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| EGO and victimhood https://www.pick-up-artist-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=64794 |
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| Author: | chasehughes [ Mon Mar 29, 2010 5:44 am ] |
| Post subject: | EGO and victimhood |
THE EGO We first need to define what ego is before we start down this path. Most people will say that ego is having an inflated sense of superiority or an inflamed self confidence that is almost parasitic in nature. Some believe the ego is a need to always build yourself up and put others down. While this is mildly true, it's like describing a house as 'a place with a closet'. It is true, but it doesn't do anything as far as making someone understand what it truly means. The ego, in short, is a false self. When we are born, we have no concept of the self at all, we interact with the outside world without the knowledge of ourselves as a part of it. When our mom tells us we are smart or that we did a good job, we insert that comment into our identity and that is ALL we know about who we are. Whatever we receive is automatically assumed to be true about ourselves; who and what we are. This is the creation of ego. Ego is a false self that continuously runs in the background collecting input, data, information and social facts and inputs them into a functional model of identity. The ego is based loosely on comparisons you make and social data you receive. It is the driving force that makes you want to gather information to make sure you are on a higher level than someone else. The results of ego: 1. A perception of ourselves as separate from other people. 2. A general perception of duality: good vs bad, you vs me 3. An inability to see PAST the ego 4. A personal trust in the EGO 5. Feeling dominated by EGO beliefs 6. Limitation of your potential 7. A sense of victimhood 8. Scarcity: money, health, women, vitality 9. Need of pseudo security like clothes, confirmations, validations, friends etc. 10. Dependence on others or external influences to bring happiness and validation The ego believes that having an absolutely open heart, living openly and fully acknowledging your faults, to love all and give all with NO strings attached means that we will somehow lose something by doing so. We would be sacrificing something or giving up something, even if we cant define what it is we're losing out on; that if you give it away, you will be left with less, or sometimes nothing at all. Herein lies the opportunity for the turnaround; a truly life-altering change in perception. All that has to be done is to realize that the ego is not you, part of you or an extension of you. It is, in fact, a wholly separate being that has been created BY YOU. Whatever interactions you have, relationships you manage or conversations you participate in with yourself, will come back to you in a way that reflects the ego. Now, lets take the hippie talk out of this and land the damn plane for a second here. When you're at a stoplight and a Ferrari pulls up next to you, what are the first words in your mind...if you're at all like other men, you will automatically dismiss him by calling him a fag, saying he's compensating for a small penis or mentioning something about him being an attention seeking, midlife crisis victim. This is ego. We'll get deeper into this in a second. What kind of internal dialog happens when a guy bumps into you pretty hard in line at a Starbucks? Did he just feel that? Did he know I was standing here?Did I just get punked by this guy? He doesn't even seem to give a crap. Should I say something? What would I say? If I take a stand, can I guarantee my victory, or will he make me look like an idiot in front of the hottie behind the counter? Shit, she might have seen him bump into me and I didn't do anything about it. Any chances I have of picking her up or at least generating a little attraction are gone now. Next time this happens, I need to be ready and I need to know what to say. And on it goes...this is ego. When you talk to women, their reactions can seriously change self perception. The ego is looking for feedback at all times, and is ALWAYS scanning to see if it is under attack by a random comment, a snide remark, an innocent joke from a friend or a woman in a bar. Something happened to us that made little avatars pop up in our heads and take control more that we'd like it to. Imagine carrying around a little notebook. Throughout the day, whenever someone reacts to you or speaks to you, they are writing little entries into your notebook. It functions much like a guestbook. As you carry this around, someone may compliment your shirt, haircut or shoes and the entry in the notebook might say, "You have good fashion sense." or, "You are good looking." But as soon as the entry is made, it transforms the word YOU to the word I. Then the entry says, "I am good looking, and I have good fashion sense." This then makes us feel good. It carries us, so to speak, at a slightly higher level of personal confidence. So we continue our day, as we interact, all kinds of entries are made in our notebook. When a guy cuts us off in traffic, he makes an entry that says, "You have just been punked." And of course, the entry goes from YOU to I. When we go to the bar, a woman responds very positively to advances. She's giggling, interested and thinks you are fun. When you tell a funny story, she laughs and grabs your leg. She's just made an entry in your book. She has said, "You are interesting, cute, funny, attractive, sexy..." and the list could go on. When you return at the end of the day, the notebook comes out, and all entries, no matter how negative, uplifting, meaningful or degrading, are INSERTED INTO OUR IDENTITY. Just having the knowledge of this will change your ability to govern yourself in the future. The ego is a false self. How often does the average guy really look deep into his beliefs, his