We hear it in headlines.
We hear it at family dinners.
It’s always “our people” vs “their people”.
Our values vs their values.
Our faith vs their faith.
And somehow “ours” always trumps “theirs”.
We all oppose genocide.
We all agree that indiscriminate killing of civilians is wrong.
But somehow, we only start voicing our concerns when it’s “our civilians” getting killed.
We feel it in the air we breathe.
A world of division.
And divisions within division.
And with each manufactured crisis,
we fragment and divide even more.
We fight over everything.
Over semantics, over details.
Hell, we even fight over dust.
It feels like every conflict is just sides of a coin.
Killing each other.
Forgetting their side wouldn’t even exist,
but for the side they want to “wipe from existence” …
how ironic.
You’d think it’s an accident,
but it’s actually the engine.
Irony is the engine of this system we call home.
This is the great sickness.
We are told to call it a polarity.
And it comes in twos.
Each polarity has a twin,
and they seemingly can’t be in the same room together.
We’re told they must be kept apart
to avoid a destructive fusion.
And that’s why we’re forced to pick a side.
And that’s just the first lie.
The second lie is the one that really matters.
It is that the two sides were real to begin with.
Like they weren’t born to mirror each other.
And nothing can get us going like our reflection.
That’s what polarities are.
One is born.
At that same moment.
Another is born to balance it out.
The two sides of the coin only exist together.
But the coin exists with its every detail,
with its entire being,
with and without those sides.
So do they really matter?
Isn’t the coin that holds all of our being,
with all its sides,
the one true thing that matters?
So why would I want to be one side of a coin when I can be a whole coin?
Why would I want to be a coin when I can be anything and everything?
Why would I want to connect with one side of a coin, exclusively,
alienating the rest of the coin and all what lies beyond it?!
What if we’re much more than just the coin?
These are the questions an old soul ponders upon in the dark of the night.
The only light coming from a fire the old soul feeds with those questions
and the resulting spirals.
And in the background, as you look into that fire,
your answers – the ones the soul sought - appear in the distance.
A magnificent pyramid.
It looked like a coin with endless sides.
A whole existence contained within its walls,
with a million different sides to choose from,
a million different wars to fight.
But in the stillness of the fire,
as it ruthlessly burnt every falsehood,
every polarity, only truth remained,
and it was in the ashes.
That is where the endless sides of the pyramid get blurry,
and the one true duality reveals itself,
a choice between the world inside the pyramid’s walls,
and everything else.
The choice between the coin,
and what is not the coin.
The trance of the fire breaks when you hear footsteps in the distance.
At first, one.
Then another.
Silhouettes against the distant glow of the Pyramid.
They are walking away from it.
They are walking towards the fire.
And you know exactly what they are walking away from,
because you have walked the same path.
They are walking away from the shattered maps.
From a world where grand empires that once gave a single name to a hundred tribes
are now a broken mosaic of nations,
fighting over the lines in the sand.
Where the fragments are weak, and ripe for invasion.
They are walking away from the walled gardens of faith.
From a world where great religions,
born from the same shattering truth,
now build walls around that truth,
forgetting the shared well from which they all once drank.
This is the great, historical war on wholeness.
And they, like us, have finally realized it is not happening "out there."
It is happening inside each and every one of us.
Everyone here was once a soldier.
Everyone here fought for a side of a coin,
convinced it was the whole world.
Everyone here remembers the walls.
But not even remembering will save us.
We will need to forget the walls to make space for something whole.
It’s quite a subtle duality.
You must remember the cage in order to forget it.
You forget the cage to remember the open ground that was always there.
Remembering is the path; forgetting is the liberation.
And in that quiet space,
when even the need to be a "Rememberer" falls away into the ashes,
a name is given to the journey itself: Odisea.
It is born with a humbling realization.
You look up from your own small fire,
the one that felt like the only light in the universe,
and far in the distance, you see another flicker.
And then another.
The darkness is not empty.
It is dotted with other fires -
like constellations of stars mapping something ancient -
where other souls who have walked their own path out of the Pyramid,
have found their own ground.
Odisea is not the first fire.
It will not be the last.
It is simply our fire,
lit in the hope that its light might reach another,
and remind them they are not alone.
The great work is not to build the one true fire,
but to remember we are all part of the same, scattered, yet indivisible light.
Links:
A Path to Remembrance (Book)
What is Odisea.Guru?
The Dojo
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