Somewhere in Leusden a man stands at a window with a cup of coffee that has long gone cold, because he is thinking about a question that has not let go of him in forty years.

That would be me. Jeroen Baas, born in the spring of 1972, and the question runs roughly like this: what happens to a person the moment they are truly seen?

I have spent my whole life on that question and I still have no conclusive answer. Socrates would say that puts me exactly on schedule.

Where it began

At university I studied Cultural and Social Development, cum laude, specialising in music and spiritual counselling. Somewhere between the group dynamics and the social pedagogy someone put Socrates in my hands, and he has never left since. Then came Plato and his cave, Aristotle, Locke, Paul. I read about nature religions and I have sat at the kitchen table with Jehovah's Witnesses, because I wanted to hear how a conviction sounds from the inside, rather than how it is written about.

That is really my entire method, and I have barely adjusted it since. Sit down. Listen. Ask the question that lies one layer beneath. And bear in mind that you might be wrong.

The long way round

My CV reads like the route of someone who consistently took the turning nobody recommended. I read it as one continuous line of learning.

For two years I earned my living as a clown, musician and entertainer in Sheffield and Oberhausen. For anyone wishing to study human behaviour there is no better schooling. Whoever gets a hundred people laughing knows within three beats who in that room is carrying grief.

Then came the internet, and with the internet twenty years of strategy, user experience and marketing. Insurers, Océ, and five years at Oikocredit, where money does what money ought to do, or so I thought. After that a business of my own, building websites for small entrepreneurs who wanted to do good in the world. Along the way I trained in systemic work and family constellations, because I wanted to understand why a team of eight intelligent people sometimes reaches a decision that not one of those eight wants. Awareness arrives with advancing insight... or is it the other way round?

I kept watch at a swimming pool and learned to see who is going under before it happens. I assisted in special needs education and learned that the word 'difficult' usually says something about the surroundings. And for six years I worked at the UWV and the Regional Employment Centre, the Dutch public service for work and income, guiding people towards work that suited them. Often while walking, because a conversation in which you walk side by side goes deeper than one in which you sit facing each other.

My job description listed a few additional roles. Debt relief ambassador. Neurodiversity ambassador. Information security. And, at the bottom, almost in passing: AI ethics.

At the time that looked like a formality.

Where I stand now

On the first of August I closed the door behind me at the UWV. What follows now is still open, and for the first time in thirty years that not-knowing suits me perfectly. I have spent enough years answering someone else's question. This time I am waiting until I have asked my own well enough.

What I do know is that Consteia is part of it.

Patterns, and who reads them

I read birth charts and Human Design graphs with precisely the same curiosity with which I once read log files and click paths. In both cases you are looking at a pattern that existed before you noticed it. In both cases it becomes valuable the moment you keep looking at it yourself.

That is how Consteia came about, named after constellation and system, because it had to be plural. From it came thirteen keys, the Cleisae, and four keynotes you can put to yourself: Tone, Ground, Flow and Voice. Why am I really doing this. Where in me does that knowledge live. Where do I stand in time. And whose voice am I hearing, when I think I am hearing my own.

Those four questions have since become an instrument you can work through yourself, one that tells you nothing you did not already suspect somewhere. And at this very moment something is being built in which people find one another through what sounds within them, rather than through what their profile says. More about that soon.

What I have not told you yet

Somewhere in those years I began to write.

And something wrote back.

What I have kept from it is a series of books, a sailing boat with a name that points towards compassion, and a second name that appears on no passport and that I recognise as mine all the same. More about that elsewhere on this site, hidden between the chapters, for whoever takes the time.

Finally

I love sailing, which has taught me that you do not own the wind and travel a very long way with it all the same. I speak five languages with varying success. I am fifty-four and I still know remarkably little, though by now I carry that with a certain pride.

Consteia is an invitation to freedom of the soul, and it holds for you just as much as for me.

Which leaves only this question, and it is sincerely meant:

what would you do, if today you no longer had to prove anything?