I watched all of these movies to try to figure out the answer to something that most of us can feel intuitively even if we can't explain exactly why it is that there seems to be a pattern that keeps showing up again and again in some of the most popular films. Maybe you've noticed it too. In movies like the Matrix, Wall-E, The Shawshank Redemption, and even in shows like Severance, and Black Mirror.
They seem very different on the surface. And yet, if you look a little deeper, they share almost exactly the same meaning. A symbolic message that's hiding in plain sight.
Here's what we find. First, we're shown a world that turns out to be deeply flawed. In many cases, it's revealed to be a kind of prison.
Then we see the creator of that world who's trying to control and manipulate everyone inside of it. And then we find a redeemer figure who shows everyone how to break free. This is the basic story arc in all these films.
Now, you might look at this and say, "Isn't that just the hero's journey? " Well, there are some elements of that for sure, but it's actually a lot deeper than that because there's a very specific symbolism going on. And what it's hinting at is the idea that there are dark forces in this world that are trying to keep us distracted and confused.
They're leading us onto paths that are harmful not just to the mind, but to the soul. And whether we know it or not, they're trying to get us to give up the very things that make us who we are: our freedom, autonomy, consciousness. It goes back to a philosophy known as Gnosticism: a very old set of ideas that's often misunderstood and it's been maligned throughout history.
And even today, there's no shortage of people attacking it without really understanding what it is. But I think one of the reasons Gnosticism has endured for so long and why it continues to be the subject of so much discussion and debate is that at its core, it's really a story. It's a myth that mirrors a lot of the things we still deal with today.
And like any story, it answers three basic questions: Where did we come from? What are we doing here? And where are we going?
The psychologist Carl Jung saw within these ideas a hidden process for psychological change that any of us can use to break free from our conditioning. And it's how we grow into who we were really meant to become. So today we're going to look at what these teachings are.
We'll look at why these ideas have found their way into so many films and TV shows. And we'll look at what it all means for you. Because once you understand these symbols and once you see these patterns, you'll never unsee them again.
Let me show you what I mean. The first pattern we find in these films is the idea of a paradise. A world that was once perfect in every way.
But the closer we look, the more we find that things aren't really what they seem. In Free Guy, the hero lives in an impossibly bright and colorful place filled with excitement and stimulation. "My name is Guy and I live in paradise," he says.
But the world he's living in is completely fake. It's a computer game, a digital illusion that's been programmed by a powerful corporation to make huge amounts of money. In the Truman Show, the hero lives in a beautiful suburb of a place called Sea Haven, where everyone is wholesome and pleasant.
There's no crime, no conflict, and nothing ever changes. But it's a false paradise because the town of Sea Haven is actually a gigantic TV studio. He has no idea that his whole life is being filmed and broadcast to the world as a television show.
Everybody in town is an actor except him. Even his wife, his mother, and his best friend are all actors. His whole life is a lie.
And of course, the Matrix is probably the clearest example of the fallen paradise. Agent Smith sums it up when he says,:"Just look at it. Billions of people living out their lives.
Oblivious. The first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered. Everyone was happy.
But it was a disaster. No one would accept the program. " So, what does it mean that so many of these movies tell the same story of a seemingly perfect world that is revealed to be broken and corrupt?
Well, they're all different versions of the same story. The original paradise in the Garden of Eden. It's here that God tells Adam and Eve that they can eat anything they want except the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, warning them that if they do eat it, then on that day they will surely die.
But one day, an evil serpent tricks Eve into eating it. She shares some of the fruit with Adam. And for this, God makes them leave the garden forever.
They can never come back. And the rest of their lives are painful and hard. Traditionally, the lesson of the story is that disobeying God is what led to the fall of humanity.
It's what introduced sin into the world, and it ruined what should have been a perfect paradise. But a lot of people have raised questions about this interpretation of the story because why is there an evil serpent in the garden? Why doesn't God want us to have knowledge of good and evil?
And why does he punish Adam and Eve for being tricked? After all, how could they have known that what they were doing was wrong? Because they didn't have knowledge of good and evil until after they ate it.
Well, it turns out there's another version of this story that answers these questions in a completely different way. We find it in an archaeological discovery that happened in December of 1945 in an upper Egyptian town called Nag Hammadi. It was here that a farmer was digging in the desert when he hit a very old jar almost a meter high.
