What lies beneath the glossy surface?
What beasts exist where there is no light?
At what depths do we truly become afraid…when the darkness envelopes us?
Monsters we cannot see could be made up of unfathomable extremities, constructed of unknowable amounts of teeth, and have the look of a demon none who dare to dive could even imagine.
…
Is that not the journey to the center of our own soul?
Is that not the very undefined areas of the map we so eagerly hedge?
The soul itself is not just freedom and voice. Our has never been just the best of us…because the best of us exists after the battle with the worst of us.
Why do you think that it’s so hard to be ourselves? To find ourselves? Because most of us fear the worst…of ourselves.
In all of its endlessness, even the universe seems to be a vacuum that still pulls us to it without fear. It has an infinite and unknowing endlessness. There are few knowns and 1000 unknowns, yet we still purge our fears and try to understand all of what the universe is.
Is it because of the objectivity of it? Is it just easy to explore something that has no defined life? Something that shows no sense of defense or retaliation for being penetrated?
We seem to be more courageous in the discovery of the universe — even the discovery of all natural things on Earth itself — than the discovery of the most untouched parts of ourselves.
We fear the dark parts of the soul.
We truly fear ourselves; attaching more comfortably to what’s accepted and what’s expected by society. We attach obsessively to what works and what seamlessly joins us to others.
Yet, we become anxious about the disruption that manifests within us. With the truest us; when we want to speak uncommonly, act voraciously, and maybe just live beyond what’s expected.
Why?
Is it because we know what lies there? Is it because we know that the limbs, claws, and teeth exist? That we will surely be consumed by the beasts of self-made lies and corruption and suppression that keep us from honest expression and character?
Or…
Is it because we have no clue of the exponential potential that lies in the untapped areas of our souls? Is it because we fear what we never got to be or the superficiality that has grown from trauma, influence, and expectations? Is it because we don’t feel we have the ability to take on the dragons that we have fed so gluttonously…?
Truth may be the only thing that matters when we think of the size and success of authenticity and true individuality. The truth we tell ourselves and the truth we need to force ourselves to tell the world is the sword that slays the demons of the darkness we’ve created.
The unmet self, the real you is not something that you should feel ashamed of not being. Not unless you ignore and do nothing to remedy it.
To even understand the separation between what our souls want and what we actually do…and what it takes to close the gap of those two…takes years of development in the first place. We have to understand the world well enough. We have to understand ourselves well enough.
But the greatest thing that keeps us from knowing well enough is our reluctance to see beyond our own beliefs. It’s avoiding new information and seeking the bias destruction of everything that opposes our own perspective on life.
Why?
Because most humans don’t have the humility to. We are afraid of being wrong. We are afraid of the blow to our pride. But that’s the difference between people that grow and people that stay the same.
Some people are personalities and will be forever.
Some people are self-defining characters that continue to expand in every direction, not just one.
Things to think about:
– Who are we when we choose to satisfy our parents’ image of us rather than our own?
– What happens when we choose to build lives out of commonality rather than answer our deepest desires of our own self-image?
– When do we become all-consumed by niceties to save face, when we put others before ourselves, when we choose the path that’s too easy?
– How do we endure life when we’ve built a world of lies out of safety and peace and the oath to find a utopia and success that actually never exists?
The soul is defined only by how you define life.
The soul is kind of an abstract, adjacent energy to the mind. Yet the soul itself is only expanded…or contracted…by how well we take its signals and how deeply we listen to its whispers.
We can lie to ourselves, but somehow the soul always knows what is true. It creates friction between itself and our mind when we lie about who we are and what is healthy for us.
Our expression seems to be insanely important. And when we deny the truth, especially from fear, our feelings toxify, our minds sicken, and our hearts blacken.
All of it seems to be a cause of our inability to courageously seek out the deepest and sometimes darkest parts of our souls.
We’re afraid of our monsters.
We’re afraid to look beneath the glassy surface because we know there is an endlessness we may never return from.
But our fears do something we can’t believe. They lie to us.
The same fear that keeps us alive in the external world is the same fear that keeps us dead in the internal one.
Knowing that, we have to make a choice.
We have to choose ourselves.
Choose our courage.
Choose our darkness.
Because we carry the light.
And the light does what it’s always done.
It brings the day.
Truth and Love, Reader.
If you like my writing and the things I question, you might( I mean…probably) also like the questions and conversations on my podcast, The Rebel Minded Podcast. Find it with the link below on Substack, or on Spotify, Apple, and Google Podcasts.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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