Author’s Note
This essay emerged from years of conversations with individuals whose relationships with institutions they once cherished had become complicated, strained, or unexpectedly severed. Although their experiences differed, I was struck by how frequently institutional belonging had become intertwined with personal identity, purpose, and the pursuit of ideals that extended far beyond the institutions themselves.
My intention is neither to diminish the importance of institutions nor to suggest that their authority is inherently illegitimate. Having devoted much of my life to scholarship, teaching, and the exploration of Consciousness, I recognise the extraordinary value of organisations that preserve knowledge, cultivate communities, and transmit practices across generations. Yet my training in history and sociology has also encouraged me to distinguish between the structures human beings create and the realities those structures seek to serve.
What interests me most is what becomes possible when that distinction is understood more clearly, particularly for individuals navigating the loss of institutional recognition or reconsidering their relationship with a community that once provided meaning and direction. Such transitions can be painful, and their consequences should not be minimised. Nevertheless, they need not represent the conclusion of one’s development, service, or contribution.
Perhaps the question is not simply whether an institution has continued to recognise us, but whether we have continued to recognise the possibilities within ourselves.
— Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
For some time now, a question has been occupying my thinking. It did not arrive fully formed, nor did it begin as an abstract philosophical enquiry. Rather, it emerged gradually through conversations with friends, colleagues, fellow scholars, and practitioners of various philosophical and spiritual traditions who had devoted meaningful portions of their lives to institutions organised around ideals they considered larger than themselves.
Their experiences differed considerably, yet certain patterns appeared with enough regularity to invite closer examination. Some described losing positions or responsibilities after questioning decisions made by institutional leadership. Others spoke of finding themselves increasingly marginalised after advocating greater transparency, expressing unconventional perspectives, or challenging assumptions that had gradually acquired the status of unquestionable truth. Still others recounted being excluded from communities they had faithfully served because they explored another tradition, attended an unfamiliar gathering, maintained relationships with individuals considered undesirable, or otherwise departed from expectations that were not always clearly articulated. Others described being “sidelined” under circumstances that brought to mind a dynamic Robert Greene identifies in The 48 Laws of Power: “Never Outshine the Master.”
For some, the consequences were primarily social. Friendships became strained, invitations ceased, and familiar relationships grew unexpectedly distant. For others, the repercussions extended into professional life, affecting livelihoods, reputations, opportunities, and access to communities in which they had invested years of service. In several instances, the individuals involved had not abandoned the ideals that originally attracted them to their respective institutions. They had simply begun distinguishing those ideals from the people and organisational structures claiming authority over them.
As I listened, I found myself recalling the work of my colleague Faye V. Harrison, PhD, particularly her scholarship on decolonising anthropology and the possibilities of intellectual liberation. Her work invites us to examine how systems of authority can become embedded within the very processes through which knowledge is produced, legitimised, and ultimately transmitted. Although the contexts are different, I began wondering whether a related enquiry might be useful in examining spiritual and philosophical institutions.
What might it mean to decolonise spirituality?
I do not use the expression to suggest that all forms of institutional spiritual authority are equivalent to historical colonialism, with its particular structures of domination, dispossession, and exploitation. Instead, I am interested in whether some communities have developed habits of treating knowledge, experience, and access to the sacred as possessions controlled by an institutional centre. When that occurs, a person may gradually be encouraged to believe that the institution is not merely a steward of a tradition but the necessary intermediary between the individual and the reality toward which the tradition points. That possibility led me toward a question that initially struck me as almost absurd: How does one ostracise someone from Consciousness?
The more I considered it, the more revealing the question became.
Certainly, an organisation can exclude someone from its membership. That is neither mysterious nor necessarily improper because human institutions establish standards, create rules, confer authority, determine membership, control property, and decide who may or may not act in their names. Universities may dismiss professors, corporations may terminate employees, religious communities may excommunicate members, fraternities may revoke membership, and professional associations may withdraw credentials. Whether any particular decision is appropriate depends upon circumstances that deserve examination on their own merits.
Institutions must possess some capacity to establish and maintain boundaries. Without such capacity, the preservation of a tradition, methodology, or collective purpose would become exceedingly difficult. The difficulty, however, does not arise merely because an organisation exercises authority. It arises when the scope of that authority becomes confused with the scope of the reality the organisation exists to serve.
