Luck in Four Acts: The Strange Geometry of a Life
On Uncontrollable Luck, the Luck of Movement, the Luck of Awareness, and the Luck of Uniqueness
Author’s Note
This essay emerged through reflection upon movement, convergence, and the strange manner in which seemingly disconnected experiences gradually reveal their relationship to one another across time.
For many years, I thought of luck primarily as something external: fortunate timing, unexpected opportunities, chance encounters, or favorable circumstances. Yet the older I become, the more I find myself questioning whether luck may also involve preparedness, movement, awareness, endurance, and the willingness to remain engaged with life long enough for hidden patterns to emerge.
What follows is not an argument against effort, discipline, or responsibility. On the contrary. It is an enquiry into how effort and circumstance often interact in ways we only fully recognize retrospectively.
Perhaps many of the moments we dismiss as random are not random at all.
Instead, it may be that they are convergences whose meaning requires time before becoming visible.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
Recently, someone commented to me, “You are so lucky! You have a family, enjoy what you do, are educated, earned a PhD for unique research, and have other skills that are the source of envy.”
Upon hearing this person—whom I hardly know—provide commentary on my life, it ignited my thinking surrounding the concept of luck for a couple of days. I mean, they only see the surface. They do not know the intimate details of my journey—the ups, downs, and in-between contours, nor the emotions existing beneath the surface of what lay within their observations. Then, as Nature would have it, I came across a video discussing four types of luck—uncontrollable, movement, awareness, and uniqueness. Talk about Nature winking at you.
Having sat with the person’s commentary and the serendipitous video, thoughts and emotions about my journey began to bubble to the surface.
There are moments in life that seem entirely ordinary while they are occurring. Be it conversation, relocation, a friend’s passing recommendation, chance encounters, delayed decisions, or a period of uncertainty that initially appears to possess no meaning whatsoever.
Then years later, one looks backward and realizes that the moment was not isolated at all. It was connected to dozens of others through invisible threads that only became visible with time.
I have increasingly come to believe that much of life unfolds in precisely this manner.
Not as a straight path, but as a series of what I have come to recognise as convergences.
And perhaps what we often call “luck” is simply our imperfect way of describing those convergences once enough time has passed for us to perceive them.
For example, I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, though at the time there was no indication that my life would ultimately become intertwined with consciousness studies, meditation, neuroscience, Freemasonry, public scholarship, or the ongoing attempt to understand the relationship between inner development and human flourishing. Like most young people, I experienced life initially as immediacy rather than narrative. One simply lives forward, unaware of which moments will later reveal themselves as pivotal.
Yet looking back now, I can identify what may best be described as the first form of luck: the uncontrollable. Such may be thought of as the people we encounter, the era into which we are born and the opportunities available to us as a result, and the ideas that find us before we fully understand their significance.
There is a humility in acknowledging this. Much of modern culture conditions us to narrate our lives entirely through agency and effort, as though every meaningful outcome emerged solely through discipline and intention. Discipline and effort matter greatly, make no mistake. Yet honesty demands acknowledging that none of us creates ourselves in isolation. This is a theme I discuss in some detail in the essay titled From Contraction to Emergence.
There were books I encountered at the right moment.
Conversations that altered the depth and direction of my thinking.
Teachers whose influence continued long after the formal interaction had ended.
Unexpected openings that revealed possibilities I had not previously imagined.
At the time, they appeared disconnected.
Only later did they begin forming what I came to describe as a kaleidoscopic pattern in an essay titled My Kaleidoscopic Life.
Eventually, that pattern carried me from Milwaukee to Atlanta for undergraduate studies and the first phase of graduate school. Atlanta expanded my world intellectually and culturally. It challenged assumptions, broadened my perspective, introduced complexity and movement into my life in ways I could not yet fully articulate, and in the interest of full transparency, brought its share of moments of consciously turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones to better opportunity.
And movement of this kind, I would later learn, possesses its own form of luck.
Many people spend years waiting for certainty before they move. Waiting for guarantees, for conditions to become ideal before acting. Yet in my experience, life rarely provides such assurances. More often than not, movement itself creates the conditions through which new possibilities emerge. Here, I am reminded of a sentiment expressed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. where we learn—
You don’t have the see the whole staircase, just take the next step.
One conversation leads to another. A serendipitous introduction reveals another doorway and a relocation transforms one’s social, intellectual, and spiritual ecosystem entirely.
In due course, my path led me to Maharishi International University in Iowa, where I resumed graduate study and immersed myself in Vedic Science at both the master’s and doctoral levels. Fairfield represented a different kind of environment altogether. If Atlanta expanded breadth, Iowa cultivated depth.
There, consciousness was not treated merely as abstraction or metaphor, but as something worthy of disciplined enquiry and lived experience. The questions deepened, frameworks crystalised, practices strengthened. And over time, what had once seemed like separate interests—human development, spirituality, social systems, cognition, symbolism, resilience, meaning—began slowly moving toward coherence.
Not certainty. What ultimately dawned on the horizon was coherence.
