nevertheless discover that an idea inside her can be made audible.

This is why Bremmer’s observation about differing attitudes toward artificial intelligence is especially revealing. He notes that enthusiasm is often greater in parts of the Global South, where people may see AI as a means of expanding human capital and opportunity, while anxiety is greater among many Americans and Europeans who see it threatening existing knowledge work and professional status. Note the socio-historical element coming into relief.

Here, I am reminded of the myriad arguments against Black Americans learning to read and the famous quote from Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: A Slave, where we learn in relation to teaching a person to read:

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave,” (p. 33)

And given the increasing awareness of possibilities as more people eventually embrace artificial intelligence, admittedly, those responses are not difficult to understand.

The same door looks different depending upon which side of it one has been standing.

For those historically protected by scarce expertise, AI may appear to remove a moat. For those historically excluded by scarce expertise, AI may appear to lower a wall.

That tension will shape politics, employment, education, and culture for years to come. In particular, it should cause us to reconsider the role formal education is to serve in our global society.

If information retrieval becomes trivial, memorising information cannot remain education’s highest aim. If competent prose can be generated practically in an instant, the ability to produce grammatically acceptable sentences cannot by itself represent intellectual mastery. And if software can increasingly be constructed through ordinary language, knowing programming syntax cannot remain the sole measure of computational competence.

What then becomes more important?

I see no less than seven points to direct more attention and resources toward—knowing what questions deserve asking, recognising when an answer is wrong, understanding history deeply enough to detect false analogies, possessing sufficient self-knowledge to distinguish authentic judgement from social imitation, cultivating taste, learning to attend, developing the capacity to remain with ambiguity rather than immediately accepting the first plausible answer, and perhaps most importantly, cultivating an orientation toward life capable of determining what all this newfound capability should serve.

These are not secondary skills for an AI age. I believe they may become the primary ones.

Rubin describes creativity as beginning with a prompt rather than a finished destination. One starts with an idea, enters the process, responds to what appears, and gradually discovers what the work wants to become.

There is something deeply human in that description. Because our lives themselves often unfold that way.

We begin with intention, reality responds, we adjust, unexpected possibilities appear, we discover capacities we did not know we possessed, and as a result, the original destination changes because the traveller changes.

Perhaps artificial intelligence is most interesting not when it pretends to replace that process, but when it participates in it.

I do not know precisely where this revolution leads. Bremmer is right to warn that enormous capability distributed rapidly across poorly prepared political and economic systems may produce consequences we have scarcely begun to contemplate. There will be displacement, misuse, fortunes made, institutions disrupted, and there will undoubtedly be things created simply because they can be created rather than because they should be.

But Rubin is also right to sense something exhilarating.

There are people alive today carrying ideas they have never possessed the means to manifest. In one recent exchange with a friend, he mentioned he had an idea rolling around in his mind for a decade. As a result of his engaging with AI, he was able to bring the idea in its pre-beta stage to fruition in a matter of a few days.

In reflecting on his experience, I am compelled to posit that somewhere there is a future filmmaker without a camera crew, a future entrepreneur without a programming team, a future scholar without institutional backing, a future composer who cannot read music, and a future inventor who does not yet know that the absence of a particular technical skill may no longer prevent an idea from entering the world. This is where, I believe one’s idea, one’s will to act, and unflinching approach to AI may prove a tremendous advantage.

The gate is opening—wide—and seems it will forever remain more than ajar for many among the global majority.

That does not mean everything coming through it will be worthwhile. It, instead, means the determining question is changing.

For centuries, many people confronted a practical barrier: Can I make this?

Increasingly, another question may take its place: What is worth making?

And beneath even that question sits another: From what orientation am I creating it?

Three chords were never the point. The point was that once three chords were enough to begin, people who had previously been listeners could become participants.

Artificial intelligence may be bringing humanity to a similar threshold. This time, however, the instrument is not a guitar. It is capability itself.

Suggested Practice

Consider something you have wanted to create, explore, understand, or bring into the world but have postponed because you believed you lacked some necessary capability.

