The Cost of Clarity
On accepting what cannot be unseen or unknown
Author’s Note
There are some essays that emerge quickly, almost as though they have been patiently waiting to be written.
This was not one of them.
What began as a simple reflection prompted by a short video gradually unfolded into something much more personal. As I revisited my own journey—from Milwaukee to Atlanta, to Fairfield, to Cambridge—I came to realise that this essay was never truly about disappointment. It was about perception, the lasting education of experience, and the responsibility that accompanies seeing the world with greater clarity.
One of the great gifts of time is that it allows us to revisit earlier versions of ourselves with compassion rather than criticism. Looking back, I find no fault with the younger man who trusted generously, assumed the best in people, and approached the world with an open heart and mind. Those very qualities opened doors that led to my meeting and working with remarkable teachers, cultivating lifelong friendships, doing meaningful work, and creating the family of which I am honoured to be a part.
If this essay offers anything, I hope it is the reminder that discernment need not come at the expense of compassion. We need not become cynical in order to become wise. Rather, the challenge is to allow our hearts and minds to remain open while permitting experience to refine our vision.
Some lessons are learned through books. Others are learned through living.
Both, I have found, are indispensable.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
Several evenings ago, while winding down after a long day and after getting the Younglings settled into bed, I found myself engaging in something I rarely intend to do but occasionally do nonetheless—scrolling through a series of short videos. Most disappeared from memory almost as quickly as they appeared. One, however, caused me to pause.
The gentleman speaking, reclining in a plush chair that seemed incredibly comfortable and donning a pair of sunglasses, looked away from the camera as if he was speaking to someone off-screen and said, “I’m not bitter. I’m just no longer blind.” And proceeded to discuss the myriad reasons one cannot unsee or unknow that which one has seen or has come to be known—oftentimes with more than a few psychological scars as souvenirs for the journey.
His words lingered with me long after the video had ended. Not because they were especially novel, nor because I agreed with every sentiment he expressed, but because they awakened a line of reflection that has been unfolding within me for years. As I sat there in the silence that comes with a settled home, my thoughts wandered—not to the speaker, but to Milwaukee, Atlanta, Fairfield, Cambridge, and to the long path that somehow connected them all.
It occurred to me that there was a time in my life when I viewed nearly everyone through the generous assumption, perhaps to a fault, that people and organisations fundamentally wished to become the very best versions of themselves. It was, perhaps, an optimistic way of moving through the world, but I do not regret it. In my experiences and experiments with mind and consciousness, hope has a way of opening doors that suspicion never will, and generosity often creates opportunities that caution alone cannot.
As I was preparing to move from my hometown of Milwaukee to Atlanta, I had a lengthy conversation with my Dad regarding the move and what it might mean. We discussed the many benefits of such a move. The opportunity to meet new people, learn more about the history of the South, attend university, and how such would irrevocably refine my thinking and actions in ways both big and small. At one point during the exchange, my Dad sighed and commented, “Well, I hate to see you go, but you gotta do what you gotta do.” And with that, I continued my preparations and departed Milwaukee for what would indeed become a life-defining chapter of my journey. And as with all strong chapters, they set the stage for what comes next and more often than not successfully weave throughout the next chapter elements of that which came before.
One early, pivotal element that has served me well for a little more than three decades, was the introduction to the 1957 book by Uell Stanley Andersen titled Three Magic Words.
When I first encountered his work as a young man in Atlanta, I was captivated by its invitation to think differently about mind, consciousness, and human possibility.
Looking back now, I realise the book also planted another seed that highlighted consciousness does not merely reveal new possibilities, it reveals existing realities that were previously overlooked. Perhaps that is the more demanding gift.
As I have written about that experience in a previous essay titled The Stranger, the Spring, and the Seed, I invite curious readers to check out for added context as it provides the connective tissue for my continued work in the present.
