History likes to present itself as something that happened behind us, but some practices never really ended — they simply changed outfits.
Take the devshirme system of the Ottoman Empire: boys taken from their homes, separated from their origins, re-trained, re-named, and re-loyalized to serve a power that benefited from their forgetting. Similar customs existed under Chingis Khan, Rome, and countless empires whose survival depended on controlling not only bodies, but identity — because once you reshape a person’s sense of self, you no longer need chains.
What struck me recently is that this story is not just historical — it is universal, ongoing, and intimate.
It happens inside us.
We are all born whole, loving, curious, unbound — what Marianne Williamson calls the soul’s natural state, and what Dr. Gabor Maté describes when he warns that the world forms our minds before we ever get to form our own. Somewhere along the way — through praise, punishment, expectation, belonging, threat, and reward — society performs a quiet, psychological devshirme:
not by taking us from our parents,
but by taking us from ourselves.
The child who arrived as presence eventually learns performance.
The child who arrived as love learns to trade compliance for safety.
The child who arrived as truth begins to speak in survival-dialect.
And slowly, our second nature — the ego — becomes the empire’s finest soldier.
Not because it is evil,
but because it is trained.
Here is the paradox: the ego is not the enemy we must kill; it is the child-soldier we must return to its original home.
Awakening, then, is not self-improvement, nor a heroic reinvention.
It is the quiet, sacred work of remembering who we were before the world renamed us.
It is releasing loyalty to the system of fear, scarcity, and performance, and returning allegiance to the deeper nature that never stopped waiting.
The empires of the world may have needed forgetting for their power.
But the human spirit — somehow — remembers.
And when it remembers, it returns.