21/10/2024
The man stood quietly in the village square, his gaze fixed on the dusty feet of a passerby. He had heard the tale just moments before—a legend of a great hero who had once fought in countless battles, vanquishing foes and standing victorious. The hero believed with all his heart that he was fighting for justice and the good of the land. He believed in his overlords, who praised him and assured him that his cause was noble. And for a time, that belief gave him strength.
But then, the hero discovered a dark truth. His overlords were not the righteous protectors they claimed to be. They were corrupt, selfish, and cruel, manipulating him and his strength for their own gain. In that moment of revelation, the hero's faith shattered. He no longer believed in the cause. He no longer believed in the men who had sent him to fight. He questioned everything, even himself.
As the man in the square replayed the story in his mind, his eyes still on the bare feet before him, a strange thought crept in. The dusty feet pressed firmly into the earth, as though the ground beneath was their anchor. But what if it wasn't? The man had always believed that the ground held him up, that it was solid beneath him, unyielding and ever-present. It was a truth so obvious that it required no questioning—until now.
"What if the ground is an illusion?" he whispered to himself.
If the hero had lived his life based on a lie, what if everyone else was doing the same? What if everything they believed about the world—the ground they stood on, the sky above, even their very selves—was nothing more than a fabrication? What if the reality they accepted was simply a veil, hiding something far more mysterious and profound?
The man's mind raced. What, then, was holding him up if not the ground? Could there be something unseen, something that could not be touched or measured by the senses? A force beyond the physical, beyond the tangible world? Could it be that the entire world—everything he had ever known—was an illusion created by something far greater?
He recalled the stories of sages and philosophers who spoke of consciousness as the true fabric of reality, the only thing that truly existed. Everything else—the ground, the sky, even the battles fought by men—was merely a projection of that consciousness, a dream woven by a force without form.
He looked around, the village square unchanged, yet now he saw it differently. The houses, the trees, the people walking by—all of it could be nothing more than images, mirages projected onto the canvas of existence. And he, too, could be a part of that illusion, a figure in a grand play written by an unseen hand.
But if that were true, who was the author? Was it him? Was he the creator of this illusion, the consciousness that dreamt the world into being? Or was he simply a character in a dream, believing himself to be real while something far greater remained hidden behind the scenes?
The man smiled, a quiet awe filling him. The story of the hero had led him to a deeper truth. The hero's battles had been real to him, as real as the ground beneath his feet had always seemed. But when the hero's belief faltered, he saw the world differently. And now, the man standing in the square began to wonder if, like the hero, he had been fighting battles in a world that was not as it seemed.
Perhaps, in the end, it was not the ground that held him up, but something far more profound—the awareness of being, the consciousness that made everything else possible. And if that were true, then maybe, just maybe, he was not standing on the earth at all, but floating in a sea of endless possibilities, where the boundaries of reality could shift at a mere thought.
And with that realization, the ground seemed to grow softer beneath his feet, and the world became a little less solid, a little more like a dream.
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