Somewhere Between Psychotic & Iconic
An open letter to Western Society
I have spent a lifetime chasing Truth (With the big T), clutching at it like a mad wanderer grasping at sunlight in a forest of shadows. Every time I thought I found the ultimate answer, it slipped through my fingers. Every “Eureka!” dissolved into uncertainty. I stand here now, on the frayed edge of understanding, unsure if I’m breaking down or finally waking up.And perhaps, in the end, those two states are one and the same.
Chasing Truth Through Extremes
My journey has been a wild pendulum swing across every extreme I could find. In my desperate quest to peel back the layers and see what’s real, I have been ascetic and hedonist, believer and skeptic, sane and crazy. Sometimes all in one week. I starved my body on righteous diets, then swung around and indulged it without restraint (Mind you I don’t get hangovers), testing the limits of flesh and spirit. At one point, I survived on nothing but water and meditation, convinced purity of body would reveal purity of truth. Later, I flipped to the opposite pole, feasting on ground beef, eggs, bacon, and stout philosophy books at midnight, believing that grounding myself in primal physical experience would anchor some ultimate reality.
Through each experiment, I devoured ideologies the way I devoured meals. I fasted from one worldview and binged on another:
I renounced science for spirituality, then rejected spirituality for science.
I immersed myself in one religion until doubt eroded my faith, then plunged into a different faith only to find similar cracks.
I was a revolutionary preaching that society was a lie, and I was a penitent monk believing the problem was my own ego all along.
Each extreme promised to reveal “the Truth.” Each time, I thought this must be it. The diet, the doctrine, the lifestyle that would finally burn away the lies and leave only truth’s pure light. And each time, I found myself staring at a new set of contradictions. I would reach what I thought was a summit of understanding, only to see another higher peak in the distance, or find the ground crumbling beneath me.
Late one night, delirious from fasting and prayer in my 3rd day, I felt I was brushing up against reality itself. A fleeting sensation like the universe whispering in my ear. I scribbled in my journal with excitement. But by morning the words were gibberish. The revelation had evaporated like a dream, leaving me with nothing but achy emptiness and more questions. In those moments, the line between spiritual insight and mental breakdown felt paper-thin. Was I going insane in my relentless pursuit, or was insanity a necessary purging of falsehoods? I still don’t know.
What I do know is that pushing myself to extremes has taught me more than staying safe ever could. Every time I broke myself open, something new poured in. Every collapse of a cherished belief felt devastating, yet strangely liberating. I was shedding skins, layer after layer, not realizing at first that this unraveling was my true path.
The Lies We Live and Die By
I began to see that not only were my chosen extremes failing to hold absolute truth, but the very foundation of what I’d been taught all my life was suspect. They lied to me. Perhaps not out of malice, more often out of their own ignorance and fear, but society, teachers, traditions sold me many falsehoods about the world and about myself. And I had swallowed them whole.
They lied to you, too. They sold us ideas of good and evil, painting the world in strict black and white that never quite matched reality’s infinite shades of gray. I was told to be “good,” to follow the rules, to fit in and I’d find happiness and meaning. But that simple equation turned out to be a fraud; happiness did not always follow virtue, and meaning lived outside the lines.
They taught me to distrust my own body and desires. Society had a script ready: what success looks like, what love looks like, what sanity looks like. I followed the script to the letter until I realized it was writing lies into my soul. The education system told me what is real and what is impossible. Religion told me what to believe and who to be. Media told me what to want. All of them claimed authority over Truth. All of them lied in their certainty.
I don’t mean every lesson was false in a literal sense; rather, the absolute confidence with which these institutions declared their answers was false. The world is far stranger and more fluid than the rigid stories I was given. Truth, I found, is not a fixed sculpture to be unveiled, but a shifting dance just beyond our grasp. What was true for me one year became false the next. What society hailed as truth in one decade is ridiculed in another. Even history rewrites its truths over time.
Realizing this shook me to my core. If the bedrock of my reality was made of half-truths and illusions, where could I possibly plant my feet? I felt detached, like a traveler lost in fog with no north star. This was my crisis, and yet, it was also the beginning of my awakening. Because in that fog of uncertainty, I had to rely on something other than the old maps I’d been given. I had to rely on my own inner compass, faint and wobbly as it was. It was at this time I began to write my first book, “I Hope You Wake Up.”
I remember one surreal night in Austin, walking through the city as people drifted past me chasing moments of debauchery, and feeling like I was the only one truly awake in a city full of sleepwalkers. They all believe the lie, I thought, and maybe that gives them comfort. In that moment I felt utterly alone, a loneliness so profound it ached physically. But I also felt a spark of fierce freedom. If everything I’d been told was a lie or a half-truth, then I was free to discover truth for myself. I was free to question everything.
