From a Voice Recorder – February 1st, 2013.
Toronto. A man walks. Through the winding ravines, across wide city sidewalks, past towers of glass and alleys of graffiti. His steps echo through the layers of time. He carries no map, only a small voice recorder in his coat pocket, whispering his thoughts into it like confessions to an unseen friend.
He’s 40 years old, lived enough to see the illusions behind the surface. Now, the city looks different – like the reverse side of a mirror. Everything familiar turned strange, upside down. Yet no one seems to notice. People rush past him on Queen Street, Yonge and Bloor Street, laughing, scrolling, buying, performing.
And he wonders: Was it always like this, or did something shift when we weren’t looking?
As he walks, fragments return. Old stories. Faded dreams. A boy watching the world from behind curtains. A teenager with fire in his chest and nowhere to place it. A man who once tried to fit in, then slowly began to unravel the costume.
Each corner he turns feels like a portal. Each park bench holds a shadow of someone he used to be. And still, he walks – Not searching for answers, but listening for something ancient hiding in the traffic, in the wind through the trees, in the glint of sunlight off broken glass.
In this world, evil no longer hides. It wears suits and titles, speaks from podiums and screens, offering solutions while poisoning the well. It doesn’t sneak through shadows – it hosts the party. It signs laws, owns the media, directs the narrative. And most don’t just accept it – they cheer it on.
But cracks are forming in the veil. Some are waking up. They feel the wrongness in their bones. They want to resist, to rebuild, to rise and make things right. But what if this world isn’t broken by mistake? What if it’s built this way on purpose?
What if it’s not a malfunction – but a furnace?
A place where souls are tested, not comforted. A realm where the curriculum is pain, and the diploma is self-realization. This is not paradise – it is the forge.
Here, if you want to rise by truth, you must first fall. And not just stumble – plummet. Hit the floor of your illusions so hard that something in you shatters. Status? Gone. Approval? Gone. Everything you thought you needed to be someone… burns.
You become a ghost in your own life. The phone stops ringing. Invitations disappear. Family doesn’t understand. Friends retreat. Even your own mind turns on you for a time.
But in that void – where nobody claps, nobody calls, and no one comes to save you – you meet your Self.
Not the version others liked. Not the mask you wore. The original signal underneath it all.
And in that quiet moment, something paradoxical blooms:
You, the nobody… remember you are everybody.
Each struggle you lived through, someone else is living now.
Each truth you found in the darkness, someone else is still searching for.
You didn’t just suffer for yourself – you walked through the fire so you could one day light the way.
The Reality of Separation
From birth, we’re trained to disconnect. Not in obvious ways – no one says, “Forget who you are” – but through subtle repetition. We learn to override our inner compass. To ignore the signals: the tightness in the gut, the spark in the heart, the pull in the chest. We are taught to second-guess the vibration, doubt the energy, silence the knowing.
First, we look outward to our parents – mirroring their fears, absorbing their unhealed wounds like a sponge. Then to teachers, friends, managers, politicians – each one projecting their own fragmented blueprint onto us. We are told to be good, to be kind, to think of others, to put ourselves in their shoes… but no one ever teaches us how to be ourselves. No one models how to stay inside the body. No one shows us how to live from centre.
We learn to orbit our own being – pulled into future, past, deadlines, expectations, survival tasks. We’re praised for abandoning presence, for solving problems while disconnected from soul. We are taught how to ‘function,’ but not how to feel.
So kindness becomes a performance, not a truth. A strategy for acceptance. A costume to stay safe. But without anchoring in the body, even the purest intention gets distorted. Our energy leaks. Our gifts dilute. Our work becomes mechanical, and our love, conditional.
And this reaches its most painful contradiction in the places where presence matters most – when we’re parenting, teaching, healing. How can a healer truly heal while dissociated from their own body? How can a teacher truly teach when they’ve forgotten how to be? How can a parent offer stability when they’ve never been shown containment themselves?
When we live from our centre, even the smallest act is sacred. A word carries real energy. Kindness vibrates. Touch heals. Attention transforms. But when we live from the outside in, we become actors on a stage – mouthing lines of compassion while our bodies remain empty.
And without that inner anchor – without the honest connection to Self – our acts of service become sacrifices. We begin absorbing the suffering of others instead of transmuting it. We take on the pain of the world like it’s our responsibility to carry it, rather than raise its frequency by being in tune.
We lose resonance. We dim to fit in. We call it growing up, but it’s really shrinking down.
In that space of disconnection, fear puts on the mask of confidence. Certainty becomes noise. Silence is avoided because it reveals too much. Status replaces spirit. And the deeper truth – the radiant, living intelligence within – gets buried beneath layers of roles, obligations, and societal scripts.
But the soul does not forget.
It waits patiently beneath the noise, beneath the guilt, beneath the pressure to conform… waiting for that one breath, that one crack in the armour, where the light can get back in.
Did anyone ever stop to ask:
Why don’t we teach our children that we are One?
That every human being, every tree, every animal, every drop of water, every breath of wind is part of the same living system?
That separation is an illusion – an echo of the fractured mind, not the truth of the soul.
We are like atoms within a single organism,
like cells in the great body of Earth,
like notes in a grand cosmic orchestra,
each one carrying a unique tone, yet all resonating together in harmony.
But instead, we teach competition. We teach division.
We name, we label, we draw lines in the sand and build fences in the mind.
We forget that the breath of the forest is the breath in our lungs.
That the suffering of one being ripples through the whole field.
That when we harm the Earth, we are harming our own body.
To remember this is to come home.
To live from this truth is to awaken.
To teach it is to heal the future.
Before You Go
What comes next in this journey might surprise you. The stories you’re about to read in the Know Thyself series may not end the way you expect. Some twist. Some sting. Some seem to fall apart. But each is a mirror. A choice-point. A wake-up call.
You might ask: Is this really how we want to live?
To numb the body, ignore the signals, betray the truth of who we are –
Or to rise, to remember, to burn brighter, to become?
Every tale is a test. Every twist is a teacher.
Degradation or evolution. Sleepwalking or awakening.
What do you choose?
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