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Views from the third world. Earth.


To Be Good, Abandon Humanity

A conversation with Lord Vishnu

Only by abandoning your humanity can you truly be good. Humanity is ultimately too limiting, too speciest. What’s good for us is torture for cows and collapse for the climate. We’re fundamentally no better than crocodiles, cool in small numbers but chaos if left unchecked. To be attached to this particular avatar in aeons of evolution is unnecessarily limiting. Frankly, who gives a fuck about humanity. There’s much more going on in the world.

Evolutionarily speaking, we’re just a carbonic fart in the wind. Philosophically speaking, ‘human’ and ‘self’ are very recent and not even especially interesting identities. Whatever humans are is just one form of life, and however modern humans understand themselves is only one for of understanding. There’s more out there and appealing to your humanity is like appealing to your love for your childhood school. It’s important, certainly, but at some point you have to leave your neighborhood to get anywhere. And so it is with understanding.

The first point about understanding, of course, is that you can’t understand. That some things just do not fit into monkey brain. You can feel them but you can’t understand them. Understanding has to start with the humility that some things cannot be understood. Otherwise you don’t understand the power of Ishvara and you’re deluding yourself from the beginning.

In a Vedic or and religious sense, the idea that humans are the most important thing in the world is laughable, and this makes sense. We may be blessed by the gods but we are not gods. What a joke. We can’t even control the weather, which even a dragon can do. The trouble is that instead of lighting sacrificial fires to others, we started lighting fires only to our selves. We began worshiping our own greed, as embodied by the creed Capitalism, and here we are, at the end of every deal with the Devil. Him collecting his dues.

This is of course a tragedy for the immediate party, but that’s not you. First off, it’s not even the human species getting killed off, it’s 95% of other species. We will certainly die off in numbers, but we’re cockroaches with guns. The species will be fine. Unfortunately for everyone else of Earth.

Clinging to humanity—which somehow includes the ‘right’ to do whatever the fuck you want—is fundamentally selfish, and selfishness is the problem with the world. It’s what hurts human beings the most. The Buddha said clinging to the (individual) self was at the root of suffering, and so it is with the (social) self we call humanity. Attachment doesn’t lead us to better actions. Because we forget our connection to everything else. And so we fuck our mother Earth up. Humans are real motherfuckers.

If you want to get anywhere in your thinking, you have to literally get out of your own skull. The monkey meat sac that you call home, and which you feel so wise peering out of. Even calling yourselves homo sapiens. Wise ape. Wise ass more like it. Sneering at God and masturbating furiously. There are obviously different levels of consciousness beyond ‘consumer-with-a-passport’. We’re so fooled by the maps we call IDs that we think they’re the territory. Experience is really much more than that. Fall in love. Have children. Pet a dog. Look at the moon. There’s obviously much more to the world than where you hang your hat.

Hence saving the world means renouncing human supremacy over it. It means renouncing the demand that we can do whatever the fuck we want, because we’re so fucking special. This means renouncing your exclusive humanity and understanding that you have many identities. That animals are your cousins, plants are your second cousins, and microbes are your ancestors, and that they all still live with and through you. That the preservation of your species and way of life isn’t the most important thing in the world. That there are other ways of living too.

To have any potential access to infinity, you have to give up the finite experience of this particular breeding population and see the world as it is. Infinite. And you’re a part of the world. So you’re infinite too.