(Surprised this one hasn’t been done yet.  Great episode for countering self sabotage and building a strong life foundation.  Links and details on examples come from me, unless they offend you then they came from google )   388. Summary: Understanding Ego Backlash “Leaps forward are often preceded by desperate regressive steps backward” — Don Beck & Chris Cowan -Along the self-actualization journey you will experience many ego backlashes.  Be prepared for them!  The human mind is like a harmonic oscillator in physics.  A harmonic oscillator is a simple spring where you pull the spring, let it go and it swings back and forth along an equilibrium, seeking homeostasis.              Homeostasis is the tendency to resist change in order to maintain a stable, relatively constant internal environment. -The ego-mind is like a harmonic oscillator because restoring forces work on you to get you back to equilibrium, to keep you how you’ve always been.  Ego backlash is a big part of that restoring force, that homeostatic drive in you. -So what is ego backlash?  Anytime you make a significant change to the complex system that is you, expect a counter force that will pull you back towards homeostasis (aka: equilibrium.) eg: If you’ve been fat your whole life, but you’re trying to get skinny, expect a counter force to come in and pull you back towards being fat.  Same goes for any positive change you’re trying to make.     Where the Ego Comes From -The mind or ego-mind contains all the behaviors, patterns and survival strategies that you've accumulated since birth.  It’s filled with all sorts of meanings and symbols that you’ve created about life.  All of that gets hardwired into a giant, complex, non-linear network.  That network is responsible for maintaining its own survival. (clip: Struggle to Survive Limits Growth [4 mins])              If your ego-mind, this network, didn't have a survival drive it would dissolve and you would die.  So you’ve picked up and built a lot of survival scripts from childhood (clip: What Shapes You Most—Suffering and Love [5 min]). -The behaviors and strategies you learned in childhood were necessary, because whatever situation you were born into created survival challenges.  You had to learn coping strategies to be loved by your family and get them to meet your biological needs (food, shelter, safety). eg: Maybe your mom was hyper critical, so you became a perfectionist.  Maybe your brother was a bully, so you became quiet to avoid his wrath.  Maybe your sister was the golden child, so you became the rebel to get some semblance of attention. (clip: Survival Scripts [6 min]) -You developed more survival strategies once you started socializing in school and earning a living in adulthood.  So, even if you have physical survival handled you still care about survival in the social domain.  Being liked, approved of, admired, getting a great partner, having successful kids and an admirable circle of friends.  This is all deeply wired into your ego-mind. -The ego does two things: avoids suffering and pursues pleasure. That's your whole life in a nutshell.  (What is Ego [13 min]).  Spirituality tries to transcend survival drives.  It asks, what does reality look like when you’re not preoccupied with survival?  Ego is very safety and survival oriented. -You’ve confused your survival patterns and coping strategies with who you really are.  You’ve become attached and formed an identity out of them.  Now you think that's all life has to offer.             Your worldview is actually quite arbitrary.  You could have ended up with a very different worldview if your survival conditions were different.  Recognizing that helps you detach from your worldview and stop treating it as this special, one true thing.             Notice how you spend your life defending your worldview and your ego when it’s really just rationalizations.  It’s illusions and fantasies held together by string.  It’s not how reality actually is. (ep: Survival Shapes)   That’s how the ego is born.  You think that’s who you really are, this thing that needs to survive. -All complex systems have inertia to them, a homeostatic drive.  It tries to maintain its current state, its equilibrium.  If a system changes too much it will cease to exist.  So, any outside force that can rearrange the system is always perceived as a mortal threat.  Whether that change is harmful or helpful. eg: If you have a lego raft and you disassemble it to make a yacht, the raft no longer exists.  Even if you use all the same pieces, the lego raft is significantly different than the lego yacht. -That’s why self actualization is so difficult.  Your ego is the lego raft that wants to stay a raft.  It doesn’t want to transform into a beautiful yacht because that requires getting disassembled.  Most people don't appreciate that significant change equals death—the death of the old you.   What is Ego Backlash? -Ego backlash is a primal, emotional force that drives you back to your old, unhealthy, dysfunctional ways, back to homeostasis.  It’s demoralizing.  It’s a giant step backward after a giant step forward.             Because ego is fixated on survival, ego backlash is like an overprotective mother or father.  It’s intention is to protect, even though the impact on the child can be damaging.  It’s a very subconscious force.  