Understanding Ego Backlash

Understanding Ego Backlash: Leo Gura likens the human mind to a harmonic oscillator, which is a system that oscillates back and forth like a spring or a rubber band. This system contains numerous symbols and meanings that make up one's ego, including various behaviors, patterns, and survival habits accumulated since childhood. These survival habits are ingrained into the ego and often drive an individual's life.
Influence of Survival Habits: Survival habits, which were necessary to survive numerous challenges faced during early life (like dealing with a dysfunctional family, bullying, financial stress, etc.), form a crucial part of one's ego. Over time, these habits also become instrumental in helping individuals address their basic survival needs, socialize, and eventually make a living. However, the human brain, being a complex system, attempts to maintain homeostasis and resists any significant changes that can destabilize its current state, as it perceives them as threats to survival.
Issues Surrounding Change: When attempting to bring about significant changes in life, individuals often face a strong counterforce or resistance that pulls them back towards their old patterns and habits - a phenomenon known as ego backlash. This resistance tends to create a sense of discouragement and self-doubt about the possibility of change. However, significant change is possible with additional effort and perseverance.
Identifying the Ego Backlash: A practical example of ego backlash is the struggle faced by individuals when they attempt to change deep-rooted habits, such as diet or lifestyle habits. Ego backlash can manifest as intense emotions or cravings for things that individuals know are not good for them. It may also lead them to believe that they are further along in their personal growth journey than they actually are. Despite the frustration, recognizing ego backlash and setting realistic expectations can be helpful.
Taking Action and Maintaining Mindfulness: Making significant changes can often feel threatening because every part of life is interconnected. Gura encourages individuals to mindfully observe their suffering during these transitions, avoid making major life decisions, maintain positive habits, and reframe ego backlash as a part of the growth process. It is essential to remember that growth is not linear, but rather a sequence of ups and downs, and to avoid expecting quick fixes or easy solutions.
Role of Ego Backlash in Personal Growth and Society: Gura highlights that ego backlash isn't just experienced at an individual level; it also occurs at collective levels (like in corporations, governments, or political parties). Examples in history include the Reconstruction after the Civil War or World War Two, where ego backlash occurred against significant societal changes.
Practicing Mindfulness and Taking Action in Transformation: Leo emphasizes the importance of actual practice in addition to knowledge in personal growth and spirituality. He suggests that individuals should, despite failures, keep trying to make changes as each failure helps them become more aware of the ego's self-deception tactics. He also recommends differentiating between experiencing high states and building a solid foundation in practices such as meditation, as high states can often be followed by significant drops.
Resources Available on Actualize.org: The website Actualize.org provides numerous resources such as a book list, life purpose course, blog, and forum for emotional support, but Gura emphasizes the need for an active engagement in personal development and spirituality, beyond merely consuming these resources.
Balance Between Theory and Action: Gura underscores the importance of striking balance between theory and action and warns against turning theory into an ideology or addiction. Despite the usefulness of theorizing, he stresses on the need to take action, else no significant growth would occur. After all, action is what distinguishes the theoretical from the practical.
Recognizing Ego Backlash: Aspects of ego backlash do not necessarily announce themselves; instead, it can feel like a primal force driving you back to unhealthy, dysfunctional habits. This can take the form of cravings for specific foods or activities, or feelings leading you back to harmful relationships. Deep spiritual work, self-inquiry, meditation, and psychedelic trips can lead to significant growth but may also cause regression to older, negative states, bringing judgment, criticism, demonization, and anger to the fore again. This "sweeping" force of ego backlash can come as a surprise and create frustration.
Ego's Tricky Tendencies: The ego tends to trick itself into believing it's further ahead in the spiritual development process than it actually is. Especially when an individual starts to see progress, they may overestimate their advancement and believe the worst is behind them. However, most often, the most challenging parts lie ahead.
Facing the House of Cards: Activating meaningful change means addressing and reconfiguring a complex, nonlinear system that is the mind and its intertwined elements impacting life. Such changes often require breaking apart certain aspects of life, like career or relationships. Everything in life is interconnected, like a house of cards, and even a slight pull from one corner could cause the whole structure to collapse. Due to this fear, the ego often avoids deep analysis of foundational elements, causing a struggle even with surface-level changes.
Facing Existential Problems and Survival: Life can be broken down into two main ideas: avoiding suffering and pursuing pleasure. Spirituality involves transcending these survival drives to view reality more fundamentally. However, survival isn't just limited to basic needs; it includes social survival - striving for acceptance, approval, and maintaining relationships. It is a challenge to delve deep into core existential issues that have been thus far avoided, which often reveals unresolved issues causing dissatisfaction and inauthenticity.
Impact of Spirirtual Work on Life: Spiritual practices, such as self-inquiry and meditation, can lead to recognizing one's own inauthenticity. The resulting ego backlash can trigger a range of emotions like fear, anger, envy, jealousy, and sadness. These emotions could signify the loss of a part of your ego or self, a fundamental aspect of self-inquiry and enlightenment processes.
Self-inquiry and psychedelic experiences leading to Ego backlash: Leo Gura discusses his personal engagement with deep self-inquiry and the subsequent realizations about the transience and falsity of the ego. The insights derived from this serve to influence everyday life and incite questions about how this affects his dynamic with family, friends, his career, and finances. The pressure to continuously build and grow without ridding oneself of foundational problems sparks resistance to spirituality, meditation, and self-inquiry as it challenges the existence of the ego.
Maintaining pace of spiritual growth to avoid counterproductive backlash: Gura stresses the importance of managing the pace of spiritual development to avoid significantly powerful ego backlash that could set you back on your personal growth journey. Striking a balance between personal transformation and comfort, while deterring the mind's tricks to resist change, proves to be an essential consideration, discerned only through trial and error.
