The Technique

Here’s something that can very easily help you get the perspective you need to trigger the ego avalanche.

Alright, so to back up a bit – what is the ego avalanche?

A good way to think about it (bear with me) is to use a computer analogy. The human animal is the hardware. The ego (identity, what you think of as “you”) is software, but not just any software – it’s a virus. It provides no benefit to the human animal at all, but consumes all of its resources and directs all of its actions to its single goal: trick you into believing it, so you invest emotion and attention towards its growth.

You can disrupt this process to the point where parasitic identity can no longer trick you into feeding it.

This technique should help:

When you are emotionally provoked, by a person or life event, don’t react. Don’t defend yourself.

An emotional provocation is, by definition, painful. The pain demands that you defend your beliefs, your feelings, your identity. It does this by triggering the fight-or-flight response, but you don’t have to fight (defend yourself against the other person) or flight (leave, and mentally beat yourself up).

There’s a third option: do nothing. Let the emotional pain hit with its full force, and resist the urge to defend yourself. Let the pain do the damage. Stay with it – don’t hyoerfocus on it, but keep some attention on it, and stay until the urge to defend your beliefs dies down.

Then, take a look. Look at the self that was being defended, being created. It’s just a narrative, that in some way, is designed to stroke your vanity, your pride. It flatters you in some way, which is why you were so urged to defend it.

Keep proving to your mind that you don’t need to defend your pride. Eventually, the whole idea of doing so will seem meaningless. You’ll have a higher vantage point to see the self-building and self-defending process in real time.

The process of ego death is about seeing the tricks the ego uses to make us believe things that aren’t true. Which is why “ego death” is a bad term for it: seeing how a magician performs his magic doesn’t kill the magician, but it kills his ability to fool you into believing things that aren’t real.

Done properly, you’ll feel immensely relaxed. You’re not done yet, though. Go back to my ego avalanche post, try what I suggest there. That should trigger an irreversible process that’ll uncover the deepest tricks of the ego.

Here’s a good (albeit extreme) analogy for this:

Imagine you got a text – it’s proof that your partner was cheating on you.

What would your reaction be?

Mine would be immediate pain, followed by extreme anger. I’d get pissed, break up with her, yell, etc.

Afterwards, I’d be extremely fucking sad. Probably beat myself up for not recognizing it earlier.

There are two kinds of reactions here, forms of ego defense. Fight and flight. Getting angry is a fight response. It creates a mental story (identity) of you, who is good and in the right, against your partner, who is bad and hurting you. As much as the pain would hurt, humans love being in the right, being the good person in the situation. It justifies any angry reaction we take.

Beating yourself up is the second form of ego defense: flight. It’s a bit harder to see, but it also creates a story of you as a good person. “I was so shit, I was so stupid (but I recognize that now, so now I’m good).” It’s a good now-you vs a bad then-you.

Another way to see this is to imagine if you were the cheater, and were caught. You’d try to immediately apologize to your partner: you’re so sorry, you were wrong, you’ll never do it again. Good now-you vs bad old-you.

Anyway, go back to the first analogy, where you were being cheated on.

There’s a third option: do nothing.

Don’t get angry, don’t beat yourself up. Let the pain do the damage, let the scandal run. Don’t defend your ego, don’t let it cast you into being morally right in this situation.

It’ll hurt like a motherfucker. Stay with the pain. You’ll see your ego screaming at you to confront your partner, or beat yourself up, or whatever. Just hold the line.

Basically, you’ll realize that you don’t die if you don’t defend your ego. You can take the emotional hit and live. This puts you into a new perspective – where you can look at the ego from a perspective it’s not really evolved to be seen from. Just look at it, see what it’s trying to do, see the story of you it’s trying to create, and the actions it’s trying to get you to take.

This gets you some distance on it, so you can see the tricks that it uses to control you. Do this enough times, and yeah, you’ll hit a point of no return where it can no longer trick you to the same degree as before.

And no, I’m not saying become an actual cuck. Use the analogy above on situations in your real life.

It could be as simple as someone provoking you into an online argument. Even if you’re obviously right, and they’re wrong – don’t respond. Look at how addicted you are to wanting to respond. Don’t. Let them think they’re right, let them think they’ve won. Hold the line. You’ll actually feel some pain – the ego threatening you that if you don’t argue back, your identity is compromised. Take the hit of the pain, hold it, look at what the ego is trying to make you do.

Could be a coworker or boss at work giving you shit. Same thing.

This isn’t permanent. It’s not about taking shit from people, it’s about breaking your addiction to ego defense, so you can see the tricks the ego uses to force you into response. Once you tame the ego, you’ll be able to handle any situation far better.

From this non-fight non-flight response, you can more easily see the perspective outlined in my post, Ego Avalanche.