At first, you think it’s just you, that you don’t fit in, that there’s something wrong in you.
You get older. You realize how much it has hurt you to always blame yourself, to always look at what’s wrong with you, to never examine and wonder if perhaps it is the world that is flawed. You decide that it’s time the world started taking some responsibility too.
And, slowly at first, you start to see flaws in the foundations of the world you inhabit. First, some hypocrisy, the easiest flaw to spot because you don’t need to trust the outside world’s opinion of your world to see it. It’s purely dependent on the actual logic you believe in.
And when you notice that hypocrisy, it suddenly becomes clear it’s everywhere. Your teachers, your leaders, your friends… even your parents.
It’s a sickness. And while it angers you to see people not living up to the standards they’ve set for themselves (and for you!), you can’t help but wonder if perhaps this means something about the beliefs themselves. How can so many people fail to live up to the ideals they also enshrine? One person, maybe, but a whole world? A whole community built on lies? There must be something deeper going on.
And now you are open to other ideas, to other worlds, to other people. And you are immediately struck, almost dumbfounded, at how easily the outside world has been able to identify the very same hypocrisies you’ve seen in your world. In fact, they have whole theories to explain the world you live in, they’ve thought it through.
The ideas make a lot of sense to you. So much sense that it seems that these people have a special insight into reality itself, not just into your world. They have value. And since your world, the one you grew up in, has always disdained that outside world, you now see an even bigger crack in their paradigm of reality: they don’t see the value in the very place that knows exactly what’s wrong with them. Well, then, maybe it’s not, as you used to think, because your world is privileged, but because it is scared. Scared of facing the hypocrisy of their world. Scared of tapping into why they’re so hypocritical. Scared of realizing that perhaps their world has less value than other worlds. Scared that their whole lives have been a waste.
You won’t fall for the same trap, though. You won’t live your life like a sheep, you won’t fall into line just to make your life more convenient. Oh no. You steel yourself, you gird your loins, and you say, “I must pursue the life of truth, not the life of comfort.”
You explore deeper. You distance yourself from the world around you while examining this new world, and the more you look, the more truth you see in the new world and the more falseness you see in your own world.
You find a person in the new world to connect to. You start to visit them, virtually or physically. First you’re a tourist, a tourist fascinated by the architecture of their world, the reality in which they inhabit, and soon, suddenly, you’re thinking about immigrating.
You look back at your world, and you’ve realized that without even noticing you’ve let go of so much of its rules, so many of its trappings and restrictions. And you notice that you don’t miss them, and, rather, being disconnected from them has made you realize you can survive just fine without them, maybe thrive.
Almost imperceptibly, a moment comes. The moment where you realize you’ve already made the decision, even if you didn’t tell yourself you did. You’re already an immigrant, you just haven’t gone through the formalization process yet. And you decide, “I live here already. I feel more connected to these customs. I feel at home. This is my home. Time to make it official.”
And so you apply for your papers, and you speak to the people in charge or whoever you consider to be the access point to this new world, and you declare your intentions. You also go back home, you speak to your parents and your friends and your teachers. And you’re amazed because it wasn’t scaring, it was freeing, to tell them you are moving on. And, to your surprise, many of them encourage you. Some of them tell you they admire you. All of them saw it coming anyway.
And, of course, there are the people who’ve been hounding you all this time, trying to make you fit in, trying to get you to just accept and sit down and shut up, and now they’re apoplectic, but for the first time, you don’t care. They now live in a different world, and you can see them screaming off in the distance as your boat glides away. You’re free!
You land on the shores of your new world, and now you prepare to make this your home. You go to the store and buy their clothes. You learn their language. You learn their customs. You make friends with them, many of your new friends also immigrants because there’s something about them that feels safe. You throw yourself into this new world because you are done with the falseness of the old one, and how will you ever connect to the truth of this one without letting go of it completely?
You visit home every now and then, but you’re busy now, busy with this new world, and every morsel of truth you swallow up is like water in a desert. How much you missed! How much that you were unaware of! Now, it surrounds you, and you can’t imagine anything better. It’s glorious.
Days become months. Months become years. Soon, you hardly remember your old life, the screaming people on the shores and the hypocrites that surrounded you. This life is your life, and you’re feeling less and less defined by your old life, by the immigrant life. You are now just a citizen.
But something bothers you, something has been getting to you, and you can’t help but focus on it. No matter how much truth you find, no matter how glorious this new world seems, you can’t help but think about it because the more you ignore it, the more of a problem it seems to become.
You don’t fit in.
You’re a citizen. You found the truth here. You left the falseness of the past. You’re learning as well as you possibly can. You’re trying to take it all in, become like one of the people who grew up in this place, in this world.
But no matter how hard you try, it seems like you can’t get it right. Like there’s something wrong with you.
Maybe it’s just you. Maybe because of the way you grew up, maybe because you’re an immigrant. Maybe you’ll never fit in.
More time passes, and this subconscious argument you’ve made seems to be getting weaker and weaker. You realize how much it has hurt you to always blame yourself, to always look at what’s wrong with you, to never examine and wonder if perhaps it is the new world you’ve moved to that is flawed.
You decide that it’s time your new world started taking some responsibility too.