Perhaps you do not know how to code, you cannot draw, you have never edited a video, designed a website, analysed a large body of information, composed music, developed a presentation, or known where to begin researching an idea that has followed you for years.

Rather than beginning with the question, Do I know how to do this?, begin somewhere else:

What am I actually trying to bring into existence?

Spend a few minutes describing it as clearly as possible. Describe what it should accomplish, why it matters to you, whom it might serve, what you already understand about it, and what remains unclear. Then bring that description into conversation with an AI system.

Do not ask the system simply to make the thing for you. Instead, use the system to explore possibilities.

Question its assumptions. Reject what does not fit. Ask why it made particular choices. Follow unexpected connections. Refine your language. Introduce your own knowledge and experience. When something resonates, examine why. When something feels wrong, articulate what is missing. Allow the interaction not merely to accelerate execution, but to clarify the idea itself.

Then, before proceeding toward manifestation, ask three questions:

Can I make this?

Is this worth making?

From what orientation am I creating it?

The first question concerns capability.

The second requires judgement.

The third requires something no technological revolution can supply on our behalf.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Mount Rainier, Washington, 2011. Photograph by Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD.
Digitally restored and enhanced with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence.

Author’s Note

I have been fortunate throughout my life to encounter people willing to offer advice. Some of it proved invaluable. Some of it was well-intentioned but ultimately unsuitable for the journey I was undertaking. And some became useful precisely because deciding not to follow it forced me to examine more carefully what I believed, where I was going, and why.

With the passage of time, I have learned that wisdom does not require rejecting perspectives that differ from our own. Instead, it requires discernment regarding the vantage point from which those perspectives arise.

Some people know the valley extraordinarily well. Others have crossed the ridgeline. And a considerably smaller number have stood upon the summit we ourselves hope to reach. Each may have something to teach us, but they are not necessarily teaching us the same thing.

Perhaps one of the responsibilities accompanying maturity is learning to recognise the difference.

In the end, may we remain sufficiently humble to receive wisdom wherever it appears, sufficiently discerning to recognise the boundaries of another person’s map, and sufficiently courageous to continue climbing when our own journey calls us towards terrain others have never seen.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

Some years ago during my time in Atlanta, as I was considering Graduate programs, I found myself speaking with an individual who was remarkably generous with advice. It was one of those lazy afternoons that often occur in downtown loft buildings where residents gather to discuss all manner of life’s aspects and opportunities. As the conversation unfolded, he spoke confidently about what could and could not be accomplished, which degrees and careers were worth pursuing, which ideas would inevitably fail, which ambitions were unrealistic, and which paths were, in his estimation, simply not worth the effort.

There was nothing particularly unusual about the conversation. We have all encountered people willing to offer their assessment of the road ahead, just as we have undoubtedly offered our own opinions to others—perhaps even unsolicited. What caught my attention, however, was the certainty with which these conclusions were expressed. One might reasonably have assumed that the gentleman speaking had travelled each of these roads himself and was reporting what he had discovered along the way.

However, as the conversation continued, something became increasingly apparent. He had not built the type of organisation he dismissed, pursued the degree he diminished, conducted the kind of research he questioned, or ventured into many of the places about which he spoke with not a small degree of confidence. His protestations of possibility had not been born of direct experience. It quickly dawned on me that his perspective was built on the unstable sand of observation, assumption, and his interpretation of what seemed possible from where he happened to stand—at the base of the seeming impossible.

That realisation has remained with me ever since.

It is one thing to describe the mountain from the valley. It is an entirely different thing to speak after having climbed it.

The longer I have lived, the more I have come to appreciate that advice often reveals as much about the adviser as it does about the subject under discussion. Human beings rarely speak from reality in some completely objective sense. We speak from our orientation towards reality, and that orientation has been shaped by everything we have encountered along the way. And one of my most memorable examples of such comes from my Dad. In 2008, when I was entertaining applying to the graduate program to study Vedic Science at Maharishi International University, I was speaking with my Dad about the program and my prospects should I be admitted. He posed a simple question: “How long will it take you?” My reply, “Anywhere from seven to ten years.” To which he then calmly replied, “Well, you can either be seven to ten years older with it or seven to ten years older without it.”

