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In This episode we're gonna be talking about the ego backlash Actually today I had a very different topic planned but I Woke up and I was feeling so miserable I had a cold all week and I still have the sniffles and I also hurt my spine this week twisted it somehow so it was hard for me to sit and to meditate all week but I was kind of like suffering through the pain and and then and then towards the end of the week now I'm getting this ego backlash from a lot of meditation and self-inquiry Which is kind of fucking with my mind and so I thought well This would be the perfect time to talk about ego backlash since I'm going through it right now so here we are So let's talk about this and this is a very practical Matter Because if you're going deep down on the self-actualization journey if you're going into spirituality you will experience many, ego backlashes in your life and so you want to be prepared for them I Want you to start to think of the human mind as a harmonic oscillator in Physics a harmonic oscillator is like a simple spring where you pull back the spring and you let it go and it kind of goes bump up up up boom back and forth or like a rubber band That's called a harmonic oscillator So that's what your mind is See the mind is a very complex system Filled with all sorts of symbols and meanings that you create about your life and this is really what the ego is We're talking about the ego mind here This, is like your entire life we're talking about the heart the engine that drives your entire life that holds your entire life together This network of meanings and symbols which is your mind in it or contained all the behaviors and patterns and survival habits that you've accumulated from birth basically through all of your childhood and all of your teenage years and all of that has been sort of hardwired and baked into this giant complex vast nonlinear network Which is responsible for maintaining its own survival in existence? because if this network didn't have a survival driver mechanism and it didn't behave like a harmonic oscillator, what would happen is we do just dissolve you would, die literally you would die So you picked up and built a lot of habits in your childhood? which I would call something like survival habits These were habits that were necessary for you to survive whatever survival demands there were when you were born and basically throughout the rest of your life so like whatever family you were born into maybe you had some alcoholic father or mother or Maybe you didn't get enough love in your in your household or maybe you had some sort of bullying older sibling who bullied you all the time or maybe Your family didn't have a lot of money so your parents were always fighting over how to pay the mortgage next month and then that created a lot of stress in your life Or maybe your mother or your father Was very harsh and critical of you and didn't love you for who you were but wanted you to be somebody else Wanted you to turn out just like them and you weren't like that or maybe you were bullied at school or maybe you got picked on and laughed at by By kids, or by your siblings or something and so whatever that is you Know there's a million different variations on that but whatever that is all of that was presented to your mind and to your body into your being as a survival challenge it's like you had to you have to find coping strategies to deal with that you needed to find coping strategies to get your most basic biological needs met Food shelter safety but then you Also needed to develop coping strategies once you entered school and you started to socialize you need to develop coping strategies for how to be loved and liked and not ostracized from your community and So that people respected you and then as you grew up older and you got into your early 20s now you need to how to make a living and survive in the world that way and so now there's a whole set of additional layer of survival habits that you had to construct in order to be able to pay your bills and to be a responsible adult and all this sorts of stuff right and so this Is very deeply wired into what your ego is your? Ego is not just the sense of you but it's also all of those habits and it's all this giant interconnected vast network of stuff and it's very complicated and what happens is like any complex system if you studied Systems Theory See, my episode intro to systems thinking for that as You should know by now any complex system has inertia to it it also has a homeostatic drive to it, which means it tries to maintain its current state because for a system to be whatever it is however it is doesn't matter how it is For it to maintain that structure over a period of time whether it's days or months or years or a human lifetime It has to maintain a self-similarity because if that system changes too much or it allows forces from the outside chaotic Forces to come in there to rearrange the system whether it's for the worse or for the better it doesn't matter to the system it's always perceived as a as a mortal threat because it literally is because like let's say you have a castle built out of Legos right the Lego blocks and There's a certain form that this castle takes well you could say that's like a complex system In its metaphor well if we rearrange the Lego blocks into some other form, which is significantly different from the castle See if the castle Was self-aware and it had a you know if it was a living being and it could actually be complex enough in order to to have a metabolism and to be able to to look at itself and perceive itself then What it would say is that wait a minute too many of my blocks are being changed and rearranged into this new structure and now this new structure is not what I was and therefore that literally is the death of the castle in This case see and that's exactly what is happening inside your mind with you in your life when you're trying to create some kind of significant change or transformation in your life and that Is what we're talking about with Self-actualization and with all spiritual work is we're looking to get a significant change in our life Which is something that's actually quite rare very few people undertake a conscious deliberate effort to Significantly change their life in a very fundamental way Most people when they try to make a