There is an important difference between certainty and coherence.
Certainty often closes enquiry. Coherence, on the other hand, allows one to continue exploring while sensing that the fragments may, in fact, belong to a larger whole.
Ultimately, that movement carried Mina and me to Cambridge to help reconstitute the teaching of Transcendental Meditation® within the metropolitan area after almost a two-decade-long absence. At the time, I do not think either of us fully comprehended the magnitude of what we were undertaking. We simply felt called toward the work. And for years, the work flourished.
Thousands learned to meditate. Communities formed. Relationships deepened. Our family grew from two to six. Lectures, courses, group meditations, and public programmes created spaces where individuals from remarkably different backgrounds could encounter stillness together.
Yet life possesses a way of complicating every simplistic narrative of progress.
The last several years have brought substantial financial contraction and professional strain. Systems changed. Organizational decisions altered long-standing dynamics. Revenue declined sharply. Stability became less certain. Pressures accumulated.
There were moments when the path ahead seemed markedly unclear.
And yet, strangely, it was during this same period that another form of luck began revealing itself more fully: awareness.
Awareness is not merely perception. It is the ability to recognize meaning within unfolding experience rather than reacting only to surface conditions. Two individuals can endure the same hardship while drawing entirely different understandings from it. One sees only collapse. The other, while acknowledging the pain honestly, begins asking different questions.
What is being revealed here? What structures were unsustainable? What capacities are being forged under pressure? What future form may be attempting to emerge through present disruption?
Admittedly, these are not easy questions. Nor do they magically erase practical realities. Financial strain remains real regardless of how philosophically one frames it. Responsibility, fatigue, and uncertainty also remains real.
Yet awareness changes one’s relationship to adversity.
It allows one to perceive that contraction and emergence are not always opposites. Sometimes contraction precedes emergence.
During these years, my writing deepened. The thoughts I had spent decades contemplating eventually crystalised and allowed for the emergence of the Seven Layers of Manifestation, the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress, and the relationship between consciousness and human systems to be better understood. Both the model and framework became increasingly integrated into both my scholarship and public work. Essays emerged exploring meditation, race, resilience, social constructs, artificial intelligence, law, Freemasonry, neuroscience, and the future of human development.
At first glance, these subjects may appear unrelated.
Yet over time, I began recognizing that they all revolved around a common enquiry: what becomes possible when human beings develop greater coherence between inner awareness and outward action?
And perhaps this points toward the final form of luck: uniqueness.
Not uniqueness in the sense of superiority. Rather, uniqueness as accumulated experiences and requisite integration.
A life spent allowing seemingly unrelated experiences to converse with one another long enough for deeper synthesis to emerge.
The meditation teacher, scholar, Freemason, nonprofit leader, writer, devoted student of consciousness, husband, father, and public thinker navigating both spiritual enquiry and institutional complexity.
For many years, these identities seemed parallel. Separate. Even contradictory at times.
Now, increasingly, they feel sublimely interconnected.
Perhaps specialization is not merely the narrowing of one’s focus. Perhaps it is the patient willingness to remain with one’s path long enough for hidden relationships between experiences to reveal themselves.
I do not write these reflections from the summit of certainty. Far from it. Much remains unresolved and unfinished. The future, like all futures, retains its ambiguity.
Yet I have come to suspect that many lives are misunderstood while they are being lived.
We imagine that meaning arrives through singular breakthroughs when, more often than not, it emerges through layered convergence across decades. Through movement, reflection, endurance, and seemingly disconnected experiences slowly discovering their relationship to one another.
And perhaps this is why I no longer view luck as something entirely external to ourselves.
Perhaps luck is not merely what happens to us. Instead, at least in part, it is what becomes possible when we continue participating in life deeply, honestly, and long enough for its hidden, dare I say sacred, geometry to reveal itself. Here, I am reminded of a quote I heard many moons ago on the matter: Luck is preparation meeting opportunity.
Which is perhaps why I have increasingly come to value the steady accumulation of knowledge, experience, relationships, and inner development. One never fully knows which conversation, skill, hardship, book, or insight may later reveal itself as indispensable within an entirely different season of life. Because, as I have learned repeatedly over time as it relates to knowledge: It is better to have and not need, than to need and not have.
Suggested Practice
Take a quiet moment this week to reflect upon the “small” moments that altered the direction of your life.
Consider:
a conversation,
a relocation,
a book,
a hardship,
a delayed decision,
a friendship,
or an unexpected opportunity.
Ask yourself:
Which moments seemed insignificant at the time but later proved pivotal?
What forms of “luck” in my life were actually connected to preparation, movement, or persistence?
Which periods of contraction later revealed themselves as redirection?
What capacities have emerged within me through uncertainty or difficulty?
Where might hidden convergence still be unfolding within my present circumstances?
As you reflect, resist the temptation to narrate your life too narrowly or prematurely.
Some patterns only become visible across decades.
And sometimes what first appears to be interruption later reveals itself as initiation into a larger unfolding.
—
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/.