The First layer of the Lie
Let’s begin with the foundational claim of non-dual spirituality: "You are not the body. You are not the mind. You are pure consciousness."
Fine. But the moment I say I am the witness, the "I" is still hanging in the air, isn’t it? You can perform all the neti-neti negations you want, but that slippery little pronoun survives every metaphysical cleansing. You haven't dissolved the ego. You've just wrapped it in subtler language.
And if all phenomena are maya—objects appearing in consciousness—then so are the Upanishads. So are the teachers. So are the gurus. So are the scriptures. So is the very claim that all is maya. You can't use illusion to validate the concept of illusion without tying yourself into a perfect paradox.
Why should I believe the people who told me not to believe anything? Why are their words exempt from the laws they claim govern all other phenomena? If everything is illusion, then so is Shankaracharya. So is Buddha. So is the very idea that there is an escape.
What makes them real? Why should I trust the messengers of unreality?
They say: "Don’t trust the world. Trust me. I’ll lead you out."
But you are the world. You are maya. Your voice is part of the illusion you warn me about. You’ve just built a story where doubt proves ignorance and obedience proves understanding. That’s not spiritual clarity. That’s epistemic entrapment.
And even if I allow that some people reach something—some pure state, some realization, some stillness beyond language—it becomes yet another hierarchy. You are realized. I am not. You have seen. I have not. You are beyond. I am below. And what began as liberation ends in subjugation.
So no, I don’t buy it. Not without dismantling the entire scaffolding first. Not without turning the critique on the ones who built the system. If all is illusion, then start by questioning the ones who invented the word.
The Machinery of Maya
Even if I let go of the stories—let go of the winged angels, the elephant-headed gods, the prophets who parted seas, and the gurus who walk on water—I’m still left with the deeper structure. The system. The way these ideas were embedded into people’s lives, the way entire civilizations were shaped by them, often through fear, often through power, often through sheer repetition and ritual until people could no longer tell myth from reality.
Fine. Maybe the ancients didn’t know better. Maybe they needed gods because they didn’t have physics. Maybe they needed miracles because they didn’t have medicine. Maybe they needed stories just to hold themselves together.
But what about the ones who came after?
What about the ones who said: all that was false—but now, here is the truth? What about the Buddha, the so-called awakened one, who walks off into the forest and comes back with a method? No more gods, no more fantasy—just discipline, austerity, renunciation. And then, as if by reflex, the same pattern returns: the monastics, the rituals, the initiations, the hidden lineages. What was supposed to be an escape becomes another architecture of control.
And this is what they all do. They say: give up your ego, your desire, your name, your attachments. Become a monk. Submit. Destroy who you are so that some new, more purified version can be born. But by the time you've stripped away your self, your identity, your will, you’re no longer a seeker—you’re a recruit.
And they call this realization.
Look closely and you’ll see the same tools used again and again: isolation, repetition, dependency. Break the individual. Drown them in doctrine. Replace uncertainty with system. Whether it’s a monastery or a megachurch, a lineage or a livestream, the game is the same. Enlightenment becomes a product you pay for with your soul.
Even if you walk away from the gods, even if you call it non-duality or emptiness or pure consciousness, the moment it requires hierarchy, obedience, and surrender to someone else’s model—you’ve just traded one myth for another.
And so I ask again: if maya is the illusion, who built the machinery of maya? And who keeps it running?
The Pleasure-Pain Trap
Even if I let go of the stories—let go of the winged angels, the elephant-headed gods, the prophets who parted seas, and the gurus who walk on water—I’m still left with the deeper structure. The system. The way these ideas were embedded into people’s lives, the way entire civilizations were shaped by them, often through fear, often through power, often through sheer repetition and ritual until people could no longer tell myth from reality.
Fine. Maybe the ancients didn’t know better. Maybe they needed gods because they didn’t have physics. Maybe they needed miracles because they didn’t have medicine. Maybe they needed stories just to hold themselves together.
But what about the ones who came after?
What about the ones who said: all that was false—but now, here is the truth? What about the Buddha, the so-called awakened one, who walks off into the forest and comes back with a method? No more gods, no more fantasy—just discipline, austerity, renunciation. And then, as if by reflex, the same pattern returns: the monastics, the rituals, the initiations, the hidden lineages. What was supposed to be an escape becomes another architecture of control.
And this is what they all do. They say: give up your ego, your desire, your name, your attachments. Become a monk. Submit. Destroy who you are so that some new, more purified version can be born. But by the time you've stripped away your self, your identity, your will, you’re no longer a seeker—you’re a recruit.
And they call this realization.
Look closely and you’ll see the same tools used again and again: isolation, repetition, dependency. Break the individual. Drown them in doctrine. Replace uncertainty with system. Whether it’s a monastery or a megachurch, a lineage or a livestream, the game is the same. Enlightenment becomes a product you pay for with your soul.
