I am going to write one of my journal entries regarding my thirst for knowledge and research in that regard, in my 26 years on this planet. Ultimately, it boils down to one sentence, for those of you who don’t care to read the longer text: Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

To preface, I don’t have social media, and for the longest time, I didn’t use much of what the internet offers in terms of an outlet to voice myself, until I found this “Fediverse” thing. I realize that there are a lot of intelligent people on this part of the internet, mainly because of the due diligence and conscious awareness of privacy that makes those of us dig deeper and FIND these parts of the internet.

I grew up Persian, with a Shia father and a Sunni mother. Two Islams under one roof. I even I learned Arabic in order to engage directly with the Quran, the tafasir, the ahadith, the whole corpus. I wanted the truth without a translator between me and the source.

As a kid, there was a question that never sat right. Why would a foreign God, through a foreign book, through the mouth of a foreign prophet who didn’t even compile the book himself, demand that I believe in a text written in his language, from his culture, from his chosen people, or face death? It didn’t compute. I buried the question under years of study. I debated people. I tried to convert them. Every argument sharpened my critical thinking. Eventually, I turned those questions inward. I put my own faith under the same scrutiny I used on everyone else.

The hundreds of books I’d read couldn’t save me. The Quran. The tafasir. The history. The ahadith. The lectures. All of it reduced to one thing: It does not make sense that an all-powerful, needless God would put so much energy into testing me for an exam He already has all the right answers to, and then punish me forever if I get the answers wrong. Among other things, this broke the spell. I denounced Islam and lost all my friends lmfao

I embraced Christianity. I brought the same litmus test with me. The Trinity. The incarnation. The blood sacrifice. A god who needs his own son to die to fix a problem he designed. It failed the same test. Different book. Same foreign god. Same incoherence. So I went backward again.

I found the Stoics. I gathered what was good from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca. Threw away the rest. Then I went further back. Socrates, the godfather of them all. Then Epicurus and Diogenes. I liked this trio far more than Epictetus and Marcus. It seems that wherever there is a “god” factor, I find myself calling BS because it’s just Islam with a different name and different God(s). Plato and Aristotle I couldn’t stomach from the start. It seemed to me they were putting words in Socrates’ mouth. Plato’s Socrates is a different person than the Socrates described by his other students. Plato institutionalized him and profited from it. If that man lived today, he’d have a TV channel making millions while telling people to live simply. His solution to the world’s problems was a world with versions of himself in charge.

After all the running around, hundreds of books across traditions, I found Zen. A marriage of Taoism and Buddhism. At first it seemed promising. Then I recognized the old patterns. Rituals. Displays of piety. Performances of enlightenment. The same foreignness. I had spent my life paying homage to an Arabic god, then a Jewish god, then various Greek abstractions, and now I was serving yet another foreign being.

I left it all. Donated the books. Tossed the ones that deserved tossing. And I realized the point is not to make a point. Not to decode existence. The point is simply to be. To exist. To live in harmony with nature. That’s when I found Taoism, months after the epiphany had already arrived.

Taoism showed me there is no magical sky God demanding worship. It is a nameless, impartial, indifferent thing that simply is. In my own words, it tells you that 2+2=4. If you try to force 2+2=5, you simply won’t be able to. Not because you’re punished. Because that’s just how it is. No dogma. No fairy tales. No rituals.

Then I had another epiphany. Reading Marcus Aurelius, I noticed the translations are heavily cryptic, performative, and dense. They obscure his true message of living in accordance with nature, which he emphasized he learned from Epictetus among others. The translators did the same to Epictetus. Burying their works in layers of secrecy that don’t resonate with the simplicity and humility of the actual texts. Epicurus too, though most of his works are lost. This pattern is everywhere. I’ll bet the original message of the Bible was far simpler before being buried in ritual, secrecy, faith, and obscurity. Things Jesus supposedly said are now matters of sectarian interpretation, with some sects claiming only an elite master can decode them. The truth is very simple and always has been: Live in accordance with nature.

Every saint or virtuous figure came with a simple message. Live in accordance with nature. Stop hoarding knowledge, books, desires. Not because these things are evil or because a magical sky entity will punish you, but because in hoarding, you are forcing 2+2=5. That will drive you insane and out of touch with yourself and with nature.

I’m 26, but unfortunately outcast by my own Muslim communities for being an “infidel” lol. On the one side, I’m outcast Infidel. On the other, I’m an excommunicated ex-Christian. I just listen to the Tao Te Ching once a day, on my morning runs, and always try to inculcate this: The Tao that can be spoken of, is not the eternal Tao. So instead of TALKING about Tao, I am experiencing it. I think the TRUTH has always been THIS simple, but a bunch of conmen of all ages have buried them in layers of obscurity, myths, and “secrecy.” They take a simple teaching, something a farmer could understand, and wrap it in layers of jargon and ritual and hierarchy until you need a degree to misunderstand it. Then they sell you the key. The key is fake lol and the door was never locked to begin…smh

Edit: I now call myself Lucifer, not because he’s a catholic boogeyman, but because in doing so, I live like Diogenes. Castrating humans’ good/evil dichotomy and short circuiting their binary brains thereby. “Oh he calls himself lucifer! he’s the devil!” Also, I don’t think Enlightenment is a process of doing. It is a process of UNDOING. We came into this world naked and enlightened, as “un-carved blocks” before we were given an identity, religion, ego, personality, taste, opinions, beliefs, etc. The default us WAS enlightenment. So we return to enlightenment, not “seek” it somewhere in a magical state of being.