Learning How To Revive Your True Self In A Culture Of Egocentrism

Inner Light– (n.) Personal, spiritual revelation. A source of enlightenment within oneself. A divine presence held to guide the soul. The true self.

Something has changed within our lifetime. Can you feel it too? I can’t quite identify the turning point when society started moving in such a destructive direction, but it remains an ever-unfolding reality that has become more blatant with each passing day. Humanity is forgetting the deeper reason for our existence. Love.

What is your interpretation of Love? To me, love is the invisible force that binds us all together within this grand simulation. It is a feeling we are born bearing, before we even have the ability to comprehend its power. One could imagine that each baby born into this world brings with it a vibrant stream of infinite love, gifted to us from some far-away realm. We naturally can’t help but gravitate toward this powerful medium of loving, source energy. It is the miracle of life, and its presence grants us the hope and promise that a brighter future awaits all of humankind.

Of course, as time progresses and this new life form grows, so begins the steady, bleak indoctrination into the societal conditioning that plagues the child’s most impressionable years. We aren’t but halfway out of the womb before being introduced to the most basic level of thought programming. Deluded belief systems and ideologies pelt us from every direction. These ideals are pitched by our parents, siblings, temporary guardians, peers, priests, pastors, neighbors, teachers, coaches, co-workers, partners, lovers, followers, celebrities, athletes, brand influencers, politicians, advertisers, communities, countries, cultures, and broken systems. Just to name a few.

My point (before I verbally dance off into an emotional tangent) is…We are all taught from the moment of birth, to systematically betray the TRUE SELF. 

What inspires this first betrayal? It could stem from the dependence we have on our caretakers to ensure our own survival in the most vulnerable stages of development. On an instinctual level, we must first surrender to our parents’ standards and expectations of us in order to be nurtured, fed and protected. The budding human spirit also requires a healthy amount of love, intimacy, and the validation of our most basic, primal needs.

In nature, the animal kingdom knows to offer these tools of survival freely, motivated by love, empathy and the need to propagate one’s species. However, a malfunctioning host is not motivated by these things when it comes to the well being of their offspring. When a child senses it is merely a physical extension of the parents’ image, it learns to compensate for its presence early. So begins a conditioning process used in the sustainment of the false bond known as conditional love. The child takes on the role that has been decided for it by others, to ensure its own survival in an environment of apathetic “caretakers”.

Within this arrangement of circumstance, the child learns to either adopt or adapt to this warped mentality of conditional love. They are taught to view the promise of love as a type of currency, to be used to gain and incite control through carefully manipulated social interactions and relationships. Most children placed in this environment learn to dim their inner light very early on as a means of appeasing their “guardians”. It is a traumatic continuation of self-betrayal that spans on for generations.

The term lost soul could refer to one whose inner light was extinguished long ago, and through a lack of faith, failed to see every opportunity the Universe had presented the individual to reignite the flame again. Most people in this predicament spend their days on Earth wandering aimlessly. Going through the physical motions of living but never truly feeling what it means to be alive. Some medical experts may categorize this mental ideology as Sociopathy, Psychopathy, or Malignant Narcissism. I suppose it’s easier to pinpoint the source of this human epidemic if you create a label for it first. For now, let’s call it Ego.

What is your interpretation of Ego? At it’s best, ego has played a valuable role in maintaining the survival and propagation of the human species in the physical world. At its worst, ego has been responsible for all of the chaos, suffering, and destruction in this physical world. Ego is the false identity that was developed out of our own early perceived fears of abandonment, inferiority, loss, rejection, lack, and extinction. The day you unconsciously hand over all power to the false projection of Ego, is the day you abandon your true self. It is the day you reject the belief that you are a true manifestation of divine, infinite perfection. Ego is the evil that exists in all of us, which, if left unchecked, will spread like cancer. A cancer of the intellect that eats viciously at the mind, ultimately destroying the loyal host that once enabled it to exist.

Which brings us now to the current state of humanity. Yikes.

How did the natural order of life fall into such disarray? Let’s start with the numbers. As of July 2018, the world population stands at 7.6 billion people. According to Census reports delving back one hundred years to 1918, records reported the global population to be around 2.1 billion people. In only one hundred years time, the human population has almost quadrupled in size. This vast expansion of the population within the last century presents insurmountable evidence indicative of a decadent era in societal history. Our culture can be categorized as one of greed, dominance, entitlement, consumerism, waste, a total lack of environmental empathy and the direct cause of an imminent future of resource scarcity and global poverty. 

Now, most of us want to see humanity thrive. Many of us throughout history have taken important strides to obliterate social (as well as environmental) injustice, and halt any attempts in the continuation of systematic inhumanities. Moving across the spectrum to the furthest extreme, we have vast numbers of people in society who never really learn to expand their thoughts past their own immediate needs. Many seek to create chaos simply because they can. They are motivated by an insatiable need for power, control, and domination. It is a mentality that is indoctrinated through years of systematic abuse, perceived lack, and programmed entitlement. Oh, that pesky, little ego.

Again, we are programmed from birth to comply as a means to survive. A mechanism adopted when we were truly vulnerable and powerless in our infanthood. The problem with this mentality and how it affects society is that most fully grown adults still move through life feeling completely powerless at their core. They never grew out of the conditioning that inevitably forced them to create a false ego to assert their own “protection” of self. The result leaves one stuck in a state of arrested development, where the only objective in life is to maintain a steady supply of attention, power, control, approval, adoration, validation, acceptance and compliance from any and every outside source that stumbles into their insatiable vortex, before ultimately being consumed and discarded.

I believe it is only through the miracle of circumstance set forth by the Universe that one’s ego may be destroyed, and the soul’s power redeemed. If the Universe has led you here…This message is for you.

Stripping yourself of the ego means questioning everything you’ve ever been taught. It means breaking down any belief system that was set in place to protect the ego. It means letting go of the false world you spent years manufacturing at the expense of your sanity, only to allow others to determine your value as a human being. At least, that’s what it all meant for me. Only after I started to see through the fog of my own fears, could I start healing. I discovered that the love I had been searching for outside of myself had existed within me all along. My Inner Light. No longer could I be manipulated through fear to stay trapped in the spiritual coffin that had been assigned to me by an egocentric society.

How can we achieve enlightenment within ourselves? I believe enlightenment starts by opening yourself up to an idea that inspires you to see the true value of your time here on Earth. It is learning to respect your own intuition (that internal alarm that goes off when you invest your energy into something you know will be detrimental to your spiritual well being). It is understanding that only you have the power to commit to a positive shift within. You have to be ready. Only then can we evolve further as a species without the threat of destroying ourselves and the perfection of the natural world around us.

How can we encourage this enlightenment in others? Well, we can’t…Not directly, anyway. Enlightenment happens differently for every individual, and always by divine timing. However, I believe an exercise in extreme empathy can set in motion a monumental shift in our universal consciousness. This shift has to start early on within ourselves, and through the cultivation of our children. Our youth is society’s greatest mirror, and the next generation can’t help but reflect what it has been shown. It is an important aspect to consider when we, as adults, lose sight of how our actions forge powerful, lasting effects. The progression of the human species rests on us coming to the realization that we are all connected, and when only one of us seeks to fully embrace an ideology, whether benevolent or malevolent in nature, it surely does affect us all as a whole.

Our love and compassion are not lost, but our collective ego has surely made it more difficult to find.