identity and his manhood? This doesn't happen very often and it is getting worse with each passing generation. The ego is an input machine: it waits, scans and searches for identity feedback and information about who you are. It gets all of this information from the outside world and a shockingly large amount of it is placed directly into our identity without ANY form of gatekeeper to knock it down before it is absorbed. The constant question of the ego, in most of your situations will be this, "What does this mean about me?" How comfortable would first class be if there was no coach class on the other side of the curtain? It would be just like everyone else. We wouldn't have a lesser thing to compare our situation to. Conversely, i f first class didn't exist at all, how much different would it be knowing that we're all on the same level? Comparison is an absolute necessity for ego; it needs constant measurements and calibrations to check if we are meeting certain criteria. The ego is making most of these comparisons on a subconscious level, however. So, when we act on these comparisons, the source of our action is completely obscured. Remember the last time you saw someone with an amazing cell phone? How bout when you saw a brand new, sparkling clean version of the car you drive riding near you on the road? These are situations that cause the ego to reach over, grab your mental steering wheel and make comparisons, judgments and validations. A man without ego is incredibly easy to spot. The first stages of undoing the ego is likely to raise several inner turmoils and fears. It will be a simultaneous combination of gut-wrenching, enlightenment and becoming unstifled all at once. The ego has an amazing hard drive, in that it can store tremendous amounts of data for use in future situations. A lot of gurus, have become falsely enlightened by this fact. They've simply accumulated so much information that they are able to ACT like the ego doesn't exist in them, though it does in an alarming capacity. The tricks and manipulations the ego is capable of are worthy of their own Discovery Channel special. Over time, the ego can accumulate so much data, that it has a real capability of appearing to be absent, making you look enlightened. It can fool just about anyone...including you. There's a heavy pull for the ego to search for validation and data outside of you. When your ego finds a single way to manipulate your actions, it will. It can convince you that you are traveling on the right path, even though you're heading in the opposite direction. We have to peel back literally hundreds of layers of the ego to get back to authenticity. We have to 'unlearn' several thousand gigs of data that we've been collecting, filing, storing and using as our life roadmaps since childhood. There WILL be problems. As soon as the ego sees that you are trying to figure out how to bypass it, it will reach right on over and jerk the steering wheel back in the direction it wants to go. When you start to dig and discover all the things that will challenge the ego's defense system, it will knee-jerk react and defend itself; it wants back in the driver's seat. We start the process of learning, relearning and discovering what it authentically valuable and what was an illusion. The first tiny little glimpses of truth start to show through the clouds and sometimes, the taste of that truth isn't enough to overpower the ego's SEAL TEAM of defense. We need more. The first line of defense of the ego is to validate ALL of your thoughts in order to keep momentum and coax you back into sedation. It will officially pronounce you a victim of the world. any griping you do will make the ego stand behind you, give you a back rub and tell you that it's not your fault. You'll hear the sweet whisperings of ego and admittedly, IT FEELS GOOD! You have to eliminate ALL victim thinking first. This step is the vital precursor to phase one of getting rid of this asshole. Any victim thinking will ERASE any progress you have made during this transition. Victim thinking is making something or someone else bear the burden of responsibility for anything going on in your life. The only way to assume the first pie piece of power is to take any and all responsibility for anything and everything going on in your life, and every situation you find yourself in. You will hear victims every day; complaining, judging, condemning and shaking their heads at the 'cards they were dealt'. Hearing this in others may help your resolve to eliminate this mindset from your life. The other half of the ego is responsible for ASSIGNING MEANING to events and situations. Our culture has become obsessed with push button results. We want the immediate fix and the 'cheat codes' to get to the result faster and quicker than ever before. Imagine, if you can, for a moment that Tom Selleck's Mustache (Mustache was capitalized for ultimate respect) was the way to get women. As modern men, our first instinct would be to find a way to get it. We would search the Internet for creams, lotions, pills or even fake stick-on mustaches that we could quickly grow and instanly have the mustache. HAHAHA!!! We've found the secret. No woman can resist now! This is what happened with the instant 'pick up chicks' sites and books that are out there. We want the women to think we're amazing, so we looked for the words to say, the jokes to tell, the way to stand and how to walk to make a girl feel attraction. As I mentioned earlier, these are all amazing, useful and interesting ways to FAKE masculinity and authenticity. It's the airbrush six-pack we've all been looking for. In the latest SPAM movie, there's a guy who tries to become SPAM. When SPAM shows up and saves his life, the guy gets pissed off and asks SPAM, "What's the difference between you and me?!" SPAM lowers himself into the SPAM and says, "I'm not wearing hockey pads." This speaks to our culture in a lot of ways I will