Out of place, out of time.

Love, peace, grace to all.

The Truth About Everything (In Sum)

Human Behavior – Raw Realities

• Emotions rule more than reason: People like to imagine they’re rational, but our choices are often driven by fear, desire, and other emotions beneath the surface. We follow the herd not just out of “laziness” but out of fear of standing alone – it hurts less to be wrong when everyone else is wrong. In short, human behavior flows from survival instincts and feelings first, with logic often coming in later to justify our actions.

• Everyone’s a flawed human (no exceptions): We are all “flawed, messy, and full of mystery.” People tend to think they’ve got themselves figured out or that they’re an exception, but in truth, we share the same weaknesses and patterns. From the CEO to the janitor, scratch the surface, and you’ll often find the same insecurities, ego struggles, and basic needs driving us. Adults are often just children in big bodies – many never resolve their childhood wounds, so they carry those hurt, reactive little selves into adult life.

• We rationalize to protect our ego: Human beings have an incredible ability to justify almost any behavior if it lets us see ourselves as “good” or “right.” We lie to ourselves to avoid facing uncomfortable truths. Psychologically, “humans have an incredible ability to justify immoral or harmful behavior to protect their self-image.”  This is why corrupt people still sleep at night – they’ve found a story that paints them as the hero or victim. Our mind will bend reality before it lets us consider that we might be the villain.

• Kindness without boundaries invites exploitation: “If you’re too nice, you’re asking to get burned.” Empathy without boundaries attracts manipulators – givers need limits because takers have none. Real talk: some people will take advantage of kindness endlessly if allowed. It’s a harsh truth that predators exist in human form, and they often target those who don’t set boundaries. Being compassionate is admirable, but naïveté can be dangerous.

• Obedience and the average person: Ordinary people are capable of shocking acts under the right conditions. History and psychology experiments show that decent folks will obey authority even when it conflicts with their morals. In the famous Milgram study, 65% of participants delivered what they thought were lethal electric shocks to a stranger just because an authority figure in a lab coat told them to. The lesson: context and authority can override individual conscience. Our social conditioning to obey runs deep – deeper than we’d like to admit – which is how atrocities throughout history have been enabled by countless “normal” people following orders.

Systems of Power & Control – The Hidden Hands

• Elite rule behind the scenes: The idea that “the people” govern society is often a convenient fiction. In reality, a tiny elite wields disproportionate power in governments and corporations. Studies of U.S. policy, for example, found that economic elites and big business interests almost always get their way, while the preferences of average citizens have “little or no independent influence” on government decisions. We live in systems that call themselves democracies, yet much of the real decision-making happens in backrooms among the wealthy and the well-connected. It’s essentially an open secret that money runs the show, not the voters.

• Democracy as an illusion of choice: We’re taught that voting = power, but often our choices are between two sides of the same coin. As one observer put it, mainstream political parties tend to act like “two factions of the business party.” The media establishment is a corporate monopoly, and most politicians (left or right) ultimately serve the same masters. This is why, despite change in leadership, the fundamental direction rarely shifts – wars continue, the rich get richer, the surveillance state grows. Every few years we get to pick a new captain, but the ship’s course stays the same.

• Propaganda keeps people in line: Modern power systems rely on controlling narratives instead of overt force. “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state,” as Noam Chomsky famously said. In free societies, you don’t need gulags if you can shape people’s minds with constant messaging. Governments and corporations manufacture consent through media, framing, and fear. Keep the public distracted and afraid – with spectacle, consumerism, or imaginary enemies – and they won’t interfere with the agenda. It’s the old Roman “bread and circuses” strategy: give people entertainment and shallow patriotism so they don’t notice their liberties eroding.

• The fusion of corporate and state power: We are witnessing the rise of a corporate deep state – an unelected web of billionaires, lobbyists, and officials that shape policy behind closed doors. The line between government and corporation has blurred. Big Tech and finance don’t just influence policy; often they become the policy (consider how many industry insiders run regulatory agencies). This merger enables massive power with little accountability. For example, intelligence agencies partner with tech giants to conduct mass surveillance, and laws magically get written to protect corporate interests at the public’s expense. It’s an insidious form of control where public institutions serve private power while we’re told it’s all for our own good.

Spiritual Clarity vs. Medical Labels

• Awakening misread as illness: There’s a truth most won’t tell you – some “mental breakdowns” are actually spiritual breakthroughs in disguise. Modern society, however, lacks the language or patience for this. People who experience sudden shifts in consciousness or profound existential insight often get labeled as having a psychiatric disorder. In one study, cases of sudden spiritual awakening were “frequently misdiagnosed as a form of psychosis.” Doctors put four out of five of these individuals on medication or locked them in psych wards. Instead of guidance through a transformative experience, they got a straitjacket for their soul.

