Distraction Mechanisms of Ego

[Mahyar]

Hello, 

I am starting this topic for a very good reason and that is the complexity of ego! I didn't come to this realization until after 7 months of living in "HELL" while my ego was parading! And the reason was rather simple: I overly underestimated how devil works. 

So here in this topic I would like to start with sharing with some of my own discoveries on how ego actually distracts and then ask you to share your experiences on your self-actualization journey. I have 2 main reasons for opening this topic: 

1. When you read other people's experience facing their ego, you can actually become wiser in your way of dealing with yours,
2. When you engage in exposing your ego, you will automatically become more aware of the traps and you develop a higher level of mindfulness. In other words you become more structure-aware. Bookmark this post and come back often with new ones. I guarantee you, it's endless.

 

There are certain practices that I found helpful in my understanding of how distraction actually works. One of them is choosing daily topics for contemplation and assessing your concentration on that topic. It's actually very simple. I like morning rituals, so when I start my days, I do some magick rituals and do my meditation and then spend 15minutes on contemplating on my own self-actualization. Before I leave home to work, I choose a theme to focus on, let's say today I am focusing on how temperature affects my mood. And then as I move through the day, I keep monitoring my mood and it's relation with the room temperature. Let's say I start the day at 8 and I remain focused until 10 and then I notice I have completely forgotten that I already have a task. Whenever I get distracted, I notice it and then return to the self-monitoring. But before returning, I rewind a little back to figure out how I actually got distracted. For example, I was focused, until I walked into a coffee shop to grab a coffee and I saw a beautiful lady and I started rehearsing in my head on how I would approach such people or even fantasizing in my head about xXx! No judgement. I just become aware of it and return to self-monitoring. I've noticed it just supercharges my concentration as well as helping me to become more and more aware of the distraction mechanism.

The good thing about this is that when you do it repeatedly, over time, you actually can go meta. Meaning, for example, when first time you happen to have that experience in the coffee shop and the next day you have a similar in a business meeting, you can conclude that in general there is some sexual issues and if you actually embrace it as some problem that can be addressed, then you can work on it and level-up. The more you practice this, the higher you go in the hierarchy of ego-structure. 

Now, there are some exceptions for when you can suspend this practice temporarily. For example, you might be doing some focus-demanding task like reading, researching, meditating, contemplating, praying etc. During these moment you can let go of the self-monitoring but once you are done with the task, you return again. Make sure that task itself is not something that ego is fooling you that it is important and therefore you need to forget about the self-monitoring. Also become aware that how ego comes up with argument to convince you how silly this practice is.

 

Think of it this way: Assume you have a pre-defined baseline focus and that is self-monitoring or in this example, becoming aware of the temperature changes and its effect on your sensations and mood. It is represented by "____" (underline) and then the secondary task is something that happens for a known period of time and is represented by "^". Now you all you need to do is to make sure once ^ is done your thoughts are not spread all over the place and you are back to __. And identifying, if that is not happening, what is the reason for why you didn't return to __. An ideal day should look like this

______^____^_^______^__^_____^____^______

A distracted day looks like this:

____^__&(#____#&#%^#$#^#$@#@^___

I hope you get the idea.

 

For this topic to remain clean, I thought I will define some rules so we can all get the most benefit. Here they are:

• Please don't share feedback on other's reply. Only share your own thoughts
• Keep it simple as much as you can, just share the mechanisms in an elegant and clean bullet points

Good luck!

[mememe]

thank you! (still want to feedback this) i realized for myself before, but more so while reading this:

• without proper self monitoring self development doesn’t work 
• it’s difficult to start again with it if once having stopped doing it, it’s the #nr1 tool in self development but has different techniques
• it would be nice if the forum had a project/workshop section, not the journaling section! where over commenting is banned, but people can work for a longer timeframe on tangible changes in their life in groups

Edited February 1, 2022 by mememe