Waking Up From Our Collective Amnesia ✦ Nobody Truly Wants Destruction

By EL Cruz · Phoenix Project Foundation Categories: Mental Health Research · Consciousness as a Skill · Ancient Wisdom & Science · Part II of the Pro Human Manifesto

Turn on any screen today. Spend five minutes scrolling a news feed. What do you get?

An absolute deluge. A constant flood of endless conflict, political vitriol, systemic failures, and the sheer overwhelming scale of human suffering.

And it is so easy — dangerously easy — to look at that landscape and conclude that human beings are fundamentally wired for chaos. Like we are all just passengers on a massive freight train accelerating toward a cliff. Waiting for the crash. And somewhere deep down, maybe even wanting it.

That is the dominant narrative of our time.

But it is wrong. Profoundly, demonstrably, anciently wrong.

Because when you lay out what the wisdom traditions of humanity have been saying — across thousands of years, across vastly different languages and cultures — they all converge on one staggering, counterintuitive truth:

Nobody. Truly. Wants. Destruction.

What we are witnessing is not a collective death wish. It is something far more treatable. Far more hopeful.

It is amnesia.

We forgot who we are.

What This Deep Dive Covers ✦ The Journey Ahead

This article travels across ancient scripture, global wisdom traditions, modern neuroscience, and quantum metaphysics — all pointing to the same exit route. Here is the map:

The Watchman on the Wall ✦ Ezekiel 33

To understand where we are, we have to start where the Phoenix Project Foundation starts — with the image of the watchman.

Ezekiel 33. A lone figure standing high on the perimeter wall of an ancient fortified city.

In modern society, we associate elevation with status. You climb the corporate ladder to look down on people. But the watchman isn't on the wall for ego. They are elevated for one sacred, functional purpose: to see the horizon. To see what is coming before the people sleeping in the streets below have any idea they are in danger.

The Hebrew phrasing is:

"When the watchman sees the sword coming..."

Hebrew: הַצֹּפֶה כִּי רָאָה אֶת הַחֶרֶב בָּאָה Pronunciation: Ha-tzofeh ki ra'ah et ha-cherev ba'ah — Ezekiel 33:3

It is a burden of sight. The elevation is entirely about vantage point.

Think about who the modern watchmen actually are. Combat veterans returning home. First responders. Emergency room nurses. Anyone who has survived profound, shattering trauma and done the grueling work of healing. They have been on the wall. They have seen the absolute extremes of human fragility. And because they possess that vantage point, they can look at our society and see the mental health crisis looming while everyone else is still arguing about what is trending online.

But Ezekiel 33 establishes a sobering rule for anyone who holds that awareness:

"If the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet... his blood I will require at the watchman's hand."

Hebrew: וְדָמוֹ מִיַּד הַצֹּפֶה אֶדְרֹשׁ Pronunciation: V'damo mi-yad ha-tzofeh edrosh — Ezekiel 33:6

If you stay silent — whether out of inconvenience, fear of causing panic, or simply wanting to protect your own peace — and the city is destroyed, the blood of the people is required at your hand.

This completely dismantles the modern concept of solitary, self-indulgent healing. You cannot simply heal your own trauma, retreat to a quiet life in the woods, and ignore the burning world. If you have done the work to gain the vantage point, you have a cosmic obligation to participate in the awakening of others.

But the true nature of this warning is revealed in the climax of the passage. Because it is not a threat from a wrathful deity. It is the exact opposite:

"I take no pleasure in the death of anyone... Turn and live!"

Hebrew: שׁוּבוּ שׁוּבוּ Pronunciation: Shuvu. Shuvu. Meaning: Turn. Turn. — Ezekiel 33:11

The repetition of Shuvu is not accidental. It reads less like a divine judgment and more like a parent desperately screaming from the sidewalk as their child absentmindedly wanders into heavy traffic.

Destruction is a wrong turn. Not a destination.

We explored the full weight of Ezekiel 33 — the wall, the watchman, the blood accountability, and the mercy — in our first research article. Read it here →

Nobody Truly Wants Destruction ✦ The Core Truth

When we see a society fracturing under the weight of addiction, polarization, and despair, we are not looking at a population fulfilling its desires.

We are looking at people who have lost their internal map.