The Only Constant is Paradox
After a long journey of bouncing between extremes and smashing idols of supposed truth, a gentle realization began to dawn: Contradiction is not failure. It is nature. Impermanence is the only truth that has never betrayed me. Everything changes; everything contradicts itself eventually. And that’s okay. In fact, that’s beautiful.
For so long I had been afraid of my own contradictions. How could I be spiritual and skeptical? How could I crave solitude one month and community the next? I felt like a fraud, or hopelessly inconsistent. But now I see those contradictions as paradoxical wholeness. I am multitudes; I contain opposites. The universe contains night and day, creation and destruction, and so do I.
I learned to embrace impermanence: the idea that nothing, not even “enlightenment,” is a permanent state. One day I might feel I’ve touched the divine; the next day I’m back to mundane anxieties. One moment I am full of love for the world, and an hour later I’m cursing the traffic. This used to make me feel unworthy, How can I talk about higher truth when I still get upset at silly things? But now I smile at my human fluctuations. The sky can shift from clear to stormy in minutes; why should my soul be any different?
In fact, I started to suspect that truth itself lives in the contradictions. Think of a koan, those Zen riddles that have no logical answer, like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The very point of them is to short-circuit the logical mind, to force you into a deeper understanding that transcends binary thinking. My life became a kind of living koan. Every extreme I lived was one hand clapping. I needed to hear the sound of the other hand, the opposite perspective, to approach wholeness.
Over time, I made peace with not having a single answer. I made peace with being a work in progress, a tapestry that is constantly being unwoven and rewoven in new patterns. This was terrifying at first, the ego wants something to hold on to, some badge of “I’ve got it figured out.” I had to let that ego die a thousand small deaths. But each death of a certainty gave birth to a new curiosity, a humility, and oddly, a deeper strength. I had been so fragile when I clung to one “Truth” tightly, because if anything threatened it, my whole identity shook. Now, by holding life loosely, by saying “I don’t know for sure” and carrying on anyway, I found a resilience I never had before.
There’s a kind of bliss in admitting I don’t know. There’s a sacred mystery that opens up when you accept that truth is fluid and flickering, like an ever-changing mosaic. The stress of needing to be right all the time melted away. In its place came compassion – for myself, and for others who are also stumbling through their own fogs of beliefs and doubts. We are all walking through the fog, brushing up against reality in rare glimpses when the mist parts. One person’s fog may be religion, another’s is science, another’s money or fame. I don’t begrudge anyone their fog anymore; I just gently wonder what lies beyond, and I encourage them to peek outside it when they’re ready.
Beyond Words: Truth in Silence and Story
One of the most humbling lessons in my journey was discovering the limits of language. I have written tens of thousands of words in search of truth (ironically, even this very article). Words are my bread and butter; they are the tools I have to express the ineffable stirrings of my soul. Yet time and again I found that language is a lie or at least a very limited symbol when it comes to ultimate Truth.
During one of my extreme phases, I took a vow of silence for a day. I chose to even turn off my thoughts. In that quiet, I noticed something profound: reality just is. It doesn’t narrate itself. All my life I had been layering words on top of reality. Naming, categorizing, judging every experience. Without words, anxiety couldn’t easily hook into me, because I couldn’t tell myself a story of fear. Without speaking, I communicated with existence in other ways: through feelings, through simply observing. By the end of that day, I touched a truth I can’t put into words, ironically proving my point. It was a truth felt in the body, in the heart, beyond the mind. The moment I tried to articulate it, it slipped away, leaving only a warm imprint, like the afterglow of a meditation.
This taught me that while I talk about truths and write manifestos about awakening, I must always remember that the map is not the territory. The word “water” isn’t wet; the menu is not the meal. Likewise, my descriptions of the Divine or of Reality are never the thing itself. They are at best poems and pointers, at worst distortions. Knowing this keeps me humble. It also keeps me playful. If all our philosophies are ultimately stories or metaphors, then let’s not go to war over them. Let’s share them, explore them, challenge them, but also hold them lightly.