And that was it. So simple. So straightforward to have left no room for misinterpretation. He simply stated what was obvious to him without embellishment and from lived experience; thus opening a door for me to make the decision.

That experience taught me a valuable lesson. One I endeavour to pass along to my children—both directly and indirectly.

Each of us carries an internal map assembled over years of experience, education, disappointment, success, failure, culture, relationships, and inherited assumptions. Some portions of that map have been drawn from roads we have personally travelled. Other portions were handed to us by parents, teachers, institutions, traditions, communities, and people whose judgements we learned to trust long before we were old enough to examine them critically. Still other portions are blank, although we may not always recognise them as such.

We consult this map so frequently that, over time, something curious can happen: we cease to distinguish the map from the landscape itself. As a result, the map becomes the mountain.

It is an understandable mistake. If someone has spent an entire lifetime in the valley, the valley may appear complete. They may know every stream, every tree, every familiar road, and every change in the landscape that accompanies the passing seasons. From such a vantage point, their knowledge may be extensive and their observations entirely accurate.

Yet accuracy within one portion of the landscape does not necessarily confer knowledge of the whole.

When another traveller arrives speaking of alpine lakes, hidden passes, or vistas visible only from the summit, such descriptions may sound fantastical and thus implausible to someone who has never crossed the surrounding ridgeline. The difficulty is not necessarily that the traveller’s account is inherently false. It may simply lie beyond the boundaries of the listener’s experience and imagination.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly careful about whose counsel I seek when considering where I wish to go or what I seek to accomplish.

The principle is simple enough. If I were preparing to climb a difficult mountain, I would certainly value the meteorologist who could tell me about the weather forecast for the duration of my climb, the physician who could advise me about the demands both altitude and associated physicality of the climb might place upon the body, and the local resident who understood the surrounding terrain and could advise me accordingly. Each possesses knowledge that may prove invaluable. But when the question becomes how to reach the summit, I would be particularly interested in speaking with someone who had actually made the ascent. Not once but several times.

Not because experience makes that person infallible. It does not. Rather, there are things the mountain teaches that cannot be learned from the valley.

The same principle undoubtedly shapes our everyday lives, although the distinction is often less obvious. An aspiring entrepreneur may receive business advice from someone who has never built a business. A person contemplating writing a book may be discouraged by someone who has never completed a manuscript. A young scholar may be warned away from research by someone who has never undertaken the long and sometimes frustrating process of producing original scholarship. Someone beginning a contemplative practice may even be assured that certain states of consciousness are impossible by a person who has never undertaken the practices through which such states are said to become available.

In each case, the advice may be sincere. Indeed, some of the most limiting advice we receive is offered by people who genuinely care about us.

That is precisely what can make it so persuasive.

A person does not have to wish us harm to discourage us from a path. They may simply be interpreting our destination through the boundaries of their own experience. Their concern may be genuine, their reasoning coherent, and their intentions loving, while their map nevertheless lacks the territory we are attempting to enter.

I have experienced enough of life to recognise when someone, as the Texas idiom states, “Is all hat, no cattle.”

Subscribe now

My own journey has carried me into places I could not have adequately understood beforehand. Scholarship looked different before I undertook doctoral research than it did while sitting with difficult questions that refused easy answers. Leadership looked different from the outside than it did after accepting responsibility for people, institutions, outcomes, and decisions whose consequences extended beyond myself. Teaching meditation was one thing in principle and quite another after years spent sitting across from individuals arriving with different histories, expectations, doubts, aspirations, and understandings of consciousness.

In each case, participation changed the map.

This is why, when I wished to understand meditation, I was attentive to those whose lives bore the unmistakable marks of sustained practice. When I decided to understand scholarship and later pursued graduate school, I listened carefully to those who had submitted themselves to disciplined enquiry, emerged the better, and made substantial contributions to the human enterprise. And when I desired to understand leadership, I studied the works of those whom many considered the great writers on the topic and paid particularly close attention to those who had accepted its burdens, made the difficult decisions, lived with their consequences, learned from their mistakes, and continued forward.