Our minds operate as prediction machines. We see all the wreckage and we immediately reverse-engineer a motive: look at the mess — we must have wanted to make a mess. We assume that because the outcomes are so destructive, the original intent must have been a conscious desire for self-destruction.

But we mistake the symptom for the design.

The suffering we see is not the result of a collective death wish. It is the result of a profound systemic amnesia. A massive deviation from our fundamental architecture.

We just forgot who we are.

And the mission — the entire mission of this Foundation — is to decode the exact mechanics of how we lose our way, and more importantly, how we find it again.

How We Fall Asleep ✦ The Five Stages of Societal Decay

We do not leap off the cliff in a single moment of madness. We are systematically blinded to the edge by the very institutions and societal structures we build to protect ourselves.

The Phoenix Project texts map out a five-stage pattern of societal decay. Reading through these stages feels like reading an autopsy report of the last twenty years. The mechanics of how human beings slowly fall asleep at the wheel are terrifyingly mundane.

Stage One ✦ Disconnection

It begins subtly. A leader, a corporation, or an individual simply stops listening. They stop consulting their conscience. They ignore the wisdom of elders. They brush off critical feedback and isolate themselves in an echo chamber.

The Yorùbá tradition of Ifá in West Africa refers to this as ignoring the Orí — the inner divine head.

Yorùbá: Orí Pronunciation: OH-ree Meaning: The inner divine head — your sacred inner compass

Once you sever that internal connection, you slide into stage two.

Stage Two ✦ Justification

Nature abhors a vacuum. Remove the moral compass and you must replace it with a narrative that makes you the hero of your own story. You start causing harm but rebrand it. Laying off thousands becomes necessary structural realignment. Polluting a river becomes an unavoidable byproduct of industry.

Evil rarely announces itself as evil. It almost always wears the mask of inevitability.

Stage Three ✦ Dehumanization

You cannot continuously harm human beings if you view them as mirrors of yourself. The cognitive dissonance would break you. So you reduce them to abstractions. Statistics on a quarterly earnings report. Consumer demographics to be manipulated by an algorithm. Collateral damage. Mere resources to be managed.

Stage Four ✦ Normalization

Outrage is exhausting. You cannot stay angry forever. So eventually, people adapt. Policies or behaviors that would have sparked massive protests five years prior become the boring everyday reality. Just how things are done.

Stage Five ✦ Fear Maintenance

For a disconnected system to sustain itself without facing massive rebellion, it must keep the population in a constant state of low-grade panic. The 24/7 news cycle. Algorithms that prioritize outrage. Narratives of artificial scarcity. If everyone is terrified of their neighbor and exhausted by the daily struggle to survive, no one has the energy to look up and see the actual sword coming.

It is a perfect trap.

The Phoenix Parables ✦ The Quiet Room, The Line, The Ladder

The Quiet Room

We usually picture evil as a supervillain plotting in a dark, smoky lair. But the parable describes a boardroom.

The room is well-lit. The chairs are ergonomic and incredibly comfortable. The thick mahogany doors close out all the noise of the streets below. The people inside are highly educated, softly spoken, and fiercely polite. They do not shout. They simply look at spreadsheets and optimize processes.

Over time, the people in that room stopped listening to the cries of the people outside. They only listened to the schedule. They worshipped the efficiency of the process. They made decisions that devastated communities, poisoned ecosystems, and ruined lives. But because the process was clean and orderly, no one felt personally responsible.

A perfectly polite, frictionless process can carry a profoundly catastrophic outcome.

The Line

Millions of people standing shoulder to shoulder, shuffling forward inch by inch. No idea where they are going. Moving only because the person in front of them moved.

A child takes one step to the left out of the line. Just one step. And immediately their perspective shifts entirely. They realize they are not in a narrow hallway. They are in a massive open field. Gardens. Rivers. Thousands of different directions they could walk.

The child runs back to tell the others. But the adults are either too terrified of losing their place in the queue, or furiously angry at the child for disrupting the order.

The line provides a false sense of progress while completely blinding you to reality.

The Ladder With No View

We climb endlessly, accumulating status and wealth, completely forgetting why we wanted to get higher in the first place. We reach the top rung only to realize it is leaning against the wrong wall.

