Hey everybody, welcome back. Now we're going to discuss what's probably one of the most confusing concepts and the whole of psychology. That's why psychology doesn't talk about it much. This is more like a Zen belief. There's something out there called ego. It's not ego is, you know, we classically think of it in a Western sense.

Oh, you've got a huge ego, which means you're full of yourself. No, the ego just means you are yourself. Your ego is a false sense of self created by unconscious identification with the mind. What does that mean? Your mind creates an AI Think of it this way. You have a squirrel out in your backyard.

What's your squirrels name? Your squirrel doesn't have one. Even other squirrels don't have a name for that squirrel. Why? There is no I in a squirrels mind. only humans have what's called meta cognition.

Now a meta study is when you're looking at multiple studies to figure something out. metacognition is when you have multiple thoughts. But it's more than that. It's when you think about your thinking. a squirrel doesn't think about their thinking. They see that they eat or not, they don't think about the knot.

They don't critique it. They don't have reviews about it. You know, they don't have their friends. You know, where do you find the best nuts? And are these tasty nuts? Or are these nuts going to give me gas?

They don't think about it. See it, eat it. Okay, there's water, drink it. Tree climate. Now the squirrel come in, play or run? Simple.

They don't think about themselves. They don't think does my tail look like it's getting fat. They don't think about their thinking. This is a major defect of the human brain, that we have this eye and we actually think Our ourselves, it actually becomes this other character in our mind, which has incorporated itself into our mind and creates a false sense of I. And this is what we'll and we'll talk about this in the next section, what ultimately becomes your negative inner critic. Because once this AI this ego is created, it has this running dialogue, it never shuts up as if its life depends on it.

I'm going to prove this to you because you normally don't hear your own chatter your mind people say, Oh, no, I don't talk to myself my head unless I'm having a conversation or I'm thinking about something. Oh, no, no, no, no. You never, ever, ever stopped talking to yourself. You cannot shut up. If anybody else talked this much, you would choke them out. You just don't hear it.

You kind of ignore this background noise. Let's sit alone in a room by yourself for three to five minutes. And try not to think. Try not to hear any voice in your head. It takes a Zen master years to learn how to think of like one thing. There was an old Zen task.

It says think only tree and you look at the tree and you only think tree and you don't think about anything else. Then you have mastery. But to be a true master, they say, Okay, now the second step, remove the tree. And you're like, well, then what? Then you think nothing. That's when your Zen master when you can actually stop thinking.

You're thinking, I know a guy used to sitting next to high school. I don't think he ever thought the whole the whole damn day. Maybe, but I doubt he was a Zen master. He was thinking about all kinds of things that were completely worthless. And he just looked like he had nothing on his mind because nothing of any value is on his mind. It's not the same thing.

Your brain they call the chattering monkey, or the wild horse because it just can't be tamed. We'll just go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, running commentary on everything. You don't even know you have this problem. Until it's mentioned to you by somebody like me brought to your awareness in by bringing it to your awareness. You can now see it, you can now understand the problem. And you can begin to control it.

Shameless plug here. I got a great course on Zen. Very inexpensive, it's worth, you know, thousand times what I'm charging for it. But grab it. It's my gift to the universe to just give this way for free. I want this information out there.

I do not want people suffering. I've been a therapist pretty much my whole life. Life. My goal was not to make a fortune because I got broke doing therapy. I made all my money. You know, doing internet marketing, never made any money doing therapy went broke, I would never retired.

Because I want to help people. That's it. Even with the internet marketing was my goal with internet marketing, make a boatload of money. Why? So I never have to worry about money again. And I can spend the rest of my life helping people and I can just give it away for free if I want.

Cool. Nice. So check out that course. Now, the ego at the end of the day, its job is to ruin your life. So you've got to understand this, get a handle on it, figure out what it is and learn how to control it. You'll be one of the few people that does and this will make your life better than almost anything else.

So let's drive on learn a little bit more. So the ego exists to give us a sense of self. This is why it's created. So, you know, we say I or me or we, these are things that we kind of point to. Now, we think there's one us we're going to talk about this a little bit later there's we actually have multiple loss. I remember I was reading a little piece in between when the comedy shows I forget the guys name.

