There is always a moment — quiet, unceremonious, almost funny —
when a person suddenly realizes:
“I’m not confused.
I actually know what I’m doing.”
It can happen anywhere:
— in a bank office,
— in a Soviet village,
— in someone’s Substack comments,
— or in a long conversation between two people who did not expect to recognize each other’s mind.
This story contains all four.
https://closertoconsciousness.com/
Dr. Alexander Durig tells the beginning of his story like a comedy:
and the sudden realization, after a year of 18-hour days:
“Hey… I think I actually know what I’m doing.”
It’s not a triumphant moment.
It’s not applause, not recognition.
Just clarity.
Clarity born from friction.
These early experiences shaped him more than academia ever did.
They forced him to look at how people misunderstand structure,
and how intelligence gets misread when it doesn’t fit the template.
That part — the “misreading” — is where our stories overlap.
Long before I ever saw a business plan,
I was a child in a Soviet village, sent by my grandmother to pull weeds.
I was a lazy child —
or, more accurately, a strategically efficient one.
And then I noticed the chickens.
They were doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing:
pecking out weeds,
working tirelessly,
visibly enjoying themselves.
So I did what any early-stage CEO would do:
I tied the chickens to shrubs and young trees
so they would clear specific areas for me.
It was perfect.
Garden clean.
I free.
A scalable, low-cost, ecological solution.
Most importantly, I imagined my grandmother finally sitting with me to read.
Instead, she looked at my construction, sighed, and said:
“Go wash the floors.”
And that is when I learned my first cognitive principle:
People love complicating what already works.
Also:
delivering a functioning system does not protect you from someone else’s confusion about it.
Which, oddly enough, brings us back to Durig.
As he described clients and bankers saying:
“Something is wrong — we don’t know what — but something.”
I recognized the pattern instantly.
It’s the exact thing that happens to premature minds:
The field responds.
The person sees clearly.
And yet the system says: “This feels wrong.”
What feels wrong is simply the timing.
Premature insight looks like error until enough people catch up.
Durig knows this.
I know this.
You probably know it too, if you’ve read this far.
At one point, Durig said:
“I have no one to talk to about these things.”
It reminded me of physicist Simon Shnoll, who once said:
“What is it like to be a scientist who had no one to discuss his ideas with for 60 years?”
Loneliness is the hidden engine of cognition.
So when Durig suddenly commented on my work with such clarity —
field, body, ecology, ethics —
I felt a rare horizontal moment:
Two minds, approaching structure from different angles,
meeting in one field without needing translation.
It doesn’t happen often.
When he noticed the triadic structure in my very first Substack post,
I said:
“Apparently there is a universal storage room of forgotten ideas,
and we both keep peeking into it from different doors.”
He uses academic language.
I use intuitive architecture.
Yet the forms match.
This is why the dialogue matters.
Not because of Egypt.
Not because of theories.
But because two minds briefly occupy the same angle of perception.
And that is always rare.
This is not a story about business plans.
Or chickens.
Or pyramids.
It is about recognition.
About the shift from
“Why do people think I’m strange?”
to
“Ah. Someone else sees it too.”
That moment is worth an entire discipline.
Maybe even an entire book.
And I keep wondering:
what would happen if children grew up without being inflated for their creativity,
and without having it quietly crushed —
if no one called them “genius,”
and no one said “don’t do it like that,”
and they were simply allowed
to apply their own angle to the world
without applause
and without correction?
What kind of minds would appear then —
and would we even recognize them?
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