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 to, 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.
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, 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/.