The Neuroscience of Amnesia ✦ Dr. Joe Dispenza

Here is where ancient wisdom and modern science converge on the exact same mechanism.

Dr. Joe Dispenza's research on neuroplasticity reveals something staggering: by the time you are 35 years old, 95% of who you are is simply a set of memorized behaviors. Completely unconscious. Memorized behaviors, emotional reactions, and hardwired beliefs that function like a computer program running in the background.

The brain is fundamentally a record of the past. It acts as a prediction machine to keep you safe in the future. And it conserves energy by automating your life.

"Your personality creates your personal reality." — Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself (great book btw, highly recommend adding to a reading list)

If you do not actively, forcefully inject conscious awareness into your daily routine, your neurology will default to the familiar. And if the familiar is the apathy of the line — or the polite destruction of the quiet room — then you will participate in the destruction of your own life on pure autopilot.

Destruction by default.

Consciousness as a Skill ✦ The Framework for Waking Up

If the systems we live in are designed to lull us into a neurological coma, and our own brains are wired to take the path of least resistance — how do we actually wake up?

The Phoenix Project Foundation introduces a framework called Consciousness as a Skill (CaaS).

For centuries we have treated consciousness as a nebulous philosophical byproduct of simply being alive. Something that happens to us. A mystery we cannot control. CaaS demands a radical reframing: consciousness is a highly specific, trainable skill set. An active discipline.

Think about how you build physical strength. You do not sit on your couch meditating on the concept of strength and hope muscles spontaneously appear. You go to a gym. You lift heavy weights. You intentionally subject your muscle fibers to stress, creating micro tears. You rest. And your body rebuilds the tissue denser and stronger than before.

CaaS applies this exact physiological law to mental and spiritual development.

The training maps three stages of human evolution:

The Pro Human ✦ The awakener who steps out of the line. They begin the heavy lifting of noticing their own automatic emotional reactions, recognizing their biases, and actively questioning the narratives they were handed. The first rep in the gym.

The Engineer ✦ The engineer doesn't just observe the faulty wiring. They actively re-architect their neurology. Building new habits. Rewriting the code.

The Architect ✦ The architect has integrated the training so deeply they become the coach. Holding the doors open, maintaining the knowledge, guiding the next generation out of the quiet rooms.

And the prime directive across all three stages is absolute:

Do no harm to humans.

Not a passive philosophy of avoidance — a fiercely active discipline applied across every domain of life. Including your digital footprint. Because online is real life. The Pro Human rule is clear: if a technology, policy, or algorithm harms human dignity, it must be challenged. If it uplifts humanity, it must be protected.

The Power of Awareness ✦ Neville Goddard and the Law of Assumption

To understand the underlying mechanics of reality itself, the Phoenix Project texts draw on the foundational metaphysics of Neville Goddard — specifically his masterwork The Power of Awareness. (another great read!).

Goddard's philosophy is an absolute intellectual earthquake.

His core thesis: consciousness is not a biological phenomenon happening between your ears. It is not a byproduct of the brain. Consciousness is the only reality. The fundamental, unconditioned cause substance of the entire universe.

The phrase I am is not just a pronoun and a verb. It is the self-definition of God. The absolute foundation of all existence.

Every physical object, circumstance, and event you experience is a specific rearrangement of that invisible cause substance of consciousness. You walk around saying I am wealthy, I am sick, I am lonely, I am successful — the conditions change. But the core I am remains the same infinite substance. You are simply wearing different masks of reality.

From this foundation comes his most famous principle: The Law of Assumption.

"Your imagination is the only redemptive power in the universe." — Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness (chef's kiss!)

If you wish to incarnate a new, greater value of yourself — if you want to heal, achieve a goal, or change your life — you cannot manipulate the outside world. The external world is simply a delayed reflection of your internal state. A mirror.

You must assume that you already are what you want to be. Sustain the feeling of the wish fulfilled, even when your physical senses deny it, and that assumption will harden into fact.

The Radio Metaphor

Right now, in the room where you are sitting, there are dozens of radio stations broadcasting. Jazz. Talk radio. Classical. Pop. They all exist simultaneously, perfectly, in the air around you. You just cannot hear them all at once.