A university may dismiss a scholar, but it cannot expel that person from knowledge. A scientific institution may reject a researcher without thereby removing the researcher from reality. A religious community may revoke membership, but the administrative act cannot, by itself, determine the individual’s relationship with the sacred. A fraternal organisation may withdraw recognition or leadership duties without possessing the authority to revoke virtue, just as a court may render judgments in pursuit of justice without thereby owning justice itself.
The distinction becomes especially interesting when we consider institutions dedicated to inner development. A community may legitimately determine who teaches a particular method under its auspices, participates in its programmes, or enters its facilities. It may possess sound reasons for preserving the integrity of its instruction and protecting those who seek its services. But if Consciousness is understood as fundamental to human experience—or, within certain philosophical traditions, fundamental to existence itself—then institutional authority necessarily encounters a boundary beyond which it cannot proceed.
Think of it this way, an organisation may prohibit a person from entering a particular contemplative space, but it cannot prohibit awareness. It may withdraw a title or credential without withdrawing the individual’s capacity for experience, understanding, or growth. It may even determine who belongs within its administrative boundaries, but it cannot determine who belongs to existence itself. And once that distinction becomes clear, the original question begins to change and becomes: At what point does an institution confuse stewardship with ownership?
My training in sociology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels has long encouraged me to examine institutions not merely through their stated purposes but through the relationships, expectations, incentives, and structures of authority that develop within them. Organisations are human creations, and human creations inevitably reflect something of the capacities, limitations, aspirations, and contradictions of their creators. Even institutions established around the most expansive ideals must operate through comparatively ordinary mechanisms: budgets, committees, policies, personalities, hierarchies, procedures, and decisions made by people who possess differing levels of information, wisdom, experience, and influence.
None of this makes institutions inherently suspect. Indeed, they are among humanity’s most remarkable accomplishments. Institutions permit knowledge to survive the people who discovered it. They allow traditions to cross generations, methodologies to be refined, communities to coordinate their efforts, and valuable practices to remain available long after their original teachers have departed. Without such structures, much of what humanity has learned would repeatedly disappear with those who learned it. The difficulty, however, begins when the institution established to preserve something gradually comes to regard itself as possessing the thing it preserves.
A university exists to steward knowledge, but knowledge exceeds the university. Courts operate in service to justice, but justice is not contained within a courthouse. Scientific institutions organise enquiry into reality, but reality does not depend upon institutional consensus for its existence. Religious communities preserve teachings, rituals, texts, practices, and relationships through which human beings approach the sacred, but no administrative structure can plausibly contain the totality of that toward which those practices themselves merely point.
Similarly, an organisation dedicated to meditation or human development may have a legitimate responsibility to protect the integrity of a particular technique or tradition. I understand the importance of that responsibility through my own years of teaching and scholarship. Methodologies must be preserved with care because seemingly minor alterations can eventually change the nature of what is being transmitted. Precision, continuity, and responsible instruction are not trivial concerns. They are essential dimensions of faithful stewardship. Yet protecting the integrity of a path is not the same as owning the destination toward which the path points.
This distinction matters because the relationship between an institution and its members can change almost imperceptibly. What begins as a community organised around a shared purpose may gradually become a structure in which loyalty to the organisation is treated as evidence of loyalty to the purpose itself. Questions about policy may be interpreted as challenges to the teaching, disagreement with leadership may be regarded as evidence of insufficient understanding, and exploration beyond familiar boundaries may be understood as disloyalty rather than curiosity. In such circumstances, the institution’s preservation can become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the preservation of the authority exercised by those who lead it.
The process need not arise from deliberate malice. Institutional cultures develop through countless interactions, many of which are shaped by sincere intentions. Leaders may genuinely believe they are protecting something precious. Members may fear that allowing too much variation or innovation will weaken a tradition they cherish. Communities may become accustomed to practices that once served an important purpose but have gradually outlived the circumstances that justified them. Over time, habits become expectations, expectations become norms, and norms acquire a moral significance that can make questioning them appear threatening. For example, an institution may begin defending arrangements that are historically contingent as though they were inseparable from the enduring reality it was created to serve. As a result, the map becomes confused with the territory, and the steward begins behaving as though it possesses the destination when, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
Within my work surrounding the Seven Layers of Manifestation, this confusion occupies a particularly important place. Institutions belong to what I describe as the Human-Derived World. They arise through human consciousness interacting with the phenomenal world and with other human beings. Universities, governments, corporations, religious organisations, fraternal orders, professional associations, foundations, movements, policies, offices, titles, hierarchies, and systems of governance are extraordinary human creations. They allow societies to organise themselves, preserve knowledge, coordinate resources, and pursue purposes that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for isolated individuals to accomplish. Yet, in the final analysis, they remain human-derived.
