disillusionment

Tonight's theme is disillusionment. It's hitting me how much and for how long I've been led astray by others. People I trusted more than myself, more than my own instincts and intuition, which have turned out to be incredibly reliable compared to the people I've put my trust in.

It started from so early on. Being misled by family, whether intentionally or as a result of their insecurities, fears, agendas, delusions, opinions and beliefs. From the beginning I could see the truths they were denying but after having my perception invalidated and rejected so many times, my natural reliance and trust in it gradually turned to doubt. I was taught to dismiss what I saw and felt and to rely instead on the directions of others, which turned out to be a huge mistake. First with my parents and then with almost every other person and institution from then on. It's only after all these years that I've come to find that they've been unreliable almost across the board. They've mostly either been deluded, lying, manipulating, overconfident, full of unexamined programmed beliefs or, frankly, just wrong.

The whole realm of words and ideas is entirely its own thing. It's this mental hologram of concepts that we all carry around and project onto reality. When we read and talk, whatever we engage with gets added to our holographic impression of reality and evaluated according to sets of programmed beliefs, values and agendas. It has no existential reality, its only function aside from practical engagement is in the realms of human imagination and discourse. The word love is not love - it's an idea loosely indicating a potential aspect of experience. The word trust is not trust. The word sky is not the sky. The word God isn't God. All these words just trigger the hologram to bring up our ideas about the word along with associated feelings that we either get off on or despise. It's all completely abritrary and meaningless when it comes to reality. It's all its own separate thing, we're just engaging with and exchanging ideas that don't necessarily match up with what we're referring to. The number of times I've heard or felt pressured to use the word "love" while my intuition was telling me that it wasn't there makes me shudder to this day. Same with God, faith, honor, loyalty, empathy, all these beautiful and utterly misappropriated words that can so easily be used to coerce. Without awareness of the relativity of these conceptual subrealities it's incredibly easy to be waylaid by words and appearances.

I was really grieving today realizing this and its impacts on my perception and choices. First it came as anger from recognizing how much I've been let down (to put it lightly) by various people and systems, and then finally the grief at how I abandoned myself and reality for so much nonsense. When all along it turned out I've had this built-in guidance system continuously humming in the background and showing me the utterly simple and raw truth of people and situations as I encountered and engaged with them - instinct and intuition.

It's all there. The necessary data is just picked up and known. The truth is almost always obvious, just not necessarily to the eyes or ears. It's knowing without knowing exactly why. It's right there. Animals operate on it instinctively and we do too initially but we've been programmed so thoroughly to doubt and override it and rely on superficial impressions, words and formalities instead, which are all incredibly unreliable. We're taught to have everything externally validated or approved by someone with an arbitrary higher social position. What's the good in that if almost everyone is either deluded, lying, manipulating, overconfident, full of unexamined programmed beliefs or wrong? Their validation is more than likely going to come from an agenda, bias, fear, or something like that than the truth.

In the end, nothing has been more consistently reliable than gut instinct. I've just chosen to dismiss it over and over. I've chosen to mistrust it and to trust others instead, either from being fooled and compelled by superficial appearances or because of my conditioning to believe that I couldn't possibly be smart enough to trust myself. All of these disempowering beliefs pushed on me by those who benefited from my lack of confidence. Not smart enough, not good enough, not knowledgable enough, not capable enough. All of it bullshit from the start, mainly so I could be used for various ends.

Even in terms of learning. The only learning that I can say with certainty has been of real value has come from direct engagement with the world. Whatever I learn from experience gets integrated seamlessly, I don't need to think about it. It just gets added to the capacity to effortlessly know and navigate more effectively. Or maybe it just brings me back to my instincts and intuition - to recognizing once again that I failed to tune into and trust myself.

I really don't know about the things I've learned from the words of others. It's entirely possible that it's just compelling for me to conceptually explore and expand my mental hologram, in part because I don't trust myself and I'm still looking for someone else to tell me what's what. Has any of it improved my life or understanding? That's debatable. Maybe in relation to certain goals at times. Otherwise it's given me a lot of ideas and things to mess around with but the amount of it that can be confirmed without a doubt to have been true and useful is unclear. Almost everything that can be read or said relies on a framework of implicit beliefs and values which can almost always be deconstucted or collapsed with a bit of effort. Examine one deeply enough and thousands of other associated ideas fall apart like a house of cards. It's why all of us can have such vastly different views on what appear to be the same things. It's why we're always arguing. It's why everything I say here can and likely would be argued with no matter how carefully I wrote it out, and why those arguments could be considered perfectly reasonable from certain perspectives.

I'm going to start trusting my own judgement more. If it turns out I'm wrong about something or someone, I'll learn far more through experiencing it myself. But I don't care who it is, I won't take the word of someone else over what my instincts and intuition are telling me anymore.