cover later, but in relation to the ego, we've been horribly programed to systematically think that a product or a purchase can gain success. Just buy the costume and become the hero. Buy the jeans and become the model, buy the watch and become James Bond, Take that protein powder and get the swimsuit model. When we see a commercial or ad, it has about six hundred times the amount of absorption power than we think. The ego sits with us while the commercials are on and stores data, like always.The questions the ego asks when you're in a social situation are the same questions it asks while collecting data from commercials. When you buy all this stuff, it actually CAN give you a ton of confidence, but is it real? Sure. It works as long as your clothing, car, body language and the other 'tricks' get validated by people or commercials. Remember the last time you bought something really cool and then saw the commercial for it afterwards and thought to yourself, "Yessss....that's mine. I OWN that. It's awesome.............I'm awesome". The ego lives through validations received by the outside world. When you have a ton of this confidence, it's extremely easy to get it crushed because it's based on receiving confirmation. When you've completed PRIME, your ego will be severely diminished and you will operate on a much higher level and you will NEVER need to make sure people know it, or make sure other men are still below you. The untamed ego is forever sending out social 'feelers' to everyone around you. These feelers will define your identity as long as ego has the reins. The ego is responsible for taking a snapshot of an event and asking the question, "What does this mean about me?". Let's assume you walk in to your workplace and you say 'good morning' to someone you know. When they respond with a pissed off demeanor, the ego kicks in and starts asking the question. You wonder what you might have done in order to produce this response. Maybe someone was talking badly about you. It's possible that you said something incredibly offensive and didn't even realize it. Maybe she's mad at you for not following through with something you forgot to do. Did you borrow something and not return it? Your ego immediately goes into self definition mode; trying to glean something from the situation that might indicate what's wrong. You may never really find out that her car was broken into last night and all her tires were slashed. Your ego would assign a meaning that makes the situation ABOUT YOU. When we get cut off in traffic, we start filling in "I AM" statements and only after this has been done, do we get pissed. When a guy cuts us off, what's the first thing we do? Hit the brakes, right? Then we go and make it about us. "When he cut me off, that was disrespectful, am I not worthy of respect? Does he think I'm weak or something? Does my car look like a girl's car? I'm not a pussy. I need to honk at this guy. Look at that gay little 'No Fear' sticker on his back window. What a fag. If I can get in front of him in the next few minutes, I'm cutting his ass off too. I hope he doesn't have a gun." Walking past a Starbucks, a couple of girls at a table start laughing when you pass them. I'm sure I don't need to go into your head too much here. When a friend cancels plans you had together (and be honest) what's your internal dialog like? "Is he pissed at me? Did I piss him off somehow? Last time we hung out, I had a pretty good time. Did he find something better to do? Screw it, I'm going to flake on him next time he calls me too." This happens all the time when a man returns from work to a non-responsive wife. The same thought process kicks in without even asking permission. Although his wife may have just had a horrible day, he assigns this meaning to himself and may even get defensive with her. She is not responding to him in a way his ego would like her to. For him, the ego statement here is, 'She's upset again. I must have done something. How can she be so pissed off when I've had such a great day? I am unable to make her happy. This MEANS something about ME. If I did something different, I might have gotten a different response." The obvious trend here is that he is assigning false or imagined meaning to the situation and making it about him. Almost ALL men do this. Instead of being present with how she is, he makes it ABOUT HIM, and sometimes will retaliate. We'll get into that stuff later. The process of undoing the ego is not as simple as other things we do. It is harder than quitting smoking, changing life habits, or starting new success habits. The ego has been there for a long time and its roots are hidden in many places. The ego can't be stopped or smothered, per se. It can, however be monitored from a vantage point of knowledge. When you become aware of the parasitic and socially destructive capabilities of the ego, it will be twice as easy to notice when it's starting to activate or control. The first phase of this process is monitoring the ego. This is where the ego should be watched and monitored only. In this process, we will only notice the actions and behaviors of the ego. If we try to force the ego to close up shop, it will not work. Any resistance that we create against the ego will cause resistance FOR the ego. During the monitoring phase, the turmoils and difficulties that take place internally will be difficult to see past. You will have incongruent between several of your 'normal' thought processes and your behaviors. It will be incredibly tempting to say screw it, and go back to the comfortable place where the ego pretty much runs the show. This first phase will most assuredly separate the boys from the men. You will be encountering discoveries that challenge your way of life. Your beliefs, identity and self-talk will be brought into question. The dark side of yourself will show more of itself than you may care to observe. The beliefs we've had almost since birth do NOT want to go down without a fight. This new system will be your ego's sworn enemy. