A memoir — coming soon
One man's unlikely journey beyond the rational mind
A story about what happens when a chartered accountant, seasoned in the hard logic of business transformation, begins to ask questions that logic alone cannot answer.
Discover the bookDavid Cox built his career on rational foundations. Two decades of customer experience consulting, a Chartered Accountant background, global clients from Vodafone to Bupa. A man who trusted data, frameworks, and the measurable logic of business transformation.
"What's here is simply the story of how a life can come apart, and what becomes possible when the pretending ends."
The Rational Mystic is the memoir of what happens next — when the frameworks run out, when the spreadsheets fall silent, and when a deeply analytical mind is forced to reckon with dimensions of experience it had spent a lifetime explaining away.
This is not a book about abandoning reason. It is a book about what reason cannot reach — and what awaits on the other side of that boundary. Written with warmth, honesty, and the occasional hard-won laugh, it speaks to anyone who has ever suspected that the rational world, for all its power, is only part of the story.
This is the story of a very ordinary life. Not a remarkable one, not a tragic one, and certainly not a heroic one. It is the kind of life that has played out countless times, shaped by familiar forces of family, culture, expectation and fear, with all the subtle variations that make each of us feel uniquely alone in what we carry.
And yet, it is also the story of something extraordinary. Not because of what happened to me, but because of what I began to notice. Somewhere along the way, beneath the habits of thought and the roles I had learned to play, cracks began to appear. Through those cracks came glimpses of something quieter and deeper, a way of knowing that didn't argue, justify, or demand, but simply felt true.
I don't believe my experience is unusual, maybe just overlooked. I imagine that many of us might have had moments when something inside us cuts through the noise, in crisis, in grief, in love, in nature. But I wonder how often we explain them away, dismiss them, or quietly keep them to ourselves, just as I did.
So, the act of writing this book is an attempt to take those moments seriously, without turning them into beliefs or doctrines. I am not trying to write a guide, a method, or to claim any special insight. It is simply an exploration, grounded in lived experience, of how a quieter kind of knowing showed itself to me, how easy it was to lose touch with it, and what began to change when I stopped fighting it.
What the book explores
A portrait of a mind shaped by logic, commerce, and the satisfying certainty of cause and effect — and why that was never quite enough.
The moments that do not fit the model. The experiences that cannot be filed, explained, or productively ignored.
What it means to move into territory for which no map exists — and to discover it is not as frightening as the rational mind predicted.