Conspiracy theories are tempting.
It’s smart to question the official narrative of what’s happening in the world. And it feels even smarter to speculate on what the actual truth might be.
It’s all too easy to piece together a head canon of what’s “really happening” that makes perfect sense, given how widely read you are on a lot of different topics, and your depth of understanding of them. You’re an intelligent person, after all. (Right?) And it’s easy to find evidence for your version of events.
Soon, you start wondering why everyone else can’t see the truth of what’s going on.
It’s hard not to think of them as less intelligent than you. Or maybe just brainwashed by the mainstream narrative. They’re not educating themselves. And maybe it’s not even their fault. The rat race of daily life keeps everyone just on the edge of too busy and nearly broke, so they’re all running around just trying to keep their lives together.
Anyway, the system is set up so they don’t have time to question the narrative or dig deeper into the truth.
So you dig deeper yourself, hoping to enlighten them. Collecting more and more evidence. Maybe you even meet other people who’ve seen the truth, and have evidence of their own to support it. Maybe you form a society. A society of the enlightened.
Marcus Aurelius would have thought you were a little pathetic.
“Nothing is more pathetic than people who run around in circles, ‘delving into the things that lie beneath’ and conducting investigations into the souls of the people around them, never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely. To worship it is to keep it from being muddied with turmoil and becoming aimless and dissatisfied with nature—divine and human.”
*
Okay, it’s true: the official narrative of events isn’t always the whole story.
Sometimes it’s not even a true story.
But spending your time and energy—your precious life!—trying to unearth the truth isn’t going to fulfill you in any way other than making you feel smart and dissatisfied with your fellow human beings on multiple levels.
Your job isn’t to sort ultimate fact from the myriad of fictions vying for supremacy. You don’t have to prove the truth to anyone. Or even figure it out. 99% of the time, you can’t.
Your job (according to Marcus) is to pay attention to the power within you—your spirit. That’s the key to living a fulfilling, peaceful, joyful life.
Its guidance will be simple.
Your spirit is never going to say things to you like “figure out where COVID truly came from and convince your friends of it.” Or “you could be the one who finally figures out what really happened to JFK.”
That’s your ego talking. (And your ego isn’t bad, but it’s not the same as your spirit’s guidance.)
Your spirit will guide you to peace, love, play, adventure, art, beauty, healthy relationships, and good stuff that’s accessible here and now in your life. Its nudges feel like peace, happiness, and desire. And sometimes like negative emotions, nudging you in the opposite direction of what’s causing the unwanted feelings.
Be attentive to the power within you and worship it sincerely.
*
Love,
L.