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. An 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 Graduates 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.”
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 become 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/.