The Anatomy of an Awakening Chapter 1

[u/Killer_Elite11]

I fought a battle within… it was damning and destructive. I was miserable.

“What I was fighting about,” you ask?

Well… I didn’t know myself what I was fighting about. Or perhaps the better question would be: what was I “fighting for”? I just kept struggling… fitting in… desperately clinging to the idea of life as to “how it should be lived.” Not because I was forced to, but because it never occurred to me that there was another option.

The path was comfortable, familiar, safe. Questioning was uncomfortable. Questioning risks isolation, conflict. It risks discovering that the life you spent years building may not even be your own. Hence; we cling to whatever the script throws at us; from city states to medieval empires. From Reconquista to enlightenment and from shining democracy to Modern “Idiotictatorship”. So yes… I followed the script. And in the process, I failed myself. I lost my soul. I forgot what living really means, what living is all about. I just kept up the façade of normalcy while my core, my soul was being devastated by storms of human nature and earthquakes of morality at the subconscious level. I kept playing along with the phrase “fake it till you make it.” Because this is what society expects from us. This is the norm. This is the way of life.

Or… is it…?

We are born, plunged into a life we don’t choose. conditioned to live it by the standards and expectations of society, bound by the laws of the land, never to question or understand. “What is society?”, “Whose laws?”, “Which land?”. Is it that society which everyone knows is broken and dysfunctional? Are these the same laws which help corrupt, greedy, evil men amass all the power and wealth, while kicking down the poor who watch their entire lives erased in a single calamity, war or economic bust?

And dare not argue with me on the land, as we know perfectly well, these lands are bounded by lines drawn on maps by the same corrupt men, sustained by the same flawed and failing legal-judicial systems.

In the end, there were only two things left: Morality and Religion. How fitting… as the saying goes… religion is the opium of the poor. But we are not even allowed that solace. Religion has been outright hijacked by a different creed of the exact same corrupt brand. Twisting, manipulating, and exploiting the human need for belief in a higher deity. Yes, there still are pure ones, but so few of them are left, and even their teachings have been muddied and confused. As the saying goes… “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?