To the ego, love is poison.
Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is a struggle between one individual to another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. __uman beings never submit to human beings._ Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one__ country and such like things, but the object of their effort is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual__ needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals.
No Longer Human
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Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is a struggle between one individual to another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. __uman beings never submit to human beings._ Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one__ country and such like things, but the object of their effort is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual__ needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals.
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Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life__ meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style.
On our Journey, we should not dwell on the guilt emerging because of dropping back to Ego-dominated state; instead, we should celebrate that we are in the state of the Presence!!
Ego is the central figure of our personal history, based upon the past and looking into the future. Ego is the deepest dream of the Consciousness.
In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space an time, but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness.
The awakening process is not about 'finding who you are' but more about finding out about the ego, about who you are not.