change in their life they're just doing window dressing they're changing the very surface of their life they're not going very deep trying to change like fundamental existential Aspects of their being They, change little things like they change maybe how they dress or they change one of their friends out of a dozen friends or maybe they change a relationship And and and even that can be difficult even that can produce ego backlash so what is ego backlash ego backlash if We're thinking of the mind as this harmonic Oscillator it's the oscillation of the string Or of this spring rather it's the oscillation of the spring so what that means is that you should expect that any time you make a significant change to this complex dynamic Nonlinear living system that you are you should expect a counter force that will pull you back towards homeostasis towards the status quo of whatever you were So if you were fat your whole life and now you're trying to get skinny you should expect a counterforce To come in and pull you back towards being fat because being fat is a sort of a survival Coping mechanism believe it or not that your mind created and it's it's getting you some kind of payoff So, maybe it's because you Were bullied at school so much that you've developed such low self-esteem That that's why you feel like you need to eat and you're always? Overeating and you're eating all these desserts and and all this sort of stuff Because you're not getting them maybe the kind of love that you wanted to get That's just like one example of course that's not the the reason that all people are fat but that's just one simplistic example and so The ego backlash is just whenever you're trying to make progress in your life and make a significant change the more significant of a change you're making the more fundamental the change is Not just window dressing stuff but if it goes like to the existential level then you should expect a very significant force to kind of pull you back out of it That's ego backlash and it doesn't feel good and it can feel very disappointing it can feel depressing Because you feel like you've taken a giant step forward in your life Trying to change something maybe you're trying to change your career you're trying to change your diet you're trying to change And become a better meditator or You're trying to become a nicer person you're trying to work on some emotional problem you have maybe you have some anger problem and so you're trying to work on that so that you don't Hurt, the people you love in your life but then you make progress and Then as soon as you feel like okay now I finally made it have made the change and now it really seems like it's it's stuck and then of course you backslide and you take two steps back And Then you start to wonder like will I ever change Is self-help even a thing can even work Or is it just all pipe dreams is spirituality really a thing or is it just wishful thinking can I really make significant changes in my life and the answer of course is that you certainly can but it's gonna take a lot more work and suffering, than you probably realized See most people don't appreciate what change means change literally means the death of you now there can be various degrees of this death from a total degree 2 minor degrees, which is mostly what people encounter you know like for example when you're trying to change your diet some part of you really is going to die if your diet is really gonna change and so that part of you will be struggling to make sure that you don't change your diet because that part of you doesn't want to die it's scared And Of course it's not just gonna come out and outright tell You what's going on all of these are various kind of like subsurface subconscious Forces and a lot of times all you experience is you just experience like the the blunt emotional impact of the ego backlash the ego backlash usually doesn't announce itself to you like oh here I am After your meditation retreat you know you've done all this meditation work and now here I come the ego backlash It doesn't work that way usually it just feels like some sort of very primal force emotional force is Driving you back to your old unhealthy dysfunctional ways Like you might get a craving for some cheesecake or You might get a craving for some poor nerf or some sex or you might get this real like sadness in you that makes you want to go back to your ex And make up with them even though you know that they're abusive to you Or you know after after? Weeks or months of meditating hardcore doing all this self inquiry and and you know making lots of spiritual progress Then all of a sudden you crash back down into your ego and you you start to judge people and you start to criticize people and you start to demonize people which was something that you would think you'd be over by now and now like it comes back maybe now some anger comes back at you kind of like that and you're like it sweeps you it sweeps you like like a giant ocean wave just kind of carries you out into the ocean away from shore That you've been swimming to it's kind of like that and that can be very frustrating and It can take you by surprise Because a lot of times in this work We like to trick ourselves the ego likes to trick itself into thinking that it's more developed in advance than it really is That it's further along than it really is Especially when it starts to see a little bit of progress it tends to over Estimate its own progress and it's like okay now we're going you know now we're moving towards something we're moving towards enlightenment and now you Think okay now the worst is yet behind me? And usually, when you think like that the worst is yet a head of you? so you want to be prepared so the value of talking about this topic is just to to set the proper expectations and I do have an episode called setting proper expectations Go check that one out because that one's also very important it dovetails with what I'm talking about here so What you need to understand is that when we're talking about creating a significant change in our life we are talking about chilling aspects of ourselves and we are talking about Reconfiguring this vast complex Nonlinear system that is your mind that is holding your entire life together and that's a tricky proposition because Mmm you know oftentimes when you're making a significant change it's not just a straight-up