In my own life, in general, it took me about 34 years before I truly began to start waking up from the matrix of the society around me and its spells of conditioning, indoctrination, and subconscious programming that I was under—spells that were cast over me as soon as I was born into this world. And now, being 37 at the time I’m putting this together, I’m not saying that there isn’t a whole lot of life ahead of me in becoming more conscious and aware, or that there isn’t still more growth to be had in breaking my psyche free from influences, attachments, and inherited imprints of things that I didn’t consciously choose in my own psychospiritually sovereign essence. But at this point in my awakening so far—my awakening from the spellcraft of nation, religion, polarized politics, and even from things like generational trauma within my own familial system, among many other collective enchantments—I feel like I’m finally in a good place to start authentically bringing forth my own understanding of things so far in this journey, not that I haven’t already begun doing so.

This isn’t me discounting the genuine essence of love, devotion, and sacred connection that can exist within faith, patriotic expression, family bonds, ancestral lineage, or even a sense of belonging to a community structure in general across the wide spectrum of cultural, spiritual, and social experience, but I’m mainly speaking to the false-light manifestations of those identities, institutions, and systems—where their original purity and intent becomes inverted and entangled with toxic manifestations of power and distorted energies of fear and control, turning what was once meant to nourish the soul and connect humanity to its higher potential—the unfolding of deeper self-awareness, ethical maturity, and collective illumination—into something that binds human consciousness to stagnant states of conscious awareness. And it is through this stagnant field of collective consciousness that society deteriorates through its own lack of inner depth, introspection, and conscious evolution.

For this particular reflection, I won’t be doing a deep dive into every framework of human civilization that can cloak its darker workings and hidden corruptions beneath the performance of righteousness, as I’ve already spoken to some of these other topics in previous thought pieces, and will probably create more writings about other expressions of false light, spiritual corruption, and collective deception in the future. But this one will stay centered on the phenomenon of nationalistic enchantment and the blind idol worship of nationhood, where this energetic undercurrent of inverted devotion that many people are still entangled with—it is the kind of delusive force that creates a dangerous blind spot in our collective psyche, causing moral inversion, cognitive dissonance, and the collective denial of the inherent darkness and malevolence that festers beneath the underlying architecture of national identity—blinding society to the devastation, suffering, and ethical decay that all unfold in the name of its own self-preservation, perceived dominance, and sense of goodness.

This pattern isn’t confined to any one culture or civilization, yet America stands as one of the clearest manifestations of how national mythology can transmute moral blindness into perceived virtue. Because once you awaken out of the collective trance of cultural conditioning and realize that much of what is celebrated as virtue is built upon exploitation, supremacy, and denial, American exceptionalism isn’t a reflection of moral greatness—it’s a collective spell of enchantment that veils predatory conquest, systemic subjugation, and collective psychospiritual stagnation in the language of moral righteousness, entrancing the masses into believing that institutionalized inhumanity is national destiny. And this enchantment of moral self-deception, it gives free reign to the darker impulses of the collective psyche to rise unchecked—veiling their true nature beneath the appearance of moral righteousness, all while drawing sustenance from the suffering of others, and in the context of a nation-state, both within its own borders and beyond them.

People can pretend all they want that their country—a country that was born essentially through literal blood magic, ritualized violence, and systemic predation, where its spirit is still animated by the same underlying currents of exploitation and spiritual corrosion at its core—is something to be proud of, but what’s built on the desecration of human life can only masquerade as greatness for so long until its own rotten foundation consumes itself eventually in the long run. And when it does—well, not when, as we are already in the midst of the fall of an empire that mistook its own moral theater, patriotic pageantry, and self-glorifying propaganda for ethical authority and civic righteousness—what’s collapsing isn’t just a nation’s image, but the illusion that its dominion was ever righteous in the first place, and that it was ever guided by anything higher than its own hunger for power, control, and domination—just a deception of false virtue that was and still is cloaked in the counterfeit glow of a light that it never truly carried.

I mean, we could say this about many countries in the world, and about many ideological frameworks of collective identity, belief, and allegiance, but at the end of the day, no civilization, nation-state, institution, or ideology is inherently better than the others, because if the same underlying machinery of human darkness is at work beneath all of them in their own individual endeavors of domination, expansion, and self-preservation, then all that truly differs between them is the costume that darkness wears across the different manifestations of righteousness, all shimmering with the counterfeit glow of whatever they each to believe to be the true light. And the truth is, when that darkness isn’t consciously realized, confronted, and integrated into a collective national, political, or religious awareness, it will always disguise itself as light—and anyone who dares to expose it becomes the enemy of the illusion of national innocence, religious sanctity, or political virtue itself, and also of anyone that is still deeply bewitched by those collective spells of shadow masquerading as light.

With all of that now expressed, what I want to ask you, the reader, is this: on a deep underlying psychospiritual level within yourself—myself included—in our allegiances to whatever systems, symbols, or ideologies we hold dear, what darkness are we unconsciously feeding or protecting, convincing ourselves that we are good in our efforts of righteousness, when in fact we are operating from a very repressed undercurrent of darkness? Because just like the timeless reflection that says, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,” the deeper truth is that the abyss of human darkness isn’t only out there in the world—it’s also within us. And until we have the courage to face that inner abyss, to see where the same currents of human darkness live within our own being and collective consciousness, we will continue to unconsciously recreate the very structures, ideologies, and systems of oppression that we so often stand against. And we will continue to be blind to how our collective human darkness—just like our individual abyss of human darkness—can very well often reflect the same undercurrent of corrupted will, brutality, and shadowed consciousness that we so often condemn in other nations, groups, ideologies, and people, where we perpetuate the same cycles of ethical decay, stagnation of human consciousness, and moral disintegration, just under a vast spectrum of different flags, creeds, and names.

But awakening to this truth isn’t just about seeing the darkness—it’s about acknowledging how easily we rationalize it when it serves our own sense of virtue or sense of belonging. Because once we become conscious of our own shadows, we have to ask ourselves: are we willing to accept that even in our efforts of so-called righteousness—all in the name of whatever we perceive to be “the light”—that we are often also simultaneously drawing from a place of primal darkness deep within us to do that, especially when those efforts scale into collective or national expressions of moral identity? Because in truth, we aren’t so different from the other people, groups, ideologies, or nations that are also drawing from that same abyssal undercurrent of human darkness for their own pursuits of self-preservation, moral dominance, or ideological control—each believing themselves to be justified by the light they think they carry. Yet in the end, when the light they thought they carried reveals itself as shadow, they all remain bound to the same undercurrents of corrupted will, moral arrogance, and ethical decay that is keeping humanity ensnared in an endless cosmic theatre of opposition—eternally reenacting the same archetypal dramas of division, conquest, and moral collapse, just under varied disguises.

This means that beneath all the pageantry of virtue and the theatre of righteousness, what we are really confronting is the same ancient paradox—which is the devil within us preaching as an angel of light, and humanity worshiping its own corruption in the name of goodness.