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance, Eastern philosophy calls this resistance, we will use the term incongruence. The experience of incongruence is akin to falsely telling someone you are a doctor, them believing it (feels cool for a second) then hearing them tell you they are a surgeon and start quizzing you. The rift between the desires to escape, lie more, try to pass his challenges and kill him so no one knows is incongruence. Incongruence is simply behavior and thoughts being completely out of alignment with each other. The ego's very life blood is drawn from the illusion that we are victims of the world we see; that other people can attack us, that guilt and punishment are warranted and the giving anything deprives us of something. The monitoring phase of ego will disrupt several processes in the mind. Everything in our minds work just fine as long as we have a sort of mental congruence: using one specific behavior system. But what happens when a new operating system is introduced? We all worked 'just fine' while the ego had the wheel. Then we get introduced to this new concept that pokes a ton of holes into our self concept and our concept of life. The only thing that needs to be done in the monitoring phase is to listen to the ego. Your knowledge of its toxicity will automatically make small changes in your thought process without any effort needed on your part. These first few weeks, focus only on 'being there' with the ego and observing what is says, does and causes you to think. Make no judgments or resistance to this at all. Just 'be there'. You may even want to journal the times the ego came up in obvious ways. In the first few weeks, only the truly obvious lashes of the ego are noticeable and the larger part of it will still be running in the background. You should judge your initial progress ONLY by the amount of judgments you make about other people or situations. The amount of meaning you assign flows from this alone. Again, do not try to force a change out of yourself. Aside from giving yourself hemorrhoids, it will only make the ego stronger. Once you go through only about a week of this, you will see a lot of change. What's pretty damn cool about this is that all the change you see, is change you didn't have to DECIDE to make. It happened automatically by simply monitoring ego. Once you learn how much we are all affected by ego, it will be nauseating. When the curtain gets pulled back, the amount of self deception and addictive validation will knock you backwards. For several days, try to focus on what makes you lose the controls to someone else. When does the ego reach for the wheel, and when does he rip you out of the driver's seat? What would have to happen for you to admit that something else has a HUGE amount of control in your life? |
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| Author: | chasehughes [ Mon Mar 29, 2010 5:46 am ] |
| Post subject: | Victimhood |
A problem we have as men today is the passive mentality. In this article, we discuss how the passive mentality and victimhood are related. Victimhood is the state of being affected by the world around you. It is the sav VICTIM: one who is harmed by or made to suffer from an act, circumstance, agency or condition. A person who is tricked, swindled, or taken advantage of. "Why couldn't I be the one to spill that cup of McDonald's coffee on my lap? I'd be so rich." Victims tend to blame the entire world for their plight. On top of this, they have a need to feel that their suffering is unique and more severe than others. Most of us can identify with this: When we experience a hardship or loss, we want to hear, "Man, I've seen some people have some hard times, but this is by far the worst." Victims delight in knowing that others confirm their status as a 'unique sufferer.' In this mode, victims will need to confirm that no one will ever truly understand what they are going through in their struggles; as if their tragedy was the only one that had ever occurred and theiri personal circumstances prevent ALL others from understanding it. This mentality guarantees that no one will be able to help them out. If they continue suffering and watch others try to help them unsuccessfully, they will slide deeper and deeper down the victim fun slide. (Okay, that was a strange choice of words, but I'm keeping it.) If someone was able to help the victim, they would cease to be able to identify with the victim role. The victim thrives in this suffering. The helplessness they feel brings them comfort and reassurance of their victim status. In relationships, victim-women will create situations that cause their partners to become frustrated, angry or otherwise upset. She will force the situation until it is in lock-step with her personal script. A woman will keep pestering a man until he explodes, she gets yelled and and she's transported into her 'comfort' zone of being a victim. You'll hear the whole life script from the beginning that usually goes something like this: "I'd have been so successful if my ex-husband wasn't so controlling. My career would be so amazing if I had some better bosses. My life would be so different if the college had a better student program. I'd exercise more if my life wasn't so busy right now. My health would be so much better if they had better food to eat." This script is added to each day and a lifetime of quotes like this are kept close at hand when tragedy strikes. As far as her helping herself and coping with her losses; not a friggin' chance. This would yank her out of the script and into a role of PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. Our modern legal system has a giant, Foo Fighters sized hand in this. All you need to do to get rich is file suit against a large company (whom we're all victimized by anyway...right?). Even if you're mildly offended, a 