This does not mean experience is everything. Thoughtful observers can perceive things participants overlook, and the person standing outside a system can sometimes see its structure more clearly than someone immersed within it. Nor does experience automatically produce wisdom. Sadly, many people have travelled great distances without reflecting deeply upon what the journey taught them. And as our social media era attests, a person can climb the mountain and return with little more than photographs.

The point, therefore, is not that we should seek advice only from people who have already accomplished precisely what we hope to accomplish. Such a rule would be unnecessarily narrow and would deprive us of perspectives capable of enriching our journey—even if the only thing provided by such persons is in the form of humour. For humour holds a valuable place during long journeys. So, never underestimate its value.

For me, however, the deeper lesson is discernment.

We should understand the vantage point from which advice is being offered and weigh it accordingly.

There remains an important difference between someone describing a road they have observed and someone describing a road they have walked. Both may offer information, but the latter may also provide something more difficult to acquire from a distance: orientation born of participation.

That distinction has become increasingly meaningful to me as I have reflected upon consciousness itself. Many of the deepest questions of human life resist second-hand understanding because some dimensions of reality disclose themselves only through participation. No description of stillness is equivalent to becoming still. No explanation of love substitutes for loving another human being and being loved by another human being. No lecture on courage eliminates the moment in which we must finally act despite our fear. We may study each of these experiences extensively, but eventually there comes a boundary beyond which explanation can carry us no farther. We must enter the experience. And in entering the experience to do the thing, we become the thing.

Perhaps this is why so many of humanity’s philosophical, contemplative, and spiritual traditions place such emphasis upon deliberate practice. Knowledge can point towards the path. A teacher can describe it. A text can preserve the observations of those who travelled before us. But none can take the steps on our behalf. This we must do of our own freewill and accord.

The mountain does not fully reveal itself to those who merely discuss climbing. At some point, one must climb. The pen or keyboard does not magically make one a good writer upon picking up the pen or beginning to hunt and peck the keys. As one practices the craft of writing over long periods —writing, revising, discarding, beginning again—one eventually becomes a better writer than when one began. Not perfect, but definitely better.

The same is true of our relationships. All the books ever written about loving, being loved, and building strong intimate relationships cannot confer upon us the ability to do any of those things simply by reading them. In my experience, such capacities are developed through participation, trial and error, vulnerability, reflection, and the willingness to continue learning. Even then, there remains much to discover about the person one seeks to love, to be loved by, and with whom one hopes to build a strong and enduring relationship. The journey continues in each of these arenas, because there is always something experience can teach us that theory alone cannot. And that, I have come to believe, is part of the beauty.

Recognising this has also made me more compassionate towards those who offer advice I ultimately choose not to follow. I no longer need to assume that they lack imagination, misunderstand me, or wish to discourage my progress. Sometimes they are simply describing, with complete sincerity, what the world looks like from where they stand.

I can appreciate their concern without adopting their horizon.

That may be one of the more important forms of discernment we develop as we mature: learning to receive another person’s perspective without automatically allowing it to become our own. We can listen without surrendering judgement. We can remain open without becoming directionless. We can honour someone’s experience while recognising that their experience may not contain the destination towards which we ourselves are moving.

Every sincere person has something to teach us. Some help us avoid unnecessary hardship. Others remind us to proceed with humility. Some see hazards we have overlooked, while others reveal possibilities we had never considered. Even those whose advice proves unsuitable may provide something valuable by forcing us to examine more carefully why we have chosen the road before us.

Wisdom, then, lies not in refusing advice, but in understanding what kind of guidance we are seeking and from whom said advice is sought.

If we wish to understand the valley, there is great wisdom in asking someone who knows the valley well. If we are preparing to cross the ridgeline, we should listen carefully to those familiar with the crossing. And if our heart is set upon the summit, there is something to be learned from those who have stood there—or who, even now, are faithfully making the ascent.

