AMNESIA

The Great Forgetting: The Ancients New This

If the ancients knew this, if the truth sat in plain sight for thousands of years, then how the hell did we lose it? How did humanity go from cosmic awareness to the psychological dumpster fire we seem to be living in today? It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was something much simpler. Much darker. Much more human.

We forgot who we were.

We got hypnotized by who we thought we needed to be. The moment humans began building civilizations, survival became the priority. We had to gather resources. Protect borders. Endure brutal winters. Defend tribes. Fear became a tool. And after tens of thousands of years, fear stopped being a tool. It became a habit. Then it became culture. And everything fear touches, it distorts. That’s why nearly every ancient tradition warned us about the same traps: greed, ego, power, materialism, comparison, desire, control, attachment. They weren’t trying to make us “moral.” This was never about morality.

They were describing psychological malware.

• In the Tao Te Ching, we’re told that when wealth and honor lead to arrogance, they invite destruction.

• In the Qur’an, we are warned not to spread corruption on the earth.

• In the Bible, we are told not to store up treasures on earth.

• The Buddha taught that clinging is the root of suffering.

Different languages. Different cultures. Different countries. Same diagnosis. The moment we forgot who we were, we tried to fill the emptiness with everything except the truth. And that’s exactly what we did.

• We built civilizations on the lie that we are separate.

• We built economies on the lie that we are lacking.

• We built identities on the lie that we are not enough.

The ego, which began as a small tribal survival mechanism, evolved into a global operating system.

• We compared.

• We competed.

• We hoarded.

• We feared.

• We performed.

• We consumed.

• We scrolled.

• We turned life into a scoreboard.

• We made success into a costume.

• We traded meaning for dopamine.

• We replaced stillness with stimulation.

• We replaced silence with noise.

• We replaced contemplation with content.

And maybe the biggest shift of all: We stopped asking, “Who am I?” And started asking, “Who do they think I am?” We traded truth for distraction. And the worst part? The distractions got really, really, really good. Scary good. Seductive. Addictive.

• We engineered apps that hijack the nervous system.

• We created news cycles that feed on cortisol and outrage.

• We built algorithms that weaponize attention.

• We normalized tribal division and monetized anger.

If you live in America, you are swimming in it. We didn’t just forget the ancient truths. We built a world designed to drown them out.

Look at the symptoms:

• Anxiety is normal.

• Depression is common.

• Addiction is everywhere.

• Loneliness is epidemic.

• Attention spans are collapsing.

• Wisdom has been replaced with content.

• Contemplation with distraction.

We became the most technologically advanced species in history, and simultaneously one of the most spiritually disconnected. The truth didn’t disappear. The noise just got louder than the signal. The ancient warnings weren’t metaphors. They were prophecies. Forget yourself, and you will forget everything that matters.

But here’s the part we don’t talk about enough:

• The ancients didn’t just warn us about the fall.

• They also predicted the awakening. 

Because every illusion, when pushed far enough, collapses under its own weight.

• When the noise becomes unbearable …

• When distraction stops numbing …

• When the ego starts to look like a wobbling Jenga tower …

That’s when people begin to wake up. And right now, in this era, in this generation, you can feel it. The illusions are cracking. The old distractions don’t hit the same. People are starving for something real, and they don’t even know what they’re hungry for. This is not random. This is what happens when forgetting reaches its breaking point. Which brings us to the most important question of all: If forgetting creates suffering, then what does remembering create?

Freedom.

Every ancient tradition, without exception, didn’t just diagnose ego, fear, and illusion. They left instructions for what happens after the collapse. They left a roadmap. And it doesn’t look like dogma. It doesn’t look like rigid rules. It doesn’t look like performance or purity or perfection. It looks like internal transformation.

• It looks like stillness in a loud world.

• Presence in a distracted culture.

• Humility in an age of performance.

• Service in a system built on self-promotion.

• Love in a time of fear.

Awakening isn’t becoming something new. It’s subtracting what you are not. It’s peeling back the layers of conditioning until what remains is what was always there.

• You don’t become infinite.

• You remember you were never small.

• You don’t acquire love.

• You remove what blocked it.

• You don’t defeat the ego.

• You see through it.

And when enough individuals begin remembering, culture shifts. Civilizations shift. History bends. The Great Forgetting was never the end of the story. It was the setup. Because when the illusion becomes unbearable, remembering becomes inevitable. And maybe, just maybe, this era of anxiety, distraction, collapse, and confusion isn’t proof that humanity is failing. Maybe it’s the pressure before awakening. Maybe it’s the contraction before expansion. Maybe this is what it looks like when the wave begins to remember it is the ocean.

And if that’s true, then your remembering matters.

Not someday.

Now.