Do not confuse my meaning. That observation is not intended to diminish their value. It is, instead, intended to locate them within a larger understanding of reality.
Location matters because human beings frequently mistake the structures through which they encounter something for the thing itself. We may become so accustomed to approaching knowledge through universities that we begin treating credentials as synonymous with understanding, become so accustomed to encountering justice through legal institutions that we overlook the distinction between what is lawful and what is just, and become so accustomed to approaching the sacred through particular traditions that we begin confusing institutional belonging with spiritual development.
The Seven Layers of Manifestation invite us to examine these distinctions more carefully. The Human-Derived World contains the arrangements through which people organise their lives, while the deeper realities toward which many of those arrangements point are not necessarily products of the arrangements themselves. An institution may orient itself toward Consciousness, preserve teachings concerning Consciousness, or transmit practices through which individuals explore subtler dimensions of experience. It may even create beautiful spaces, cultivate meaningful communities, and support generations of practitioners in their development. But none of those accomplishments transforms the institution into Consciousness itself.
Recognising this distinction does not require one to reject the institution. Nor does it diminish the gratitude one may feel toward the people through whom valuable knowledge was received. It simply permits a more accurate understanding of the relationship itself. The institution may have provided the introduction, the instruction, the community, and the conditions through which a person encountered something deeply meaningful. Those contributions deserve recognition. But gratitude for the steward need not become permanent dependence upon the steward’s approval. This becomes particularly important when institutional relationships change.
For someone who has spent years within a particular community, exclusion can produce a form of disorientation that outsiders may struggle to understand. The institution may have provided not merely activities or professional opportunities but a framework through which the individual understood personal identity, relationships, service, and ultimately purpose. Friendships may have developed over decades. Family relationships may be intertwined with membership. Professional credentials, financial stability, and social standing may all depend upon continued institutional recognition.
However, when those connections are disrupted, the experience may feel less like leaving an organisation and more like losing an entire world. And we should not trivialise that loss. Nor should we romanticise exclusion as though suffering automatically produces wisdom. Some institutional decisions are justified; others are not. Some departures are freely chosen; others occur under circumstances that involve coercion, retaliation, discrimination, or serious failures of governance. And understanding the distinction between stewardship and ownership does not eliminate the need for accountability, nor does it require individuals to abandon legitimate efforts to obtain redress. But it does offer another possibility alongside those efforts: It allows a person to begin distinguishing what has been lost from what remains.
A community may withdraw its recognition without withdrawing the knowledge a person has acquired. A professional title may disappear without erasing the capacities developed through years of practice. Access to a familiar gathering place may end without extinguishing the relationships, values, or aspirations that originally made the place meaningful. Even when an institution’s actions produce genuine harm, those actions do not necessarily possess the authority to determine the remainder of an individual’s life.
This is where I believe the distinction becomes more than philosophical. It becomes a question of agency and brings to mind something my Dad conveyed to my siblings and me: “Material things may be taken away or lost to the ashes of time. Yet all that you learn can never be taken from you as it is safely deposited within your mind. Therefore, guard the mind above all because material things can be replaced if lost.”
What happens when a person who has devoted years to an institution begins recognising that the institution was never the ultimate destination? What becomes possible when belonging is no longer understood exclusively through membership, when purpose is no longer dependent upon a particular title, and when the pursuit of knowledge or spiritual development is no longer imagined to terminate at an administrative boundary?
Admittedly, the answers will differ because human circumstances differ. Some people may find renewed purpose within the same tradition through another community. Others may discover that their development requires exploring previously unfamiliar approaches. Still others may retain deep affection for the knowledge they received while recognising that the organisation through which they encountered it no longer provides the conditions necessary for their continued growth. And none of those possibilities necessarily represents abandonment. Because, sometimes fidelity to a principle requires reconsidering one’s relationship with the institution established to preserve it. And sometimes the most important transition is not leaving an organisation but ceasing to believe that one’s future depends upon its permission.