When I left Atlanta nearly two decades ago to pursue graduate study in Fairfield, Iowa, I carried that orientation with me. I believed deeply in education, in service, and in the transformative potential of consciousness. More importantly, I believed that if one approached people honestly, worked diligently, and remained committed to principles larger than oneself, those qualities would eventually be recognised and reciprocated. It was a simple way of seeing the world, and for many years it served me well.
Life, however, has a remarkable way of educating us beyond the classroom.
The lessons that have shaped me most did not arrive during seminars or emerge from the pages of a dissertation. They arrived through conversations that did not unfold as expected, promises that dissolved with time, institutional decisions that revealed priorities different from those publicly professed, and relationships that gradually exposed themselves not through dramatic moments but through consistent patterns.
Looking back, I realise those years were marked less by dramatic betrayals than by small accommodations. A conversation would leave me slightly unsettled, yet I would explain it away before returning home. An organisational decision would strike me as inconsistent with its stated principles, but I would tell myself there must be context I did not yet understand. Someone would repeatedly say one thing while consistently doing another, and I would continue granting them the benefit of the doubt because that had always been my instinct. None of these moments, taken alone, seemed particularly significant. Their power lay in their accumulation.
Then something interesting began to happen.
The isolated incidents I had diligently worked to explain away gradually ceased to appear isolated. Conversations separated by months began to resemble one another. Decisions made years apart followed strangely familiar trajectories. Behaviour that I had once described as exceptional slowly revealed itself to be entirely consistent. Eventually, what I had initially mistaken for coincidence later surfaced into relief and introduced itself as an unmistakable pattern.
Looking back now, I realise that one of the most difficult moments in adulthood is not discovering that others are imperfect. We have always known that. The more difficult discovery is recognising that our understanding of them has become incomplete. As a result, the moment comes a when mounting experiences removes the stories we have wrapped around reality until reality itself, as relates to some people and some institutions, finally stands before us without embellishment—the Emperor really had no clothes.
Admittedly, the change, I discovered, did not occur within the people around me or the institutions with which I was connected. It occurred within my own perception. Put succinctly, I was seeing more clearly than I once had.
That realisation carried with it an unexpected burden. Once we genuinely recognise a pattern amongst people and with institutions, continuing to ignore it no longer feels compassionate. It feels dishonest. We are no longer deciding whether to trust another person or institution. We are deciding whether to distrust our own experience. Those are considerably different decisions.
For many years, I assumed that expanding one’s consciousness primarily meant becoming more compassionate, more patient, more understanding. I still believe those qualities naturally arise. What I failed to appreciate was that greater consciousness also sharpens perception. It becomes increasingly difficult to ignore what experience has unmistakably revealed. Awareness enlarges not only our capacity to love, but our capacity to discern. And discernment, if it is genuine, eventually asks something of us.
Around this same period, I happened to read Mel Robbins’ Let Them. The simplicity of the title struck me immediately. The phrase was not, at least for me, an invitation to indifference. Rather, it became a reminder that I am not responsible for convincing others that my experiences are valid or that my boundaries are justified. People are free to misunderstand me. They are free to conclude that I have become distant, cautious, or different. In truth, they would not be entirely mistaken.
I have changed—not because disappointment hardened my heart, but because experience refined my vision.
There was a version of me that accepted explanations the present version can no longer reconcile with lived experience, that believed repeated patterns deserved one more opportunity to become exceptions, and that confused extending grace with postponing necessary adjustment.
I hold no resentment toward that younger man. He was learning and becoming a better, more fully whole human.
In many respects, his openness made possible the life I now cherish. It carried me from Milwaukee, to Atlanta, to Fairfield and eventually to Cambridge. It introduced me to extraordinary teachers, remarkable students, enduring friendships, and, perhaps most significantly, to Mina. Together we have built a family, taught thousands of individuals to meditate, and devoted ourselves to work we believe contributes meaningfully to the world. None of that would have been possible without his willingness to trust.
Yet maturity has also taught me that trust and discernment are not opposing virtues. They are partners. One opens the heart while the other protects it.