We need not reject the maps others hand us. We simply need to remember what they are—maps—and are thus representations drawn from particular vantage points, shaped by particular journeys, useful within particular boundaries, but never identical to the whole of reality.

For if we forget the distinction, we may unknowingly inherit the boundaries of another person’s experience and spend a lifetime mistaking the edges of their map for the limits of our mountain and imagination. Let it not be so. For we may be meant to soar while others may be meant to remain closer to the ground.

As for me, my journey calls for me to soar. And soar I shall.

Suggested Practice

Examine the Maps You Have Been Given

Think of one destination you are presently working towards. It might concern your vocation, education, relationships, spiritual development, creative work, leadership, health, or some other meaningful dimension of your life.

Now consider the people whose advice you have allowed to influence your thinking about that destination and its possibilities.

For each person, ask yourself:

From what vantage point is this person speaking?

Have they travelled the road themselves? Have they successfully helped others travel it? Are they offering specialised knowledge about one portion of the journey? Are they speaking primarily from observation? Or might some portion of their counsel reflect the boundaries of their own experience, fears, disappointments, or imagination?

Do not undertake the exercise to judge them.

Instead, undertake it to understand the map you have been handed.

Then ask one final question:

Whose counsel would I seek if I were choosing my advisers according to where I am going rather than where I have already been?

Write down one name.

If possible, begin a conversation with that person.

The mountain may require your own steps, but there is no requirement that you climb without the wisdom of those who know the terrain intimately.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.

Author’s Note

This essay is adapted from my forthcoming book, Elegant Transitions, an exploration of how we navigate periods of change, uncertainty, loss, and becoming with greater awareness and intentionality.

Some transitions announce themselves clearly. Others become visible only in retrospect, after enough distance allows us to recognise that while one part of our lives was contracting, something else was quietly taking form. The Price of Admission emerged from my own effort to understand such a period—not by denying what was lost or absolving those whose decisions contributed to it, but by asking what the experience also made possible.

That distinction lies near the heart of Elegant Transitions. We cannot always choose the transitions that enter our lives, nor can we determine the conduct of everyone we encounter along the way. We can, however, cultivate greater agency in how we meet those experiences, what we learn from them, what we leave behind, and ultimately what we carry forward.

Sometimes the measure of a difficult season is found not only in what it cost us, but in the capacities, clarity, relationships, and possibilities that emerged while we were moving through it.

—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD

There are numbers that become difficult to look at once they grow large enough. They cease being abstractions and begin representing things: years of work, opportunities deferred, security diminished, plans postponed, and choices narrowed. Over the course of approximately three years, my wife and I watched more than $300,000 in revenue disappear from our financial lives. Even writing that number now gives me tremendous pause. There is no clever philosophical formulation that makes it insignificant. It was, and remains, a considerable amount of money. And I recognise the amount represents remuneration that an appreciable portion of the American citizenry may not earn during the course of their working lives.

For much of that period, the arithmetic seemed to provide the most obvious way of understanding what had happened. There was what we once possessed, what we expected would occur, and what remained after circumstances unfolded differently. Some of those circumstances were beyond anyone’s control. Others involved decisions and behaviours that I continue to regard as questionable. Relationships changed. Expectations proved unreliable. Opportunities that appeared reasonably secure did not materialise. And the financial consequences accumulated slowly enough that there was rarely a single moment at which one could point and say, There. That was when everything changed.

Life seldom provides such convenient markers.

Instead, there was a gradual contraction. We adjusted, reassessed, made decisions, absorbed consequences, and continued moving forward. Mina and I had four children to raise. There was work to be done. People continued learning Transcendental Meditation. Classes continued. Meetings continued. Papers needed grading. Research needed completing. Meals still had to be prepared, laundry washed, floors vacuumed, children educated, bills paid, and the ordinary rhythms of family life maintained. Whatever was happening around us, life did not suspend itself while we attempted to understand it.

For a time, however, I found myself periodically returning to the ledger. How much had been lost? What might that money have made possible? Where would we be had certain things unfolded differently? What would our lives look like if particular people had acted differently, if certain promises had been fulfilled, or if I had recognised some patterns earlier than I did?

