The Powers that Be are not necessarily a bunch of people sitting around a table rubbing their hands together and cackling, but forces and ideas and perspectives that have a momentum of their own and work through people.

Yes, that perspective has been on my mind a lot. OTOH it makes no sense to go so far with that that one overlooks the fact that specific people takes specific actions.

Ironically, those people -- the mystics -- who draw a lot of attention to the illusion of ego are also those who possess the means for focusing and empowering individual will.

I can understand how you'd be concerned about anti-rationalism in this post. Far be it from me; I have been trained as a mathematician, after all. But learning to use math as a tool has the additional important benefit of making me aware of its limitations. So what I want to do is attempt to overcome our culture's absorption in rational analysis to the exclusion of other dimensions of human concern.