But you got he flashes it up there for about two seconds. And it's this little script and they're numbered. And this guy is an absolute genius. Everything he says is like, brilliant. I'll have to have to figure out who that is. And I'd love to get I was thinking the other day I want to get a collection of his works, but he had one on just the other night.

And it said something about who is this I that I call me. And if there's an eye who is the person observing the eye, that creates a we and if my I is bifurcated, which means splitting two. Then who are we? And we seem to be many, the multiplicity that I was talking about. And if we are the many then who is the true eye? And that's the question because you have an eye you have this ego.

And then you can sit outside like I said, sit in a room for three to five minutes and listen, observe this ego blather on. Well, now there's two people. There's the ego, which is the fake you. And then there's the observer, which is the real you watching this fake ego for the very first time in your entire life. This is amazing for the very first time watching the fake you that was pretending to be you. That head purloined your entire personality.

You thought this was you? Now you realize it's not it's a fiction of the mind. It's an ego, and it's what's causing so much damage in your life and you the true you get blamed for it. Matter of fact, remember I told you about the Zen master think only tree, then remove the tree. What happens to the Zen master when he removes the tree, or even just gets down to just tree? Serenity?

All this negative chatter and self talk and confusion and blather goes away. And when everything is removed, which is the ego when the ego is removed and all that chatter and blathering and negativity and just rubbish is removed? What's left? You and serenity? Perfect. People keep trying to be happy and doing this and achieving happiness, you know, creates happiness.

Nothing. Happiness is your natural state. When you remove all the crap. I used to do a Paul's poopy pile Paul's poopy pile, the three P's Paul's poopy pile? What is it? I would draw a pile of crap a pile of manure on the board.

And I would draw diamond underneath the manure. And I said, This Is Your Life. This is you. Here you are thinking all this crap has happened to you. And at some point you start to think you're a pilot. You are the pilot crap.

When actually you're the diamond. And there's nothing wrong with you. You were born beautiful, perfect, innocent. There's nothing to fix. Here's what we got to do. We got a boatload of crap to get rid of.

You don't need to be fixed because you aren't broken. You aren't damaged and you're not defective. You are just filled with crap. Now we talked about the give Gago garbage in garbage out. Crap coming in. Coming in coming in coming in pretty soon.

I said you'd be what do you remember? You'd be full of it. That's the crap pile on top of you. Got to get rid of it. What color that crap pile. We've talked about it, and the accumulation of all these things that we've talked about culminate in this thing called the ego.

So why does the brain create an ego? Well, it helps us feel stable in the world. But at the same time, like we talked about, it causes most of our pain. It gives us a sense of eye, a sense of this seeing, like we're living our head, and we see out through our eyes. That isn't actually true. I mean, it's a hard concept to wrap your mind around it.

So I'll keep talking about it. And as I go through it, we'll kind of weave through the layers, your brain will almost take quite a period of time to digest it. That's why it's good to read some Zen books, because they'll describe it, then they'll describe it again. Then they'll describe it again. They'll describe it again and then describe it again. It's like trying to explain color to a blind man, but eventually, you know, you'll get it.

You'll get it, you'll get it, but it takes layers. It takes repetition now, the ego fix To support the idea of a separate AI, the ego creates a character that is forced to follow certain rules and match a certain self image. That's what the ego is, it creates a character. That character becomes a you, that isn't really you, but it's damaging your life. And that becomes your self image. So your self image is always false.

So, the false self image, one creates pain so we can live the ego needs pain. If there's not pain, if there's not a problem that it has to solve, if there's not something for to think about, and it loves to think about the negative, I used to watch CNN, you don't see an N stands for stands for constantly negative news. Now we laugh at that, but that's accurate. That's what your false self images your false ego is. It constantly cranks out negativity, negativity, negativity, like CNN constantly negative news. They talk for half an hour about nothing but negativity.

And then it's cycles over and over and over again. This is exactly what your ego does. It thinks of negative things. It's highly repetitive, it almost always thinks about the exact same thing over and over and over again. And it loops and it loops and it loops and it loops and it loops. If I made you sit through the same movie, every single day all day for the rest of your life.

That would be pretty much what the ego does. You don't get bored because your own pain is fascinating to this crazy ego. It loves to listen to it. Nobody else would want to listen to it. But I said strangely you will. Because you're not really really listening.

