The best traps are the ones we build for ourselves. The best lies are only true up close. When our faces are so pressed to the grindstone we don’t even think to look up anymore. That’s when the lies sink deepest.
We have allowed a prison to be built around us and we have placed the bricks ourselves.
People are not happy when they commute two hours each way, in a car they don’t own, to do a job they don’t like, for a company they know makes the world worse for their children.
People are not happy when the technology that should have brought them salvation from that fate was instead turned against them as a tool to enslave their minds, numb their senses, and turn their hearts against one another in ever finer, ever more pointless distinctions between us. We have allowed this machine to turn our differences into danger and our neighbors into strangers.
People are not happy when their only value is a value that can be measured. When everything must have a point and that point must be known before you can even attempt the business of living. That is not living.
People are not happy when they’re told that everything is figured out and the mysteries of our magical existence have been reduced, quantified, and accounted for. Nothing to see here. When our intellectual leaders taught us that dreams, imagination, feelings, and hope itself are not the real, powerful, constructive forces they really are, but neutered things to be cast aside as childish fancy.
As if children were the ones in the wrong.
But people are not stupid.
We know there’s something more. Something better. You can feel it. People want something they don’t know how to ask for.
Well I do.
Resist the urge to find a good reason this feeling is not true. The answer is not in another job. It’s not in a business. It’s not working harder. There is no way to get ahead when we’re all sinking. The machine hides behind individual good reasons. Your sense that this structure is a siphon is not wrong.
You may be in a cage, but you don’t have to pretend to like it.
Resist the urge to put your head back down simply because there are others who have it worse than you.
Resist the urge to sit down again because you don’t want to complain.
Resist the urge to pretend the feelings of anxiety, pointlessness, and dread that seep in are anything like how life is supposed to be.
We were never meant to live this way.
The good news… the good news is that we don’t have to. We can dismantle the machine that kept us small. It starts by accepting that is real, and we have constructed it.
There is no prison except that which we create. There are no bars.
We are the bars.
But we can be so much more than that.
You can see it in our skies, in our dreams, in our stories.
You can see it in our myths, in our prayers, and in those long, quiet moments in nature.
You know that something special is happening.
We are being shown that there is so much more to reality, if only we have the courage to admit it could be true, then to seize this opportunity to find out for ourselves.
You can.
You have been lead to believe you have no power, and so you have none.
You’ve been lead to believe you cannot answer your own questions, and so you cannot.
You have been lead to believe you cannot change your circumstances, and so you’re trapped.
You have been lead to believe that your physical existence, locked inside your body, working for the machine until you meet oblivion — that this is all you could ever dare to hope for.
They lied.
The truth that cannot be kept from you any longer. And here it is:
Nothing is impossible, you’re not going to die, and everything loves you.
Your God, your universe, wants this for you — and you don’t need anyone else’s permission to take it.
It’s your birthright. Take it.
There’s a vast, cosmic civilization just sitting out there! We don’t have to stay small anymore. They’re waiting for us to realize this. Nudging us toward this truth. Praying we will wake up.
Take it.
We are so much more than our bodies. Reality is so much more than atoms.
You already have every tool you need. You were born with it.
Take it.
We wanted something we didn’t know how to ask for. Prayed for an answer, for salvation. We’re being shown that answer, and it couldn’t be more clear to me.
You are your own reality. You can control it if you learn how. This is your birthright.
You can have anything, be anything, do anything. There are no limits. Yes, it really is that good.
You have already received the greatest gift that could ever be given.
The gift of everything.
Take it.