Ego backlash doesn't announce itself.  You just experience the blunt impact of it. eg: You might get a craving for some some cheesecake, cheeseburgers, or cheese in a can, or porn, or a sadness that makes you want to go back to your ex even though she was a total jerk.  You wonder, “Does self-help even work?  Is this as good as it gets  ?Can I really make significant changes in my life...?” -The answer is: of course you can, but it's going to take a lot more work than you probably realized.   “Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.” —Alexis Carrel -The ego creates all sorts of clever structures to avoid suffering and to maximize pleasure.  Your whole life has been built upon that.  It’s structures are built upon older structures, like how modern Rome is built on many layers of ancient Roman ruins.  That’s how your ego-mind and psyche are constructed.             To get the most meaningful change you need to do some psychic archaeology on yourself.  You need to excavate those skeletons that are responsible for why you feel so incomplete, so broken, so dissatisfied with life and so fundamentally inauthentic.  (That’s why you’re so anxious about getting love and approval.) -Notice that most self help doesn’t go far enough.  It just slaps some superficial change onto an unstable foundation.  Unfortunately, you can’t fix deep foundational problems with a surface-level approach.  That’s like trying to fix a tree by spray painting the leaves instead of nourishing the roots.             That’s why people become self-help junkies.  If the ego can distract you with a bunch of fancy theory, you’ll never get to the real work of applying the lessons and dismantling your ego. eg: What if you took a hard, honest look at your career and found out it violates your highest values? To grow spiritually you’d have to get a new job, but that will affect every area of your life. You need that job to pay the bills, to support your wife and kids.  Losing that job might cost you your family.  You have to stare all these consequences in the face.               -Your ability to get significant, impactful change is proportional to how much you can tolerate deconstructing your foundation.             Transforming your foundation comes with pain, the type of pain your ego’s been avoiding your whole life.  That's why few people undertake a conscious, deliberate effort to transform their life.  It’s way too threatening and painful to the ego.  Any attempt sets off a scramble back to homeostasis, to that unsatisfying status quo.   What Triggers an Ego Backlash? (26:20) -An ego backlash can get triggered in many ways.  This list is not exhaustive at all. -A deep breakthrough, because the ego mind knows that if it keeps going in that direction it’ll die.  So you’ll start wanting to avoid any spiritual work (meditation, self-inquiry, psychedelics, etc), maybe even for a long time.  eg: Leo will spend ten days meditating non-stop.  Then his ego will compel him to watch tv, play video games, or eat unhealthy food, which he usually doesn’t do. -After installing new healthy habits.  Changing your work habits, developing a strong work ethic, waking up early, changing your diet, a no-fap challenge and so forth. -Trying to install too many habits at once. -Changing too quickly.  If you do it too fast the ego backlash can be so strong it’s counterproductive.  You could freak yourself out.  You may even get disillusioned with personal development and avoid it for years.  Select a pace of growth or deconstruction that will stretch but not scare you off the path. -Small changes can also provoke smaller sized ego backlash.  Pursuing enlightenment will provoke much bigger ego backlash because it offers the most transformative power. -After enlightenment experiences, glimpses of non-duality, psychedelic trips, solo retreats, Vipassana retreats, after lots of self-inquiry. -Listening to binaural beats. They’re meditative and play different sound frequencies in each ear.  Listening to them a lot can cause emotional upheaval from old memories resurfacing.  After processing that, an ego backlash can happen.   How to Prepare for an Ego Backlash? Prepare for them now so when you’re in the thick of it you can weather it wisely. 1) Don’t Make Any Drastic Life Decisions During an Ego Backlash!             This is very important.  It can be very dangerous.  You could easily make some kind of foolish, rash decision (leaving your family, divorcing your spouse, quitting your job, suicidal ideation, etc.)             Don't make any major life decisions when you're feeling very negative, crippled by fear, anger, sadness, or feeling very disempowered or mired in victim mentality. 2) Develop Mindfulness Skills             Have those mindfulness muscles ready when you need them.  You’ll especially need them in the heat of the moment when you want to throw all this theory out the window.  Develop a daily meditation habit, do consciousness raising retreats, research and consider using psychedelics in a responsible, grounded way. 3) Expect That Ego Backlash Happens             It will accompany any significant change in your life.  It's going to bring fear, suffering, and a slew of emotion. It’s totally normal to experience this, so you’re not weak or abnormal. 4) Reframe Ego Backlash in a Positive Way             It’s a sign of growth, so don’t get discouraged!  