Five Modern Myths That Have Brainwashed Westerners Into Dumping Their Potential

Defuse the programming, ASAP

The values we take for granted are about to come crashing down, whether we’re ready for it or not.

You can catch glimpses already. Wars & political populism causing wokism to crumble. AI replacing service workers. And climate disaster right around this century’s corner.

The future will not be anything like today’s status quo. And when the rapid changes intensify, a blaring truth will make itself obvious.

Much of what we consider ‘human nature’ is just cultural conditioning.

Whether the future feels like an uncomfortable transition or an exciting ascension depends entirely on de-programming your Western cultural shackles, while you have the leisure to do so.

‘Evolution stops at humanity.’

I majored in evolutionary biology in university. There wasn’t a word about natural selection for city-dwelling humans.

Because we create our environments, rather than nature’s environments creating us.

But ignoring human evolution has a scary caveat: the assumption that we’ve got total control of our own destinies. So there’s nothing more to be done; we’ve won the game of earth-based life forms.

But in the Dharma traditions of Asia, a central philosophy is the existence of an evolutionary stage beyond a human being’s consciousness.

And it certainly doesn’t come about by being the reproductively fittest, or best at surviving!

Osho & Sri Aurobindo both famously remarked that once a soul “evolves” through multiple reincarnations to reach the human existence, its evolution is no longer an external process.

It’s an internal one.

This means we’re responsible for our destinies not at the species level, but our individual mindstream that gets reincarnated.

We carry all our habit-energy forward, into every body-mind that is reborn, and there is a state of being that is beyond this.

Pursuing and attaining this higher evolution is the very goal of a human’s life on Earth. Higher consciousness is more ‘real’ than anything else. And it’s our responsibility to realize it!

I can’t even describe what a difference this acknowledgment made in my life.

I learned to see all my actions, speech, and thoughts within the context of increasing my well-being, lifetime to lifetime. Even the drudgery of materialism has its purpose: acting as a reminder of the limitations of worldly pursuits.

‘Humans are inherently selfish & competitive.’

At the height of European colonialism, thinkers like John Locke decided to come up with theories about us being savage barbarians needing laws & rules just to exist harmoniously.

But the Tragedy of the Commons isn’t an empirical experiment. It’s just a subjective, culturally burdened fantasy mislabeled as a thought experiment.

In truth, humans are inherently altruistic and compassionate because those qualities are what allowed us to evolve intelligence in the first place.

The sooner we realize we’ve all got more inclination toward cooperation than competition is the day we’ll actually be able to collaborate our way out of the mess the planet is in.

The day I internalized this message, I realized that people are inherently precious.

They may suffer from ignorance that clouds this, but that doesn’t erase their potential for purity. It just blocks them from happiness, like a young child that has no idea what’s truly good for themself!

‘Tradition is Against Progress.’

What happens when we proclaim god is dead simply due to shortcomings of Abrahamic-style religion, and we decide to get addicted to materialism instead?

Countries like America happen.

Whether it’s the rebellion against the British aristocracy that founded the country in the first place or the morbid architecture that dots the landscape, American history is one of constant rejection of ‘tradition.’

But what if America is in a collective cultural psychosis, rather than actually being a world leader?

You see, aesthetics are supposed to be engineered according to tried and tested guidelines, not “innovated” into buildings that make people depressed.

Empirical testability & replicability is the hallmark of tradition.

We’re used to science and industry being the forerunners of reliability, but we forget that humanity wasn’t in a dark age prior to the scientific renaissance. Europe was.

For millennia before that, knowledge traditions were welded together to produce interdisciplinary innovation, such as health sciences and spirituality (Ayurveda and Yoga in India).

They weren’t merely the primitive cave-men wall-paintings we stereotype ancient knowledge to be.

There is much they knew which we’re too insensitive & uncultured to even appreciate, let alone fully comprehend and make use of!

The moment that I realized ancient knowledge systems were just as robust & valid as modern Western paradigms, I gained a huge treasure.

I was able to think outside the box.

‘Your career matters.’

The most influential people I’ve ever met were spiritual teachers who’d de-prioritized everything other than the cultivation of their minds. But their lives weren’t a mess.

And they weren’t yogis wandering the mountains, having given up on society. They were living in the middle of it.

Somehow, their careers just happened to them. They found a way to make ends meet with their talents, and balance it with their contemplative exploration.

We’ve been conditioned to think that however we sell our labor is the prime marker of who we are.

In any halfway sane society, our identities would rest upon the qualities of our character and the compassion of our actions. Not our servitude toward the ever-expansive economic machine.

What matters is our actions of body, the quality of our words toward others, and the level of consciousness of our thoughts.

Careers are simply how this fits into the wider world, beneficially or not.

‘Nuclear families are how it should be.’

I grew up in a disenchanted suburb.

Every single building was the same. It was a constant reminder: this is how a human lives, if you don’t fit in then there’s something wrong with you.

But it turns out that stuffing elders into retirement/death homes and coupling up for the sake of coupling up is not the way the enlightened ones would want the world to operate.

Many people have read the incredibly uplifting Autobiography of a Yogi.

But few know how the author, Yogananda, was an emphatic advocate for new styles of communes & intentional communities, centered around the development of human consciousness.

I do not intend to inherit a dying world that gasped its last breath because humans were too individualistically siloed to collaborate on creating a more sustainable world.

Nor do I believe that online screen-communication can solve even an iota of the problem.

We need to build a world worth bringing children into, not settling into coupledom in order to feel better about ourselves. And the first step is normalizing intentional communities & smarter urban planning, not gasping & screaming at the thought of this turning us into ‘hippies.’

Don’t ever let your subconscious forget it.

• You’re responsible for your own mind’s evolution. It comes with the job of being human.
• People inherently want to get along. Align with that.
• Look to what’s worked in the past to design the future.
• You are your karma, not your career.
• It’s dehumanizing to “settle down” into a life-pattern which is the literal cause of ecological decay.

Uncomfortable paradigm shifts are bound to arise as the decades of this century progress.

It’s up to you if you want to be ahead of the curve or at the back of the herd!