When Your Inspiration Answers Back

I’ll admit to having a moment. I read the email three times with my door closed, which is unusual because I almost never do. I did not want my wife to see me indulging in this moment. The third time through, I sat very still and let the words settle.

This week, Dr Lisa Miller endorsed Room to Be Human.

There is a particular feeling when someone whose work lit your path turns around and says, yes, you saw it too. It is not only pride, although I admit to that. It is also extreme relief. The thing you felt in your chest turns out to be real. You were not making it up.

I have said before that my writing is a vulnerable witness, not scholarship by a long shot. I stumbled into the federal contracting world, stumbled into Norway, stumbled into building a company that tried to treat people like whole humans. I do not have the academic credentials to prove what I have seen and felt. So when a scientist who has spent her career proving it looks at my witness and nods, something deep in me settles that I did not even know was unsettled.

What Dr. Miller Wrote

Rasmussen’s vision reveals breathtaking possibility for our elevation as a humanity. A realistic manifesto for an Awakened Society. A new professional world appears in which structurally we gain momentum to realize our innate spiritual birthright. The spiritual core of human flourishing and societal renewal. Just in time.

– Lisa Miller, PhD, Professor and Founder, Spirituality Mind Body Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University; author of The Awakened Brain

Late in the production process, I actually stopped the presses to bring her research into the book after I discovered her book The Awakened Brain through a mentor. It meant so much to me that I encourage friends to read it, even before you get to my own book. I am sure this annoyed several people trying to finalize my manuscript, but The Awakened Brain probed something I had intuited for years and couldn’t leave out: transcendence is not a gift handed to a lucky few (as Maslow sometimes framed it). It is standard human equipment, wired into every single one of us from birth. A birthright!

That finding changed the book. It emboldened me to expand the definition of my reader and of my readers’ humanity. It also changed how I see the people around me. If the capacity for awakening is universal, then a workplace that crowds it out is not just inefficient. It is standing between people and something they were born to have. That felt important enough to hold up production.

She called the book a realistic manifesto. That word, realistic, matters to me most. I have spent twelve years trying to build this vision inside a real company, with a real payroll, real deadlines, and real moments when I got it wrong. And I had real critics! External and internal voices telling me I was off my rocker. And many moments of self-doubt.

I am so grateful for Dr Miller.

Two Voices, One Intersection

Before my enamoration with Dr Miller, another hero sat on my bookshelf. A few weeks ago, Dr Scott Barry Kaufman also endorsed the book.

The scarcest resource in the age of acceleration is unclaimed time. Rasmussen makes a humane, clear-eyed argument that without unclaimed hours, the best parts of being human never get to happen. This is a beautiful book.

– Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, author of Transcend

Kaufman gave me the sailboat metaphor to replace the pyramid. His recovery of Maslow’s late work showed me that self-actualisation was not at the top of a pyramid, and it was not the highest-level pursuit either. That was transcendence. And it needed a secure hull and an open sail. You cannot reach for meaning when you are worried about drowning.

Miller gave me the wind in the sail. Where Kaufman mapped transcendence as the height of human growth, she showed it is present in everyone from the start. Not something we climb toward, but something we unfold.

Room to Be Human lives where those two ideas meet. If transcendence is both our highest reach and our common birthright, then time and space to unfold are not perks. They are the structural conditions for being fully human. I recently saw the two of them together on Kaufman’s podcast, and something clicked that has not stopped clicking since. Having both of them now vouch for the book feels like a circle closing in a way I could not have planned.

The Endorsements I Cannot Get

Some of the voices that shaped this book will never read it. I say this with appropriate humility about my own place in any intellectual tradition. But also because most of the voices are historical figures.

Maslow saw the farther reaches of human nature and died before the world caught up to his later thinking. Mary Shelley gave us a creature who asked only to be recognized, and a maker who looked away. Aldous Huxley wrote both warnings: the Brave New World that numbs us into compliance, and the Island where people are free to wake up.

I think of them as canaries. They sang out long before the air turned toxic. Each of them asked the question this book asks now: what happens to the human when we build faster than we become?

I cannot send them a galley copy. I cannot get a blurb from Mary Shelley, though I would give quite a lot to know what she would think. But when two living scientists look at the same question and say this answer holds, it feels like the closest thing to hearing back from those earlier voices. As validated as I can imagine feeling, which is saying something for someone who has spent most of his career feeling like an imposter in intellectual spaces.

Just in Time

Dr Miller ended her endorsement with three words: Just in time.

I have been sitting with those. They landed differently than the rest.

As AI absorbs more of the work that fills our days, we get to choose what fills the space it leaves. We can pour in more acceleration, more tasks, more efficiency. Or we can make room to be human. The window for that choice is open now, but I am not sure how long it stays open. Technology does not wait for us to figure out our values.

I do not know if I have gotten all of it right. But when two people whose work I have admired from a distance say the direction is true, I feel less alone in the asking.

To Dr Miller and Dr Kaufman: thank you. You gave me the map, and now you have told me I read it well enough to represent your work. That means more than I can properly express.

Room to Be Human arrives in early 2027. If this vision speaks to you, I hope you will join the journey at robertrasmussen.me.

I have written before about leadership, interdependence, and what it means to build organizations that treat people as whole humans. If these themes resonate, my earlier work explores some of the same territory from the inside of a company trying to live it out.