When truth chooses you

Awakening is double: confronting the world’s corruption and our own shadow

I would like to present to you a “grand unified theory of awakening”, if only in embryonic form. The essence of it is two dimensions — external and internal recognition of “shadow” — and two axes — awareness and integration — for each of those two dimensions. It gives us a framework to locate ourselves, our relationships, and our social milieu where narratives are fragmented, friendships are frayed, and consensus reality is fractured. The hypothesis is that it is only through coupled advancement of both outer and inner work that we make progress. This is not a novel insight, but is worth restating, as it matters.

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The “Great Awakening” movement seeks to build public acceptance of difficult facts about the world, and how we have been deceived. My own book, Open Your Mind to Change, was banned twice before the current third imprint — generally a sign of having provoked illegitimate power, not irrelevant delusional ramblings to be ignored. By coincidence, my email inbox today points to a rival Oxford alumni tome, Choosing Truth: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Discover It. This accidentally highlights the gulf in understanding between the liberal establishment and emerging “keyboard warriors” — including their shadow dynamics.

My book is a free PDF and eBook download (and the companion On Q is public domain, so publish it yourself for profit if you want). In contrast, the academic textbook is priced far outside the range of ordinary readers at £88 (around US$115). It reveals academia as spiritually exhausted, needing defensive texts to shore up the system’s authority in the face of existential challenge. It defends the canonical NGO causes: climate change, racism, inequality, gun violence, democracy, public health, sustainability — presenting these as self-evident truths, while accusing others of “truth denialism, conspiracy mongering, relativism.”

This divide in both price and product highlights the interplay between external and internal truths. They mask their own unwillingness to face the truths that destabilise their worldview (e.g. judicial corruption, systemic capture, biowarfare, propaganda itself). Truth is no longer Logos — it’s a bureaucratic category of Truth™ that simulates truth, not describes it. Rather than being a bold philosophical intervention, Choosing Truth is a counter-insurgency manual against the world of Anons. Its aim is to reassert the authority of institutional “objective truth” at a time when their narratives are collapsing.

While Choosing Truth defends the elite consensus, Open Your Mind to Change aims for personal liberation from consensus illusions. They write to fortify the walls, I write to invite people to walk free of the prison. That prison is one where the outer darkness cannot be confronted, because the inner shame (at having been duped both personally and as a class) has to be reassigned to others. What they accuse others of — relativism, denial, conspiracy thinking — is exactly what they themselves are practicing:

• Relativism: treating truth as “whatever the current institutional consensus is.”

• Denial: refusing inconvenient truths (e.g. about corruption, captured science, weaponised narratives).

• Conspiracy thinking: attributing dissent not to reasoned critique but to shadowy, irrational forces.

It is textbook projection: the very accusations they hurl are their own unacknowledged weaknesses. Their spiritual failure is in the title: truth isn’t chosen, it chooses you. If you ignore it, you end up '“vaxxed”, where unacknowledged danger overtakes you — because risk doesn’t respect opinion. Which is a natural segue into describing these external and internal worlds of truth: we cannot decouple confrontation with our own demons when naming those in the world.

External awakening scale (Darkness of the World)

Consider this the epistemic initiation into harsh reality: the harrowing journey many of us go through in realising the world is not as we were taught it to be. I have added a rough estimated percentage of the population in each bracket of the hypothetical development scale, from zero being least aware of reality, to 100 being most aware. Reasonable people could argue over the numbers.

• 0–10 – Naïve Trust (~25–30%) — We are in a childlike state where for our psychic safety we believe the world is essentially benevolent and fair. We assume institutions, leaders, and systems generally protect people.

• 10–20 – Mild Doubt (~30–35%) — We notice occasional corruption or injustice, but frame it as the exception, not the rule. People in power essentially mean well, and the few “bad apples” can be corrected.

• 20–40 – Disillusionment (~20%) — We recognise systemic flaws: governments lie, corporations exploit, courts err. The dissonance between lived reality and official consensus means we begin to question media narratives and institutionalised stories. There is still hope reform from within is possible via “accepted” oppositional forces (party politics, charities, pressure groups).

• 40–60 – Exposure (~10%) — We finally see corruption as structural, not incidental, and recognise that power often sustains itself through deception, coercion, and cover-ups. We start noticing patterns across domains (law, politics, finance, medicine) of suppression of truth and ethics. Existing frameworks (like capitalism vs socialism) fail to explain what we observe.

• 60–80 – Deep Awakening (~3–4%) — We understand the system as predatory, not protective, and accepts that “normal” life runs on hidden exploitation and manipulation. This triggers grief, anger, and alienation. We begin to orient life as resistance or detachment from false narratives, outside the mainstream society.

• 80–100 – Full Clarity (<1%) — We perceive the world as a contested battlefield of Logos vs. corruption, with no illusions about the innocence of institutions or the neutrality of culture. This recognises both the scope of the darkness and the possibility of redemption through truth, Logos, and integrity. It allows us to see corruption clearly without being consumed by it.

The first 60% of the scale holds ~85% of the population — exactly as Jacques Ellul noted in his 1960s classic, Propaganda. The official narrative doesn’t need to convince everyone, it just needs to stabilise the majority into passivity. Meanwhile, the deep awakening and clarity levels are tiny minorities, but they exert outsized cultural impact, because once someone moves into 60–100, they stop being “manageable” by propaganda. This is why “QAnon” is so reviled by the legacy media, as it asks questions about authority that undermine the establishment’s ontology.

