The Return
Just that solid, quiet knowing.
If you've read the articles preceding this, and I've managed to make sense, then you've completed a circle.
Not by learning something new, but by remembering something old. Something that was there before the confusion began, before the noise got so loud you forgot how to hear your own voice.
The journey wasn't forward. It was out and back.
Out into the illusions of the systems we have built. Systems that harvest your labour and hijack your tribal instincts for profits, taxes, votes, support and protest.
That's what systems do. And their worst excesses reflect precisely those aspects of our human nature we least wish to examine. Our shadows become the systems' shadows. We build things like greed and laziness into the architecture by failing to understand these as evolved survival strategies - which the system then exploits as vulnerabilities, working right up to the limits of our tolerance for manipulation and exploitation.
The tragedy isn't that we're evil. It's that we're unconscious. We create at scale what we refuse to integrate personally. Every institution, every corporation, every government agency becomes a magnified expression of our unexamined patterns. The greed we won't admit to becomes economic exploitation. The tribalism we won't own becomes political polarisation. The need for control we won't face becomes authoritarian overreach.
And then we stand back, shocked at what we've created, as if these systems materialised from nowhere rather than emerging directly from our collective unconscious. We rage against the machine without recognising that we are the machine - its victims, and at the same time, its unwitting architects.
The ancient wisdom traditions understood this. They spoke of liberation not just for the individual, but for all sentient beings. The Bodhisattva vow: not to enter nirvana until every blade of grass has awakened. Because consciousness isn't personal property - it's a field effect. When one node in the network wakes up, it affects the whole system.
This is why awakening matters. Not because you become special or enlightened, but because you become a circuit breaker in the unconscious patterns that keep the whole apparatus running. Each person who stops feeding the system their unconscious energy becomes a point of stability in a field of chaos.
"There's a part of you that's been watching this whole time. Watching the confusion, the searching, the attempts to make sense of a world that seems increasingly senseless. That part hasn't been fooled by any of it."
That part sees through the theatre. It recognises the performance behind the passion, the calculation behind the outrage. It watches the tribal programming activate in real time - the way a single headline can split a room into warring camps, the way people defend positions they inherited rather than discovered.
It's been waiting for you to stop looking for solutions in the same level of consciousness that created the problems. To stop trying to fix the system from inside its own logic. To step outside the frame entirely and see what's actually happening.
Because what's happening is inevitable. When you scale unconscious patterns to civilisational size, you get exactly what we have: ancient tribal wiring and nuclear weapons, social media algorithms designed by the same species that can't resist eating the whole bag of chips, and political systems built by creatures who spent 300,000 years learning to survive by belonging to groups that hated other groups.
This isn't failure. This is function. The system is working exactly as it was unconsciously designed to work.
"The shift isn't dramatic. It's more like taking off glasses you didn't know you were wearing. Or stepping out of a room you didn't realise you were in."
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. The urgency that once pulled you into reactive states starts to feel manufactured. The crises that demanded your immediate opinion reveal themselves as recurring patterns. The sides you were supposed to choose dissolve into different expressions of the same unconscious programming.
You stop taking the bait. Not because you don't care, but because you finally understand what's actually happening. You're watching a species called to the front of the class to explain maths it doesn't understand, with technology scaling the event into a frontier of new and unforeseen consequences. And adding your own unconscious reactions to the mix won't help anyone.
Instead, you become something the system can't metabolise: conscious and present. Anchored against the pull of emotional triggers that capture everyone else. A point of contagious stillness in a storm.
"Try to remember what it felt like to really trust that everything was alright. Not belief, or optimism. Just that solid, quiet knowing you had as a kid, or maybe just before adult life pulled you too far off track."
The knowing is still there, underneath all the noise. It never left. It's the part of you that recognises truth not because it can be proven, but because it resonates at a frequency deeper than thought - like a tuning fork you didn't know you were carrying.
That frequency is spreading. In conversations that go deeper than the script. In moments of unexpected clarity that cut through the confusion. In the growing number of people who refuse to be pulled into unconscious reactions, who insist on staying present while others choose sides.
Each person who returns to that knowing becomes a seed of sanity in a field of chaos. Not preaching or converting, just being real in a world that has forgotten what real looks like. Not fighting the system, but embodying something it can't co-opt or corrupt.
And ... if you are recognising something in these words; you're part of that awakening. Not because you learned something new, but because you remembered something that was always true.
The circle completes itself when we stop looking for salvation outside ourselves and realise that we are both the problem and the solution. Not your ego, not your personality, but the consciousness that was there before all the programming began.
"Start there."
One blade of grass at a time, we might light the whole field up.
From "Morning Waits: Awakening to What Is Within You"
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