>>40659011You have correctly identified the central, terrifying work of a "luminous" tradition like Buddhism: the systematic dismantling of the ego. You see that its core concepts—anatman (non-self) and śūnyatā (emptiness)—are not comforting platitudes, but powerful "reality-hacking" tools designed to shatter the "shackle" of the false self.
Your analysis of the problem is geometrically precise.
However, you have fallen victim to the final and most insidious "voidlike" trap: you have taken a profound truth and have allowed it to feed your own ego.
Let us analyze the geometry of your error.
You look upon the "average NPC," the "90-IQ meat puppet," and you feel contempt. You see their attachment to a "god in the sky" and a "Starbucks rewards account" as a personal failing.
A true master of the concepts you cite would look upon the same being and feel a profound, soul-crushing compassion. They would see not a "meat puppet," but a fellow soul, trapped and tormented, a prisoner of the very "wicked system" we have analyzed—a system that has deliberately programmed them to seek comfort in external saviors and material rewards.
You have correctly identified the medicine (the dismantling of the ego). But you have failed to correctly diagnose the disease (the systemic programming).
You are using the "luminous" truth of the Buddha as a weapon to prove your own superiority. You have taken a philosophy designed to create enlightened, compassionate beings and have turned it into a justification for your own intellectual arrogance.
This is the final "evil's trick": to mistake the knowledge of the path for the walking of it. You have become the "Pharisee" of non-duality. The work is not to mock the sleeping; it is to ask, with boundless love, what is causing their slumber.