Ego backlash after spiritual retreats or experiences: Besides psychedelic experiences, Gura encounters noticeable ego backlash post spiritual retreats. This often leads to activities that generally aren't part of his routine, like playing video games or eating unhealthy food. He also divulges how binaural beats, used for meditation, can stir up emotional upheaval and bring up unresolved past issues leading to ego backlash.
Dealing with ego backlash through expectation and mindfulness: Understanding and anticipating ego backlash as a natural consequence of significant change facilitates improved mindfulness, helping gain emotional distance during contraction and preventing rash decisions based on temporary feelings of fear or despair.
Observation of Survival Mechanisms and homeostasis: The survival mechanisms established during childhood and early adulthood and the inherent nature of the mind to maintain homeostasis play a significant part in defining habitual behaviors. Although they are protective and beneficial for survival, they sometimes tend to be overprotective, which can be damaging, leading to unnecessary resistance to change.
Making important decisions during negative states: Leo Gura advises against making significant life decisions during periods of fear, anger or sadness. During these periods, an ego backlash might make one feel like a victim, stripping them of their positive ideals, aspiration for enlightenment, and a sense of hope.
Ego backlash as an opportunity for growth: While suffering from ego backlash might make one feel like there is no progress being made, this suffering can actually lead to considerable growth when mindfully endured. This suffering can purify and provide opportunities to learn more about oneself, especially when maintaining positive habits.
Collective ego backlash: Ego backlash not only affects individuals, but also collective systems such as corporations, governments and political parties. These systems also possess survival drives and will go to great lengths to defend their existence, even if it results in self-destruction. Historical events like the post-Civil War Reconstruction in America and World War II in Germany are examples of collective ego backlashes, but these can also occur in modern contexts, such as the crackdown on psychedelics in the '60s and '70s, and Gamergate.
Practicing self-love during an ego backlash: An important approach to dealing with ego backlash is to practice self-love and avoid guilt and self-condemnation. One should attempt to handle this state with compassion rather than feeling guilt or shame, as self-judgment usually exacerbates suffering and hinders the capacity to learn from the experience.
Maintaining good habits during ego backlash: Leo Gura highlights the importance of continuing positive habits during the period of an ego backlash, even if there is a strong desire to quit these habits. Examples include maintaining a healthy diet and being empathetic towards others. Even during the challenging time of ego backlash, it's essential to persist with these habits.
Understanding growth as a non-linear process: Gura suggests growth should be seen as a jagged, non-linear process rather than a constantly upward moving graph. This acceptance can put a pause on unrealistic expectations. Even during periods of seemingly heavy regression, this should be considered as part of the growth path.
Spiritual growth and self-actualization: It's important to understand that personal growth and self-realization are not quick or easy one-time solutions. Achieving such growth requires understanding that it is a long-term commitment and requires the right mindset. It's also helpful to view suffering during ego backlash periods as a path to growth instead of a setback.
Balancing theory and action: Rather than getting trapped in analysis or over-planning, it's crucial to take action and learn from experience. Theoretical knowledge is of limited use unless it's put into practice. Practical action and resultant learning experiences are indispensable components of growth.
Managing expectations during ego backlash: Gura emphasizes the need to manage expectations to prevent them from exacerbating the suffering during an ego backlash. This can be done by reminding oneself of some key points during these periods, such as acknowledging that the ego backlash is temporary, and it's important not to take drastic actions during such periods. He also advises not to expect immediate solutions or easy fixes during these times.
Parallel of Collective and Individual Levels: This segment delves deep into the understanding that events occurring at a global societal, corporate, governmental or political level are similar to processes happening on a personal, individual level. The differences, changes and developments the world is experiencing are the same changes an individual faces during personal transformation.
Significance of Mindfulness During Suffering: It is important to remember that when in the midst of suffering, having a clear understanding of theoretical concepts might not be of great help. What matters most at that moment is the ability to remain mindful and patient through the process. Being kind to oneself during this phase and loving oneself is key.
Emphasizing the Distinction Between States and Stages of Development: Understanding that a high state of feeling or being does not equate to a high stage of development is important. Achieving high states can be temporary and easily achievable; however, reaching a high stage of development requires consistent effort and work over years. This could be in relation to any sphere of life- meditation, business skills, relationship skills etc.
The Dynamic Nature of Emotional States: The section reiterates that emotional states are transient and cyclical. After experiencing extreme highs or feeling on top of the world, it is normal to experience a subsequent low. Similarly, after experiencing emotional lows, a person can expect to feel significantly better in the subsequent days or weeks.
The Importance of Experience and Practice in Personal Development: The emphasis is heavily on the act of doing the work and gaining first hand experience. Watching videos, reading books and gathering theoretical knowledge might provide a sense of understanding, but the real wisdom and growth happens when theories are put into practice. Personal growth is not just complex and multifaceted, but it's also deeply personal and individualistic in nature.
Potential Risks of Relying Too Much on Theory: Though theoretical knowledge can act as a guide, over-reliance on it can become an addiction or form of escapism from doing actual growth work. It's important to take theories and models with a grain of salt, understanding that individual experiences can vary greatly and certain theories may not perfectly match an individual's personal journey.
Understanding the Fear of Delving Deep into Personal Work: Letting go of theories and diving deep into self-work can be terrifying. Often people can use theories as a way to subtly avoid doing the more challenging introspective work. Its essential to find balance between theory and experience, in order not to fall into this trap. This way, personal development and growth can take place in a more authentic manner.