The way to the rapture of supreme liberation leads, paradoxically, through the acceptance of disappointment. We must give up hope. Hope is an obstacle so long as it remains false hope. False hope is the equivalent of denial. We must come to terms with the fact that our personal suffering and the planetary crisis of our entire biosphere derive from the same flaw: the evolutionary glitch in consciousness called the human ego.

We have outgrown the ego. We outgrew the ego, which is an imaginary identity complex, once we gained the capacity for symbolic thought. That capacity has brought us the enormous power of technological prowess. But that power is now in the hands of monkeys. The human ego is an apelike false consciousness obsessed with dominance, sexual pleasure, and animal comforts. It cares not a bit for the fate of the Earth. Arming apes with thermonuclear weapons is simply not a good idea. Unless we transcend the apelike ego immediately, our species is doomed—and we are going to take all the other innocent beings of Nature’s wonderland down with us.

We all know this, but we refuse to remove our ape costumes and get real. This is the anguish of our bad faith. We refuse to let go of these imaginary identities, even though they are destroying us. This is sheer stupidity. (more…)