An Invitation to Unravel
After years of this inner and outer odyssey, I found myself with a pile of notebooks filled with revelations, questions, poetry, rage, and hope. It was the raw evidence of my soul’s journey, scrawled in ink and tears. From those pages I began to craft books – not because I had answers, but because I needed to weave the tapestry of my experiences into something others could touch. The culmination of that work (so far) is 2 books ironically titled “They Lied to You” and “I Hope You Wake Up.” I say ironically because I don’t position myself as the one who knows the Truth while everyone else lies. Rather, They Lied to You is a provocation, a dare to the reader to question what they’ve been told, just as I had to. And I Hope You Wake Up might make one think that I know I am awake, when I only know I hated when I knew I was sleep. It’s the books I wish someone had given me at the start of my journey, not a book of answers, but a book of permission to doubt.
Currently I am writing They Lied to You. It is an act of peeling back another layer. As I write each chapter, I confront my own assumptions yet again. I put an idea on the page and then question myself: Is this truly my experience, or another subtle hand-me-down belief? I have rewritten the book multiple times as my understanding has evolved. In the end, I realize that the book will never be perfect or “done” because I am not done. I have to let it go into the world with its imperfections, trusting that those who read it will take from it whatever seeds they need and water them in their own way.
Over time, I’ve written other pieces and blogs, each one a snapshot of a certain place on the path, each a mirror reflecting one angle of the prism that is truth. But They Lied to You remains the heart-piece, the one where I am finally voicing the depth of my disillusionment and the fragile hope that was born from it. It is not a declaration of ultimate Truth, but an invitation to start unraveling the sweater of lies thread by thread, even if it leaves us exposed and shivering for a while. Especially then. Because only when we are raw and exposed can we feel the authentic warmth of reality on our skin, without the insulating layers of comfortable falsehoods.
In sharing my story and my words, I’m extending a hand to fellow spiritual seekers and curious souls. Not to lead you to enlightenment like some guru, I am no guru, but to walk beside you into the great unknown. My breakdowns and breakthroughs, my manic quests and quiet realizations, are simply a testament that transformation is possible when you have the courage to question everything.
Question everything. Seriously, everything. The society that shaped you. The belief system you cling to. Even that familiar voice in your head insisting “this is just how it is.” Question it all, but do it with sincerity and an open heart. You might discover, as I did, that beneath the answers you’ve always accepted are deeper truths and even deeper questions. You might realize that uncertainty isn’t something to fear or fix, but something to befriend. A quiet guide, not a threat.
Life is like an onion. And onions? They don’t have a center. So keep peeling. Maybe that’s the whole point.
At this point in my life, I no longer seek to banish all my doubts. I invite them in for coffee like old friends. We sit together, my truths and lies, my faith and skepticism and we listen to each other. In that listening, a new understanding emerges, one that is richer for holding multitudes. This understanding whispers that being on the edge is exactly where life is most vibrant, on the edge of knowing and unknowing, of falling apart and breaking through.
Walking Through the Fog, Together
If you’ve read this far, perhaps something in you is also standing at a precipice or wandering through a fog. I want to reach out across these pages and tell you: You are not alone out here on the edge. In fact, this edge is where the most alive parts of us dwell. Every great spiritual seeker, every philosopher who ever mattered, every ordinary person who woke up to a new morning determined to see with fresh eyes, they all walked this line between certainty and surrender.
So, let’s walk it together, you and I, and all of us who sense that there is more to reality than the comfortable stories we’ve been sold. Let’s stumble and get back up, question and learn, doubt and trust in turns. Let’s embrace the grand paradox that we know nothing and yet everything that matters is already within us.
In the end, I have come to love the questions themselves. I have come to find beauty in the impermanence of my answers. My manifesto, if I have one, is not a shout of “I have found it!” but a softly spoken invitation: “Come and see for yourself.” Come and see what lies beyond the next veil, and the next. Peel back the layers. Feel what it’s like to drop the heavy bags of certainty and walk naked into the mystery. It might feel like a breakdown at times, but I promise, it is also a breaking open.
Question everything, embrace the contradictions, and cherish the journey. In a world addicted to lies and easy answers, daring to live your own questions is a revolutionary act of truth. And who knows, as we each awaken in our own trembling, glorious way, we might just find that we were never truly broken, only breakable, and in being breakable we were always capable of transformation.
I would be honored if you chose to preorder They Lied To You or buy my current book I Hope You Wake Up. Your support means more than I can express; it’s like having a friend walking beside me on this path of discovery. Either way, whether you read more of my words or not, know that I am here, quietly sending you love. Not a fickle love, not a conditional love, but the kind that remains steady through every twist of fate and every questioning of reality. Thank you for sharing this moment with me, for daring to question one of the most cherished illusions we have. Remember, no matter what you decide, no matter what life decides for you: I love you, unconditionally, always.
Remember, no matter what you decide, no matter what life decides for you: I love you, unconditionally, always.
Psychonic