Chase on Ancient Texts

Full transcript below:

You are walking through a simulation, not a digital one, but a psychological one. The crack in the wall, the glitch that reveals the truth, has been staring you in the face your entire life. We are about to open a door that most people spend their entire lives trying to keep shut. Once you walk through it, you can never unsee what lies on the other side. This isn't just a history lesson. It is an excavation of the human soul. We are going to decode a message that was left for us, a message that explains exactly why you feel that subtle, constant background hum of anxiety. But before we can show you the exit, we have to show you the prison. And the blueprints for this prison were discovered in the most unlikely places.

For the last twenty years, researchers have been obsessed with a single impossible anomaly. When we analyse over 190 ancient sacred texts — the Gnostic gospels found in the caves of Egypt, the Upanishads of India, the Hermetic writings of Greece, and the shamanic codes of the Maya — a terrifying pattern emerges. These are civilizations separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. They had no internet, no mail system, and no way to speak to one another. Yet when you translate their words and strip away the cultural costumes, they aren't just saying similar things. They are describing the exact same structural reality. It is a global echo. It is as if five strangers in five different isolated rooms all painted the exact same portrait of a man they had never met down to the exact number of eyelashes. This statistical impossibility forces us to ask a frightening question: What did they all see?

They weren't hallucinating. They were observing a fundamental law of the universe that we have forgotten. This is where the pattern becomes undeniable. Academics usually treat these texts like poetry or primitive mythology. They say, "Look how quaint, they worshipped the sun." But they are missing the point entirely. These weren't myths. They were data reports. These ancient authors were the early scientists of consciousness, documenting a physics of the soul that we are only just beginning to rediscover with quantum mechanics. They were leaving us a message.

Imagine human history not as a linear progression but as a scattered puzzle. We assume we are inventing new truths in the twenty-first century. But we aren't. We are simply recovering fragments of a treasure map that humanity buried for its future self. We are amnesiacs waking up in a room full of clues, slowly realizing that the previous occupant of the room was us. But there is a massive obstacle standing between you and this map. It is a psychological firewall that prevents you from reading the code. We call this obstacle the problem of certainty. Why do we fight wars over holy books? Why do we argue over translations and dogmas until we kill each other? We do it because certainty is a shield. We use our beliefs to protect our fragile egos from the unknown. But the ancients knew that truth is not something you can capture in a sentence. Truth exists before language. It exists before thought. The moment you think you have grasped it, you have strangled it. This is why the message has remained hidden in plain sight for so long. We have been too busy defending the container to drink the water inside. We analyse the paper, but we ignore the ink.

Here is the danger I promised to reveal. The reason you have struggled to find lasting peace and the reason fear dictates your decisions is because your brain is using a fundamental error to process reality. It is a cognitive virus that convinces you that you are alone. This virus is so pervasive that you don't even know it is running in the background of your mind right now. It is the root cause of your anxiety, your depression, and your constant need for validation. The ancients identified this virus, and they gave us the antivirus. But to install it, you have to understand the first limitation they faced: the cage of language.

How do you describe the infinite to a primate brain designed to hunt and gather? They had to use a specific type of code, a code that looks like a story but acts like a key. In the next section, we are going to turn that key. But be warned: the first truth we uncover will require you to accept that everything you think you know about your own death is a lie.

We ended the last section with a warning about a virus in your mind:
That virus is the belief that language can actually contain the truth. It cannot. The ancients faced a devastating problem that we are still failing to solve today. They were trying to describe a five-dimensional experience — infinity, God-consciousness, the source code of reality — using a primitive three-dimensional tool called language. Language is a cage. It is a fishing net with holes that are far too wide to catch the water. It can only catch the fish. The moment you put a label on the infinite, you have already destroyed it. You have taken the boundless and forced it into a box made of vowels and consonants.

This is why Lao Tzu opened the Tao Te Ching with the most brutally honest disclaimer in history: the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. He was warning you. He was saying the moment I try to explain this to you, I am forced to lie to you because words are too small. We read these texts thinking we are learning the truth. But we are actually just staring at the label on the bottle, never drinking the wine. If language is a trap, why did the greatest teachers in history — Jesus, the Buddha, the mystics — speak at all? Why didn't they just remain silent? They spoke because they had to hack the system.

Remember, these teachers did not have the vocabulary of modern quantum physics. They didn't have words for superposition, entanglement, or a holographic universe. They were speaking to people whose entire reality revolved around agriculture, weather, and trade. So how do you explain to a farmer that his soul is a fractal of a cosmic field? You don't. You tell him a story about a mustard seed. You tell him about a lost sheep or a burning bush. They use metaphors not to be poetic, but as a survival technology. These parables were zip files, compressed data packets waiting to be unzipped by a future generation that finally had the capacity to understand the physics behind the story.