improvement it's not always just that you take this giant tangle of complicated Survival habits that you've had your whole life and that you just like slap on some positive healthy stuff on top of it and everything gets better a lot of times what you have to do is you have to kind of like regress first and Certain, parts of your life have to like you have to like break it apart you know it may be like you take your career and you look at your career and you you and you you think about how My career is so inauthentic like what I'm doing at Work maybe I'm even doing something that violates my greatest values maybe I'm I'm Violating integrity maybe I'm even doing something illegal with my work and then you have to like look at that you have to see that oh for me to move to the next level like in my spiritual growth To be more authentic with people in my life with my children Or with my wife and all of that I would first have to resolve this deeper in authenticity that's there in my career But my career of course is tied to my ability to support My family right because if I lose my career how am I gonna support them maybe then my wife will leave me and my children will then hate me for getting divorced with my wife and you know my whole life will fall apart and So, that's why you never really look deeply at your career You never are able to to make any significant change in your career because of course every part of your life is Connected with every other part and it's kind of like um like a house of cards that's holding itself up and you know if you start to question one little corner and you sort of pull on the cards over here the whole thing is gonna collapse and so your mind is scared of that it knows that and then especially when we're talking about doing The deepest spiritual work if we're talking about self inquiry if we're talking about Hardcore meditation if we're talking about doing solo meditation retreats the kind that I've demonstrated on my blog If we're talking about deep psychedelic trips where you're questioning your entire life you know this is like where you're questioning the very foundation of your house of cards and This, is where it does get scary because your whole life could start to fall apart depending on how dysfunctional your life is and all of us have various kinds of dysfunctions in our lives but of course it comes in degrees some of it some of us have a lot more of it than others do So if your life is extremely dysfunctional Your ego is not even gonna let you analyze The very foundation of your house of cards because it's way too. Threatening it's way too painful it's gonna cause way too much suffering to do that so your ego is gonna keep all your awareness only at the surface level of your house of cards and even then you're gonna struggle you're gonna struggle even just to make changes at the surface but you know for you to get Significant improvement in the quality of your life that is directly proportional to how deep you can go and how much you can work on the foundation and how much you can tolerate working on the foundation and working on the foundation Necessarily comes with suffering Because suffering is what you're Sort of Always trying to avoid in your life that's like what the egos whole game is that's what you do in your whole life is you only do basically two things one is you avoid suffering and two is that you pursue pleasure That's your whole life in a nutshell that's your whole life from the moment you were born up to today in Every facet of your life from your career to your eating habits to your exercise habits or lack thereof to your relationships and to your education and everything else all right you're avoiding suffering and you're pursuing pleasure And that constitutes was survival is survival you're always Trying to survive and What spirituality is is is trying to transcend your survival drives and to look at reality in a more fundamental way see reality The way that it looks? when you're not preoccupied with survival and Survival is not just physical survival it also includes your social survival So even though you might think like well Leo I'm not I'm not surviving every day you know I've got a pretty decent House and I've got a car and I've got my food needs met and all that so I'm not surviving. Oh Yes, you are you're you're busy struggling to survive in the social domain try to be liked try to become famous trying to get approval from people Trying to manage your relationships with your family and your friends and your girlfriend and your boyfriend and husband and wife and all of this and children and you're trying to maintain that whole house of cards See So look very closely at your life to see that that's what you're doing most of the time 99% of the time you're just preoccupied with survival and so of course Because the ego is built Upon, the avoidance of suffering and the ego creates all sort of very clever structures in order to avoid suffering and to maximize pleasure and because your whole life has been kind of built upon that and Built these structures like one is built upon another upon another upon others for like an ancient city you know like an ancient old city like modern Rome is gonna be built on on many layers of Ancient ruins you know there's probably like 10 or 20 layers of ancient Rome underneath modern Rome that it was built upon well that's sort of how your your mind and your psyche is constructed in your ego and So of course to get the most significant change we have to go very deep to the lowest levels to the like the to the origin all of those existential Problems that you've been avoiding your whole life well we have to deal with us And of course the whole point of avoiding them the reason you were avoiding them in the first place and you created all these clever defense mechanisms and Survival strategies to cope with those is because you didn't want to look at them you didn't really want to deal with the core issues and so Because of this you should expect that if you do start to you know excavate down below do some psychic archeology on yourself then what you're gonna discover is that there's a There's a lot of skeletons in your closet down there which are of course Responsible for why you feel so incomplete so broken so dissatisfied so unfulfilled with life and so fundamentally inauthentic Which is why you worry so much about getting