Ego Trap

Evolutionary Psychologist Doug Lisle explains, that super ego/inner audience is not simply an "inner critic". Only if people actually hate you. Or if they love you on a whim or due to your showing off and you would better not prove them wrong. Which is what he calls ego trap. On other occasions the inner audience is what empowers you, makes you feel secure in advance and proud in retrospect. Your realistic track-record and expectation of success.

And i suppose self-esteem is the believe, that you will someday be able to produce a change of your operating principle, that will render your inner audience generally accepting, implying predictable success of your actions, relative to the goals that are intended, by your operating principle.

I am perfectly capable of dying all by myself, so don't bother clapping, but thank you very much.

/jk

(his take on developing autonomous self evaluation starts at minute 43:20)  


Can we describe some aspects of the spiritual circus in terms of how doug lisle describes the ego trap? There might be value in generalizing the phenomenon. I mean seeing that it is just what humans do anyway, inside and outside of this particular circus. That gurus who play into it are no different from superiors in companies or advertisers in media or politicians or parents.

I will try a rough draft, not knowing at all where i am going with this.

I suppose the spiritual search could be (in part) the equivalent of procrastinating the risk of loosing esteem, or potential esteem. Procrastinated awakening would be the equivalent of truly loosing your esteem, because it is not going to look like you have been made to think or feel it SHOULD look like.

Like when "your second book" is going to be nothing like "the first book" and not better either, by the criteria, according to which the first book was great.

And perhaps you have picked the Guru or spiritual tradition (or if you are expressive: the following, scene, sangha) that appeared to be in favor of your first book, but would therefore not know how to value your second book, meaning true awakening.

What was your first book? I suppose it's how your spiritual seeker identity appears to have a certain wisdom, a "spiritual intelligence" as Wilber calls it.

It may likely be a typological thing. Something like "ENFJ are woke AF, because they are so loving", "INTJ (Ni) are woke AF because they are so mysteriously autonomous", "ENTP are woke AF because they are such keen players". "INTP (Ti) are woke AF because they are so iconoclastic", ...

(Such a degree of awareness of individualized qualities does actually correlate with the age of enlightenment or the liberation of the sixties: all together, we have come to recognize and appreciate such abilities in society, albeit to varying degrees. This is also the circus, the matrix of today, it's flat and dissociative AF.)

You may seek resonance with people who are not going to know how to understand and like a more actualized and whole and adaptive version of your self.

But if this is the ego trap, then could you get out of it, by going into resonance with the right inner audience? How could you know, what audience (Guru, school, etc) was the right one, if you don't know what your true self is going to be like?

Doug Lisle suggests to crack the ego trap by merely dismissing the approval you harvested from your old inner audience or paradigm, so that you overcome this drug like addiction. Then you may be free to discover a pure creativity, without knowing where that is going to take you. (43:20)

Applied to typology, you could say: Wow, that was quite egocentric of me, to believe that my personality type was more spiritual than other personality types. I was in deed more intuitive, feeling, thinking, sensual, intro or extroverted, but not more transpersonal and ego aware at all, I was merely conceptualizing and criticizing "ego" from a unique point of view, that other people did not understand quite as well, or were more vulnerable to.

As an extrovert i was often thinking of the ego as avoidant or stubborn (I), as an introvert i was often thinking of it as corrupted or opportunistic (E), as a thinker i was often thinking of it as fear based ignorance or lying (B), as an intuitive i was often thinking of it as attachment to routine or property (S), as a feeling type i was often thinking of it as greedy or violent (T), as a sensual type i was often thinking of it as being escapist or deceptive (N).

We were happy to critique some potential aspects of egocentricity, that other people are manifesting more frequently, than we do, but that does not make us most awake. We were least aware of the aspects of egocentricity, that we manifest the most.

Furthermore Doug Lisle suggests (45:40), that the goals of a free SELF would be defined, so as to be achievable, without any cooperative involvement of any subjective and potentially egoic feedback, that we have come to known from the matrix and our own past life within it.

That means that, in the context of liberation, the outcome of any action we undertake can not possibly be part of the definition of our "liberating goal setting". That is because the outcome of virtually all actions is co-created (via conceptualization, interpretation) by egoic people in the matrix and surely also influenced at least in part by our own remaining egoic conditioning.

A liberating goal setting must therefore be defined according to subjective and transpersonal or trans-egoic criterias, because subject is all that remains, when objective outcome is eliminated.

In other words: The self-liberating witness is exploring the subtle aspects, within the world.

And such exploration can perhaps be described in most subjective terms like curiosity, acceptance or love. But i don't suppose that language based descriptions are helpful in subtle exploration.

Just start overflowing and don't ever stop. Bottle some of it up, but do not attempt to produce something else, just so that it can be expressed with favorable outcome. The main dedication is to forget about the old outcome oriented goal setting for as long as possible. (I suppose some would call that self-inquiry)

I don't know, that is just the best i can do right now.

Doug kinda disagrees with a liberation of goal setting from conceptualized outcome, but he is speaking on accomplishing practical activities only, not about the problem of directing a neurological shift towards a subtle, witnessing or nondual state.