When you turn the dial to 98.5 FM, you hear jazz. You did not create the jazz station. You simply matched your receiver's frequency to a signal that was already broadcasting.

Your I am assumption is the tuning dial.

When you assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, you are physically and psychologically tuning your consciousness to a specific reality that already exists in the quantum field. Goddard teaches that all of time and space — every conceivable variation of your life — exists simultaneously in an eternal, infinite now. Creation is already finished. We are not making something from nothing. We are simply becoming aware of a reality that already exists.

Sin and Righteousness ✦ The Real Definitions

Goddard strips away centuries of theological dogma to return to the etymological roots of these words.

The word sin originates from an ancient archery term. It literally means missing the mark. It has nothing to do with breaking arbitrary rules. It is the tragedy of failing to incarnate your highest potential. If you deeply desire to be healthy and vibrant but constantly assume the identity of a sick person, you are aiming your consciousness at the wrong target.

Righteousness is not moral superiority. It is the psychological state of right consciousness — the sustained feeling of already being the person you wish to be. It is accuracy. A mathematical law of cause and effect.

Sacred Sound and Breath ✦ Ancient Acoustic Neuroscience

How do we know when our internal dial is tuned to truth? The sources introduce a biological mechanism called somatic confirmation — signal discernment.

While the analytical mind calculates probabilities based on past data, the soul recognizes truth instantly — and communicates that recognition directly through the nervous system.

This is resonance. The felt yes. It happens before your brain can formulate a sentence. You read a single sentence in a book and suddenly your body reacts. Full-body goosebumps. Your chest feels physically lighter. An involuntary deep exhale of relief.

Truth doesn't just hit your eardrums. It reverberates down your spine.

And this understanding of physical resonance wasn't a niche idea. It was encoded into the foundational sacred practices of almost every major culture on Earth.

Look at the pattern — because it is impossible to ignore once you see it:

In the ancient Vedic and Hindu traditions, the primordial sound used to tune the mind is:

Sanskrit: AUM ✦ Pronunciation: AH-OO-MM

In the Hebrew and Christian traditions, every prayer is sealed with:

Hebrew/Aramaic: אָמֵן ✦ Pronunciation: Ah-MEN

In the Islamic faith, the sacred closure is:

Arabic: آمِين ✦ Pronunciation: Ah-MEEN

In Buddhist and Tantric traditions:

Sanskrit: OM MANI PADME HUM ✦ Pronunciation: Om MAH-nee PAHD-may HOOM

In the mystical Sufi tradition, the ultimate breath of the divine:

Arabic: هُو ✦ Pronunciation: HU — the sacred breath of God

These were never cultural punctuation marks. They were never just periods at the end of a prayer.

Analyze their phonetic structure. They all terminate in deeply nasalized humming consonants — the M, the N, or the NG sound. Hum the end of the word AUM right now. You do not feel it in your throat. You feel the vibration move up into the roof of your mouth, through your nasal cavity, and it literally buzzes the sphenoid bone right in the center of your skull.

Exactly where the pineal gland sits.

The ancient mystics were practicing acoustic neuroscience. By vibrating those specific phonetic gates, they were physically tuning their neurology — stimulating the glands associated with higher states of awareness.

The Sacred Breath

And the most profound fundamental vibration of all — the one we engage in thousands of times a day before we ever speak a word — is breath itself.

Every ancient culture identified respiration as the sacred bridge connecting spirit to physical matter:

Sanskrit: प्राण ✦ Prana — breath and life force Ancient Chinese: 氣 ✦ Qì (Chi) — breath and vital energy Hebrew: רוּחַ ✦ Ruach — breath and spirit of God Ancient Greek: πνεῦμα ✦ Pneuma — breath and spirit Arabic: رُوح ✦ Rūḥ — breath and spirit/soul Sanskrit: ब्रह्म ✦ Brahman — the universal consciousness and animating source of all existence Yoruba / Ifá: Èmí ✦ — breath and the divine life force bestowed by Olódùmarè Lakota Sioux: Niyá ✦ — breath and the animating life soul Lakota Sioux: Wačhékiyapi ✦ Wakan — the sacred mysterious energy flowing through all living things Algonquian nations: Manitou ✦ — the spirit force present in all things, animate and inanimate Hopi: Hikwsi ✦ — breath as the literal and sacred life force

In every one of those languages, the word means both breath and spirit. They were never separated.