It's precisely when you're backsliding that you have the most opportunity to learn and grow, but it’s also the toughest, most painful time to stay mindful.             Whenever you feel like you’re regressing, remember, you’re actually being purified.  You’re growing right now as you are suffering through this mindfully.  That’s a really important reframe.             When you’re feeling down, remember that your best states usually come after your worst states.  You can rise to a new level, a new breakthrough if you just suffer through this mindfully, with compassion.  By the next week or next day you can end up feeling pretty good!             Remember, you can still try again next week, next month, next year, and this time you'll be wiser.    5) Be Compassionate and Self-loving Instead of Perfectionistic             It's very powerful to apply self-love.  Console yourself.  Take good care of yourself.  How would you treat a loved one who was going through an ego backlash?             “But Leo, why am I so pathetic?  Why can't I get my shit together?  I deserve to feel guilty for splurging on food, porn, television!!”              Don’t fall into the temptation of guilting, judging and condemning yourself.   That just doubles your misery.  When you're doing that, that's precisely when you're not learning.  That’s the opposite of suffering mindfully.             Nobody can suffer through a full ego backlash with perfect mindfulness, so don't be a perfectionist.  If you expect perfection you'll fall short of that standard.  That will just make you more depressed.  Love Yourself. 6) Understand and Appreciate the Power of Homeostasis             It’s keeping you alive, so don’t judge it.  Understand your mind as a harmonic oscillator.  It’s not evil or bad for pulling you back.  Your ego is just very safety and survival oriented. eg: When you have a terrible psychedelic trip, one that scares the hell out of you, your mind will bring you back to normal within a week. That’s the helpful side of homeostasis.  If it was that easy to shift your mind you could easily slip into total madness and stay stuck. 7) Setup Your Expectations for Growth Properly             Growth is not a win-only journey, or a straight line that's constantly moving upwards (ep: Setting Proper Expectations.)  Self-actualization is a series of ups and downs with occasional big spikes.  After a big spike downward that’s usually when you get your biggest spike upward.              Stop expecting quick fixes and one-time solutions. There’s almost never one thing that resolves all your issues.  The ego likes to trick you into overestimating your own development, especially when you start seeing a little progress.  You expect peak experiences to lock in and become your new permanent state when that’s not how it works. 8) Compassionately & Honestly Assess How Much Change You Can Handle             Figuring out that balance is tricky, because the mind will use that as an excuse to not change.  “I can't handle another meditation retreat.  I can't handle more psychedelics.”  It becomes a psychological cat and mouse game with your own mind about how much change you can truly tolerate without a complete regression. Self-inquiry is important for knowing where you’re at (ep: How To Do Self-Inquiry.)              Figure out the right pace of growth through trial and error.  Sometimes you just need to go through these “big change, then backslide” episodes three or four times to learn where your tipping points are. 9) Notice How Sneaky Your Ego Is             This helps you head it off at the pass.  You’re lost in the maze of your own mind.  Life is so challenging because of all the tricks you play on yourself.  You’re not sure how to distinguish your genuine motivations from the devilry of your ego. (ep: Life is a Maze.  ep: Higher & Lower Quality Consciousness.)  Notice your self-deception, your unhealthy survival strategies, your selfishness, how you evade responsibility, how you project onto others and the world (ep: What is the Devil.)               Fortunately you have around 80 years to live, so you’ll have many opportunities to sort through all this stuff.  You don’t have to fix everything right away. 10) Understand the Difference Between States and Stages of Growth             It's much easier to attain a high state than it is to attain a high stage of development.  A state is a peak experience.  A stage takes years of work to build, just like learning an instrument or public speaking.             As a newb you could get lucky and have a peak meditative state that even reaches zen master levels, but you're not going to be at the zen master’s stage of development.  For that you’d need a decade of practice.             It’s important to make that distinction so you don’t get seduced by those high peak states.  People will do a retreat or some psychedelics and feel on top of the world.  They assume that peak state will be their default state forevermore. It's never like that.  Usually after a high state you drop back down into ego backlash.   What To Do During an Ego Backlash 1) Label it explicitly.  That helps you get some distance and objectivity.             Call it out as an ego backlash.  “That's the ego backlash Leo was talking about!  There it is!”  