And, slowly at first, you start to see flaws in the foundations of the world you inhabit. First, some hypocrisy, the easiest flaw to spot because you don’t need to trust the outside world’s opinion of your world to see it. It’s purely dependent on the actual logic you believe in.
And when you notice that hypocrisy, it suddenly becomes clear it’s everywhere. Your new teachers, your new leaders, your new friends…
It’s a sickness. And while it angers you to see people not living up to the standards they’ve set for themselves (and for you!), you can’t help but wonder if perhaps this means something about the beliefs themselves. How can so many people fail to live up to the ideals they also enshrine? One person, maybe, but a whole world? A whole community built on lies? There must be something deeper going on.
And your old world comes back to you in a flash.
And now you are open to their ideas, to their world, to their people. And you are immediately struck, almost dumbfounded, at how easily your old world had been able to identify the hypocrisies you’ve seen in the new world. In fact, they had whole theories to explain the world you live in, they thought it through.
The ideas you used to dismiss suddenly make a lot of sense to you. So much sense that it seems that world you grew up in may have have had a special insight into reality itself, not just into your world. They have value. And since your new world, the one you moved to, has always disdained your old world, you now see an even bigger crack in their paradigm of reality: they don’t see the value in the very place that knows exactly what’s wrong with them. Well, then, maybe it’s not, as you used to think, because the new world is privileged, but because it is scared. Scared of facing the hypocrisy of their world. Scared of tapping into why they’re so hypocritical. Scared of realizing that perhaps their world has less value than other worlds. Scared that their whole lives have been a waste.
You won’t fall for the same trap, though. You won’t live your life like a sheep, you won’t fall into line just to make your life more convenient. Oh no. You steel yourself, you gird your loins, and you say, “I must pursue the life of truth, not the life of comfort.”
And… you try. Try to start exploring. But you can’t help but notice something. You can’t help but see something.
You are a sheep. You were always the sheep.
You thought the new world, beckoning to you, had the answers you were looking for only because it had examined what was wrong with another world. And it was true, it had unimaginable, beautiful, glorious answers and truths to the world. It was all true, it was all real.
But you had fooled yourself. You thought your job, then, was to dress the part and become one of them. You thought that because they had some answers, they had all answers.
And in the meantime, you had abandoned all of the truth from the world you came from. All of it. Even the truth that was beautiful.
And you look around. You are standing at the edge of your shore and you’re looking at the shore on the other side. In both lands, you see the same thing: hypocrites. Liars. The people who told you to just shut up and listen.
You look across to other lands, for a moment tempted to try them. But you suddenly understand. They must have hypocrites also. Liars. They must have falseness in their beliefs. They must be wrong about so much, so much. They must have have people so scared they’re living a lie that they will also try and intimidate you to fit in.
All you can see is falseness, lies, deceit. Everywhere you look, it seems that there can only be wrongness, hypocrisy. You will never fit in, you will never belong. What a world, what a sick, sick world, and it’s all one, not cut into pieces. There is no new world, there is no old world, there are not multiple worlds, there is just this one, and it is false.
You get in a boat, you unfurl its sails, you leave everyone behind, and you go float into he middle of the sea. You drop anchor when you finally lose sight of all land, of all people.
Now there is only you, there is only your voice, your truth.
You are alone.
There is nobody else to look at, nobody else who you can see falseness in, lies in.
There is only you.
But that’s not enough.
You take off the new clothes from the new world, and you throw it in the water. You shave off your hair. You take everything you’ve learned and you throw it in with the clothes. All the things that remind you of the falseness of the world.
You are naked. Now there is truly nothing but you.
You look into the water, into your reflection.
And you are shocked at what you see.
You thought you had gotten rid of it all, you had shed the lies of the world. But in front of you stands a liar. You thought there would finally be no hypocrites. And you see a person who, throughout your whole life, has always struggled to live a life where your views were in line with your beliefs. You thought there would be no more false beliefs, but you see the falsest belief at all: that you know anything.
There must be truth in you, though, there must be. And so you peer harder, harder, harder. You look at the your reflection so hard that soon all you see are the shards of refracted light that create the image of you. You look even deeper, until there is no water, there is only light.
In the light, you see truth. You see the only truth that ever mattered. The truth that you saw in the old world and the new world. Was it in you all along, you wonder? The truth that you saw, was it in the body you had inhabited, is that what the light you’re seeing is?
You break into a thousand pieces, and you spread out over the water. As you spread, you see that the light is everywhere, and it was within you and outside of you, that it wasn’t dependent on you even while it was part of you, and that it was flowing in and out of all things at all time.
And as your body spreads over the world and you dissolve into a million pieces, you see that this same light is just as bright and just as existent everywhere. It was in the old world and it was in the new world. And you were right that it was all one world, you realize, but it was united in light, not in falseness. The falseness was a distraction, you see now.
The part of you that is tears falls to the ground, from the cloud of your body, and you see how you wasted so much trying to dress in a disguise and escape and become a whole different thing entirely when no matter where you were, you were light, and so were your teachers and your parents and your friends.
The tears land in every world in every place, and you see you inhabited it all at once even though you never acknowledged it.
And as your body finally turns from dissolution into light, you understand that nothing has actually changed in you, you never dissolved, you never broke apart, you never disappeared.
You were always only light. And so was the world.
