[Mike Todd]

Hi Andrei,

I was a *nix admin and coder for almost 20 years. Like you, I found that a career in IT eventually lost its meaning, and I spent a long time in its wake wandering the landscape of vocation and avocation. After almost a decade in this wilderness I reached a point best framed by a few lines of poetry:

And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.

And so I shut myself in like Kamo and immersed myself in introspection for several years. Who, or what, emerged was an acceptance of uncertainty and an appreciation of circumspection. There was only one thing of which I was remotely convinced; as Easwaran observes in his introduction to The Upanishads:

[The] wider field of consciousness is our native land. We are not cabin-dwellers, born to a life cramped and confined; we are meant to explore, to seek, to push the limits of our potential as human beings. The world of the senses is just a base camp: we are meant to be as much at home in consciousness as in the world of physical reality.

An exploration of consciousness, both experiential and intellectual, led me to Dr. McGilchrist’s work, and here we are.

If I might now offer a reflection in retrospect which may be of service going forward – one grounded in uncertainty and circumspection: no individual approach, either experiential or intellectual, will suffice to survey, even remotely, our “wider … native land”. If you find yourself on a spiritual path, with the aim of connecting and cooperating, look to the renaissance man as your model.

A couple of quotes from Dr. McGilchrist to close:

Certainty is … related to narrowness, as though the more certain we become of something the less we see.

Uncertainty … is not a sign of failure, but lies deep in the nature of what we are trying to grasp. Truth is uncertain not because it is empty, but because it is full – rich, complex, manifold.