Those questions are legitimate. I still believe that. Reframing an experience should never require falsifying it. Poor behaviour does not become admirable merely because one eventually learns from it. Decisions that harmed others do not become wise because those affected found a way forward. Accountability and growth are not mutually exclusive, and I have little interest in the kind of retrospective spirituality that turns every injury into a blessing simply because we survived it. In short, when people and institutions engage in outcome bias, they reveal a desire to evade accountability. And that is something I cannot countenance

Something else happened, however, while I was studying that ledger. I began noticing another one.

The period during which so much was disappearing financially was also one of the most generative periods of my intellectual life.

In September 2023, after years of doctoral study, I defended my dissertation. The research had begun as an investigation of mystical experience among Freemasons, but somewhere along the way it had yielded something larger: the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress. What began as an effort to understand the developmental journeys of other people had become a framework through which I could think about growth itself. Questions that had occupied me across decades—through undergrad study in History, then both undergrad and graduate study in Sociology, a student of the Rosicrucian teachings, becoming a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, becoming a Freemason, later a teacher of the TM technique, and student of the study of Consciousness and Human Potential—were beginning to speak to one another.

Then came the Seven Layers of Manifestation (SLM).

It did not arrive as a business plan or as an attempt to create another intellectual product. It emerged gradually from years of trying to understand how the reality described in Maharishi’s teachings, the sociological world I had been trained to study, the historical processes I had spent much of my adult life examining, and the inner experiences I had known since long before learning Transcendental Meditation might belong within the same explanatory landscape. All of which I was encouraged, during my dissertation defense:

“to begin to find a universal language so that you can share from the various different Traditions with individuals and groups in language that they can grasp.”

It was during a deep meditative experience not long after I defended my dissertation that the language began to emerge within the SLM framework—Pure Consciousness, Universal and Natural Laws, the Phenomenal World, Human Consciousness, the Human-Derived World, Constructs, and Outcomes. It quickly became not merely a collection of categories, but a way of orienting myself toward questions I had been asking for much of my life.

As the framework developed, something else began happening. Ideas that I had previously regarded as separate interests started revealing themselves as parts of a larger enquiry. The historian in me had always been interested in how ideas shape societies. The sociologist had been trained to examine the structures human beings create and the consequences those structures produce. The student of the Rosicrucian teachings had, early on, recognised there existed a veil covering the world I had come to know as a child. The meditation teacher had spent years observing what happens when people encounter a technique that allows them to experience subtler levels of their own awareness. The scholar of Vedic Science had become increasingly interested in the relationship between Consciousness and the phenomenal world. The Freemason had spent years thinking about symbols, transformation, moral development, and the transmission of knowledge. None of those identities disappeared. They began integrating.

Subscribe now

Admittedly, I could not see the full significance of that integration while it was happening. At the time, I was still living inside the contraction and feeling every aspect of the experience.

That may be one of the peculiarities of difficult periods: we can see what is being removed much more easily than we can see what is being formed. Loss announces itself immediately; whereas becoming tends to work much more subtly.

The work nevertheless continued. On Transcendence developed into a place where I could think publicly rather than merely publish conclusions. The International Meditation Hour created opportunities for conversations across contemplative traditions and disciplines. The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress continued to mature. The Seven Layers of Manifestation became increasingly useful as a diagnostic framework through which I could examine not only individual development but institutions, culture, technology, and the relationship between consciousness and human creation. What had initially appeared to be separate projects slowly began functioning as an ecosystem.

Then came Transcendental Brain.

Even that began more modestly than what I can now imagine it becoming. What first appeared to be a platform for exploring consciousness and human potential has increasingly become a place where questions about artificial intelligence, emergence, attention, information, neuroscience, contemplative experience, and human development can encounter one another. Conversations that would once have seemed peripheral now feel strangely central. A discussion with an investor leads to questions about the emergence of consciousness. A scientist sends me a book examining quantum aspects of life. A colleague sends a paper on attention and artificial intelligence. Conferences introduce new people and new questions. Ideas travel across disciplinary boundaries and return altered by what they encountered there.

