The Great Forgetting: Our Story of Disconnection

Suppose we are born from a universe that is conscious and interconnected, a fantastic and living whole. Why do we feel so profoundly separate? Why do so many of us walk through our days feeling a quiet sense of spiritual homelessness, adrift in a world that seems chaotic and meaningless? This feeling is not a personal failure. It is a shared condition, a deep cultural wound that has a story.

Every religion has a narrative to explain this feeling of disconnection from the divine. Many of the old systems tell a story of an “Original Sin,” a moral failing in our distant past for which we are still being punished. This is a story of inherent brokenness, of a fall from grace that left a permanent stain on the human spirit.

Lucidism offers a different story. Our “fall” was not a moral failure, but a cognitive one. It was not a sin, but a forgetting. We are not broken; we have simply forgotten our true nature. This is the story of “The Great Forgetting.”  

The Illusion of Separation

For most of human history, we lived with an intuitive understanding of our place within the whole. Our ancestors did not see a hard line between the world of spirit and the world of matter, between humanity and the living Earth. The divine was not a distant king in the sky; it was the life force that pulsed in the river, the intelligence that guided the stars, and the fire that burned in their own hearts. They knew they were a part of the conscious universe, not separate from it.

But over time, we began to adopt new stories, new “old systems” of belief that created a powerful and convincing illusion of separation. We drew a series of lines in the sand of our consciousness, and these lines became the walls of our reality.  

First, we drew a line between spirit and matter. We took the sacred, immanent intelligence of the universe. We projected it outward, creating distant, external gods who lived in faraway heavens. This act cleaved reality in two. The world of the divine became a remote, perfect, and separate realm. In contrast, our world, the world of nature and the body, became profane, imperfect, and fallen.  

Second, having separated spirit from the world, we then drew a line between humanity and nature. Nature, no longer seen as a living expression of the divine, was demoted to a collection of dead resources, a clockwork machine to be measured, mastered, and exploited. We began to see ourselves as separate from and superior to the very planetary life-support system that birthed us. This created a deep sense of alienation, leaving us feeling like cosmic orphans, no longer at home in our own world.

Finally, we drew the most intimate line of all, the one between the self and the divine. By placing God “out there,” we forgot that the source of divinity was “in here.” We began to believe that our own intuition was untrustworthy, that our own desires were dangerous, and that our own consciousness was merely a fluke, not a fractal of the universal mind.

The Architecture of a Caged Soul

This Great Forgetting was not just a philosophical shift; it had profound and lasting consequences for the human soul. These three great separations, of spirit from matter, human from nature, and the self from the divine, created the very architecture of the spiritual anxiety we feel today.

When the divine is external, you lose your sovereignty. If the truth and the power are “out there,” then you need an intermediary to access them. This gave rise to the great institutions of the old systems: the priestly class, the holy books, and the rigid dogmas. We outsourced our connection to the divine, becoming dependent on an external authority to tell us what was true. Our personal, direct experience of the sacred was devalued, and we learned to trust the word of the institution over the wisdom of our own hearts.  

When the divine is an external judge with a fixed set of laws, you learn to live in fear and shame. Your natural, human impulses, your desires, your anger, your ambition, were reframed as “sins,” transgressions against a distant king. This created a state of constant inner conflict, a war between your own nature and the rules you were told you must obey to be worthy of love. Shame became the cage, and guilt became the currency of control.  

This is the source of the “spiritual chill” and the “institutional allergy” that so many seekers feel. We are not rejecting the divine. We are rejecting the cold, distant, and judgmental god that the Great Forgetting created. We are rejecting the cages of shame and the systems of control that were built in his name.  

A Necessary Forgetting?

It is easy to see this story as a tragedy, as a great mistake in our collective history. But the Lucidian path invites a more nuanced and empowering perspective. What if the Great Forgetting was not a mistake at all? What if it were a predictable, perhaps even necessary, stage in our collective evolution?

Think of the development of a single human child. A baby lives in a state of merged consciousness, unable to distinguish between itself and its mother, between itself and the world. To become a sovereign individual, that child must go through a necessary process of separation. It must learn to say “I,” to form an ego, to see itself as a distinct and separate being. It must, in a sense, forget its connection to the whole to develop its own individual consciousness fully. Only then, as a mature adult, can it consciously choose to enter into a relationship of connection with others, not from a place of dependency, but from a place of wholeness.

Humanity, as a collective, has been on a similar journey. The Great Forgetting was our planetary coming of age. We had to fully experience the illusion of separation to develop the tools of the individual mind: our logic, our reason, our science. We had to stand apart from nature to learn to see its mechanics. We had to build our own sense of a separate self before we could consciously choose to rejoin the whole.

Seen from this perspective, the pain of our disconnection is not a punishment. It is a signal. It is the ache of a developmental stage we are now ready to outgrow. The Great Forgetting is reaching its end. The loneliness, the anxiety, and the spiritual hunger of our time are the birth pangs of a new awareness. They are the sign that we are ready to remember who we are and to begin the next great stage of our evolution: The Great Synthesis