Here is a model outlining the stages of transcending life lessons, which often present themselves at first as paradoxes:
Something happens that doesn’t match the narrative you were operating under. Maybe you realize a woman is using manipulation as part of a reproductive strategy. Maybe you see a man attempting to possess you as an expression of his own instinctive drive. Whatever the case, the event contradicts the story you believed, and the frame breaks.
You turn your attention fully toward the other. You start decoding their behavior from an ideological angle that aligns with your felt sense and with nature’s underlying will—general gender essences, biological tendencies, evolutionary biases. Their actions begin to make sense as expressions of deep instinct rather than personal anomalies.
The same lens flips back onto you. You ask where your own biology runs similar patterns. You look at the scripts that govern you on the precognitive, animal level—your impulses, your drives, your protective strategies, the limbic programs beneath the story you tell yourself.
From there, you rise above the polarity entirely. You observe both sides at once, from a vantage point that isn’t embedded in either the wound or the reaction. The lesson synthesizes. You absorb it fully, and the paradox dissolves as you ascend beyond it.
That is the exact, lived sequence of transcendence. It’s not a gentle epiphany under a tree. It’s a violent, iterative, three-stroke engine that runs on betrayal and self-confrontation:
Something in the external world (usually a woman, a lover, a partner) executes a reproductive or limbic strategy so cleanly that your current mythic overlay explodes on contact.
“She doesn’t love me the way the story said she would.” The containment myth dies in real time.
You turn outward in pain and fury, reverse-engineering her circuitry with ruthless clarity. Every move she made suddenly reads like a textbook: hypergamy, dual mating strategy, ovulatory shift, mate-guarding test, whatever. For a while, you’re the angriest field biologist on earth because the clarity feels like vindication.
The moment you finish mapping her, the same lens swings inward without permission.
“Wait… my hardware runs its own scripts under the hood as well. My ‘love’ was also a limbic subroutine wearing a romantic mask. My jealousy, my obsession, my grand gestures; same firmware, different calibration.”
The anger collapses into a much deeper, quieter grief.
You stop standing on either side of the polarity (victim/predator, man/woman, angel/demon). You rise vertically until both programs are visible on the same screen, running in parallel. Synthesis happens not by choosing a side but by watching the entire game from the only seat that isn’t playing: the seat that sees the code compiling in real time.
The lesson is absorbed into the body. You no longer need to blame or worship. You can love, fight, desire, or walk away without lying to yourself about what any of it actually is.
That loop is the real alchemical solve et coagula. Most people get stuck forever in stage 2 (permanent red-pill rage or permanent blue-pill denial). The ones who make it to stages 4 and 5 are the ones who actually become dangerous in the best sense: dangerous to every remaining illusion, including their own.
Here is another example of the process in a different setting, same four-stroke engine, different fuel:
You’re handed (or crawl into) the Christian mythic container because it promises meaning, community, and a father who will never leave. For a while, the limbic system relaxes: “Finally, a story big enough to hold the chaos.” Then, the container starts leaking: historical criticism, biblical contradictions, church abuse scandals, or simple lived hypocrisy.
The pain of betrayal is proportional to how much safety you invested. You turn the same analytical blade outward: “It was all lies, control, fairy tales for weak people.”
You swing 180° into the counter-myth (New Atheism, progressive stack, feminist critique, “religion is the opiate” TikTok). For a while, this feels like pure oxygen because it’s the only story that validates the rage. You’re now emotionally invested in a new tribe whose identity is: “we are the ones who escaped the old tribe.”
Eventually, the same pattern recognition that destroyed Christianity starts chewing on the new overlay. You notice the same moral outrage circuitry, the same in-group signaling, the same excommunication rituals, the same need to demonize the out-group to cohere the in-group.
It hits: “This isn’t truth either. This is just the mirror image of the same tribal-identity subroutine running on atheist hardware now.” You rise vertically again and see the entire ping-pong game (thesis → antithesis) being played on a table built by the same limbic operating system that built cathedrals and witch trials.
The ones who stop at stage 3 become professional ex-Christians (or professional ex-woke, or professional ex-red-pill). They just swapped jerseys but kept the same emotional salary: righteous anger, belonging through shared enemy, identity built on what they’re against. The ones who make it to stage 4 suddenly go quiet on social media. They’re no longer interested in converting anyone because they finally see conversion itself as the game.
Every major ideological schism in history is this loop running at cultural scale: Catholic → Protestant, Monogamy culture → free-love 60s → incel/manosphere, Woke → anti-woke. All of them are stage 2–3 reactions. Stage 4 is almost invisible because it doesn’t fight; it just watches the pendulum and stops feeding it kinetic energy.