approval from other people you, worry so much about them liking you in the social domain Because you have spent your whole life avoiding the deep existential issues and now anytime you try to tackle those deep existential issues Suffering will come up Because you've been sweeping that stuff under the rug and The ego backlash a lot of times comes from a sort of recognition of your own inauthenticity Here you were thinking you were the self developed person and you were working hard on yourself and you accomplished all this stuff in your Life but then The rude awakening Comes that it's like oh all of that was just a facade I was lying to the outside world and I was lying to myself and there are these deeper truths that I Didn't want to look at and now I'm looking at and now of course it's it's like it's Agitating to me and of course now you have these emotions that come up fear anger envy jealousy Sadness is a very common one you might feel a kind of a sense of loss like you're losing something in your life and that's right you're losing a part of your ego and if we're talking about going you know to you self-inquiry towards ultimate enlightenment then you're gonna be losing yourself not just a fragment of your ego but the entire thing and how do you cope with that and that's what I've been sort of coping with this week is I was doing some pretty deep self inquiry and You know it's dawning on me more and more that there's no self there and That you know my entire personality and ego is just a house of cards and so the more you look at that it's one thing to just kind of know that intellectually it's even another thing to to see glimpses of it of course you know I've had many very profound non-dual experiences and various mystical states and highs But then it's sort of another thing to actually start to like let those insights permeate your psyche and start to affect your everyday world and Now it starts to get real you know now you really feel it because now You know what does this mean for my career what does this mean for my business so what does this mean for my money situation What does this mean for my relationships will I ever you know even be in a relationship again what does it mean for my friendships what does it mean for like my family do I even speak to my family anymore like you know your mind starts to accost you with all these Fears and doubts and concerns and some of those are legitimate Your life may need to fall apart before you're able to reconstruct it into something healthy and That's what most people don't appreciate most people if they try to do is they try to always build more and more and more on top of their life they They take this sort of additive approach but they don't realize that you know stuff Does have to die off if we're talking about significant change you can't just keep adding more and more To your ego or I mean you can but that's just not gonna solve your problems Because there's there's the foundational problems that are not going to be fixed just through the additive approach So in my own life when do I get the biggest ego backlashes oftentimes is after a a deep breakthrough on psychedelics and And the way that manifests is that often times then I want to Sort of avoid any kind of spiritual work after that. I might want to avoid meditation I might want to avoid self inquiry I might want to avoid psychedelics for a long time because Mmm well the ego mind knows that if he keeps going in this direction That's going to be the end of the ego mind and The rate at which you grow or the way the rate at which you deconstruct yourself is very important because sometimes when you try to do it too quickly The ego backlash becomes so strong that actually it becomes counterproductive You can kind of freak yourself out of changing or growing and then you can kind of like shrink from the challenge and then you can kind of just sort of avoid it for years and so that's important to to be mindful of is that you want to be able to select a sort of a pace of growth or Deconstruction which Which is kind of stretch you? You're still gonna suffer it's gonna stretch you it's gonna be difficult but not so much that it scares you completely off the path which can sometimes happen so And it's difficult to tell you you know how to strike that balance you know where do you draw that line Between doing too much meditation too much self inquiry too Much psychedelics to changing too many habits in your life at once and then you End up just completely backsliding and then maybe spending the next year playing video games and eating hot pockets in your mother's basement sort of thing right so you got to find what that what that line is for you and you want to stay just under that line so that you don't you don't trip yourself into into kind of like regressing in a way where you're just like Completely disillusioned with self development completely disillusioned with spiritual work And So, that's why Self-love is is important that's why self reflection isn't because you've got to kind of self reflect and kind of be very honest with yourself and kind of Have an honest assessment of where you're at right now in your life and how much change can you really handle And The mind is so tricky because sometimes the mind will use that against you and they'll say Oh, well I can't handle this I can't handle it another meditation retreat. I can't handle more psychedelics when you really can it's just that your mind will of course use this to to get you not to change and so it becomes the sort of psychological Cat-and-mouse game with your own mind about you know how much change can you really tolerate Without a complete regression and the only way you're gonna figure that out is just through trial and error and being very mindful of the dynamics that are going in your mind be very mindful of how sneaky the ego is and how it plays tricks on you And just honestly going through these backsliding episodes where you know you make a big change you backslide and Then you try it again you backslide again you try to get you back so that you know sometimes you got to do that three or four times kind of learn where where your own Tipping points are Also in my own life besides psychedelic trips I experienced this after solo retreats or the posture retreats you know you spend 10 days meditating non-stop and then you come back from that and usually what