He broke it open. And inside the jar, he found 13 very old books bound in leather. Together, they came to be known as the Nag Hammadi Library.
And inside one of these books, there was a text called the Testimony of Truth. And this text gives us a version of the Adam and Eve story where the serpent isn't evil at all. Why?
Because the serpent tells Eve that it's not true that you'll die on the day you eat the fruit. What'll happen is that your eyes will be opened and you'll understand the difference between good and evil. And that's exactly what happens.
They don't die. They gain moral understanding. And so in this version of the story, the serpent is actually the revealer of truth.
Of course, this is a controversial idea for a lot of people because, well, isn't the serpent evil? And isn't the Garden of Eden a good place? The author Graham Hancock makes the point that there's a fundamental problem with any paradise.
If you live in a place where you have everything you could ever want and you never have to struggle or make any moral choices, then there's nothing to learn and nowhere to grow. There's just endless self-indulgence. And if you stay there, you'll stagnate as a person.
The movie Wall-E shows us exactly this kind of world where in the 29th century, humanity now lives on a giant spaceship called the Axiom. It's built like a high-tech vacation resort where we're told that everyone has everything they need to be happy. It's an artificial paradise where the robots do all the work and life is one long, never-ending holiday.
And yet, because they have nothing to work towards and no reason to push themselves, they've all become weak and helpless like babies. They just jump from one distraction to another until finally the captain of the ship realizes that humanity has lost its way and it's time to go home. What this means is that symbolically, we have to eat from the fruit.
Because how else do you grow if you don't learn to make choices between good and evil? Our lives are defined by the choices we make. And it's through those choices that we grow.
Which means that understanding good and evil is a central part of what it means to be human. We see the same choice in the Matrix where Morpheus plays the role of the serpent and he offers Neo a choice. "This is your last chance.
After this, there's no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. " The red pill is the forbidden fruit. It's a metaphor for illumination.
It represents the first step in humanity's awakening, and it's the initiation to which every seeker of truth has to take. This forms a core idea in what would come to be known as Gnosticism, a collection of teachings that emerged in the late 1st century among early Christians. They were looking for something called Gnosis, which is Greek for knowledge.
But it's more than just intellectual knowledge. It's experiential knowledge, the kind of spiritual insight that can only come from direct experience with the divine. And they saw Gnosis as the true secret teaching of Jesus Christ.
And they believe that he came into the world to awaken humanity by sharing a set of instructions that were meant to show us how to free ourselves from our ignorant condition. As you can imagine, this was a very controversial idea. And even today, Gnosticism is a very debated area among scholars because it paints a very different picture of Jesus than the one we're used to.
But you might wonder, how do we know that any of this is true? What reason is there to think that Jesus even had a secret teaching? Most people agree that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all form the New Testament canon.
And together they describe the life of Jesus and the things he taught. But let's look at the Gospel of Mark 4: 11 and 12. Here Jesus says to his disciples, "The secret kingdom of God has been given to you.
But to those on the outside, everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving and ever hearing but never understanding, lest they should turn again and be forgiven. " This is a really strange passage because it implies that Jesus had a deeper teaching that he purposely held back. But why?
What is the Secret Kingdom of God? And why doesn't he want people on the outside to know what it is? We see it again in the Gospel of Matthew in 13:1 where Jesus says to his disciples, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.
" So, how do we explain this? Elaine Pagels is a professor and historian of early Christianity. In her book, The Gnostic Gospels, she explains that Jesus would have taught in much the same way that other Jewish rabbis did in the first century, which means he had one set of teachings that he used when speaking to crowds of people in public, but he also had another set of teachings that he kept secret.
These would have been advanced lessons that he shared only with his personal disciples. They weren't written down. They were passed orally from teacher to student because that was the only way you could judge the maturity of the seeker and see if they were really ready to be initiated into gnosis, the secret knowledge.
Pagels points to 1 Corinthians 2: 6 and 7: "We speak a message of wisdom among the mature but not the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God's wisdom a mystery that has been hidden. " So Pagels says that Jesus would have taught in both of these ways.
A public teaching that was written down in what became the New Testament of the Bible and a secret esoteric teaching that contained hidden mysteries that he revealed only to the mature. Both of these teachings were meant to complement each other and many rabbis today still teach this way. We see the same theme of secret teaching in the Matrix where Morpheus takes Neo into the construct.