That transition can be difficult because institutions do more than organise activity. They help organise identity. When someone has spent years describing themselves through a particular membership, title, profession, affiliation, or community, the loss of that designation can feel like the loss of a portion of the self. Here, I am reminded of a recent GBH News interview with former Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, who reflected upon the disorientation she experienced after losing her position and tenure at Harvard. When asked whether the experience felt like losing her identity, she explained how thoroughly her professional self-understanding had become intertwined with being a Harvard professor. Eventually, she found herself confronting a question that extended well beyond her particular circumstances: “And so what am I?”
Noting on Dr. Gino’s self-assessment, what particularly interested me was something she shared later in the conversation. Reflecting upon what she might teach students differently were she to return to the classroom, Gino suggested that she would place greater emphasis upon preparing them for moments when established professional identities and circumstances are unexpectedly disrupted. Her experience had brought into sharper focus the distinction between what a person does, the institution with which that person is associated, and the deeper capacities that remain when those arrangements change.
Whatever conclusions one reaches regarding the disputed circumstances surrounding her dismissal, that distinction deserves consideration. Institutional recognition can become deeply intertwined with identity, but identity remains more expansive than the titles, affiliations, and categories through which we have learned to express it.
Because a person who has taught remains capable of learning and sharing knowledge. Someone who has served remains capable of service. A scholar remains capable of enquiry. A practitioner remains capable of practice. A person who has contributed to a community may discover other communities in which those contributions are welcomed and valued.
Admittedly, the work of rebuilding may require patience, resources, supportive relationships, and an honest acknowledgement of what has occurred. It may also require developing boundaries that were previously absent and reconsidering assumptions about authority, belonging, and personal responsibility. None of these changes is necessarily easy, and there is no obligation to describe a painful experience as a blessing merely because something constructive eventually emerges from it. Nevertheless, the possibility remains that life beyond an institutional boundary may contain more than loss. It may, in truth, contain renewal.
Indeed, some individuals may eventually discover that the capacities developed during their years of institutional service become the very resources through which they create something new and more engaging. Their knowledge may find a different audience, experience may inform more responsive forms of leadership, and their acquired understanding of institutional limitations may help them build communities in which disagreement is less threatening and authority is exercised with greater humility. And in that sense, the departure from one structure need not represent the conclusion of a person’s contribution. It may become the beginning of a different expression of it.
This possibility does not absolve institutions of responsibility for their conduct. Rather, it prevents institutional conduct from acquiring more authority over an individual’s future than it deserves. And it , therefore, returns us to the importance of stewardship.
Every enduring institution must negotiate the tension between continuity and change. Traditions cannot survive if everything is treated as negotiable, yet they may become increasingly brittle when nothing can be questioned. Leadership must preserve standards, but preservation can become indistinguishable from control when disagreement is automatically interpreted as disloyalty. Communities need boundaries, yes, but boundaries established to protect a shared purpose can become barriers that instead protect institutional power from scrutiny. Therefore, the challenge is not to eliminate authority but to exercise it in proportion to what has actually been entrusted to the institution.
A steward receives something valuable without confusing responsibility with possession. The steward protects what has been entrusted, preserves its integrity, makes it available where appropriate, and prepares it for those who will come afterward. Faithful stewardship requires both discernment and humility because the steward understands that the responsibility may be temporary even when the thing being stewarded is enduring.
Ownership, on the other hand, makes a different claim. It implies that the thing itself belongs to the institution and that continued access to its value depends upon continued allegiance to those exercising authority.
The difference can appear subtle in ordinary institutional life, particularly when organisations have operated successfully for generations. Yet the consequences become visible when individuals question authority, explore unfamiliar perspectives, or find themselves outside the institution’s recognised boundaries.
Does the institution respond as a steward seeking to preserve the integrity of something larger than itself, or as an owner defending possession of something it believes belongs exclusively to it?