happens is that very quickly the ego gets sucked back in to Watching television for me playing video games which usually I don't do but that oftentimes after a retreat I'll want to play some video games Eating someone healthy food sometimes I don't you get that too much anymore But that happens after retreats after after self loss of self inquiry I also get some of these tendencies and Very interestingly sometimes I listen to binaural beats which are these like meditation Different sound frequencies that play in each year and If you listen to a lot of binaural beats What can happen is that they can cause emotional upheaval stuff can come up in your psyche stuff from From your past old memories all sorts of garbage can kind of just come up to the surface of your consciousness and then you have to process that and from that can come ego backlash But I mean by no means is this an exhaustive list. I mean people will experience ego backlash from so many different things from enlightenment experiences From various glimpses of non-duality if you're just trying to install new habits like maybe you're trying to change your work habits Like to develop a strong work ethic maybe you're trying to wake up early in the morning that can cause an ego backlash if you spend your whole life not doing that If you're trying to change your diet that's a very common one if you're doing a nofap challenge very common to get ego by backlashes there so What do you do to minimize? ego backlash and how do you deal with it well firstly you just expect it You want to understand your mind as this harmonic oscillator and you want to appreciate The homeostatic forces which are keeping you alive so it's not that your mind is evil or bad in in kind of pulling you back your mind is this very safety and survival oriented and it has to be to keep you alive and you know sometimes you can really appreciate the power of homeostasis and the value of it like for example when you have a terrible psychedelic trip a really bad one like a really gnarly one that scares the shit out of you But then you're thankful the next day because your mind Brings you back brings you back to normal Within a week you're back to normal you forget about the trip it's out of your mind and you're just back to normal and you're Thankful for that because you don't want to be stuck in that horror full State of madness that you were in when you're on one of these very deep psychedelic bad trips So you can appreciate that see there homeostasis is working in your favor it's making sure you don't go crazy because if it was that easy to shift your mind you could easily like take a psychedelic shift your mind into total madness and Then and then stay that way for the rest your life now that would be a problem wouldn't it So the homeostasis is there to protect you Now of course just like an overprotective mother or father The effect on the child can be very damaging even though the intention is good and that is sort of what happens is that All these survival mechanisms that, we built when we were a child and early adults? They turn out to be not as necessary as we thought they were especially after you know we've kind of outgrown Those various risks and dangers that we faced now We don't face them anymore but those habits that we create in order to solve those issues are still there And they're still running our lives So very importantly just expect that ego backlash will happen any significant change generally comes with suffering It's gonna come with fear. It's gonna come with various emotions that come up so When this stuff does happen if you're making a big change in your life start to label it explicitly call it out as an ego backlash, so when it's happening to you can just say to yourself oh, oh Yeah, that's the ego a backlash that leo is talking about oh yeah there it is That helps you to get some distance from it so you're not totally sucked in and absorbed to it the next step is to observe it as mindfully as possible and this is where it helps for you to have a meditation habit and To do these various kinds of retreats that. I'm talking about or to do psychedelics all of these develop more mindfulness within you so if you have some mindfulness skills that you've hopefully built up already then you want to apply those in your moment of sadness depression fear and General contraction so generally what happens is the ego contracts so as the ego contracts the more mindfulness you have the more easily you can observe the contraction without getting sucked into the contraction and acting from the contraction and very importantly at this point if you're mindful enough you want to remind yourself not to make any kind of drastic major life decisions in this state of contraction Because you could easily make some kind of foolish rash decision like I'm leaving my family or I'm I'm divorcing my spouse Or I'm quitting my job, or you could even get to the point we say I'm killing myself Be very careful about that because this can be dangerous You want to make sure That you don't make any kind of major life decisions when you're feeling negative when you're feeling crippled by fear anger sadness or anything like this When you're feeling very disempowered when you're feeling like a victim and all of this will happen to you All right that's that's what makes the ego backlash so difficult is that it's got so much emotional charge to it that it just kind of like sucks you and sweeps you away and you're not able to like think clearly All of your lofty high ideals all of the the reasons that you were pursuing enlightenment and spirituality and the reason you're pursuing self-actualization the good person you're trying to become all the love and the beauty of life all of that gets stripped away from you in this moment of ego backlash you don't have it You're feeling very negative at that moment it's gonna feel to you like there's no hope your life is gonna be terrible in that spirituality will never work for you and you'll never get enlightened and you'll never be able to To change your diet and you'll never be able to find a good job and you'll never be able to to get a good girlfriend or a good boyfriend you know you're gonna feel very negative and You want to make sure to remind yourself not to make any major life decisions at that point And just mindfully observe the suffering I have an episode called How to deal