As a non-christian, at risk of mis-quoting Jesus, we must hate our family and our community if it means we cannot love the creator.
The point I'm drawing from this outrageous misquotation is that, awareness is our jesus. At the sacrifice of the bullshit, we must pierce the darkness with our light fearlessly.
As a teenager I would be convinced that popular media culture was indeed popular or that it was my own original idea to like the things it pushed. I even believed they held inherent value. Then I joined a group that focused on self-awareness, through breath meditation amongst other things, and observing reality on a constant basis and my interaction with it, I started to see what my choices actually were and how my choices were manipulated through repetition and smart marketing engineered into the group mind.
Consciousness, true consciousness, actually requires that we walk into the flame.
The belief we are conscious and are making conscious decisions just because we were born into a body and have a brain is just that - a belief. Conditioning that has been drummed into us since birth now sitting as part of our core programming in the group mind. The belief system of free-will, the belief system called consciousness, much like the belief system of democracy and equality. We live in a pop up world of belief systems that hold no substance when you look behind the picture.
What if we were raised with awareness that to have free-will, we have to work for it and only a true individual can have the capacity, which is so far removed from the definition of an individual in today's consumer world.
Anyways, thanks for a great comment. All the best, Monti