This helps you not get totally sucked in and absorbed. 2) Observe it as mindfully as possible.             Apply your mindfulness muscles to those moments of sadness, depression and fear.  Hopefully you’ve already built up those skills by then.  As the ego contracts, the more mindfulness you have the more easily you can observe the ego without getting sucked in and lashing out from it. 3) Suffer though it mindfully, with compassion and self love.             Mindful, compassionate suffering will purify you and that’s when you’ll make your greatest progress.  It’s very counterintuitive.  This is the pain of growth, so don’t feel discouraged.  This too shall pass.              Don’t guilt, judge or condemn yourself.  That’s an ego trick to stop you from learning.  Remember, you can get back on the horse again, but this time smarter and with more experience.  (clip: Failure Generates Success [9 mins]) 4.  Maintain your positive habits even if you don't feel like it.             You probably won't want to meditate or observe your diet.  You’ll probably want to push people away.  Try not to do that. eg: Leo didn’t want to shoot this episode about ego backlash.  He was procrastinating, resisting, then he went through the usual motions and by the time the camera was on it felt like any other day. 5.  Try rewatching Leo’s episode on Ego Backlash.  You can reflect on the lessons, which may help centre you through these challenging moments.   The Collective Ego Backlash (42:50) -Individually we have egos and collectively complex systems also behave as though they have egos and survival drives.  (ep: Collective Ego) -Ego backlash occurs within corporations, governments, political parties, social movements of various kinds, and so forth.  There’s a parallel between the collective level and the individual level. World War II was an ego backlash of the German people against the harsh Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I.  It created a festering wound which ultimately allowed Hitler to come to power. The American South during the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877) experienced a collective ego backlash against the abolition of slavery.  The KuKluxKlan murdered black people in the 1000s during this time.  Also, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (this action later cost him enough votes to lose the presidency.) Jim Crow laws were also a collective ego backlash against the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and other strides made by African Americans after the Civil War. -Oftentimes one stage will react strongly against another stage above it.  They’ll try to dominate and demonize it. The crackdown on psychedelics after the hippie revolution in America (late 60s to early 70s.)  Psychedelics were outlawed, all scientific research on them was basically banned for decades.  These laws were passed by the Nixon administration.  The war on drugs was declared and it’s still going on. Gamergate was a collective ego backlash against feminism, multiculturalism and various stage green spiral dynamics forces.  (That backlash has filtered to other areas of geek culture, especially with youtube clickbait being so lucrative, although it’s arguably not as bad as Gamergate was.) If feminists from stage green try to demonize stage orange masculinity too much stage orange masculinity will come back and try to defend itself through an ego backlash.  (Two balanced takes on representation in Star Wars and The Last Jedi.  Vausch calls out leftist circles.) The Alt-Right movement and the Tea Party was born after the election of Barack Obama.  It’s a stage blue/orange collective ego backlash against green.    The election of Trump was a collective ego backlash against Obama (demo of Obama’s 2012 win.)  That's not the only factor, but it’s a very interesting factor. Trump's rise to popularity within politics started with the birtherism thing which was really a direct attack on Obama. -All complex systems have these harmonic oscillators.  For a corporation or political party to sustain itself as it is, it has to resist death.  It does that by defending itself at all costs, even when it’s dysfunctional or pathological. -Right now the Republican party in America is self-destructing.  Since 2016 we've been witnessing this.  Some of them see it, but many of them don't because they are part of the system.  So of course the system doesn't see that it is sabotaging itself.   You Are the Republican Party! (48:06) -That's exactly what's happening in your life, with you.  You have the intention to clean up your diet, to meditate, to self-inquire, to follow through on your dreams, but then you sabotage yourself. -You’re not conscious enough to really see how you're damaging yourself. You have different parts in your mind that are fragmented and fighting each other. You have the higher self, the lower self, survival scripts, competing coping mechanisms and more. -This is similar to how Europe needed to experience the horror of war in order to ultimately pacify and unify.  Europe is quite unified right now, but that's only because there have been hundreds of wars throughout European history over the last couple thousands of years.  A war is raging in your mind.  All this needs to get reconciled for you create foundational, significant change in your life.