Even if you walk away from the gods, even if you call it non-duality or emptiness or pure consciousness, the moment it requires hierarchy, obedience, and surrender to someone else’s model—you’ve just traded one myth for another.
And so I ask again: if maya is the illusion, who built the machinery of maya? And who keeps it running?
The Cult of Charisma
Let’s be honest: most people don’t want truth. They want someone who looks like they’ve found it.
They want presence. Composure. Gravity. They want slow hand gestures, long silences, and that deep, calculated calm that says, “I know something you don’t.” That’s charisma. And it’s mistaken for realization every single time.
So the same cycle begins again. The followers come. The cameras turn on. The books get written. The disciples dress like the teacher. The teacher says, “I am not a teacher.” The followers quote it like scripture.
And that’s how you build a cult—not of belief, but of performance.
Charisma is not wisdom. It’s a social technology—an emergent glitch in human psychology. We evolved to follow people who look confident, composed, detached from need. That doesn’t mean they’re right. That just means they’ve figured out the aesthetics of authority.
So now, everyone wants to be that guy. Everyone wants to be the clean-shaven, robe-wearing, soft-spoken mystic with a YouTube channel. And behind that act? The same impulses. The same marketing instincts. The same need to gather attention, build a platform, sell the path.
It’s not that some of these people aren’t intelligent or insightful. Some are. But insight without accountability becomes manipulation. And manipulation wrapped in grace becomes a cult of personality.
So yes, you escaped organized religion. But did you really escape hierarchy? Did you escape power? Or did you just give it a new face and a better microphone?
Even the Path Out Becomes a Trap
Let’s say I stop trying to punish the old stories. Let’s say I give up my anger toward the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the gods with tusks, the prophets with golden plates. Let’s say I allow that maybe people needed those stories—maybe they were just doing what they could with what they had.
But then what about the ones who came after? The ones who said, That was all false—but now here’s the truth.
The Buddha. The enlightened one. The chosen one, just like every other chosen one. The man who walks off into the forest, starves himself, strips away desire, and comes back with a method. And the story begins again.
Another sacred figure. Another path. Another canon. Another priesthood.
And suddenly, “truth” requires rituals. It requires monasteries. It requires robes and chanting and initiations and doctrines and lineages and lifetimes of purification. Suddenly, realization has an entry fee. And the price is your individuality.
This is what every spiritual system does. It tells you: Dissolve your identity. Forsake your family. Cut your attachments. Trust the path. We will remake you.
It’s not spirituality. It’s psychological warfare with a smiling face.
And if you don’t feel it at first, just wait. The deeper in you go, the more you’ll be told you’re not ready. That you must do more. That the truth is real but you are not. That you have to keep peeling away every trace of personal will before you’re allowed to taste it.
By the time you’ve submitted enough to be trusted, you’ve given away the only thing that could have questioned the system in the first place: your own mind.
And that’s the trap. Even the path out is a path in. Even the escape hatch drops you into another room.
And suddenly you’re not seeking truth. You’re just trying to survive inside someone else’s map of it.
The Problem Is the Pattern
You can call it religion. You can call it spirituality. You can call it healing, awakening, ascension, realization. But underneath all of it—the myths, the robes, the mantras, the livestreams—it’s the same pattern repeating itself over and over again.
Someone claims to see more clearly than everyone else. They break away. They go to the forest. They starve. They sit. They return with a message.
Then others follow.
Then the message hardens. Then the message becomes method. Then the method becomes hierarchy. Then the hierarchy becomes dogma.
And now the original truth—the insight that shattered old illusions—has become the new illusion. It has become the new justification for power, for submission, for institutional inertia.
The pattern is what corrupts it. Not the people. Not even the ideas. Just the pattern.
Every revolution becomes a system. Every system becomes a doctrine. Every doctrine becomes a trap.
And we keep doing it. We keep looking for the one who has the answer. We keep building shrines to those who reject shrines. We keep asking for maps from those who said don’t follow maps.
We want to be led. And so we are.
Not because it’s true. But because the pattern demands it.
No God Required
Maybe the scariest truth isn’t that God isn’t real. Maybe the scariest truth is that we never needed one to build the world as it is.
Humans are enough. Enough to create beauty. Enough to create horror. Enough to build temples, write scriptures, shape laws, and design entire metaphysical systems—without a single divine whisper. Just our fears, our drives, our brilliance, our hunger for permanence and control.
Even if there’s no God, even if there’s no ultimate reality, no final awakening, no eternal truth—look at what we’ve done.
We built this.
And if it all collapses, it’ll be because we did that too.
So maybe it’s time to stop outsourcing the mystery. Maybe it’s time to stop waiting for someone else’s vision of transcendence. Maybe it’s time to look squarely at what is—not as disciples, not as seekers, but as the ones who are capable of creating meaning without borrowing someone else’s myth.
Because the terrifying, liberating possibility is this:
There is no map. There is no chosen one. There is only us.
And that’s enough.