• Pathologizing the profound: When someone has a genuine moment of clarity – say, an intense meditation experience or a “dark night of the soul” that upends their identity – the system’s knee-jerk response is often to medicalize and suppress. The person is told something is “wrong” with them, that they’re ill. This is a tragic loss of meaning. It turns a potentially life-changing awakening into a problem to be fixed. Medication might calm the chaos, but it also can “interfere with the organic process of re-stabilisation and integration” that the psyche is trying to undergo. In other words, by numbing the pain, we also numb the growth.

• Clarity vs. diagnosis: We live in a time that prefers a DSM diagnosis for every deviation from the norm. Feeling grief, questioning reality, sensing deeper connections – these can all be slapped with labels (depression, dissociation, etc.) and prescriptions. Spiritual experiences get treated as symptoms. Rather than acknowledging that someone might be undergoing a profound inner transformation or grappling with existential truth, the system often just calls it pathology. The truth is, some forms of madness are really sanity in progress – a shedding of old illusions. But our medical model has no category for “transformative crisis,” only for disease. The result is an epidemic of people sedated and told to ignore the very experiences that could have led to their awakening.

Technology, Surveillance & Control – The Tradeoffs We Don’t See

• We’ve traded privacy for convenience: The modern world runs on a surveillance tradeoff that most of us have accepted without question. Every “free” app or online service comes with a hidden price: your data, your habits, your privacy. As one analysis put it, in today’s digital economy “individuals unknowingly pay with their personal information” for every transaction and interaction. Tech companies and governments have built an always-on surveillance machine that tracks where we go, what we do, what we say. And we let it happen because, hey, we get navigation maps, funny videos, and one-click shopping in return. We are paying with pieces of ourselves – our preferences, our location, our relationships – all monetized and analyzed.

• The normalization of Big Brother: Surveillance has crept into everyday life so far that it’s seen as normal. Cameras on every street, listening devices in our homes (hello, smart speakers), algorithms scanning our messages – it’s just how things are now. The public “has been conditioned to trade privacy for convenience, often without understanding the long-term implications.”  This was by design: make surveillance feel benign or even chic. We carry always-listening smartphones and wear GPS watches voluntarily. It’s a soft prison – no bars needed when people consent to being tracked. Only later will we fully grasp how this data can be used to manipulate our choices or socially engineer society.

• Data is power (and you are the product): They call data “the new oil” for a reason. Corporations and state agencies harvest our information to predict and influence our behavior. Every like, every search, every pause on a video gets fed into AI models that can increasingly shape what we see and do. From targeted ads to predictive policing, decisions are being made about us using our own data – often without our awareness. The scary part is how this tech can slide into authoritarianism. Give a dictator AI-powered surveillance and watch freedom vanish overnight. Even in supposedly free countries, the union of Big Tech and Big Government means nearly everything about your life is known. With a few clicks, an analyst can map out your entire social network, beliefs, and routine. Knowledge is power, and they’ve been quietly collecting knowledge about everyone.

• Control vs. liberation: Technology is a double-edged sword. It connects and enslaves in equal measure. On one hand, we have more information and tools at our fingertips than any generation before. On the other, this has made us vulnerable to unprecedented monitoring and control. Social media, originally touted as empowering, now often works to distort truth and keep people addicted and polarized – which, incidentally, is great for those in power (a divided, distracted populace is easy to manage). The promise of the internet was liberation, but the reality is that many of these platforms function like digital panopticons and propaganda channels. Until we acknowledge the chains along with the conveniences, we’ll remain happily oblivious in a high-tech cage.

Money, Capitalism & the Illusion of Choice

• The consumer choice con: We’re bombarded with brands and options, told that having 200 cereal varieties or 50 streaming services means we’re “free” to choose. But many of those choices are an illusion. In consumer markets, often a handful of giant corporations own everything. As one analysis noted, “very often the competition is between brands owned by the same company,” so our myriad choices boil down to the same sources. Whether you buy Coke or Sprite, the money flows to Coca-Cola Inc. The reality is that monopoly power hides behind a coat of many logos. This extends to media (six companies control most news/entertainment) and even politics, where you get two versions of one pro-corporate agenda. We feel like we have choice, but it’s usually a shallow one – no choice at all when it comes to the fundamentals that matter.