None of this means that losing more than $300,000 in revenue was somehow necessary for these things to occur. I cannot know that, and I have no desire to construct a mythology in which every painful experience had to happen precisely as it did so that some predetermined future could emerge. Life is more complicated than that and engaging in outcome bias holds the potential to create a degree of complacency that would neither serve me nor this endeavour well. My position is that there may have been gentler, less expensive routes to this moment. But those are not the routes we travelled.

This is.

And because this is the life we actually lived, I have become increasingly interested in a different question. Rather than continually asking what the experience cost us, I have begun asking what became possible through the people we became while moving through it.

That question changes the accounting.

It does not erase the first ledger. The money remains gone, this difficult experience is now part of our history, and the people responsible for their upstream choices that produced downstream effects do not get a free pass. But the second ledger is real too.

It records a completed doctorate and a scholar who emerged from the process with questions considerably larger than those with which he entered it. It chronicles frameworks that did not previously exist. It registers writing, teaching, conversations, platforms, collaborations, and relationships that have begun opening entirely new possibilities. It includes greater discernment about institutions and the difference between the realities they serve and the structures human beings build around them. It also attests to a marriage that endured considerable pressure, four children who continued growing while their parents navigated uncertainty, and a family that remained a family even when the surrounding circumstances were anything but settled.

And perhaps most importantly, it facilitated ultimate clarity.

I know considerably more now about what matters to me than I did three years ago. I know what I am willing to build, what I am no longer willing to maintain merely because I once invested in it, the difference between loyalty and entanglement, that one can remain grateful for what an institution, relationship, or chapter provided without surrendering one’s future to it, and I know that resolution does not always require reconciliation. Moreover, I have learned that moving forward does not require pretending that what happened behind us was acceptable.

There is freedom in that.

For years, I thought the mature response to difficult experiences was primarily to understand them. My training reinforced that instinct. Historians reconstruct events. Sociologists search for patterns. Scholars interrogate assumptions and examine systems. I still value all of that. Understanding matters enormously.

But understanding the past and remaining oriented toward it are not the same thing.

At some point, explanation has done its work. One can recognise the pattern, learn from it, establish whatever boundaries are necessary, and turn around. As there is a future waiting in the other direction.

That recognition has gradually changed how I understand the $300,000 loss in revenue. I still call it a loss because, financially, that is precisely what it was. Yet I no longer believe “loss” is sufficient enough to describe the entire experience.

Perhaps the value of an experience cannot be measured solely by what was lost during it, but also by what became possible because of it.

I think about education in much the same way. We rarely describe tuition simply as money that disappeared. We understand that the expenditure purchased entry into an environment in which something could happen: knowledge could be acquired, capacities developed, relationships formed, and horizons expanded. The money is unquestionably no longer in our bank account, but its disappearance is not the whole story because something may have been received in exchange that cannot be represented adequately on the same ledger.

Life occasionally presents tuition we never agreed to pay.

That does not make the invoice fair. Nor does not mean we should thank those who helped send it. It simply means that, having paid it, we would be foolish not to take the education.

There is a familiar aphorism, often attributed to former Harvard president Derek Bok: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” The attribution may be uncertain, but the wisdom of the observation has remained with me for many years. Education can indeed be expensive. Yet there is another cost associated with refusing to learn from what life has already charged us to experience.

I increasingly think of the past three years in those terms.

Without question, the tuition was extraordinarily high, and I would not voluntarily enroll in the course again. There are lessons I would gladly have learned for considerably less. Yet here I stand—or rather, sit—typing these lines, possessing an education I did not have before entering it.

Perhaps that is why the phrase price of admission has stayed with me.

Admission suggests a threshold. On one side is the life we knew. On the other is a life that could not yet be fully imagined. We rarely know the significance of such thresholds while crossing them because our attention is naturally drawn toward what we are leaving behind. Only after enough distance has accumulated do we sometimes discover that the door through which we reluctantly passed opened onto terrain we could not have reached by remaining where we were.