It's a private simulation room where he gives him one-on-one training. But why does he keep them secret? Why not share them with everyone?
Because "most people are not ready to be unplugged. Look around. What do you see?
Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, the very minds of the people we're trying to save. But many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. " So if we suppose that Jesus had a secret teaching, what were they?
What did they say? The New Testament Gospels don't tell us what they are, but Pagels suggests that some of the books found at Nag Hammadi may hold the key to some of these secret teachings. One of these texts, the Gospel of Thomas, identifies itself as a secret gospel.
What's interesting about it is that Professor Helmet Koester of Harvard University has said that although the Gospel of Thomas was most likely compiled around 140 CE, it may include some traditions that are even older than the Gospels of the New Testament, possibly as early as the second half of the first century, which would make it as early or possibly even earlier than the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But unlike the other gospels, Thomas doesn't tell the story of Jesus's life. Instead, it's a collection of 114 lessons that purport to be the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke.
In one of his most important sayings, number 70, Jesus says that if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. In other words, salvation lies within.
It's a powerful idea that we see in a lot of Gnostic films, and it's a major theme in the Shawshank Redemption. In the scene where the warden meets with Andy Dufresne for the first time in his jail cell, we learn that the warden is a Christian who likes to quote from the Bible. "I am the light of the world," he says.
For almost the whole scene, he's holding Andy's Bible in his hands. And yet he totally misses the fact that there's something hidden inside. A rock hammer that Andy will later use to dig his way through the wall and escape the prison.
But what's the deeper meaning of this scene? Well, the warden represents the kind of person who studies and memorizes the words of the Bible but doesn't understand its true meaning. He doesn't see the hidden mysteries.
He's ever seeing but never perceiving. He's ever hearing but never understanding. He thinks that salvation comes from the literal words of the text.
And so he misses the secret teaching that's hidden in plain view. And that's what the hammer represents. It symbolizes the secret that will set you free.
And there's a lot of biblical symbolism in the film. Andy represents the Gnostic Christ. From the beginning, he's an innocent man who comes into the fallen world of the prison, much like Jesus does.
and his first miracle is making a deal with the guards so they can all enjoy a beer on the rooftop. It's a scene that mirrors Christ's miracle of turning water into wine. Andy's escape from his jail cell also mirrors the empty tomb of Christ after his resurrection.
But more importantly, Andy reveals the Gnostic secret. He teaches the other prisoners that the way to become free is by bringing forth what's inside them. It's why he helps them build and expand the prison library.
It's why he teaches people how to read and why he helps them develop their inner world. Gnosis is doing the things that cultivate the soul, the part inside all of us that no one can touch or take away. When we experience it through beauty, art, or music, it gives us a glimpse of the divine.
This is how we transcend the pain and suffering of this world. It's how we hang on to hope. And it's really what keeps him going after 19 years of wrongful imprisonment to finally escape.
So you might ask at this point, why don't Christian churches teach any of these Gnostic ideas today? Why is their portrayal of Jesus so different from the Gnostic one? Well, if we go back to the time of early Christianity after Jesus died in the first century, we find that there was no single organized church authority.
Early Christians had many and radically differing religious beliefs and practices. Each group practiced Christianity in their own way, and each followed their own interpretation of Jesus's teachings. But this began to change with figures like Irenaeus.
In his massive work "Against Heresies", he tried to argue for a single universal church that followed one set of doctrines and rules. He claimed that this church alone was the true Orthodox church and that any other kind of teaching was heresy. And yet gnostic theologians didn't see themselves as heretics.
They saw themselves as Christians. But in the 4th century, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and the Orthodox gained military support, the penalty for heresy was severe. Just having a book that was denounced as heresy became a crime.
These books were confiscated and burned, which is why hundreds of years ago, someone living in Upper Egypt took their books and hid them in a jar to save them from being destroyed. They buried that jar in the desert at Nag Hammadi, where it stayed hidden for almost 1,600 years. But why were the authorities so threatened by these Gnostic ideas?
What made them so dangerous? Well, some of the texts found at Nag Hammadi show us that the Gnostics had a radically different story for why the world is the way it is. And they offer very different answers to a lot of the questions that are often asked in Christianity.
