Upstream
On Consciousness, Capability, and Where We Choose to Work
Author’s Note
This essay emerged from an unexpected convergence. Several hours before watching the interview that prompted these reflections, I had recorded and shared a short video asking whether each of us is contributing to society’s exhaustion or to its rest and rejuvenation. I thought the reflection complete and continued with my day.
Later, I happened across an interview with former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou. As I listened to him describe a world of intelligence gathering, surveillance, geopolitical power, covert operations and extraordinary human capability, I found myself contemplating the relative significance of my own work centred upon consciousness and human potential. The question stayed with me long enough to reveal something I had been too close to my own work to see clearly.
Only afterward did my mind return to the video I had recorded. What initially appeared to be two unrelated moments suddenly seemed to be approaching the same question from different directions: What happens when our capacity to affect the world develops more rapidly than the consciousness from which that capacity is exercised?
Upstream grew from sitting with that question.
‑Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
Recently, I recorded a short video built around a thought that had been occupying my attention. I found myself imagining society as though it were a single person. If society were a person, I suggested, perhaps we would not necessarily describe that person as evil. Perhaps we would describe them as exhausted.
The distinction interested me because I know something about exhaustion, as most of us do. Exhausted people do not always behave like themselves. Our patience shortens and the capacity to entertain complexity diminishes. We may at times become more reactive and less reflective. And things that might appear manageable after sufficient rest can feel insurmountable when we are depleted. Under those conditions, the distance between stimulus and response can become remarkably small.
Rest changes something. It does not eliminate difficulty, nor does it guarantee wisdom, but it can restore the space within which clearer thought becomes possible. A rested person can encounter the same circumstances and perceive options that exhaustion had concealed. Decisions can become less reactive and more deliberate. We can respond rather than merely react.
That was the thought behind the video, and it eventually led me to a question:
Am I contributing to society’s exhaustion or its rest and rejuvenation?
I recorded the piece, uploaded it later, and continued with my day.
Sometime after, without any conscious connection to what I had recorded, I happened across an interview with former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou. The programme was built around twenty-four questions submitted through an “Honesty Box,” and I decided to watch. Admittedly, the conversation was fascinating.
Kiriakou described a world most of us encounter primarily through films, novels, news reports and occasional glimpses afforded by declassified documents or congressional investigations we may take time to view via C-SPAN. He spoke about intelligence gathering, surveillance, recruitment, covert operations, espionage, terrorism, torture, assassination attempts and the psychological characteristics useful to intelligence officers. At one point, he described the CIA’s basic responsibility in almost mundane terms: recruit people who can obtain secrets, analyse those secrets, and provide policymakers with information upon which consequential decisions can be made. Yet he also described the considerably darker activities that can accompany the exercise of state power.
As I watched, I became increasingly aware of scale.
There is an enormous world operating beyond the boundaries of our ordinary awareness. Governments gather intelligence, militaries develop increasingly sophisticated capabilities, intelligence agencies recruit and manage human assets, corporations possess enormous technological and financial power, scientists push against the boundaries of what is possible, artificial intelligence is developing at extraordinary speed, and entire systems operate every day whose decisions can affect millions of people whom those making the decisions will never meet.
Sitting there watching Kiriakou describe his experiences, I began thinking about my own work.
For years, much of my life has centred upon consciousness and human potential. I have taught meditation, researched consciousness, written about human development, explored the relationship between inner experience and outward behaviour, developed conceptual frameworks, convened conversations, and gradually begun assembling what I have come to understand as an ecosystem. Different parts of that ecosystem approach the question from different directions, but the underlying concern remains remarkably consistent:
What becomes possible when human beings more fully develop the capacities already latent within them?
Normally, I experience this work from inside it. I move from the next essay to the next conversation, the next research question, the next programme, the next framework, the next person sitting before me wanting to learn to meditate. When one lives inside a body of work, its individual pieces can become so familiar that their relationship to the larger world becomes difficult to see.
Watching Kiriakou, however, briefly changed my vantage point. Subsequently, I found myself wondering:
What is the real value of what I am building?
The question was not born of despair. Nor was it an abandonment of confidence in the work. Quite the contrary. It was more like an encounter with scale. When one listens to someone in Kiriakou’s position and with his expertise describe the machinery of intelligence agencies, geopolitical conflict, surveillance systems and decisions involving war and death, one’s own work can suddenly seem incredibly small. There are governments moving billions of dollars, institutions influencing the trajectories of nations, and technologies capable of reaching into almost every dimension of modern life seemingly without detection. Against forces of that magnitude, what does an ecosystem centred upon consciousness and human potential actually amount to?