I have also come to understand why clarity is so often mistaken for coldness. From the outside, they can appear remarkably similar. Both establish boundaries, radically alter relationships, and on occasion require saying no where we once enthusiastically said yes.
But they arise from entirely different places.
While coldness may be argued to withdraw love and diminish our humanity, in my experience clarity removes illusions associated with people and institutions and thereby allows us to make decisions from a base of clarified vision versus the previously occluded state of awareness.
Today, I carry no desire for revenge against anyone who or any institution that became part of this education. Bitterness has never interested me because bitterness keeps us emotionally tethered to experiences we claim we wish to leave behind. And like my Dad once commented regarding anger being akin to holding a hot coal, doing so only injures the one holding it. However, clarity does something altogether different. It acknowledges what experience has revealed, adjusts accordingly, and simply keeps moving.
Perhaps that is why the gentleman’s words from the video lingered with me long after I had set my phone aside for the night.
“I’m not bitter. I’m just no longer blind.”
I understood precisely what he meant.
The cost of clarity is that certain illusions can never again provide comfort. Relationships once viewed through hope alone must now also be viewed through the widened aperture of experience. Organisational affiliations once evaluated by aspiration must also be evaluated by conduct. And people once known primarily through their words must eventually be understood through their deeds and unmistakable patterns.
Just know, there is always a price for seeing clearly. Yet there is also freedom.
Universities award degrees for knowledge acquired through study. Life confers a different kind of education altogether. Its tuition is paid through experience, its examinations arrive without warning, and its lessons often take years to fully comprehend. Perhaps that is why it is often referred to as “the school of hard knocks.”
And among the greatest of those lessons from this university curriculum is this: once we truly see, returning to blindness is no longer an act of innocence. It is a choice.
For my part, I have chosen something different.
Not bitterness, cynicism, or suspicion even. Simply the stoic resolve to honour what experience has taught me and to move through the world with my eyes wide open. In so doing, eventually I came to understand that the greatest danger was never that other people occasionally misrepresented themselves. It was asking myself to keep pretending I had not already seen what experience had patiently revealed.
Because there are some lessons that cost too much to learn twice.
As I reflected upon the years while penning this essay, another thought surfaced—I do not regret for one moment having once viewed the world through more hopeful eyes.
That younger version of myself trusted easily, believed generously, and by default assumed the best.
And I accept that some might call that naïveté. I do not and cannot.
Without that young man’s openness of both heart and mind, I would never have left Milwaukee, moved to Atlanta, travelled to Fairfield then moved there, would have most certainly not met Mina and wed, would not have stood before thousands of people teaching meditation, nor earned a PhD borne of a night time dream experience.
The very qualities that occasionally exposed me to disappointment also opened the door to almost everything for which I remain most grateful. And if I were somehow given the opportunity to begin again, knowing everything I know now, I would still choose to become that young man before becoming this older one.
Because, and to echo a lesson learned from my Mom many moons ago, “Sometimes, the best sense is bought sense.”
And I am more than happy to have paid that price.
Suggested Practice
Take a quiet walk or spend fifteen to twenty minutes with a journal.
If walking, rather than thinking about someone else, reflect upon your own journey.
Ask yourself:
What belief about people, organisations, or life has experience gradually refined?
Is there a pattern you once explained away but now understand more clearly?
How has greater awareness changed not only what you see, but how you choose to live?
As you reflect, resist the temptation to judge your younger self. Instead, thank that earlier version of you for having the courage to hope, to trust, and to move forward with sincerity. Then ask how those same qualities might continue to serve you today, now joined by the wisdom experience has provided.
Close your reflection with a few minutes of silence or meditation.
And should you opt to journal, before closing its pages, complete this sentence:
“One lesson that cost too much to learn twice is...”
Then ask yourself what it would look like to honour that lesson—not with fear or resentment, but with quiet clarity.
Notice whether clarity has made you harder—or simply more honest.
There is an important difference.
—
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/.