But here is the danger. Humanity fell in love with the story and missed the physics. We started worshipping the finger pointing at the moon and forgot to look at the moon itself. To understand why this confusion leads to war and suffering, visualize the sunrise paradox. Imagine you are standing in front of a sunrise so massive and overwhelming that it brings you to your knees. Now imagine you have to go back into a dark sealed cave and explain that light to a group of people who have lived in total darkness their entire lives. They have no concept of sun. If you say it is like fire, one person thinks it is dangerous and burns. If you say it is like gold, another person thinks it is heavy and valuable. Suddenly the people in the cave are killing each other over whether the truth is a burning coal or a golden coin. That is exactly the history of human religion. The contradictions are not in the truth. They are in the translation. Different cultures use different lenses to view the exact same light. Once you stop fighting over the metaphors, you are left with the raw, naked signal they were all trying to transmit.

This brings us to the edge of the cliff. Once the metaphors are stripped away, we are left with five specific truths. The first one is the foundation of everything, and it is also the most terrifying concept for the human ego to accept. It is the one truth that, if fully realized, would dissolve your anxiety instantly, but it would also dissolve you. The ancients called it the ocean and the wave. To understand it, you have to be willing to entertain a possibility that goes against everything your senses tell you. You have to be willing to accept that the person you think you are — the name on your ID, the history in your memory — is not actually real. It is a hallucination. If you aren't real, then what is looking out from behind your eyes right now? That is the question we answer next.

If the person you think you are is a hallucination, then who or what is looking out from behind your eyes right now? The answer is the first and most dangerous truth of all. It is the secret that every ancient civilization tried to tell us. From the banks of the Ganges to the deserts of Judea, you are not separate from the universe. You never were and you never could be. The Upanishads of ancient India condensed this into three Sanskrit words: Tat tvam asi. Translated, it means "you are that." Not "you are connected to that" or "you are loved by that" — you are that. The divine is wearing a human costume and its name is you. Jesus said the exact same thing when he told us the kingdom of God is within you. He didn't say it was in a building, a book, or a sky palace. He said it was inside the very center of your awareness. This is not a poetic sentiment to make you feel special. It is a structural fact of reality.

The ancients understood that the feeling of being a separate self — a little ego trapped inside a bag of skin fighting against a hostile world — is a glitch. The Sufi mystics describe this perfectly: you are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop. Hermetic texts say all is one. Taoism says the Tao expresses itself in ten thousand different forms. The Maya called it heart of sky, heart of earth — the universe as a single living organism. Separation is the primary illusion of the human condition. We spend our lives building walls to protect us from "them," not realizing that "them" is just another version of us. The universe is not a collection of billions of separate objects; it is a single field of consciousness playing a game of hide-and-seek with itself.

To grasp this, use the metaphor that shows up in almost every tradition: the wave and the ocean. Imagine a wave rising out of the sea. For a few seconds, it has a shape, a height, a distinct form. You could even give it a name. The wave looks at the other waves and says, "I am bigger than you," or "I am faster than you," or "I am afraid that I will crash and die." But the wave is suffering from a delusion. It thinks it is a thing. The wave is not a thing. It is a behaviour of the ocean. It is one hundred percent water. When the wave crashes, it doesn't die. It just returns to the source it never actually left. Birth is the ocean rising. Death is the ocean settling. You are the wave. You think you are a temporary, fragile creature, but that is just the form you are taking right now. Underneath the form, you are the water. You are the infinite behaving as a person for a brief moment in time.

This isn't just mysticism anymore. It is physics. Quantum mechanics is finally catching up to ancient spirituality. We now know that matter is not solid. Atoms are ninety-nine percent empty space, and what is left is just vibrating energy. The field is the only reality. There is no you versus the universe. There is only the universe experiencing itself from your specific point of view. When you hurt another person, you are quite literally attacking your own hand. When you judge someone, you are judging a reflection in a cosmic mirror. The moment you truly understand this, not just intellectually but in your gut, the entire game of life changes. You stop trying to win against the world and you start moving with it.

If we are the ocean, if we are the divine, infinite, and safe, why are we so terrified? Why does your stomach tighten when you check your bank account? Why do you lay awake at night worrying about the future? Because there is a second truth. There is a virus that has been installed in your mind to make you forget what you are. This virus is the only thing that keeps the illusion of separation alive. It is a lie so convincing that you have built your entire personality around it. Until you learn to delete it, you will never be free.