I sat with the question. Then something from the interview popped into my mind and began shifting it.
Kiriakou was asked whether someone could work as a spy and still possess a moral compass. He answered a definitive yes, and then immediately described the cost of maintaining his own. There were things, he explained, that an intelligence officer might be asked to do that were so immoral, unethical, or illegal that one simply had to refuse. His eventual opposition to the CIA’s torture programme came at tremendous personal cost, yet he maintained that speaking publicly about it had been worth what followed.
That exchange seeming settled deep within my mind more than I realised at the time. Perhaps because it exposed something beneath the extraordinary capabilities he had spent much of the interview describing.
Capability, by itself, tells us very little about what capability will serve.
A person can become extraordinarily disciplined, intelligent, persuasive and effective while employing those capacities toward destructive ends. An organisation can possess astonishing technological sophistication without possessing corresponding wisdom. Nations can accumulate enormous military power without necessarily becoming proportionately discerning about when or how that power should be exercised. Human beings can become increasingly capable of manipulating matter, information, biology and one another without undergoing an equivalent development in the consciousness directing those capabilities.
Suddenly the question I had been asking about my work began to change.
Perhaps the central problem facing humanity is not whether we can become more capable. We already are incredibly capable.
The history of civilisation is, among other things, a history of expanding human capability. We learned to cultivate land, construct cities, preserve knowledge, cross oceans, harness electricity, split atoms, travel beyond the atmosphere, map the human genome, and create machines capable of performing forms of cognitive work once thought to belong exclusively to human beings. We have become remarkably good at extending the reach of human intention and built what I refer to as the human-derived world.
The more consequential question may be what determines the intention being extended.
This is where I believe the question of orientation becomes unavoidable.
A powerful tool does not determine the purpose for which it will be used. Intelligence does not determine wisdom. Technological sophistication does not necessarily produce moral development. Even extraordinary states of organisation and discipline can be directed toward outcomes that diminish rather than enlarge human flourishing. And I believe many of us will agree that education does not guarantee ethical conduct.
Something must therefore precede capability.
There must be some consideration of the consciousness from which capability is exercised.
That realisation returned me, unexpectedly, to the video I had recorded and shared:
If society were a person, it wouldn’t be evil. It would, instead, be exhausted.
What had seemed like a reflection on the emotional condition of society now appeared to contain another question. If individuals, as I posit with the Seven Layers of Manifestation (SLM), collectively produce institutions, cultures, technologies, economies and governments, then the quality of the human beings participating in those systems cannot be entirely separated from the quality of what those systems produce.
An exhausted, frightened, and angry society will build things. A society organised primarily around competition, scarcity, or domination will build things. And a society composed increasingly of people capable of acting from greater clarity, integration and awareness will also build things.
To my mind, the question is not whether we will create. Human beings create almost compulsively. We externalise our understanding of reality into families, institutions, laws, technologies, economies, religions, educational systems, political structures and cultures. As we learn from the SLM, the human-derived world is, in this sense, a continuing expression of human consciousness.
The guiding question is what quality of consciousness will increasingly find expression through what we create?
Seen from that perspective, the world Kiriakou described and the world in which I have chosen to work no longer seemed as distant from one another as they had during my subsequent ruminations.
An intelligence agency, military, corporation, university, and Artificial intelligence are all built by human beings.
Governments, markets, technologies and social systems can become so large and complex that they begin to appear almost autonomous, but somewhere within every one of them are people perceiving circumstances, interpreting information, responding to incentives, experiencing fear and ambition, exercising judgement, and making choices and living with consequences.
That is where the question becomes upstream.
If we concentrate exclusively upon changing the visible structures of society while neglecting the consciousness of the people who inhabit and reproduce those structures, we may eventually discover that we have changed considerably less than we imagined. New institutions can reproduce old patterns. New technologies can amplify ancient impulses. Revolutions can replace one hierarchy with another. Extraordinary tools can be placed into hands governed by remarkably familiar fears.
This does not mean that inner development substitutes for institutional reform, public policy, scientific advancement, civic engagement or social action. The world requires work at many levels simultaneously. Structures, laws, incentives, institutions, and material conditions matter.