with strong negative emotions That's a very important episode for when you're in this the the dot sort of the depth of the ego backlash so that you can just kind of suffer it mindfully and let that suffering actually purify you and grow you and so there's sort of a silver lining to these ego back lashes in a sense it's terrible because you're like at the worst that you would feel in your life during these moments and It also feels like you're not making any progress But at the same time if you're able to suffer it Mindfully that suffering will purify you and in that you will actually make your greatest progress So this is another one of those very counterintuitive things these things that kind of go full circle it's precisely, when you're backsliding that you have the opportunity to Learn the most about yourself and to grow the most but it's also precisely because of that that it's the most difficult for you to remain mindful during that moment and To maintain all of your good habits and that's another way to deal with ego backlash is As much as you can try to maintain your positive habits even if you don't feel like it So If you're in the midst of an ego backlash you probably won't want to meditate that day you'll want to skip it you probably won't want to observe your diet that day you'll want to go splurge on some cheesecake and you probably Won't want to be nice to your children or to your friends or to your family members huh, push yourself just to be nice anyways Like today I really didn't want to shoot this video like I was really debating about whether I should shoot or not I felt like procrastinating it And I just kind of went through the motions and then you know by the time that I turned on the camera It's really not much different than any other day The next thing to remember, when dealing with an ego backlash, is to not get discouraged by it Frame it in a positive way Frame it as though this is growth this is part of the growth process What's really important is to stop thinking of growth as a straight constantly upwards moving line on a graph that's not what your spiritual growth or your self-actualization growth will look like it will look with like you know jagged sawtooth kind of pattern with lots of ups and downs and sometimes big spikes downward and Usually it's when you get to your biggest spike downward that then you get your biggest spike upward as well So the way that I try to reframe it in my mind, whenever I'm having this emotional upheaval or I'm feeling Like I'm regressing is just that This is the path this is the growth. I'm growing right now as I'm doing this as I'm suffering through this this is the growth That's a really important reframe And also how you deal with it is that you stop expecting quick fixes and easy one-time solutions Almost never in your life will there be just one thing that will just come in there and resolve all your stuff for you It just doesn't work that way So Make sure you get your expectations right Get them right now because right now you're probably not an ego Backlash state so that when you do get into an ego backlash state in a month or in a year or in five years you'll remember this You'll remember these points and you'll be able to console yourself While you're in the midst of it? it's also very powerful to apply self love in these ego backlash states and what that means is that you Don't fall into the temptation of guilting yourself and judging yourself and condemning yourself That's very common That's our natural inclinations to say all but I thought I was better I thought I was stronger this shouldn't be happening to me Why am I so weak why am I so pathetic why can't I get my shit together Why do I just keep splurging on this food why do I have to go and jerk off to this porn why do I have to watch this television or I you start to guilt yourself for that and that just doubles your misery and When you're doing that that's precisely when you're not learning you're not suffering mindfully there So rather than that try to love yourself more during this moment try to be easy on yourself So we've talked about various examples of course we're just touching the tip of the iceberg of all the different examples that exist that are possible for ego backlashes to occur that will cause them So the other thing you should be aware of though is that there's something called the collective ego backlash as well Individually we have egos collectively complex systems Also, behave as though they have egos and survival drives for example I have an episode called collective ego which talks about a lot of these collective dynamics that. Many people aren't aware of So the ego backlash will also occur there it can occur within corporations within governments within political parties and If you're stood of history then you you've seen this you've seen this play out in ancient history but, also in modern history so for example Reconstruction after the Civil. War in the American South what was that but a collective ego backlash against the abolition of slavery? So things like the Jim Crow laws That's ego backlash at the collective level and Then if you're student of German history and the world wars then you know that World. War two was? really sort of an ego backlash of the German people against the way they were treated in The end of World War one with the sort of a very harsh treaty that was imposed upon them after losing World War one the weight of that Punishment really just sort of created a festering wound Which ultimately allowed Hitler to come to power and create World War two so We can think of that as a collective ego backlash You Can also think of the crackdown on psychedelics that happened in the late 60s and early 70s after the hippy revolution in America What was that but a collective ego backlash? Psychedelics were outlawed all these laws were passed by the Nixon administration and others the war on drugs was declared and it's really still going on today and these beautiful substances were demonized and All scientific research on them, was basically banned for heard for decades and we're still to a certain extent going through that Although now psychedelics are going through sort of a second Renaissance Gamergate what is that but a collective you go backlash against various stage green spiral dynamics forces that are coming to the floor and reshaping society like Feminism and