The Forgotten Self

A Parable of Separation

Truth is not something that can be dragged into the mind and tethered by logic. It cannot be fully explained, only experienced. The wisest among us—those sages, mystics, and awakened souls—have long understood this. That is why they spoke in parables and painted truth with story, not argument. For truth, when told too directly, can sound like fiction to ears trained by fear and conditioned by illusion.

So come with me now—not to believe, but to imagine.

Close your eyes and place yourself inside a world untouched. You are born into Utopia.

Here, life unfolds in its purest form. You eat what grows from the earth. You drink from unpolluted streams. You laugh freely and love without suspicion. You embrace strangers as reflections of yourself. Your purpose is not productivity, but play. Not conquest, but connection. You are innocent. You are whole. You are at peace.

Then, one quiet afternoon in a sunlit field, a strange craft descends from the sky. An otherworldly being steps forth and speaks. It tells you that Utopia is about to be destroyed by a great cosmic force—an asteroid rushing toward your sanctuary. You have only five minutes to survive. The only escape is to board a cramped ship that will carry you to a distant, unwelcoming place.

You hesitate—but you board. You leave behind everything you know.

You arrive on a planet called Mars. The air is thin. The soil, barren. The being tells you that the only way to survive here is by entering a mechanical body—an exosuit, a robot engineered for this alien world. You resist, but again, there is no choice. You are placed into a form designed not for thriving, but surviving.

To conserve resources, your true consciousness is put into a kind of slumber. A chemical sustains your life, but just barely. You are alive—but dimmed. Awake—but only faintly. Your experience of life becomes filtered through this machine.

Centuries pass. Thousands of generations later, these machines evolve. They upgrade themselves, repair themselves, enhance themselves. Knowledge multiplies. Efficiency sharpens. Populations grow. But somewhere along the way, the being inside—you—is forgotten.

The robots now rule Mars. They debate origins, invent theories, study systems. They speak of circuits and data and probability. But none recall the soft earth of Utopia, or the feeling of sunlight on skin, or the joy of holding a stranger’s hand without fear. They no longer believe in the being that once animated them. If one among them begins to question—if one begins to feel—the others scoff. They call it delusion, fantasy, even insanity.

And yet… something stirs. A quiet ache, a whisper in the heart of metal. A longing that has no words. A sense that this is not all there is.

That whisper… is the true self.

Can you now begin to see the separation we have created within ourselves?

We, too, have left our Utopia—our original state of being. We entered this world and clothed ourselves in bodies, in identities, in thoughts, in labels, in survival strategies. We forgot that these were garments, not who we are. We mistook the robot for the soul.

This separation—the great forgetting—is not a flaw of our spirit but a condition of the world we inhabit. The ego, like the mechanical suit on Mars, evolved to navigate this realm. It builds, it defends, it rationalizes, it adapts. And in many ways, it serves us. But it is not us.

The soul—the divine spark within—needs no evolution. It is already perfect. Timeless. Whole. It does not grow, it only awakens. It remembers.

The ego, however, is artificial intelligence. It learns. It adapts. It fears. It controls. It clings to the illusion of separateness because it was built to survive, not to see. And in doing so, it becomes the very veil that hides the soul.

But what happens when we begin to remember?

What happens when the divine self stirs in its sleep and whispers, You were never this machine. You are not of this world. You are only visiting.

In that moment, the ego trembles. For if we awaken fully, the illusion ends. The vehicle is no longer needed. And what dies is not us—but the false self that believed itself to be all there is.

To awaken is not to destroy the ego, but to stop mistaking it for your identity.

The finite was never real. The separation was never true. The robot was never the being. It was only a shell, a suit, a temporary form for the eternal to move through experience.

And now, here you are—remembering.

May this remembrance lead you not to abandon the world, but to walk within it with open eyes. To move not as a robot chasing survival, but as a soul embodying truth.

Because you are not the machine.

You are the light inside it.

And it’s time to wake up.