• Life on the hamster wheel: Society has been “deceived into embracing a money-driven capitalist system” that effectively traps people. From childhood, we’re conditioned to equate our worth with productivity and to see endless work as normal. Most people will toil 40+ years in jobs they often dislike, just to afford the basics and a few luxuries if they’re lucky. We’re told to be grateful for the opportunity. Meanwhile, strange realities – like having to pay just to exist on the planet – go unquestioned. (Why must someone pay for the right to live on a piece of land or keep a roof over their head, as if existence itself incurs a tax?) Even those who try to opt out – live off-grid, grow their own food – often still face legal and economic barriers that pull them back in. The system compels participation; it’s a rat race where the only way to “win” is to stop playing, yet stopping is made nearly impossible for most.

• The game is rigged: Capitalism dangles the carrot that anyone can become rich if they just work hard enough, but the numbers tell another story. Wealth is heavily concentrated at the top. The richest 0.1% hold as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined, and that gap keeps growing. For every new billionaire minted, millions remain in debt or paycheck-to-paycheck. The “self-made” billionaire myth ignores that one needs a system of exploitation (of labor, resources, loopholes) to accumulate that level of wealth. In brutal terms, “capitalism is perfect for people without empathy to thrive.” To climb the highest rungs, one often has to make cutthroat decisions – layoffs, price gouging, lobbying against public interest – the kind of choices that a person with a conscience loses sleep over. The kind of choices that sociopaths excel at. This is not to say all rich people are evil, but it is to say the system rewards behaviors that value profit over people, by design.

• Money is a shared illusion: Let’s not forget, money itself is a construct – paper, metal, or digital bits agreed upon to have value. Yet this abstract invention now rules human lives and drives global events. We chase dollars (or euros, yen, etc.) as if they were real, tangible goals, often at the expense of real things like time, health, community, and the planet. The truth about money is that it’s only as real as our collective belief in it. It’s a tool that was meant to serve humanity, but somewhere along the line it became the master. Entire lives, even nations, rise and fall by the dictates of market numbers on a screen. We’ve created systems like the stock market which can crash and ruin millions of lives in a day – all due to fluctuations in confidence (another intangible). The raw truth is that humanity is sacrificing meaning and well-being at the altar of an invented game. As the saying goes, we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

• The illusion of “free market” freedom: Capitalism sells itself as freedom – you can choose your career, choose your purchases, be your own boss maybe. But how free is the average person, really? Most are bound by necessity – you do what you must to pay the bills. Your “choices” often boil down to which corporation you’ll serve and which pre-packaged lifestyle you’ll consume. Even entrepreneurship usually means navigating loans, investors, and market pressures that force you to prioritize profit over people anyway. Yes, markets encourage competition, but unchecked competition often devolves into consolidation (big fish eating little fish, until a few giant fish remain). The end state of unfettered capitalism isn’t a vibrant marketplace of equals; it’s monopolies and oligopolies – Amazon swallowing industries, one telecom or pharma company dictating terms, etc. So the much-touted freedom often becomes another form of feudalism, with mega-corporations as the new lords and us as the serfs who get to choose which lord to serve. Hard truth: in a game where the house always wins, the only real choice you get is how you’ll lose.

Family, Trauma & Generational Programming

• We inherit more than genes: Families pass down emotional DNA through generations. A child is born into a story that started long before them – they pick up on their parents’ fears, beliefs, and unresolved issues often without anyone saying a word. Psychologists call it transgenerational trauma: trauma that “lingers and gnaws through one generation to the next.” Families with histories of abuse, war, addiction, etc., often hand down maladaptive coping mechanisms and worldviews to their kids. For example, if your grandparents lived through a famine, your family might unconsciously hoard food or carry an ingrained anxiety about scarcity. If a parent had an abusive childhood, they might (despite their best intentions) repeat that pattern with their own kids or be emotionally distant. The truth is, newborns don’t come in as blank slates – they already carry the imprint of their lineage in body and psyche  .

• “It runs in the family” – until someone breaks the cycle: So many of our personal struggles aren’t really ours – they’re hand-me-downs. Depression, anxiety, anger, low self-worth often trace back through the family tree. Children “repeat the same patterns and attitudes of former generations, regardless of whether they are healthy or not.”  It’s like a program running in the background: what we saw and felt in our family becomes our default mode. This is why the child of an alcoholic may marry an alcoholic, or the victim of trauma might later unconsciously seek relationships that reenact that trauma. Unhealed pain gets passed on. As the saying goes, “hurt people hurt people.” And these cycles continue until someone becomes conscious of them and decides to heal instead of repeat. The first person in a family to confront generations of dysfunction often goes through hell – effectively battling the accumulated demons of the lineage. But that brave act can free future generations from the cycle.