Multiculturalism and all of this so gamergate was a reaction against that a Lot of times you notice that if you're familiar with the spa dynamics stages that one stage will react strongly against Another stage above it trying to dominate it or try to demonize it So for example if feminists from stage green try to demonize stage orange Masculinity too much stage orange masculinity will come back and you know try to defend itself through an ego backlash and What about the the Tea Party and the alt-right movement that was born over the last ten years here in America really after the election of Obama That was a very interesting collective ego backlash sort of a stage blue/orange ego backlash against against green And that's still going on today and really the election of Trump was really just a collective ego backlash Against Obama you can think of it that way that's one way to analyze it that's not the only factor but It is a factor a very interesting factor it's very interesting for example that Trump's rise to popularity Within politics really started with the whole birtherism thing which was really a direct attack on Obama there interesting how that worked So you see? Complex systems which of course include government's corporations political parties social movements of various kinds they behave just like all complex systems do like these for the harmonic oscillators and so for a corporation to be able to sustain itself or for a political party to sustain itself as it is it has to resist death And the way that it does that is by Defending itself at all costs even When it's dysfunctional even with it's pathological Even, when it hurts itself it still does it and in fact you know the Republican Party in America right now is self-destructing the last two years have we've been witnessing the self-destruction of the of the of the Republican Party but the People in the party of many of them some of them see it but many of them don't see it because they are part of the system and so of course the system doesn't see that is Sabotaging itself and that's exactly what's happening with you individually in your life? You have the intention to you know clean up your diet and to eat healthy but then you sabotage yourself Along the way and you're not conscious enough to really see how you're damaging yourself because you have kind of different arts in your mind they're kind of fragmented and fight against each other you have like the the higher self the lower self and Stuff in between and all this needs to get Reconciled and it's this reconciliation process which really is like a war a war is raging in your mind in the same way that you know you to have a War in Europe in order to ultimately pacify Europe to unify Europe required many many wars Europe is quite unified right now but that's only because there have been like Hundreds of wars in European history over the last couple thousand years that have ultimately led to this unification and even now you know it's not totally unified there's parts of the European Union, which are breaking off all the time and There's rise of nationalist movements against the European Union right now so it's it's very interesting to observe these dynamics happening out in the world socially with corporations and governments and political parties but then should also Notice that the same stuff is happening inside of you The same kind of dynamic then you see this kind of parallel between the collective level and the individual level and it's it's very fascinating but of course all of this will just be theory When you're in the heat of the moment yourself when you're actually suffering through it all of this theory is gonna fly out the window none of its going to really matter to you so When you're really in it that's where you want to build the mindfulness skills to be able to suffer through it mindfully and Just try to do the best you can try to love yourself try to be gentle on yourself and then always remember that just because you've failed to make a change Doesn't really mean anything because you can come back next week next month next year and attempt to make the change again Only this time really you'll be smarter Because every time you fail every time you backslide if you're mindful if you backslide mindfully then you will notice the various little sneaky maneuvers that your ego uses Against you to keep yourself in homeostasis? You'll you'll start to notice various like mental tricks and self deception tactics all those deception mechanisms that I talked about in my Three-part series about self-deception you'll start to notice more and more of those You'll start to notice all the smoke screens that your mind throws up all the ways that it projects out on to the outside world how it resists taking responsibility and as you watch all of that you sort of notice just how Sneaky this beast called ego is it's pure sneakiness it's pure devilry pure trickery that's all it is And this is how the devil does his work is Through trickery through sleight of hand see my episode about what is the devil See, so we're bringing in a lot of stuff, together here and Now you start to really understand Why life is so? Challenging? It's because of all the trickery that's involved all the tricks that you play on yourself And Why life is a maze see my episode about life is a maze It's amazed because you're lost in the maze of your own mind You're not sure how to distinguish your genuine Motivations from the trickery that the devil in you throws up. Which is the ego and so you're trying to sort all this out and that's why you have 80 years to live ously you can Soar, through all this stuff, you need a lot of attempts So don't get discouraged by this Also It's important to distinguish between states and stages of development a State is like a peak experience that you have and a lot of times what people do especially when we're not Eve and we just get into self development is That we have a peak state whether it's on a psychedelic or just on a meditation retreat Or just in our life you know we're feeling great or on top of the world And then we just assume that Well that state it'll just lock in that's how my life will be from now on and it's never that way It's much easier to attain a high state than it is to attain a high stage of development this is a distinction that I got from ken wilber the distinction between states and