For example, if God is a good and all powerful being, why do we live in a world with so much suffering and tragedy in it? So, let's look at the traditional explanation for human suffering. According to the Orthodox view, suffering was introduced into the world because of Adam and Eve's disobedience in the Garden of Eden.
This was the original sin. Before that, the world was a perfect paradise. After they eat the forbidden fruit, God says to Eve, "I will make your pains and childbearing very severe.
With painful labor, you will give birth to children. " And then God says to Adam, "Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil, you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
" And so according to this view, disobeying God is what led to the fallen condition of our world. And this is really the root of all our pain and suffering. "Just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death came to all people because all sinned.
" But the gnostics give a very different reason for human suffering. They say it's not because of any act of disobedience. We suffer because of what our bodies are made of: matter.
If you think about why we feel pain or why we get sick or grow old, it's because our bodies are made of flesh and bone, cells and tissue. By nature, these things don't last forever and so we die. It's why our lives are temporary and it's why we experience tragedy and loss.
But if that's the case, why did God make the world out of such an imperfect material? Why did he use matter to create the world? Well, according to the Gnostic myth, he didn't.
They imagined the creation of the world in a very different way. Here's how they saw it. In the beginning, there was a perfect divinity called the Monad.
This is the one God of the universe and the source of everything. The Monad then starts emanating other divine beings in pairs called dyads. And with permission from the Monad, each of these pairs then creates more divine beings.
And soon there's a whole spiritual realm called the Pleroma, which literally means fullness. One of these beings is Sophia, and she decides to create a being on her own. But she doesn't get permission from the Monad.
But in doing this, she makes a terrible mistake. She creates an ignorant and malformed creature known as the demiurge. She's ashamed of what she's done, and so she falls out of the Pleroma, taking the demiurge with her, and hides him in a separate reality.
The demiurge has no idea that there's another divine world. He looks around and sees that there's no other gods. And so he assumes that he must be the only god in the universe.
Demiurge means craftsman or artisan. And so he starts building the material world as we know it. And then he takes Sophia and splits her into billions of tiny pieces and puts each of these fragments of the divine into human beings.
And so each of us is really a divine spark that's been sealed inside a material body. But the demiurge doesn't do this alone. He creates lower beings to help him.
The Archons, these are his agents and they become the rulers of the material world. And because they have no divinity of their own, they feed off the divine sparks of humanity, creating a system of control. Sealed inside this world, our sparks have fallen asleep.
We've forgotten our divine origin. And most of us don't realize that the soul is the only thing that's real and enduring, that our bodies are temporary. And as long as we can't remember who we are, we stay in the material world.
Which means that for the Gnostics, it wasn't God who made the world out of matter. It was the demiurge. And it's the demiurge who put Adam and Eve in the garden.
And the reason he doesn't want them to eat from the tree of knowledge is to keep them ignorant of the truth. But there is a way out. The Monad sends a divine being into the material world to help set us free.
This being is Christ and his true teaching is to show us how to free ourselves, to transcend the physical suffering of this world, and to awaken the spark within. This is gnosis. And so, according to the Gnostic point of view, salvation isn't found by believing in a set of doctrines or following a church authority.
It's found through gnosis, the direct revelation of divine experience, which means that anyone at any time can access it. And you do it by bringing forth what is within you. That's the source of your real power because the kingdom of God is within you.
Now, these are very controversial ideas, I know, but this is what the Gnostics believed. It's the Gnostic story and it's the symbolic myth we find in so many films today. We see all the same elements.
the demiurge, the powerful figure who is trying to control humanity and keep us ignorant of the truth. We see the false world he's built that turns out to be an illusion designed to keep us trapped here. And we see a Gnostic Christ figure who comes into the world to set us free and to help restore our connection to the divine.
So why is this same myth being told over and over again in so many different movies? And why does it seem to resonate so much with people? Psychologists tell us that we all have a storytelling mind.
We naturally tell stories about ourselves to explain who we are, why we do the things we do, and where we're going in the future. Dan McAdams calls it narrative identity. And whether you know it or not, you're living out some form of story.
Some people are living out the story of the tragic hero or the misunderstood rebel or the wounded healer. But let me ask you a question. If we imagine that our society itself is living out a kind of story, what would it be?
Well, let's look at the architects of our world. Oligarchs, corporations, big tech, and government. They're all trying to shape the world in their image.