And the literal biological science is staggering when viewed through a metaphysical lens.

Sunlight travels millions of miles through cold space and hits the leaves of plants. The plants use photosynthesis to combine that light energy with water and carbon dioxide to create glucose — they literally bottle the sun. We eat the plants. The oxygen we breathe travels to the mitochondria in our cells, which use it to burn the glucose, creating ATP — the fundamental energy currency of biological life.

We are walking biological alchemy. Solar-powered light engines.

Every second of every day, we are transmuting sunlight and atmospheric air into cellular energy — which powers the neurons in our brain, which generates the electromagnetic field of our consciousness.

Breathing is not a mundane biological reflex. It is an ongoing sacred communion with the cosmos. We are literally inhaling the universe to power the mind.

Metatron and the Shekinah ✦ The Two Forces of Creation

To build a new reality — to escape the apocalyptic timeline we see on the news — we must understand the two forces required for creation.

In Kabbalistic and broader mystical traditions, Metatron represents the ultimate divine masculine energy. The electric, directional force of the universe. Structure. Divine architecture. Order. The energy that conceives the blueprint and brings divine light downward, demanding form and boundary.

Hebrew: מֶטָטְרוֹן ✦ Metatron The archetype of structure, order, and sacred architecture

In daily life, Metatron is the energy you use when you create a strict budget, map out a five-year business plan, or build the physical walls of a hospital.

But a beautifully designed hospital with no doctors, no medicine, and no empathy is just an empty building. The blueprint requires life.

That is the Shekinah.

Hebrew: שְׁכִינָה ✦ Shekhinah — Pronunciation: Sheh-khee-NAH The divine feminine presence of God — flow, intuition, nurturing, healing, the womb of creation

If Metatron is the riverbank, the Shekinah is the raging water.

Throughout human history — particularly in Western civilization — the Shekinah energy has been violently suppressed. Patriarchal systems driven by the fear and scarcity of the quiet room sought to dominate the natural world and control human behavior. The divine feminine flow is inherently unpredictable, deeply powerful, and highly intuitive. To a system obsessed with rigid control, that flow is terrifying.

So the structure attempted to crush the spirit.

And the result is the imbalanced, deeply ill world we live in today. Immense technological structure. A profound deficit of empathy and spiritual embodiment. We have the riverbanks but no water.

The ancient agreement is that masculine direction and feminine expansion must merge consciously. When structure and flow collaborate rather than compete, they do not just add together — they multiply. Creating a third transcendent field. A sacred alchemy capable of giving birth to entirely new paradigms of human consciousness.

Women are not beneath you nor above you. She walks beside you.

The Graduation ✦ Removing the Training Wheels

An ancient village descended into chaos. So the elders built a school. Strict rules. Laws. Early religions. Its purpose was to help people remember how to interact without destroying each other.

The parable likens these systems to putting training wheels on a child's first bicycle. When a child is just learning to ride, training wheels are an absolute blessing. They keep the child upright. They prevent scraped knees and cracked skulls. They are vital protective containers.

But over generations, the people in the village forgot the actual purpose of the bicycle — which was meant for free, balanced travel. Instead, they began worshipping the training wheels themselves. They wrote elaborate doctrines about the holiness of the extra wheels. And if anyone developed enough balance to take the wheels off and ride freely, the village attacked them as a heretic.

The rigid rules became infinitely more important than the human beings they were originally designed to protect.

This is not an attack on religion. It is a profound observation about spiritual maturity. Religions and strict societal laws were necessary developmental stages for early humanity. They kept us from annihilating ourselves. But they were meant to be stepping stones — designed to help humanity eventually graduate to wholeness and inner authority, not to keep us trapped in perpetual childhood.

And our Brother Jesus made this exact point. But you have to go back to his actual words — not the Greek translation, but the original Aramaic he actually spoke:

"The kingdom of God is within you." — Luke 17:21

Aramaic: ܡܰܠܟܽܘܬ݂ܳܐ ܕܰܐܠܳܗܳܐ ܓܰܘܳܝܟ݂ܽܘܢ ܗ̱ܝ Pronunciation: Malkuta d'Alaha gawaikun hi The word Gaw: the marrow — the deep center — the innermost core of your physical being

The reign of divine consciousness is already fully installed in your absolute center. You do not need to rely on the external training wheels forever.