But so too does consciousness matter.
And perhaps one reason it is easily overlooked by most is precisely because it lies upstream of so much that is easier to see.
This insight has helped me recognise something about the ecosystem I have been developing. Its value may not ultimately rest in any single programme, framework, essay, course, conversation, or platform. Those are expressions of a larger inquiry. The deeper concern is the relationship between consciousness, orientation, human capability, and the world those capabilities produce.
How might we cultivate greater access to the subtler dimensions of ourselves from which clearer perception can emerge? How might human beings develop not merely greater resilience, but greater capacity to navigate change without being governed entirely by reaction? How might we understand the relationship between consciousness and the structures we create? And what becomes possible when the development of human capability is accompanied by an intentional development of the consciousness directing it?
These questions have followed me through much of my adult life, although I have not always recognised them as parts of the same question.
Perhaps that is one of the peculiarities of building something over time. The person doing the building often sees the individual bricks long before recognising the architecture.
The meditation teaching is one brick, research is another, writing is yet another, and the frameworks, conversations, programmes and emerging technologies are yet others.
From close range, each demands its own degree of attention. Yet occasionally something causes me to move far enough away to see the outline of what they may collectively be becoming. That evening, unexpectedly, it was an interview with a former CIA officer. And what initially made me question the significance of my work in the grand scheme of things eventually helped me understand more clearly where that work sits.
I do not need to build an intelligence agency, command a military, direct a multinational corporation or occupy political office for the questions occupying me to intersect with the consequential forces shaping our world. Those forces do not emerge from nowhere. However enormous the institutions become, somewhere upstream remain human beings.
Human beings with fears, ambitions, wounds, extraordinary intelligence, capable of compassion and deep wisdom. But also equally capable of cruelty, reaction, and astonishing shortsightedness. And those among us who increasingly possess tools capable of magnifying whatever they bring to them.
And that may be why the development of consciousness becomes more consequential, rather than less, as human capability expands.
The question I began asking while watching the interview was whether work centred upon consciousness and human potential really mattered in a world shaped by forces of such magnitude.
By the end of the viewing that evening, I was beginning to suspect that I had been asking the question from the wrong direction. Perhaps the question is not whether developing human consciousness matters in a world of increasingly powerful institutions and technologies. Perhaps the question is what kind of world increasingly powerful institutions and technologies will create if the consciousness directing them remains comparatively undeveloped.
I do not pretend to know the full answer. Nor do I imagine that meditation, scholarship, education or any particular framework alone provides a singular solution to the complexities confronting humanity. The problems are too large, the systems too interconnected, and human experience too varied for claims of that kind.
But I understand somewhat better where I have chosen to work—upstream.
Before any of these thoughts had fully assembled themselves, my mind returned to the recorded video I mentioned above as it ended with a simple question:
Am I contributing to society’s exhaustion or its rest and rejuvenation?
Several hours later, after travelling briefly through a world of espionage, power, technology, secrecy and consequence, the question remained. Only now, I understood a little more clearly why I had asked it.
Perhaps one of the most consequential things any of us can consider is not simply what we are capable of doing, but the quality of consciousness from which we do it.
Because the future will not be created by our capabilities alone. I believe, instead, it will be created by the human beings who wield them.
Suggested Practice: Moving Upstream
Take a few settled moments to consider something in the world you would genuinely like to see changed. It may be something within your family, workplace, community, institution, nation, or the wider world.
Notice where your attention initially goes. Perhaps you think about a particular policy, behaviour, person, organisation, technology, or social condition. These visible expressions matter, and some may indeed require direct action. But for this exercise, allow yourself to move one step further upstream.
Ask yourself: What qualities of human consciousness might be contributing to what I am observing?
Fear? Exhaustion? Scarcity? Anger? Ambition? Insecurity? Compassion? Clarity? Patience? Courage? A sense of connection with others?
Then bring the inquiry closer:
Where do those same qualities appear within me?
Finally, consider the question that began this reflection:
Am I contributing to society’s exhaustion or its rest and rejuvenation?
There is no need to manufacture an ideal answer. Simply observe what becomes apparent.
Then choose one small way, today, to contribute from the quality of consciousness you would like to see expressed more fully in the world.
Change is necessary downstream.
But some of our most consequential work may begin upstream.
—
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/.