And whether it's through the media, technology, the monetary system, or military conflict, they see themselves as the gods of the modern world. And so whether they know it or not, they're acting out the story of the demiurge. Because symbolically, the demiurge is really a way of looking at the world.
It's a mechanistic worldview that sees people not as free autonomous beings with their own value and dignity, but as cogs in a machine, as resources to be extracted, replaceable parts in a much larger system of control. These forces have never been more powerful than they are today. And yet, no amount of power ever seems to be enough.
Graham Hancock says that the Gnostic myth is really a metaphor for our time. It's an allegory for the idea that there are forces in this world that are trying to keep us ignorant and docile. It's trying to snuff out our divine spark and stop us from figuring out the real source of our power.
How do we know this is happening? Well, what would you say is the philosophy that pretty much every student is taught to believe in almost every school and every university? It's materialism.
Not just in the consumer sense, but philosophical materialism is the idea that the primary thing in the universe is matter. And it's made up of four main beliefs. One, all of life came into being by accident.
Every living thing we see in the world today can be traced back to a random interplay of chemicals and molecules. And through millions of years of evolution, we came into the world. Two, as human beings, we are nothing more than the physical parts of our brain and our body.
We're a collection of selfish genes, and we have no purpose other than to reproduce, survive, and then replicate those genes. Three, matter is the only thing that's real. Some even argue that consciousness is an illusion, which reverses the order of what almost every spiritual tradition tells us, that the soul is the only thing that's real and the material world is the illusion.
Four, there's no such thing as the divine, and so after we die, the brain stops working and everything about who we are disappears along with it. I've argued against these points in other videos, so I won't do it again here. But the point is that when the modern world tries to convince us that we're nothing more than our material bodies, it's doing exactly what the demiurge does.
He makes their sparks fall asleep and so they actually forget that they're divine beings. And this materialist view is now so widespread that most people don't even recognize it for what it is, a story. Because it's not a fact, it's an ideology.
It's just one possible explanation for the world and how we came to be in it. And it happens to be a very disempowering one. The psychologist Victor Frankl said that the legacy of philosophical materialism is that many people today experience what he calls an existential vacuum where the average person struggles with a feeling of alienation, meaninglessness, and disconnection from the world.
I think that's why movies like The Matrix feel so relevant even today more than 25 years after it was made, because the architect of the Matrix is such a clear example of the demiurge and the materialist worldview. He's the god-like figure who tries to reduce all human experience to a mathematical equation. He's trying to build an algorithm that predicts everything we do so he can control and steer the choices we make.
But he's not God. As intelligent as he is, all of his power is derived from a system that's built on rules. He's a machine, and so he has no choice but to obey those rules.
It's a lot like the AI and the large language models we use today. They're fast and impressive in what they can do, but they aren't thinking. When you ask it a question, what it's doing is taking huge amounts of information from the internet, and then it uses statistical rules to try and predict what the next word in the sentence will be.
And it's all based on the words that came before it, which means that they aren't reflecting or discovering meaning in any way close to what a person would do. They're using algorithms and rules to rearrange information that people have already made. And this is why the architect is doomed to fail.
Because he's ignorant of one very important fact. His formulas will never capture what it really means to be human: our consciousness. This is the spark of the divine that gives us the power of choice.
We can choose what rules to follow and which ones to break. We can make up our own rules. And the history of humanity is filled with stories of people who fought and died for what they believed in.
And this is what's so threatening to the demiurge. Because as he tries to control and suppress humanity, he's also bringing about its opposite, the Gnostic Christ. Jesus represents the awakening of a higher consciousness.
And so just as there are forces outside of us that are trying to snuff out the divine spark, there's a force inside of you that's working towards your own reawakening. And it points to the single most important thing you can do in this lifetime. So what is that?
The psychologist Carl Jung was really interested in Gnosticism and it was the Jung Institute that acquired one of the first books at Nag Hammadi which came to be called the Jung Codex. He saw within the gnostic story, a metaphor for the different parts of the mind, a kind of symbolic map that shows us how to awaken our higher consciousness. In his book Aion, Jung says that: "the myth of the ignorant demiurge who imagined he was the highest divinity illustrates the perplexity of the ego when it can no longer hide from itself the knowledge that it has been dethroned by a superordinate authority.