On this scale, Choosing Truth might score 25–35 out of 100. It sees corruption, denialism, misinformation — but still assumes the remedy lies in defending institutional “objective truth.” It avoids the deeper recognition that academia, media, and governance are structurally captured. Meanwhile Open Your Mind to Change might score nearer 80–90 out of 100. My own work fully grasps systemic corruption across law, governance, media, finance — and frames this reality as a 5GW battle space of narrative control where deception is structural and longstanding.

Internal awakening scale (Darkness of the Soul)

In counterbalance to the outside world, we can consider a parallel scale of awareness of our internal landscape.

• 0–20 - Denial and Displacement (~30–40%) — People here live almost entirely in projection, denial, or addiction. They don’t recognise their shadow, and blame others or circumstances for everything. Abusive dynamics, compulsive behaviours, and unprocessed trauma sit here. This is common in individuals who have never been exposed to therapy, self-reflection, or a supportive community.

• 20–40 - Early Awakening (~25–30%) — They know “something is wrong” in their own life, but still can’t name or own it clearly. They might start therapy, watch videos on domestic abuse, or dip into spirituality. There is a lot of resistance to owning their shadow: “I’m not like that,” “I’m healed already,” etc. This is where many survivors stall — recognising the abuser’s shadow but not their own.

• 40–60 - Functional Awareness (~20–25%) — One does enough self-reflection to manage work, relationships, and crises with some honesty, and can admit personal flaws, albeit inconsistently. Many therapists, clergy, and professionals live here — capable of guiding others but still missing depth in their own shadow. We become “good enough” to look stable but are not deeply transformed.

• 60–80 - Advanced Integration (~5–10%) — We have consistent ownership of our patterns. Relapses or reenactments may still occur, but they’re recognised and addressed. We can sustain differentiated intimacy and leadership without as much projection; “my crazies” and “your crazies” are identified and bounded. This group often becomes teachers, healers, or thought leaders — they radiate both strength and humility.

• 80–100: Rare Embodied Wisdom (< 1%) — These are the “elders” or exemplars — people who have faced down mortality, shadow, and illusion without flinching. They can be fully present with their own darkness and others’ without collapsing. We find seasoned contemplatives with decades of practice, so they are extremely rare — most people never enter this zone, and probably wouldn’t want to pay the entry cost!

Again, we can contrast the two written works. Based on its promo text, Choosing Truth offers very little self-interrogation, grief, or humility about complicity of the academic establishment in the erosion of truth. It is written in a tone of authority projection, not existential struggle — something easily discerned by the authoritative institutional sources it reaches to in the blurb as support for its thesis. This means it is more about preserving order than confronting the abyss — a score of maybe ~10–20 out of 100.

Meanwhile, Open Your Mind to Change is a deep personal confrontation with fear, exile, and trauma. It insists on Logos, moral clarity, and lived integrity as foundations. This is not pure mysticism — it is practical spirituality under fire from smears, deplatforming, and systemic persecution. While I rate my own work with the solipsism that implies, it is perhaps ~70–85 out of 100 on the internal awareness scale. I have “done my therapy” and it shows. I was once wrong, and I am OK with that. I may still be. I am OK with that, too.

Awareness vs integration — two axes of each dimension

Awareness is the degree to which we perceive external and internal realities — the structures of power around us, and the shadow within us. It is the capacity to see deception, manipulation, and corruption in the world, as well as to recognise fear, grief, and trauma in ourselves. But awareness alone does not liberate. It can sharpen perception while leaving us paralysed, cynical, or consumed by despair.

Integration is the degree to which that awareness has been metabolised into lived clarity. It is when insight has passed through the crucible of personal transformation — embodied in action, anchored in spiritual orientation, and expressed in integrity. Integration turns knowledge into wisdom, and perception into resilience. Without integration, awareness can fragment the psyche; without awareness, integration can become complacency or false peace.

When awareness runs ahead of integration, people often become disillusioned or radicalised — they see corruption but lack the inner stability to hold it. This can spiral into nihilism, paranoia, or brittle rage. When integration runs ahead of awareness, people may appear calm, functional, even virtuous, but their serenity rests on naiveté — they have not yet faced the deeper systemic realities. The mature path requires both: clarity about the battlefield, and coherence of self within it.

Choosing Truth shows modest external awareness but little integration, recognising dishonesty yet defaulting to institutional consensus, offering a shallow, technocratic response for readers still reliant on elites. Open Your Mind to Change sits in the opposite register, pairing high awareness with deep integration: it names systemic corruption as predatory, yet channels that painful recognition into Logos, courage, and responsibility. This transforms disillusionment into a spiritual framework that sustains action and guides readers toward wholeness.

A double transmutation of shame

My work has focused on the external darkness, while only nodding to the internal. What I missed was how tightly they couple. Internal growth is what lets us face the shattering moment of “OMG, I did what?” and survive the ego crash that follows. I’ve spent years building a private library of embarrassing misadventures — raw material for shadow-integration.

Applied psychology helps us move beyond “I did wrong,” while theology lifts us from “I am wrong,” offering grace and mercy to dissolve existential shame. We are deceivers of ourselves as much as we are deceived by the world. Foolishness is baked into being human; what matters is how we meet it. I once thought progress came by facts alone — I tried this in telecoms, championing elegant science and design. But when people feel stupid, they resist; insight without integration lands nowhere.

Awakening, even for hardened academics, is a return to divinity: you never lacked worthiness, so there is nothing to lose. Awareness and integration are bound together by attachment to Creator as source of truth, and by accepting we are not our own saviour but must receive unearned forgiveness. The academy is stuck because it seeks redemption in intellect alone, elevating self-as-idea while locking shame in place, making it nearly impossible to repent of delusion.

You cannot “choose truth” if you never opened your mind to let it in.