As you you deeply into your own awareness, and relax the self-contraction, and dissolve into the empty ground of your own primordial experience, the simply feeling of Being-right now, right here-is it not obvious at once?

There is a way out, but the way out is really a way within.

All sentient beings - all holons in fact - contain Buddha-nature - contain depth, consciousness, intrinsic value, Spirit - and thus we are all members of the council of all beings... And the ultimate objective truth is that all beings are perfect manifestations of Spirit or Emptiness

Spirit forgets that it's Spirit and condenses to a smaller version of itself, which is soul. Soul forgets that it's soul and condenses to mind. Mind forgets that it's mind and condenses to body. Body forgets that it's body and condenses to the lowest dimension that you can have, which is matter.

So spirit is both the highest "level" in the holarchy, but it's also the paper on which the entire holarchy is written. It's the highest rung in the ladder, but it's also the wood out of which the entire ladder is made.

The great and rare mystics of the past . . . were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future.

As Hubert Benoit said, it is not the identification with the ego that is the problem, but the exclusive nature of the identification. When our self-identity expands beyond the ego, into the deeper psychic, then even into the Unborn and One Taste, the ego is simply taken up and subsumed in a grander identity. But the ego itself remains as the functional self in the gross realm, and it might even appropriately be intensified and made more powerful, simply because it is now plugged into the entire Kosmos.