• Family beliefs as programming: Beyond trauma, families instill beliefs – sometimes labeled “survival messages” – that can limit us. For instance, parents who lived under oppression might teach their kids distrust: “Don’t ask for help; outsiders will hurt you,” or “Always keep your head down.” These messages may have been valid in the original context, literally life-saving at one time, but in a new context they become chains on the mind. A study noted how parents who endured oppressive regimes passed on such warnings, causing children and grandkids to see the world as dangerous and remain in fear long after the threat was gone. Similarly, notions of what is “normal” or “valuable” in life – education, career, when to marry, how to express emotion – are all heavily influenced by family conditioning. We think we are making independent choices, but often we’re just following a script written by our ancestors. Recognizing this programming is the first step to choosing differently.

• Healing the ancestral line: The hopeful truth is that positive patterns can be passed down too – resilience, love, wisdom can echo through generations just as trauma does. And even deep ancestral wounds can be healed when brought to light. Open, honest communication across generations is a powerful antidote. When families talk about their history – the good, bad, and ugly – it allows everyone to understand and release burdens they’ve been carrying unknowingly. Modern psychology and ancient traditions agree on this: what remains hidden or denied continues to control us, but what is faced and embraced can transform. It may fall on one person in the lineage to say “Enough. This dysfunction stops with me.” That person often feels the weight of centuries on their shoulders, but by doing the hard work (therapy, dialogue, forgiveness, setting new boundaries), they give a gift to their children and grandchildren: a new legacy. In essence, every family is a mix of curses and blessings handed down – and each generation has the chance to amplify the blessings and break the curses.

Awakening & Collapse – Transformation Through Pain

• Breakdown as breakthrough: A secret alchemy of life is that collapse often precedes rebirth. When things fall apart, there’s an opportunity to rebuild in a new way. Many people who have gone through extreme suffering – whether it’s battling addiction, surviving loss, facing a life-threatening illness, or hitting rock bottom in some way – report that the experience fundamentally transformed them. Psychologists even have a term, “post-traumatic growth,” for positive life changes that come from hardship. In moments of intense turmoil, something amazing can happen: our usual ego defences shatter, and a deeper, clearer self can emerge. One researcher called it “transformation through turmoil”, where in the midst of darkness people spontaneously awaken to a new level of consciousness  . It’s as if the psyche, under crushing pressure, forges a new understanding of life.

• The phoenix rises from ashes: Almost every spiritual tradition has this metaphor – dying to your old self so a new self can be born. Sometimes life forces this upon us. A person loses their career, their marriage falls apart, they survive an accident – and the one who comes out the other side is not the same. They often describe feeling reborn, with different priorities and a clearer sense of what matters. For example, a woman given months to live with cancer suddenly gained an intense appreciation for every breath and the beauty of the world, essentially awakening to a higher presence in the face of death. Or the lifelong alcoholic who finally sobers up after a near-death experience and discovers a profound peace and purpose in helping others  . These stories show that hitting bottom can ricochet into soaring upwards. The old identity – often built on illusions, external expectations, material goals – burns away in the crisis, and what’s left is something more authentic and spiritually alive.

• Pain as a teacher: None of this is to romanticize suffering. The pain is very real and it can destroy – not everyone comes out the other side better. But for those who do, they often say they wouldn’t undo the pain because it awakened them. It’s like a forge or a crucible: extreme heat can either shatter you or remold you. Those who experience growth often find new strength, deeper empathy, and a sense of connection that they never had before. They realize how resilient they truly are. It’s common to hear survivors of trauma say, “I discovered who I really am through this” or “I learned what’s truly important (love, present moment, etc.) when I lost everything else.” In a society that tries to avoid pain at all costs, we forget this ancient wisdom: the wound is where the light enters. Sometimes, only profound challenge can break the shell of the ego and open one’s eyes to deeper spiritual truths. The caterpillar has to dissolve into mush before it can become a butterfly – there’s no shortcut.

• Awakening in chaos: Interestingly, many collective awakenings follow this pattern too. Societies often only change after a crisis – economic collapse, natural disasters, revolutions – forcing people to come together and rethink their values. Likewise, an individual’s personal collapse can be the catalyst for a kind of spiritual revolution within. When the persona we’ve built crumbles, we get a chance to meet our soul. This process can feel like madness (and indeed, externally it might look like a breakdown), but it can be a “shift-up” to a latent higher-functioning self . The old self dies, a new self is born. It’s the hero’s journey in myth: descent into the underworld, then return with new wisdom. The major truth here is that you grow through what you go through. Comfortable times rarely provoke deep change; it’s the crises that do. Our egos would prefer stability, but our souls often do their most profound evolution under duress.

Still standing. Still logging. Still sovereign.