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Human beings live under a paradox: we yearn for freedom yet cling to systems that promise security, but which don’t deliver as promised. Whether in the form of traditional religion, the secular faith of scientism, or the countless alternative spiritualities, these frameworks often function as control mechanisms—flooding the narrow bandwidth of our conscious mind while leaving the vast unconscious unexplored.
Modern psychology suggests that our conscious rationality—what Freud called the ego—is only a thin slice of the psyche, perhaps five percent of the whole. Beneath it lies the unconscious, a reservoir of drives, memories, and potentials that shape our lives without our awareness. When we clutch at rigid beliefs to “get through the night,” we may soothe the ego but never encounter the deeper self—the “95%” that remains hidden.
Mystics across traditions have intuited this truth: the world’s dominant systems—religious, political, even scientific—operate as memetic structures, competing for allegiance and colonizing attention. They promise salvation but often deliver conformity. Alternative spiritualities, far from being immune, frequently replicate the same dynamics of power and domination. The result is a landscape where true freedom is rare—not because it is impossible, but because it demands an almost surgical precision of will, a willingness to “thread the eye of the needle.”
This is not mere abstraction. Cultural theorists like Michel Foucault have shown how power circulates through discourses, shaping what we perceive as truth. Cognitive science reinforces the point: attentional capture by dominant narratives constrains our capacity for autonomous thought. In this sense, UFO phenomena and other anomalies may serve as wake-up calls, ruptures in the fabric of consensus reality that invite us to reconsider what is real—and who we are.
The question remains: will we, as a species, take that invitation seriously? Or will we continue to drown in the flood of comforting illusions? The stakes are existential. Without a radical reorientation toward the unconscious depths and the creative potentials they hold, humanity risks remaining trapped in its own control systems—until the game ends.
Concluding Remarks
We humans need to advance culturally, by integrating a non-partisan framework, such as Platonic Surrealism, or a superior framework, that helps us integrate ALL of our innate potential, even that bordering on the truly transcendent.
References
- Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. New York: W. W. Norton, 1960.
- Jung, Carl G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
- Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
- Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking, 2006.
- Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Kevin Cann
Public Domain
11/29/2025