That virus has a name, and you feel it every single day. It is fear. Not the biological fear that helps you run from a tiger, but the psychological static that hums in the background of your life: the fear of not being enough, the fear of loss, the fear of death. If the first truth is you are the ocean, the second truth is the operating system of that ocean. Fear is an illusion and love is the only reality. Every ancient text repeats this so often it becomes suspicious. The most repeated command in the Bible is "Do not be afraid." Why? Because fear is the frequency of separation. It is the signal that says I am alone and I am unsafe. It shrinks the self. It builds walls. It is the architect of the ego.

Conversely, love in the ancient sense is not about romance. It is about physics. It is the recognition of oneness. Love is the act of the wave remembering it is the water. The Buddha said, "Hatred does not cease by hatred. By love alone is hatred healed." He wasn't giving moral advice. He was describing a law of nature. When you operate from fear, you are biologically incompatible with the universe, which is why it feels so terrible. It is like trying to run diesel fuel in a gasoline engine. The system shutters and breaks down. Every regret you have, every relationship you have sabotaged, and every moment of anxiety you have ever felt was born from this glitch: you were believing the lie that you were separate.

If fear is just a hallucination, who is generating the hallucination? This leads us to the third truth:
Your mind is not a camera. It is a projector. Most people live their lives believing that their eyes are passive windows, simply recording the world as it is. The ancients taught that is backward. They taught that you project reality and then you experience your own projection. The Dhammapada opens with "What you think, you become." Hermetic texts state the "All is mind." Quantum physics now tells us that the observer affects the observed behaviour of particles. The implications are staggering: consciousness is not inside the universe; the universe is inside consciousness.

Think of it like a movie theatre. You are sitting in the dark watching a horror movie on the screen. You are terrified, sweating, screaming at the characters to run. But the screen is just a blank white sheet. The monsters aren't on the screen. They are coming from the light in the projector behind you. Your mind is that projector. Your beliefs, your traumas, and your stories are the film reel. You project your internal state onto the external world and then get scared by the images you created. This is why two people can walk through the exact same event — a job loss, a breakup, a crisis — and one experiences it as a tragedy while the other experiences it as a liberation. The event is neutral; the film reel is different.

This is why the ancients were so obsessed with silence, meditation, and stillness. They weren't trying to relax. They were trying to stop the projector. They knew that if you could still the mind, the film would stop running. For the first time, you would see the screen as it truly is: pure white light, infinite potential, reality itself. Plato called time "the moving image of eternity." He meant your mind takes the eternal now and chops it up into a story called "my life." As long as you believe the movie is real, you are trapped in the script. You are a puppet to your own thoughts.

If you are the projector and you are the one writing the script, why would you ever write a horror movie? Why would you write a life full of anxiety and struggle? You wouldn't. The real you, the ocean, the divine, would never create this suffering. So there must be something else in the projection room with you. There is a saboteur. There is a false self that has hijacked the projector and is playing a loop of fear on repeat. The ancients gave this enemy many names; today we call it the ego. It is the only real enemy you will ever face. It is not out there. It is in here. Until you learn how to spot this impostor and kick it out of the projection booth, you will never see your own life clearly.

The ancients were unanimous on this point: the enemy is not the world outside. The enemy is the thing you call "I." This is truth number four. The ego is not your personality or your memories. The ego is psychological scar tissue, a protective suit you stitched together when you were a child to survive fear, trauma, and the need for approval. You built a character to navigate a scary world and then forgot you were playing a role. You fell asleep in the costume. The Bhagavad Gita calls this the lower self. Jesus said, "Unless a man dies to himself, he cannot live." They weren't asking you to physically die; they were asking you to kill the character so the actor could breathe.

The ego has one primary directive: survive. To survive, it needs to feel separate. It feeds on contrast. It needs to be better than, smarter than, richer than, or more victimized than everyone else. It craves hierarchy. It loves conflict because conflict reinforces the boundary between me and you. This is why your mind never shuts up. The ego is constantly narrating your life, judging others, and defending its territory because silence feels like death to it. It tells you you are under attack, you aren't enough, and you need to control everything.

Here is the secret the ancients whispered: the ego is a hallucination. It is a ripple in the ocean, terrified that it isn't wet. It is a child pretending to be a king. It has no real substance. It is made entirely of fear. This explains why every spiritual tradition from Buddhism to Christian mysticism focuses on surrender or letting go. They don't want you to be weak. They want you to stop defending a fortress that doesn't exist. You can't experience the infinite while you cling to a story that makes you small. You can't feel the ocean while you are fighting to remain a wave.