'good' attorney will ensure your story is told in a heart-breaking, shocking and repulsive manner that causes the courts to decide you are entitled to millions. If you slip on a green bean in a grocery store, find a hair in your food, accidentally shoot someone with a gun that 'malfunctioned', eat too much McDonald's and get fat or even see a poster somewhere that failed to include your ethnic background. IT"S SO EASY! YAAAAY! Cash for everyone! All you have to do is figure out how you've been victimized and the money comes pouring out of pockets all around you. As a nation we've been bombarded with lawsuits, reality TV shows, commercials for personal injury attorneys and a ton of social media. False victims and the pseudo-injured are covering more real estate in our lives than ever before. We've experienced what the US Government in 1981 called compassion fatigue. It was first noticed in the 50's as a psychological phenomenon that occurred in nurses who were constantly exposed to trauma patients and injured people. It's been a gradual burnout of hearing the news, people's stories on television, lawyers and mental health professionals who will charge a HEFTY price to REEEEEALY convince you that nothing is your fault..."Just relax, it's out of your control completely. There's nothing you can do, so why worry?" As we speak about victimhood, and victimization, lets do a reality check real quick-like. Everyone is guilty of this in some way. When we read about the destructive women, try to see if it parallels anything you do. Again, we're ALL guilty. The only way to have actual power and control as a man is by assuming FULL responsibility for your situation and your life as it is now. If we, like most men, push some of our problems off on an external source, it feels good. It relieves a burden that sat on us and puts it 'elsewhere'. I won't lie here, being a victim is pretty comfortable. When I first read about this concept in an article by Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, I was naieve enough to think that I was reading about 'someone else.' It took me quite some time to develop enough internal fortitude to actually look through my internal control panel and see that program right there in my 'life applications' list. The harder it is to recognize in yourself, the more painful it will be to finally see. We almost get this program right out of the box as babies, but no system really exists to delete it or eventually kill it. It's scary. When I speak to men about issues in their lives, most will list their problems in a well-thought, convincing and intelligent way. "My wife is just not fun anymore." "Anna is really taking her problems out on me nowadays." "Kayla really pushes my buttons." "Sarah just seems so negative all the time. It's like coming home to a downer every day." "Trish doesn't understand how I still need guy time anymore." "Since I've been with Britney, she's become more controlling and nagging." These are pretty common, and I won't deny they all suck. But how, as men, are we taking control of this? If you were to list six problems you have right now, (from any part of your life) would they look similar? Most developed guys can see the similarities, but others, who don't, require more understanding. Some guys are convinced they don't ever do this...it requires about ten women and a few PRIME men to bring this to light for them, but they DO exist. How could you re-word all of that and make it your fault? That's right...take every single one of those sample problems above and DELIBERATELY make it your fault. Are you capable? Here are the first two things written how they were, and rewritten to claim control. 1. "Anna is really taking her problems out on me nowadays." There are a hundred ways to rewrite this to make it personal for your level, but it may look like this: "I have become over-tolerant in my life. Anna is following my lead. I have become passive and allowed myself to be compromised. I ALLOWED Anna to take her problems out on me. Although I know it's unattractive, this is what I'm doing." 2. "Kayla really pushes my buttons." Rewritten: "The sensitivity of my buttons has changed. The buttons that I have complete control over have been being activated by someone else and even after they were activated, I still chose to respond as if I had no control. I lost control, literally. I allowed MY buttons to be activated by Kayla." It's impossible to miss the amount of power that is shifted when this happens. After no more than 15 days of routinely re-wording our scripts, it will become natural. If you commit to doing this, the amount of unconscious scripts you will discover is nauseating. It's like discovering your home computer has had fifty viruses all its life and they've been eating away at your computer files for years. These scripts run in the background and don't EVER have any popup windows to let you know that they are placing you into victim mode to conserve battery life. You've just installed Norton. We have several psychological exercises and 'quasi trauma producing activities designed to purge this stuff VERY QUICKLY in PRIME, but over a relatively short span of time, the majority of the script can be rewritten to regain an exponential amount of control back into your relationships and your life. To start, MEMORIZE the phrases that you normally use to 'go into' victim thinking. This takes more courage than some people have, but it's worth it. Some of the phrases you use might be something like these: "if only..." "That's just how I am... " There's nothing I can do..." " I can't believe..." " This new healthcare plan..." " The government..." These should raise a red flag in your mind and bring up the awareness required to be present with the thought. If we're driving a radio controlled car, we own the actions of that car. We are the ones holding onto the remote. 2010 Chase Hughes |
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