Perhaps the most trustworthy institutions are those capable of asking themselves that question without becoming defensive. Because their strength lies not in making themselves indispensable but in remaining faithful to the purposes that justified their creation. They understand that a university serves learning, that a court serves justice, that a scientific institution serves enquiry, and that a spiritual community serves the development of those who seek its guidance. They recognise that the measure of successful stewardship cannot be reduced to institutional survival, membership totals, financial resources, or the unquestioning allegiance of those within their boundaries. It must also include what becomes possible for the people and purposes they exist to serve.
Undoubtedly, that understanding may require a form of institutional humility that is difficult to sustain. Because it asks leaders to recognise that their authority is real but limited, that their traditions may be valuable without being exhaustive, and that the people entrusted to their care possess lives and possibilities extending beyond the institution’s jurisdiction.
It also asks individuals to cultivate a similar discernment. Institutions can provide extraordinary opportunities for learning, service, friendship, and development, but they should not become the sole measure of one’s worth or the ultimate source of one’s purpose. We can honour what institutions have given us without surrendering our capacity to evaluate them, remain grateful for teachers without imagining that their authority extends into every dimension of our lives, and we can recognise the value of belonging while remembering that belonging to something larger than ourselves need not mean becoming smaller within it.
Perhaps that is the deeper meaning of the question that originally occupied my thinking: How does one ostracise someone from Consciousness?
The answer, it seems to me, is that one cannot. One may exclude a person from a particular institution, community, building, or role, sometimes with justification and sometimes without. Such actions may carry significant consequences and deserve serious consideration. But the institution’s authority remains confined to the domain over which it possesses legitimate responsibility. It does not extend indefinitely into the individual’s capacity for awareness, understanding, growth, service, or even becoming.
And once we recognise that boundary, another question emerges, one that applies not only to institutions but to those whose relationships with them have changed: What might become possible when we cease confusing the steward with the destination?
For some, the answer may be a renewed relationship with a familiar tradition. For others, it may involve building a new community, pursuing knowledge through different channels, or discovering that the purpose which once found expression through a particular institution can continue to unfold beyond it. What matters is not that every departure produces a new beginning, but that institutional exclusion need not be granted the authority to determine whether a new beginning is possible.
The world remains larger than the organisation, knowledge remains larger than the university, justice remains larger than the court, and the sacred, however one understands it, remains larger than the structures through which human beings seek to approach it. Perhaps, then, the responsibility of every institution is to remember that distinction, while the opportunity available to each of us is to live in recognition of it.
We may cherish the paths that have carried us, honour those who helped us travel them, and remain grateful for the knowledge encountered along the way. We may also recognise when a path no longer provides the conditions necessary for continued growth and choose to move forward without allowing that recognition to become a rejection of everything that came before. Because the destination was never the building, the title, the membership, or the approval of those who administered them. Those things may have mattered greatly, and some may continue to matter for years to come. But they were never the entirety of what made the journey worthwhile.
As I have come to understand it, after years of training in history, sociology, Consciousness, and human potential, paths may indeed require stewards. Destinations, however, never require owners.
Suggested Practice: Distinguishing the Path from the Destination
Set aside a few silent moments to reflect upon an institution, community, tradition, or organisation that has played a meaningful role in your development. It might be a university, religious community, professional association, fraternal order, workplace, or another setting through which you encountered knowledge, friendship, purpose, or opportunities for service.
Consider what originally attracted you to that community. Was it the pursuit of knowledge, a desire to serve, the experience of belonging, an opportunity for professional development, or the exploration of something you considered larger than yourself? Then reflect upon the distinction between those aspirations and the institutional structures through which you pursued them.
Ask yourself: What has this institution helped me develop that remains part of who I am, regardless of my present relationship with it?
If your relationship with the institution has fundamentally changed, allow yourself to acknowledge what may have been lost without dismissing its significance. At the same time, consider what remains available to you through the knowledge, relationships, capacities, and understanding you have cultivated. If, however, your relationship remains positive, reflect upon how you might honour its contributions while continuing to exercise independent judgement and remain open to growth.
Finally, consider whether there is some aspect of your development, service, or purpose that you have been waiting for an institution—or someone within it—to authorise.
You need not make an immediate decision or change your circumstances. Simply consider the possibility that the path through which you arrived at your present understanding may not define the limits of where you can go.
As you return to your day, carry one question with you:
Am I honouring the path that has helped me grow, or have I begun mistaking it for the destination?
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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/.