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.
What does it mean to live in the imaginary? It is a condition in which consciousness illegitimately identifies itself with the mental image of its corporeal vehicle—and secondarily with all the signifiers that have been pinned to that image by the words, actions, and gazes of others since the beginning of that corporeal life. There is a third level of imaginary entrapment as well—in the expectations and demands of the Other. This begins with the demands and prohibitions made by the biological mother, starting with weaning and toilet training and non-response to cries and tantrums; continues with the demands of the one in the fathering position to act according to specified norms and roles within the family system, then to function in the educational system; and includes the demands of educational system, the religious institutions, and of the social system as a whole to live within a given paradigm of existential possibility and preference.
What does it feel like to live in the imaginary? Life is a constant turmoil and torment of thoughts, emotional chaos, power struggles, irrational behavior and remorse. Hatred competes with desire and shame; impulse oscillates with paralysis, doing with undoing, opposition with submission. Life is a bad melodrama; scenes repeat; thoughts are predictable and stale, actions pointless, petty, puerile. One lives alienated from one’s own interior, clueless of underlying agendas, dispossessed of a center, lacking integrity or mastery or grace or love. Life in the imaginary is one ongoing nightmare punctuated by fleeting moments of relief provided usually by sub-lethal abdications of consciousness or social pretenses of enjoyment.
How to break out of the imaginary? Many say it is too difficult, they do not know how. But that is mendacity. The science of human transformation is thousands of years old. It was known at least as far back as the time of the original sat yogis of ancient India, who were the first scientists of consciousness to record the processes and results of their experiments in writing. And the even more profound oral teachings of those original transformational scientists have been passed down from teacher to students all these intervening centuries. The knowledge of awakening out of the imaginary has spread around the planet, into every major culture. It is available today in bookshops and, of course, on the internet. It has been continually repackaged—as Zen, Sufism, psychoanalysis, Advaita, and so on. Underneath the differences in rhetoric and range, accentuation and accessibility, all the fingers are pointing to the same moon. And there are adept guides from one tradition or another living in every part of the world. There is no excuse for failure to understand the methodology—except a secret resistance to killing off the imaginary ego.
The ego is an addict. It may use a chemical substance, or the chemicals internally created by arousal through flirting with danger or illicit sexual encounters, or even the brain chemicals that produce sleep—because oversleeping is another addiction. Those who abuse alcohol or tobacco, sex, sleep, or danger, may for years defend their vice. They will often say that “beer and cigarettes are my friends, I can’t abandon them”—and will languidly complain that they are too weak to let go of the habits that are slowly killing their organism—until one day they suffer a symptom that really scares them—like a car wreck or a medical emergency or a loss of a once-in-a-lifetime vital opportunity. They realize the reality of what they have been doing to themselves. And suddenly it is “in their face” and undeniable that they have been fools to let themselves be seduced by poisonous pleasures. In that moment, they will most often walk away from the old addictions once and forever, without looking back.
Of course, renouncing an addiction, whether to a habit, a substance, or a false identity, has consequences. One must mourn the loss of its sensual comfort. And if it is the ego one is renouncing, then one must mourn the global loss of all of the ego’s precious self-images, fantasies, hopes, ideals, and other forms of mind candy that it had been abusing. One must also renounce the imaginary fears and anxieties—the hallucinations that continue to play in the unconscious mind that get projected on external reality and converted into karmic quagmires. One will have to face the reality that one cannot remain in a womb forever, that one must become fully born—psychologically, symbolically, and spiritually.
In the process of awakening out of the imaginary, one enters into the symbolic dimension of existence. One realizes the self is pure intelligence. The power of thought is then turned upon the carcass of the imaginary ego until it is devoured. It then becomes directly intuited that although the Self is not the body, which was only a mental construct, the Self is in truth the living organism. And the Self is all that the organism perceives. The organism and the world make up one whole. And the world is not only the phenomenal plane of experience, but includes all the inner and subtler dimensions beyond the event horizon of the five senses. And the Self, un-tethered from its imaginary and symbolic loci, shines as the ultimate perceiver/creator of all that is. There is one Self. The Self is All—and Absolutely Nothing. This realization is the gateway to the Supreme Liberation.
The world is full of people who are angry with God because they had a miserable childhood, or because they don’t have enough money to live a life of leisure, or because they were born at the end of an evolutionary epoch, and the world as they know it is coming to an end. Such egoic fretting and complaining is simply an excuse to fail to come to grips with the meaning of existence, a failure to grow up and recognize that the universe does not revolve around your ego. We must no longer make demands upon God or society or family to take care of us and parent us and mirror our imaginary identity forever. We must grow up and move beyond the mirror world into the higher symbolic dimension of reality and gain a sense of the potentialities and imperatives of Being that transcend the consumer gratifications offered by a dying capitalist system on a dying planet.
We must accept the fact that the ego’s demands will never be met. We are doomed to disappointment. We will never have the glorious unending sexual relationship that we long for. We will not be fulfilled either by children or career. Our parents will never understand us. We cannot prevent aging and death. We cannot change any of that with alcohol or drugs. There is no way out but in and up. To go in, we must be prepared to face the repressed shadow world of infantile and prenatal phantasies, terrifying traumatic memory traces, catastrophes of the collective unconscious, fractals of archetypal horror and awe. And then, even deeper within, awareness encounters the realms of the truly weird, the nonhuman elementals; lightforms, waveforms, alien, angelic, astral, etheric; and the ultimate transcendental object attracting—and blocking—the sun door, the final barrier, the Absolute Other.
Once we leave our imaginary identity behind, then we enter a new Real. The stakes are higher, the parameters are wider, the potentialities are unlimited. We encounter an endless expanse of vertical horizons, of continuing self-expansion into infinity and beyond. The payoff comes instantly, at the moment of final fusion of subject and object, dissolving Other and Self in rapturous glory, in the realization of the eternal present. Bliss explodes in synaesthesias of delight once consciousness realizes its nature is pure Emptiness, encompassing the whole transfinite universe, and that the universe is constructed out of the sweetest love that could ever be tasted.
Once you have experienced that taste, the old anguish of the imaginary will be forgotten forever. Try it.
