BONUS – The Scavenger Hunt: A Life in Clues and Consciousness
On following Nature’s road signs of destiny through a life of awakening.
The Hidden Map
During a recent morning’s meditation, as breath and stillness dissolved into one another, a single thought surfaced with the quiet insistence of a message long waiting its turn: in addition to being kaleidoscopic, my life has also been a scavenger hunt.
The phrase made me smile. Not a scavenger hunt in the childish sense of searching for baubles and trinkets, but one of consciousness—a life strewn with clues left by an unseen hand, each pointing to the next discovery. For decades I have followed these signs—sometimes eagerly, sometimes reluctantly—until their pattern began to reveal itself. What once appeared as chance now reads as choreography.
In retrospect, it feels as if some intelligence, both intimate and immense, had hidden the instructions for my life across time. All I had to do was pay attention.
The First Clues—Words and Wonder
In surveying my life, and as I have written elsewhere, it seems the first unmistakable clue came when I was either sixteen or seventeen. I had returned home from a restaurant shift, showered, and gone to bed—only to fall asleep crying and awaken the same way. This cycle of weeping—falling asleep in tears, waking in tears—repeated several times through the night. At one point, I recall feeling a calm presence—either descending upon me or rising from within. It’s hard to explain, but the calm was palpable. Through the tears, I spoke aloud: “I don’t know why I’m going through this, but I know I’m going through it for a reason—and in the end, I’ll be fine.” With those words, a subtle but meaningful relief settled over me. That calm lasted for days. Perhaps longer. And in that moment, a personal affirmation crystallised—one I still carry: I am turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones to better opportunity. That night was a quiet turning point in my life.
The next clue arrived after my relocation to Atlanta from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in a book during the Spring of 1993. I was young, still learning how to translate curiosity into comprehension and making the necessary mental preparations for matriculating to university full time the following year, when Three Magic Words by U.S. Andersen found me. The title alone suggested that there existed a secret grammar to reality, that thoughts were not private shadows but creative forces. And that Mind was the prime mover in the world of matter. Much of what I learned then became rooted in my understanding later as a result of studying works by scholars such as Dean Radin, PhD of the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, David R. Hawkins, MD, PhD, and a host of others.
Soon after came the Rosicrucians—a whisper from antiquity affirming that the quest for knowledge and the quest for divinity are one and the same. Their blend of science, mysticism, and moral refinement mirrored the kind of mind I already felt forming within me.
Years later, I would come across Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe and first encountered the notion of the universe’s holographic nature—alongside quantum entanglement theory. I felt an almost reverent wonder at the journey I had traveled. That reading, along with many others, helped shape my evolving perspective on time. I have often wondered whether that calm presence I felt was my future self, sending energy and reassurance back through the corridors of time to that younger version of me—encouraging him to just keep going. It is a message I have now passed on to my young children again and again. Because the search continues.
Not long after graduating the first time in 1998, I walked into Sphinx Metaphysical Bookstore across from Piedmont Park and my eyes were immediately drawn to a series of little blue books on a shelf in the back of the store to the right. As the books were neatly arranged on a shelf by themselves, my attention was drawn due to the sheer number of them and their colour as blue is one of my two favourite colours. I walked over to investigate. And to my minor surprise, the titles were incredibly intriguing. As I leafed through several of the books, I not only noticed the symbol on the cover of many of them, I noted with a mild knowing that the titles were published by Yogi Publication Society. As fate would have it, over the years, and whenever I ventured into a bookstore, irrespective of the city, I would seek out the books to curate titles for my library. Bearing in mind a message my friend and mentor, Dr. Asa G. Hilliard, III would often say, “A good library does not have to necessarily be large but the titles therein should be steeped in wisdom.”
As I continued my study of such material concomitantly a second B.A. and two and a half years of Grad Classes in Sociology and Education, I did not know it then, but I was learning to read in two directions at once: outward toward the world, and inward toward the Self. The earliest clues rarely declare themselves. They appear as coincidences—a book, a symbol, a feeling that refuses to fade—until time transforms them into signposts. One such signpost was a dear friend from China who casually looked at my palm and commented, “You are living two lives.” We discussed my studies beyond the academy and we fell into many long-ranging conversations on consciousness, Nature, and ancient wisdom. Yes. The signs were there.
Naming the Impulse—The Birth of Radical Scholar Inc. (2006)
By 2006, the scattered notes of inquiry had grown into a melody. Radical Scholar Inc. was born not as a business venture, but as a statement of orientation: scholarship that dares to speak of mind, soul, of consciousness, and of human potential beyond social constructs.
Around that same time, Dean Carter recommended I read Dr. John Hagelin’s Manual for a Perfect Government. In its pages I recognised what I had intuited years before—that consciousness, not policy, is the true infrastructure of any enlightened society. It was as if another clue had been decoded: that outer systems mirror inner coherence.
Radical Scholar thus became my vow—to bridge intellect and intuition, science and spirit, public service and private awakening. The name itself was an invocation, a declaration that reason and reverence could coexist without contradiction.
The Airwaves and the Echo—Connecting the Dots
Soon after came Connecting the Dots, a radio program that stitched together thinkers, traditions, and disciplines into a living conversation. It was my laboratory of synthesis—where I could explore how ideas breathe through dialogue.
I recall interviewing Dr. Carolyn Fleuhr-Lobban, whose translation of Anténor Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races offered a categorical counterpoint to the racial pseudoscience that once dominated anthropology. I remember the panel at the 2008 National Council of Black Studies conference, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, where we explored Firmin’s notion of a spiritual solidarity underlying humanity itself.