When you drop the ego, even for a split second, it feels terrifying at first. It feels like you are falling into a void. But then something miraculous happens: you realize there was never a ground to hit. You realize the armour was the weight that was drowning you. You don't lose yourself. You find the thing that was there before the fear began. Once the walls of the ego come crashing down, the final truth rushes in to fill the space.

When the illusion of the separate self collapses, you are left with truth number five: everything is connected. This is the capstone of the pyramid. The Hermetic axiom "as above, so below" isn't just a slogan. It is a description of a holographic universe. The Mayan Popol Vuh describes the universe as a single living organism. In quantum physics, we call it entanglement: particles seemingly separated by billions of miles can instantly affect one another. There is no empty space. There is only a connective tissue of consciousness. You are not an isolated entity navigating a dead world. You are a single neuron in a cosmic brain firing with infinite intelligence.

Buddhists call this interbeing: nothing exists independently. A flower is made of sunshine, rain, soil, and time. Remove the sun and the flower vanishes. Remove the flower and the universe is different. This means your life is not happening to you; it is happening through you. Your actions ripple across the entire web. Your thoughts vibrate through the whole structure. When you heal your own trauma, you heal a part of the collective history. When you forgive someone, you untie a knot in the fabric of reality itself. This is why the golden rule exists in every culture. It isn't a moral command; it is a statement of fact: do unto others as you would have them do unto you because there is no other. There is only you pushing back against yourself.

Now pause and look at the picture we have painted. You are the ocean. Fear is a lie. Your mind projects reality. The ego is a mask. We are all one living system. It sounds beautiful and perfect. So here is the question that should be screaming in your head: If this is our natural state, wired for bliss, connection, and power, how did we end up here? How did we create a world of depression, anxiety, war, and isolation? How did humanity go from cosmic awareness to this psychological dumpster fire?

It wasn't an accident. We didn't just lose the truth. We traded it. About six thousand years ago, when we started building complex civilizations, we realized that to survive harsh winters and defend our borders, we needed resources. We needed to hoard. We needed to protect. Fear became a survival tool. It worked. But after tens of thousands of years, fear stopped being a tool and became a habit. Then it became a culture. Finally it became the global operating system. We built entire economies on the lie that we are separate. We built hierarchies on the lie that we are lacking. We built identities on the lie that we are not enough. This is exactly what the ancients warned us about.

When you read the Tao Te Ching or the Bible, they aren't warning you about greed and attachment because they want you to be a good person. They don't care about your morality. They care about your sanity. They were describing psychological malware. They knew that the moment you believed the lie of separation, you would try to fill the infinite hole inside you with finite things. We started chasing approval, power, and control. We turned life into a scoreboard. We replaced the question "Who am I?" with the terrifying question "Who do they think I am?" We traded meaning for dopamine. We replaced stillness with noise.

The worst part is the distractions got really good. We have engineered a world designed to choke the life out of the truth. We have apps that hijack our nervous systems. We have news cycles that feed off our cortisol. We have algorithms that weaponize our attention and sell it to the highest bidder. We have become the most technologically advanced species in history and simultaneously the most spiritually disconnected. Look around you. Anxiety is normal. Depression is common. Loneliness is an epidemic. Attention spans are collapsing. This isn't because the truth disappeared. It is because the noise got louder than the signal. The ancient warning was not a metaphor. It was a prophecy. They predicted that if you forget who you are, you will build a world that slowly drives you insane. That is exactly where we are sitting today.

There is a silver lining. The ancients also agreed on one other thing: the illusion only lasts until it becomes unbearable. When the suffering gets high enough, the ego starts to look like a wobbling Jenga tower. Right now, we are seeing that tower shake. People are starving for something real. The distractions aren't working like they used to.:

The dopamine hits aren't hitting as hard. This is the beginning of the great remembering. Waking up isn't about becoming spiritual. You can forget that word entirely. Waking up is about realizing that you have been holding your breath for your entire life and finally deciding to exhale. It is the realization that the thing you are looking for is the thing that is doing the looking.

How do you wake up? You don't do it by adding anything. You don't need more knowledge, more strategies, or more rules. Awakening is a process of subtraction. You strip away the fear. You strip away the story. You strip away the ego. You peel back the layers of the onion until there is nothing left but the truth. What you find underneath is not a new you. It is the original you, the one that existed before the world told you who to be. It feels like setting down a heavy backpack you didn't realize you were carrying. The pressure to prove yourself vanishes. The fear of death dissolves into the ocean. You realize that you are not a human trying to have a spiritual experience. You are the universe playing the role of a human for a little while. The truth was never hidden. It was just waiting for you to stop running.