JOURNAL · Musings On 21st Century Awakening

7min read

Say the word spirituality, and most people think of practices or aesthetics: incense, meditation, robes, beliefs, or symbols. We’ve come to associate it with a kind of identity or something you adopt or opt into, like a philosophy or worldview. But before it was a category, spirituality was a function of being. It simply pointed us back to what is true beneath the human condition.

Modern thought inherited a split. Since the Enlightenment, the way humans sought truth shifted— from belief-based authority to logic-based authority. In an effort to organize and make sense of reality, we began increasingly separating our world by classifying everything with labels and definitions. In the process we turned that same lens onto ourselves. Biology names the body. Psychology maps the mind. Sociology prescribes behavior. Chemistry reveals the building blocks. We believe these frameworks because we have been taught that truth and knowing are things to be received rather than remembered. Over time, this becomes the pattern we live inside. We call it the human condition. But it is not our nature. Awakening begins when you recognize the difference between the two.

Each of us are born here without belief, and our conditioning happens so slowly and pervasively that few ever question it. We are taught what the world is, who we are within it, and how we are expected to move through it before we give those labels permission to become our forever truths. The definitions and concepts we inherit feel natural because they arrive before we are able to consciously evaluate them. In a world where so much has already been explained for us, spiritual truth seems optional as if knowing who we are beneath man-made stories is a matter of privilege or preference. Worse, it is treated as unknowable altogether, like a realm exclusive to dreamers or the naive. We become a species convinced it is optional to remember ourselves before the world tells us who we are.

One of the greatest misconceptions about the spiritual path is in thinking it is a form of belief. In practice, spirituality is the process of deconstructing belief in order to return us to what exists beneath the layers of language and societal conditioning. Call it energy, consciousness, awareness, spirit, soul, God… it is our nature. And it does not require belief to exist. No flower doubts its bloom. No bird strategizes its song. But unlike other forms of nature, humans forget that we are nature and not just existing within it. It is not optional to have a nature, nor is it optional to be moved by it, because you are it. You breathe because you are built to. Your lungs fill before you decide to let them. The same force that draws the tide moves your blood. It opens your ribs, widens your iris, leans your body toward the light, and turns your life toward meaning. These truths exist outside of human belief or opinion, and that is how we know they are absolute.

Similarly, whether you call a flower a rose or a person by their name, there is still an essential life behind the label. Names do not create life. Language does not create being. It only attempts to describe what already exists. Somewhere along the way, we began to believe in the label more than the life itself. Titles over wisdom… reputations over inner knowing… conditioning for nature. We mistook what could be named for what was real. Unless we learn to discern what is true from what is learned, we risk living individual and collective lives constructed around myths that were never ours to believe. To self-actualize in this life, we must venture down the path of conscious remembrance.

Some people feel the pull toward self-knowing early, felt as a resistance to conditioned belief and a struggle to fit into systems designed for repetition rather than growth. It is a sign that life is still moving within you, as nature cannot stagnate and thrive. It grows, or it declines. When we find ourselves unable to grow within the environments we have inherited, it is nature signaling that something essential must shift. Those in our history who refused to abandon inner truth have often been marked as heretical (witches, mystics, seers, gypsies), carrying the cost of remembering what the world tries to forget. Their lives preserved something essential by refusing to let external systems define the boundaries of reality. Their existence reminds us that truth can be forgotten, overwritten, or even punished, but not destroyed. It endures wherever life continues to move authentically through a being.

Time, in that way, is our participation in the lived experience of evolution. Some are here to hold the known; others are here to become the bridge into what has not yet been named. Awakening to the illusion means redefining spirituality from an external search for meaning to the inward return to what cannot be given to you by any system or tradition. True spirituality begins the moment you realize that truth is something you remember. From that remembrance, your life can grow in a direction that no system can contain.