I can see some of that terrain now.

The ecosystem taking shape around my work is larger than anything I envisioned when the financial contraction began. The conversations and questions are different. The people entering the conversation are different. The possibilities surrounding Transcendental Brain, Radical Scholar, my research, writing, teaching, and the broader exploration of Consciousness increasingly suggest not a collection of disconnected projects but a sustained programme of enquiry. I do not yet know what all of it will become, and I have learned enough to resist pretending that I do.

What I do know is that I am standing somewhere I was not standing before. And I know that the man sitting here typing these words is not quite the man who entered that difficult season.

Perhaps the greatest mistake we make is assuming that every cost should be measured against what we lost, rather than against who we were and thus became.

That does not mean becoming automatically compensates for loss. It does not. Some losses are devastating and leave wounds that never become wisdom. Some experiences should simply never happen. I would never tell another person that their suffering was secretly an investment in some grander future or that they should be grateful for whatever harmed them. Because meaning cannot, nor should it, be imposed upon someone else’s experience from the outside; try though some may to do just that.

But I must confess, based on my observations of this experience and learning of others having trod a similar path who went on to recover from such, that we retain considerable authority over what we do with our own experiences.

That may be among the most important forms of agency available to us. We cannot always choose what enters our lives, control the integrity of everyone with whom we interact, nor guarantee that our investments—financial, relational, professional, or otherwise—will produce the outcomes we expected. But we can decide whether disappointment becomes our permanent orientation and whether those who contributed to our losses are permitted to determine what comes next.

For me, I choose otherwise.

I can acknowledge what happened without living there—because the past is a place for learning, not living. Also, I possess the capacity to insist upon accountability without making resentment my companion. And I can remember both the sequence of events and their outcomes without remaining bound. And lastly, I can glean whatever wisdom the experience yielded and carry it forward while leaving the rest where it belongs. Because the past has already collected its payment. It does not also get the future.

So, when I look back upon these past several years, I no longer see only a period in which more than $300,000 in revenue disappeared. Instead, I see the completion of one chapter of scholarship and the emergence of another, ideas that found one another because I finally had the intellectual architecture to recognise their relationship, a marriage and family moving through uncertainty together, a body of work becoming an ecosystem, an ecosystem becoming an enquiry, and an enquiry beginning to attract people capable of carrying it into places I cannot yet foresee.

The ledger remains honest. Something substantial was lost. But something substantial was formed as well.

Perhaps years from now I will understand the exchange differently still. The story is not finished, and I am reluctant to assign final meaning to a chapter while the consequences of it are still unfolding. For now, however, I know this much: I would rather use what happened as fuel for what comes next than spend the next decade demanding that the past return what it no longer possesses.

More than $300,000 in lost revenue is an extraordinary price to pay for admission.

But if the doorway leads where I increasingly suspect it might, I intend to make very good use of the ticket I have already paid for.

Suggested Practice: The Second Ledger

Think of a difficult transition from your own life—particularly one you still tend to measure primarily by what it cost you.

Take a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns. At the top of the first, write What Was Lost. At the top of the second, write What Was Formed.

Begin with the first ledger. Be honest. Record what the experience cost you: time, money, relationships, opportunities, certainty, trust, identity, or whatever else was genuinely diminished or taken away. Resist the temptation to minimise the experience merely because time has passed.

Then turn to the second ledger.

Ask yourself: Who was I required to become while moving through this? What capacities developed? What became clearer? What boundaries emerged? What relationships deepened? What assumptions fell away? What possibilities exist now that I could not see then?

Do not force an answer. Some experiences remain painful, and not every loss needs to be transformed into a lesson. The purpose of the exercise is not to make the past acceptable. It is to determine whether the first ledger has been permitted to tell the entire story.

When you have finished, sit quietly with both columns.

Then consider one final question

What from this experience deserves to travel with me into what comes next—and what has already collected enough of my life?

Carry the former forward.

Allow the latter to remain where it belongs.

The past can be a place for learning without becoming a place for living.

—

About the Author

Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.

He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.

Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.

His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.

He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.

To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.