Gehenom ✦ The Purifying Fire

For centuries, the concept of hell has been the ultimate weapon of fear maintenance. Depicted as a place of eternal physical torture inflicted by an angry God as punishment for moral failure.

The Kabbalistic texts and the Zohar dismantle that completely.

Hebrew: גֵּיהִנּוֹם ✦ Gehinnom — Pronunciation: Geh-hee-NOM

Gehenom is not a place of eternal damnation. It is paradoxically a profound act of divine mercy — cloaked in fire. A temporary process. A maximum of 12 months of purification.

But what the fire actually is — that changes everything.

Gehenom is the acute, excruciatingly painful realization of the gap between what your soul was during your life and what it could have been. Imagine shedding your physical body and standing in the pure, unadulterated light of absolute objective truth. In that quantum mirror, there is nowhere to hide. No PR spin. No justification.

You see with perfect clarity every time you caused harm to another human being. Every time you shrank from your potential out of cowardice. Every time your apathy contributed to the destruction of the world.

That realization — that raw, unfiltered confrontation with your own distortion — is the fire.

But the fire does not exist to destroy the soul. It exists solely to burn away the dross, leaving only the pure gold behind. It is the ultimate transmutation of your distortion back into light. The final cosmic act of Shuvu — turning you back to your original, perfect resonance.

And the most empowering truth from the source material:

You do not have to wait until you die to enter the purifying fire. You can choose to step into the fire of self-awareness right now.

By engaging in the consciousness training, by becoming a Pro Human, you can spot your own distortions, confront your own apathy, and burn away the dross in this lifetime. You can graduate from the systems of fear while you are still breathing.

Turn and Live ✦ The Ancient Agreement

We started this journey looking at the wreckage of the modern world, tempted to believe that humanity is just a broken experiment. We want things to be binary — broken or unbroken.

But the truth is infinitely more beautiful. And infinitely more demanding.

The wreckage is not the design. It is simply a wrong turn.

The path home has been written in your marrow the entire time.

We explored how the quiet rooms and the endless lines lull us into complicity and numbness. We illuminated the exit strategy — by treating consciousness as a highly trainable skill, by mastering Neville Goddard's I am principle, by tuning our physical instruments through sacred sound and breath, by balancing the Metatron of our structure with the Shekinah of our flow.

And we recognized that human evolution requires us to bravely remove the training wheels of ancient dogmas — to willingly face the purifying fire of our own shortcomings so that we might finally return to our highest potential.

To leave you with a final thought — buried deep within the source texts is a revelation from the great Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi:

"The cosmos only appeared because of love."

Arabic: مَا ظَهَرَ الْكَوْنُ إِلَّا بِالْحُبِّ Pronunciation: Mā zahara al-kawnu illā bil-ḥubb — Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam

The cosmos did not emerge out of chaos or fear or some random mechanical accident. The cosmos appeared solely because of love. The divine desiring to be known — revealing itself through the mirror of creation.

So consider the chaos you may be facing in your life right now. The hardship. The entropy.

What if it isn't a punishment for missing the mark?

What if the struggle you are enduring is exactly the divine fire needed to shatter your old limited self — so you can finally remember who you actually are?

You are the watchman on the wall. You see the horizon. You hold the trumpet.

Shuvu. Shuvu.

Turn and live. 🙏🏽

Go Team Pro Human, fam. Many blessings. Peace & love to humanity.

This article is part of an ongoing series on ancient wisdom and human transformation. This is Part II of the Pro Human Manifesto. Read the full trilogy:

Part I ✦ Nobody Truly Wants Destruction ✦ Ezekiel 33 and the Ancient Agreement Across All of Humanity →

Part III ✦ Comfort Is Entropy ✦ From Survival to Living Free → Coming Soon

Phoenix Project Foundation USA is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit on a mission to end the global mental health crisis. Join the Pro Human community at phoenixprojectfoundation.com If you or someone you know is in crisis — call or text 988. Free, confidential, 24/7.