Are we trapped in a false reality?

When you choose not to distract and just sit with your thoughts, allowing painful, reactive thoughts to just float by, without giving them power, like a leaf floating by on a river, you experience a calm like no other.

The day to day drudgery merely becomes a background hum.

You no longer have an identity, choosing to simply be. Your fears, guilt and worry just fall away.

Of course, this state is seemingly impossible. The surface currents of everyday life, survival elements often force us to participate in the game.

For the majority, everything is normal, everything has a reason and is without question.

It seems to me that you either experience life directly or otherwise. Walking worn paths or making your own, getting lost in order to find.

Stripped of fear, it's quite fascinating what you uncover in your search for clarity and truth.

You begin to understand things from a totally different perspective, or rather you begin to see truths that made very little sense before.

It's almost like stepping into another dimension, with much less noise, where you can creatively think. It feels like home, like belonging. No ego to steal away your thoughts.

There's no need to belong, or to feel validated. Time almost stands still, past,present and future blurring into a single moment.

The house we built and the paths we trod, feel alien somehow, like they belonged to someone else.

For most of our lives, we don't question, observing others and assimilating, our fear holds us in a predefined orbit.

We go to school to "learn", a necessary step towards fitting in, most of us accepting the reality. We must learn skills to survive, but not necessarily to thrive. Truth is whatever we are told and we must believe it, or be damned.

It may take many years of systematic abuse before we realise the universal truth, that we've been hoodwinked at every step.

Programming in all its forms, using information carefully curated to appear "normal". The intention isn't clear most of the time, like Plato's cave, the projections are the truth and must be defended at all costs.

Our thoughts are not our own and, as a result, any attempt to connect with ourselves is both strange and often painful.

Yet, this reality is built on artificiality, not authenticity. Its corridors and landscapes created to keep us distracted, all the while we're distracted for the betterment of those in control.

We sacrifice ourselves for their lies, and are happy to do so.

Once you awaken to the true reality, there is no going back. You no longer accept the transactional thinking, the conditions we place upon those around us. We are all victims of the same mechanisms of control. Our beliefs have become who we are and our roles assigned from birth. The most compliant become the fiercest defenders of the system, enabling it to carry on in perpetual harmony, blindly following the path already laid out.

An attempt to think for yourself, or escape your "role" will likely result in you getting branded or burned, cancelled or indeed killed. The latter more likely if your voice is loud and seen as a threat to the status quo, the fake reality.

The same can be said, not just for individuals but whole cultures and countries, laid to waste because they wouldn't comply.

Our individual sovereignty becomes stuck in a web of lies and deceit, shifting reality into an alien dimension, that becomes less human and more machine-like with each decade that passes.

Reality, essentially, becomes whatever is kept on the surface, the appearance of safety and order, a purposeful shallow landscape with no depth, all the while we are contained and confined within our thinking, poisoned both mentally and physically, whilst serving a soulless entity.

Often we experience loss on our journey, when we begin to choose to live "differently". Your very foundation becomes shaken, cracked by the pain of separation. Sometimes you fall and don't ever think you'll be "okay" again. They say you learn through suffering, choosing to push through, instead of around. Confronting your fears head on, realising that the reality is shared by all that you know, but ultimately we must all walk the path alone. Our experiences are no longer designed for us, but chosen by us. Away from the cave, we finally see our true reality, feel the pain and sorrow, and it's okay.

It's a kind of submission, a return to innocence almost. Our lives are no longer complex or chaotic, at least that's my experience. Like arriving on some distant shore, uncertain of anything but your own thoughts and desires, no longer shackled to objects, in people and things. You yourself, no longer an object to be consumed or used, but standing in the centre of a cyclone, you become the calm space that you occupy. Your reality is choosing to be in whatever form you choose. Your actions need no validation, your thoughts are your own and you are free.