" What does that mean? Well, in Jung's model, if we imagine the ego as a circle, then it would be one small part inside a much bigger circle that represents the self as a whole. The ego is the conscious part of who you are, the part that's aware of what you're thinking and feeling right now.
But there's this whole area outside of it that's unconscious. These are the parts of yourself that you don't yet know about. The problem arises when the ego makes the mistake of thinking that it is you, that it's the entirety of who you are.
When it does this, the ego is acting in a similar way that the demiurge does when he makes the mistake of believing that he's the supreme authority. This creates an imbalance in the mind. Because as long as the ego believes that it's the whole of who you are, it sees any challenge to itself as a threat.
And if that's where you are, then there's nowhere for you to grow or develop as a person. So, what can you do about that? Here's how Jung explains it.
Let's say you have a hidden artistic talent, but your ego doesn't know about it. As long as this talent is unconscious, nothing will happen to it. It might as well not even exist.
It's only when your ego notices it that you can then bring it into reality. This is true of every part of the self that's unconscious. And so, this is how we grow.
Little by little, as the ego notices more and more of the unconscious parts of the psyche, it expands. And so Jung says that the proper role of the ego is to act like a light that illuminates the whole mind which allows it to become conscious and thus to be realized and fully lived. The thing is most people don't do the self-reflection that's needed to bring these unconscious parts of themselves to the surface.
Most of the time we go through life on a kind of autopilot, just chugging along. But then one day we're hit with something unexpected. A crisis that derails us from the path we're on.
Maybe your health takes a hit or you lose a loved one or you lose your job. Symbolically, these events are a lot like the Gnostic serpent in the Garden of Eden. They're the unforeseen elements that come into your life and disrupt everything that's happening.
They're painful, but they also bring the possibility of awakening. Because like the serpent, every crisis is also offering you a choice. You either stay where you are, protecting your ego, falling into the same patterns and doing the same thing you've always done, or you try something new.
You explore the undiscovered parts of yourself. You find all kinds of undeveloped talents that can help you expand beyond the old ideas of what you thought you were supposed to be. In other words, if you bring forth what's inside you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you don't bring forth what's inside you, what you don't bring forth will destroy you. And this is why Jung considered Christ to be the ultimate symbol of the self. Christ came into the world to heal the divide between heaven and earth, to bring unity to the divine and the material.
And so, he's the total timeless person who stands for the mutual integration of conscious and unconscious. Jung saw within the gnostic myth a metaphor for the ego's psychological journey toward wholeness. A way of integrating all the different parts of who we are.
It's a lifelong process he called individuation. The gnostic awakening that frees humanity from the ignorance of the garden of Eden is really a metaphor for the individuation process that lifts us out of unconsciousness and sets us free from our social conditioning. These ideas feel especially relevant today, a time when we're facing all kinds of threats and challenges we've never seen before.
What can we do about a world that seems to be falling further and further into chaos every day? Jung dealt with these same questions. He lived through two world wars and witnessed the rise of the Cold War, which brought the West and the Soviet Union dangerously close to nuclear conflict.
For the people who lived in these times, it felt like the world could end at any moment. These were problems that seemed impossible to solve. But Jung saw that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble.
They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This consists in a new level of consciousness. It's not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life tendency.
This is why he saw the work of raising human consciousness as the most important thing you can do. And as overwhelming as it seems, this is where it starts. As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through.
The change must indeed begin with the individual. It might be any one of us. Which means that when you do the work of finding your talents and cultivating your soul, it's not a selfish act.
Because as you raise your own consciousness, you also raise the collective consciousness as a whole. And as you do this work, you're not alone. You become a powerful strand in a vast tapestry of souls, a legacy of generations of people who've brought insight and illumination, each in their own way.
Humanity is both darkness and light. But history is shaped by those who bring the light forward and somehow find a way to hold on to hope and optimism even when going into the darkest places. And that brings us to the second way of becoming more conscious.
You do it by confronting the darkest parts of who you are. The things in yourself that you're most afraid to look at. It's one of the most crucial things you can do because" knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
" It's called shadow work. And if you haven't seen it yet, you can click on the video on the right side of the screen. I also want to invite you to join my free email newsletter where I share original, never-before-seen content and videos you won't find anywhere else.
And you can find that link in the description of this video. As always, thanks so much for watching. Take care and I'll see you in the next one.