stages a Stage of development takes years of work to build You have to work on it consistently So even though as a Newbie meditator you could have a peak meditative state that goes very high and might even reach the depths of a Zen master But you're not going to be at the Zen masters stage of development when it comes to meditation because for that you would need to meditate for years and decades to be able to reach a sort of a sort of a baseline level of solid meditation abilities All right like any newbie can just get a little bit lucky here and there can have a lucky break and things go right in their life But it really takes a dedication to this path to be able to to build sort of a solid stage of Meditation ability or business skill or relationship Skills, or anything like that so Make that distinction and don't just get tricked and seduced by the high states Because usually after a high state what happens of course you drop back down If you noticed after your Greatest emotional highs in life you usually end up feeling pretty low and Vice-versa after your lowest emotional lows in life actually the next day the next week you can end up feeling pretty good So that's also one way that I consoled myself, when I'm in a bad mood or I'm feeling negative or something like that is that I just remind myself that usually after my worst States of feeling I will experience some of my best ones and I will rise to a sort of a new level a new stage will be reached if I can just Suffer through this mindfully and of course I never am able to suffer through a situation fully mindfully So don't be a perfectionist about it here because again if your perfectionistic about being mindful all the time of all your suffering then of course you're always gonna fall short of that and that's just going to make you more miserable and more depressed So keep all these points in mind if you ever do experience an ego backlash in the future a very strong one Remind yourself that this episode is here you can always go to YouTube type in ego. Backlash this episode will pop up listen to it again and Hopefully that helps you to to grab yourself center yourself and suffer through the moment mindfully But even better would be if you just kind of like remember this lesson deep in your mind Such that no matter where you are if you don't have internet access even if you don't have YouTube even if it if this video gets taken down or whatever You will remember for the rest of your life how to cope through these challenging moments Alright that's it I'm done here. Please click the like button for me and come check out actualize. That'll work, that's my website there you will find The book list my life purpose course my blog and the forum where you can also get Emotional support for this journey The last thing I'll say is that it's amazing You know you can watch a lot of these videos from me or from other people you can read a lot of books about how to do personal development and spirituality but when you actually start doing it the work will feel very different than how you thought it would go or how you thought it would feel just from watching all the videos and gathering up all the concepts none of the videos and none of the concepts can really get you a sense of what this work entails Just how deep it goes just how broad it is just how multifaceted it is and also how much more difficult and complex it is then even my relatively complex videos and theories Pointed out to be That's why you need to start doing the actual work and You might discover that The best way to do the work at some point is not even to watch me anymore not even to listen to my videos Because all dad just becomes more theory sometimes you just go deeply into the work and let the work kind of guide you itself In the end all of the answers are inside of you you don't really need me you don't need elaborate theories and books and all of this this is mostly just kind of like for entertainment I enjoy, philosophy I enjoy talking about these ideas I enjoy breaking stuff down and analyzing things and making it complex like I just Enjoy, that I don't know what else I would really do in life if I wasn't doing that it's just kind of interesting to me But also it's not necessarily that beneficial you don't need all this detailed stuff, you don't need to take copious notes on all of these complicated theories and concepts really that can be a distraction so be careful Ground yourself in the work that's absolutely important Ground yourself in the work and let your work Reveal to you what is true as You actually do the work you will discover that various things that I've said various ways that I've conceptualized stuff various Models that I've shared with you aren't quite right That's right Because the work itself is its own thing And it's very messy it's very Individualized it's very different for different people so even though some of these models and concepts might be true for me and work for me They might not work for you because you've got your own Different problems and coping strategies that you've invented while you were growing up that need to be dealt with And the only way you're gonna discover those is really Going inside yourself So If you like the theory and all that all this analysis that's great just don't get lost in it don't turn it into an ideology Don't turn it into an addiction that's very easy very easy I mean hell I'm addicted to talking about this stuff for sure I have addicted to reading various kinds of Self-help books, I mean I probably at this point don't even need to read another self-help book in my entire life I Have enough theory that I could spend 40 years trying to actualize it all and that will be what I'm doing more and more in the future is I'm gonna be Relying less on theory and more on just like going really deeply into the work And that can be scary because a lot of people What they do is they they use the theory and the philosophy and all this all the concepts and models to actually Not do the work Because of course the ego is very sneaky and the ego will use any trick up its sleeve to maintain homeostasis and so if it can just lose itself at a bunch of fancy theory and cool Philosophy then that's what it'll do it'll do that for 10 years and not accomplish anything So watch out for that trap but if you still want more of it then more Theory will be coming in the future You