The self realisation that transcends our understanding, the sad thing is it doesn't require a great amount of knowledge beforehand to delve into self exploration, it is inherent to us. By going through one's own self they can have a better and a permanent understanding of where they stand in this universe. Aren't most of the issues that we humans create born out of ignorance? We don't have a unified purpose that propels us towards exploration and curiosity. What else is there except the vastness of the unknown? Aren't we at all curious?
In a short-lived life of humans, how are we so sure that some books that were written by philosophers thousands of years ago are the only truth that matters? Even in their purest forms, most of them are objectionable but recently with the rise of the materialistic view which is definitely not a science bred issue has swayed the masses and corrupted most of the thousand years old philosophies into a very narrow minded vision of selfishness and all around hypocrisy.
This wisdom about self-knowledge wasn't always lost. Ancient philosophical traditions across cultures emphasized "know thyself" as foundational. The Upanishads, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophy, Sufi mysticism all pointed toward inner examination as primary. This wasn't esoteric knowledge for the few; it was considered essential for living properly. I am pretty sure we already had that but somewhere along the history our minds got polluted.
We can never be sure what triggered all this because the idea of money itself is genius, there is no other easy way to exchange value but the knowledge of self introspection must have got lost beforehand and the people that grew up in the money era got increasingly corrupted. Money as a tool isn't inherently corrupting, it's brilliant for enabling complex exchange beyond direct barter. But perhaps when societies already lacking self-knowledge adopted monetary systems, money filled the vacuum where self-understanding should have been. Instead of being a tool serving human purposes, it became the purpose itself.
The current education system, instead of educating, disciplines kids into a conformist regime run by fear. If you don't study well in school you cannot get into a good college, if you don't study well in college and get a good degree you cannot get a job, if you cannot get a job you are doomed. But in reality you're only doomed when you don't have food and water, if the path is as simple as having some farming knowledge to avoid dying, why does the treacherous path exist at all?
Why aren't kids taught to always express their genuine curiosity instead of suppressing it for years? Have we been so far removed from the world that something as artificial as money where the whole purpose of inventing it was to have smoother trades now run the entire world? It's not even the paper itself but the very idea of money that gets instilled into kids in the current education system is the entire issue.
We are always out of place because the very goal of this education system is to produce money farmers instead of following genuine curiosities that take humanity to the next evolution. We have been so far removed from the simple trivialities of mother nature. It is all around fear that gets taught in the education system where kids have no choice but to follow the established norms that only benefits the sickest of human beings that like to see others beneath them.
The urge to control and dominate people comes from the same ignorance that started all this in the first place. The absence of self introspection. The only way we become peaceful is by knowing our own limits and by that the whole humanity's. The fact that we are just a small part of this vast unknown and nothing is written in stones.
Even the very texts that still run societies, the dogmatisms both social and moral are all invented by some philosophers who i bet didn't think that it would turn out this way. What's particularly insidious is that once this external value system takes hold, it creates its own momentum. Those who accumulate more external power get to shape education, culture, and values for everyone else. And what values would they promote except those that justified their own position? The system selects for and elevates precisely those who are most identified with external measures.
Science has definitely shed light on a lot of these hypocrisies but as all humans are on an inherent risk of corruption, it also gets diluted with politics and individual selfish agendas. The corruption might have been gradual, each generation slightly more externalized than the last, until the original wisdom became empty ritual. Texts that said "look within" got reinterpreted as "follow these external rules." Practices meant to facilitate self-discovery became mechanical obligations. The form survived but the essence was lost.
By now, we're so many generations removed from widespread self-introspection that most people don't even know what they're missing. The very concept seems alien or impractical. We've inherited a world shaped by the unconscious, and we assume this is just "how things are" rather than a deviation from something more fundamental we once knew.
The system will only change when all the participants realise what they are which is impossible without rigorous self introspection. This creates a fundamental paradox: the very system that needs changing actively discourages the self-introspection required to recognize the need for change. It's a self-perpetuating cycle where those embedded in the system are kept too busy, too anxious, or too distracted to examine their own nature and assumptions.
The system maintains itself by keeping people externally focused on grades, careers, status, consumption rather than turning inward. When someone does begin that inward journey and starts to see through the artificial constructs, they often find themselves isolated, as most around them remain caught in the conventional framework. The person who questions why we're all running this particular race becomes incomprehensible to those still running it.
Most of corrupted adults have to be educated first then we can hope that we will also do the same for the upcoming generations. The adults, the ones currently teaching, parenting, and running institutions, are themselves products of the same system they perpetuate. They teach fear because they were taught fear. They suppress curiosity because theirs was suppressed. They can't guide children toward self-introspection when they've never truly examined themselves.
It's a generational inheritance of unconsciousness. Parents and teachers, meaning well, prepare children for "success" in the only framework they know, the same one that disconnected them from their own deeper nature. They genuinely believe they're helping when they push children to compete, conform, and chase external validation, because that's what they were taught survival looks like.
The whole purpose of the education system should be to teach that "benefit for all humanity" is the only purpose even worth considering. The rock will fall one day the best we can do is explore the universe at all fronts and come up with something before that happens, because one thing that we are all absolutely sure of is Death; All material and spiritual. Everything has an end. Us, the earth and the sun itself will vanish someday. Are we still sure that the established path is still the right one?
Given the certainty of our mortality and the eventual end of Earth itself, shouldn't our systems be oriented toward collective exploration and understanding rather than perpetuating hierarchies based on control and dominance? If our time is limited, the current path of fear-based compliance and artificial scarcity seems particularly absurd.
Without widespread awakening to what we actually are, not economic units or social roles but conscious beings in a vast, mysterious universe, the fundamental structures remain unchanged. Individual awakening without collective recognition might lead to personal peace but leaves the machinery grinding on.
This seems to require a kind of simultaneous movement: adults beginning their own self-examination while also protecting space for children to maintain their natural curiosity and introspection. But this asks people to give what they never received, to teach what they were never taught. Not impossible, but it demands tremendous courage to break from the familiar patterns, especially when those patterns are enforced by economic and social survival pressures.
The challenge is staggering: how do you interrupt this cycle when the interrupters need interrupting themselves? Adults would need to first recognize their own conditioning, work through their own fears about stepping outside the system, and rediscover their own suppressed curiosity, all while still functioning within the very structures that resist such awakening.
Yet if this doesn't happen, each generation just passes the same limitations to the next, perhaps with minor variations but no fundamental shift. The children who might naturally question and explore are gradually molded into the next generation of adults who will do the molding.
This is the most fundamental issue of our times, the one that practically solves all of our barbaric societal problems. The absence of self introspection is the root from which all other problems grow. When we don't know ourselves, we create systems based on fear and control rather than understanding and cooperation. We mistake artificial constructs for reality and teach our children to do the same.
The solution has always been simple, though not easy: turn inward, examine what you are, understand your place in this vast unknown. From that understanding comes genuine wisdom about how to live, how to educate, how to organize society. Not around domination and accumulation, but around exploration, curiosity, and collective benefit.