Every interview, every broadcast, every late-night edit was another breadcrumb. I thought I was hosting conversations; in truth, and with the benefit of hindsight, I now accept that I was being educated by the echo. An echo that continues to reverberate across time and space down to the present moment and, dare I say, to the boundaries beyond infinity.
My Second Great Migration—Leaving Atlanta for Fairfield
Then came the quiet yet decisive instruction: Go.
Decamping Atlanta meant leaving stability and familiarity. Yet the pull toward Fairfield—to resume graduate studies, to deepen both inquiry and inner practice—was undeniable. It was not ambition but alignment that moved me.
Fairfield was a crucible of silence. It was there I began to understand that knowledge without stillness is noise. And it was there I met Mina—the most luminous clue of all. Our meeting felt less like coincidence and more like recognition, as though we had agreed to find one another in this lifetime and continue a conversation begun long before. Admittedly, there have been moments over almost seventeen years of a shared journey—including fifteen years of marriage—that I often marvel at the circumstances, coincidences, and convergences of our meeting and the unmatched knowingness in that moment of seeing her after sensing her. I continue to marvel at that moment all these years later.
Teaching and Reconstitution—The Work in Cambridge
Together, Mina and I embarked upon, matriculated, and graduated from the Teacher Training Course (TTC) and became Certified Teachers of Transcendental Meditation. At the conclusion of my five-months course and our six months of separation and sequestering, in January of 2013, we were recruited to consider the work of reconstituting the TM Program in Cambridge and the Greater Boston area, unaware that this act of service would define the next decade of our lives.
Since then, we have personally taught more than 2,100 individuals—each a reminder that the map of awakening is collective, not solitary. Through these years of instruction, I came to see that teaching is not the end of the hunt but its continuation. When consciousness unfolds in another, the clue is confirmed: we are all fragments of the same treasure seeking reunion with itself.
Decoding the Pattern—Doctoral Study and the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress
Between 2017 and 2023, my doctoral journey became a kind of cipher key. My dissertation on mystical experience among Freemasons illuminated an ancient lineage of inner architecture—a system for refining perception until the unseen becomes visible.
From that research emerged the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress (MPGP), my attempt to express the laws of transformation that govern both the lodge and the brain, both the mind and the cosmos. It was here that decades of intuition crystallised into articulation.
The clues were no longer scattered; they were structural. The scavenger hunt had become a blueprint for conscious evolution.
The Trial and the Pivot—2024–2025
Every quest includes a period of disorientation. Sometimes there is more than one—the moment when the next clue seems lost. For me, this arrived as financial strain: the compounded toll of a national website redesign that led to a sharp decline in the online visibility of TM, combined with the unexpected complications of a territorial reallocation in favour of a suburban location.
All of it affected our finances in ways we had never before experienced. And truth be told, it remains a process we continue to work our way through.
Yet even these trials bear instruction. They demanded discernment—not merely endurance, but re-patterning. The pivot toward On Transcendence as both Substack and Podcast was less a fallback than a revelation: the voice had to evolve to match the vision.
Simultaneously, the new foundations of Serat Group Inc. and Radical Scholar Inc. re-anchored the mission. What appeared as loss became redirection. The scavenger must learn that even the detours are destinations.
The New Constellation—Transcendental Brain and Moments of Transcendence
Now, in this present season, the clues have begun to form a constellation. Transcendental Brain, our consultancy and the forthcoming app, is not simply a technological venture but a vessel for consciousness. The forthcoming Moments of Transcendence series extends that same impulse—to share glimpses of the infinite in daily experience.
Each project—from Radical Scholar to On Transcendence, from Connecting the Dots to the TM Centre—reveals itself as part of one organism, one field of expression guided by a single intelligence: Consciousness itself seeking articulation through my life.
The scavenger hunt, it seems, was never about finding things. It was about becoming the one who could see, be, and aid as many members of our human family as possible in becoming.
The Cosmic Jest
And so I return to that morning thought—my life has been a scavenger hunt—and smile again. What began as a personal musing now feels like a universal truth. Life hides its wisdom in ordinary moments, waiting for us to assemble the fragments.
I no longer chase the next clue with anxiety. I simply listen. When the mind is still, the next direction arrives unannounced—a sentence, a silence, a person crossing one’s path.
Every clue, as I have learned, is Consciousness calling itself home. The only secret is attention.
Are you—paying attention?
Suggested Reflection
Think back on the turning points of your own life—the book that found you, the meeting that changed you, the failure that redirected you.
What if these were not accidents but coordinates? What if the map was always there, waiting for you to notice?
Close your eyes for a moment and trace your own map:
What book found you when you needed it most?
Which meeting shifted your direction?
What loss or detour revealed a hidden path?
Write down three of these “clues” from your life. Then ask yourself:
What if none of them were accidents—but coordinates placed by Consciousness itself?
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About the Author
Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a consciousness scholar, executive coach, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work—spanning The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explores how Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social-systems transformation intersect in the evolution of both the individual and society.
He is the Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship, and President of Serat Group Inc., the parent company of Transcendental Brain, a consulting and educational platform bringing consciousness science into leadership and institutional development.
Alongside his wife, Mina, he co-directs the Cambridge and Metropolitan Boston TM Program and serves as Host and Founder of International Meditation Hour (IMH), a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.
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://www.barutikmtsisouvong.com/.