It's going subliminally in the back of your head. And again alone in a room by yourself. In all the noise all distractions gone. Not only we hear it, you will not be able to Avoid it drives people nuts at first, when they start hearing it over and over again, because now it's like, you know, I said, Don't think about a pink elephant and all of a sudden, you know, that's all you're thinking about. So next, the false image makes us feel bad about ourselves. It constantly distracts ourselves.

The ego doesn't want you to focus on it, because if you focus on it, you realize how stupid it is how negative it is, you'll want to destroy it, and you'll eventually get rid of it. So what it does is it distracts you with different things, all kinds of distractions, it puts you in pain, and then distraction is the way that you get away from the pain. You focus on something that isn't the pain. So we're constantly using distractions. Look it out people try to quote unquote, pleasure themselves. They don't pleasure themselves by thinking happy thoughts in the room by themselves.

Oh, no, no, no. We need something outside ourselves to make ourselves feel better about ourselves to distract us. We distract ourselves with Sex and alcohol and gambling and the a number one with a bullet TV shows yakking with other people talking on the phone talking on Facebook, talking on Instagram, all these ways that we communicate about absolutely nothing. Most of what we talk about is absolutely worthless. If I said to you, hey, do you know that the average person spends an hour and a half to three hours every single day on the internet on the web on their phone? That's about 1000 hours a year?

I say so every every two years, actually, it's a little over because it's seven days a week, sorry. It's gonna be about 1200 hours. So about every two years, that's about, yeah, about a year and a half of work. That's huge. And I say in all that talking, all that blathering, all that whatever the hell you were doing on the internet? Did you learn one thing that made your life better and they probably can't think of one in over 2000 hours, you can't think of one in 2500 hours, you can't think of one.

Did you make even $1? Maybe it's got some monetary value. No, it's a distraction. TV shows are all about distractions. Matter of fact, they're very fast paced. If you watch, they won't go more than five or six seconds without changing the scene, or changing a character or changing an angle or a shot.

They have to keep moving, moving, moving. Why? Because if it's not distracting enough, your pleasure will go down. The more distracting it is, the more pleasurable it is. Because the only goal was to have it be distracted TV has two goals. Two main goals psychologically, well, three.

One is to sell you something that's why it's, it exists. But the second two things that I was thinking of was major distraction. And for you to have things in your life that you're never going to have. You're never going to have the hottest girl or man, you're never going to be incredibly wealthy. You're never going to go to all these exotic locations, you're never going to be a superhero or a super agent or a super anything. For the average person, their life is boring.

It's working the factory twist, bolt on nuts. Look through the Yellow Pages. It's insane how boring jobs are bookkeeping, automotive, you know, it's the same thing over and over and over again, I became a therapist because at least there'd be a little bit of variety. And I switched jobs multiple times, because even that got boring at times, you know, I do therapy that I teach that I'd want to do stuff in the stage and I want to do stuff on the internet. You know, they don't want to go out and do flooring or something, do something completely different, you know, work security, I didn't care. I had multiple, multiple jobs that would get bored easily.

Why? Because most jobs after a very short period of time, they're boring and they're repetitive. So TV takes us away from all this. They call it the opium of the masses. So distraction is huge. It's one of the leading pains that you get from the ego because you're spending a life in distraction.

You're not actually living it. When you're in a movie, you're not living your life. You're living somebody else's. When you're watching TV, you're not living your life. You live in somebody else's. When you guys are talking back and forth about absolutely nothing.

You're having somebody else's experience, not yours. And it's not in the now it doesn't exist. These are all fictions. Most your life ends up being a lot of fiction. And the self image is going to cause guilt, anxiety, remorse, remember, remember, number one, look back up there. It creates pain so it can live.

So where does the guilt the anxiety and remorse come from? Your ego more than that later. Now, the ego is actually the problem. Posing is the solution. I actually came up with this phrase for addiction. The addiction was the problem posing as the solution.

Oh, you don't feel good. Have a drink, snort a line, take a shot, pop a pill, you'll feel better. Cops pull you over for DUI screw. Let's talk crap about cops and drink her ass off till we don't care anymore. Well, isn't that how we got the DUI in the first place? Yeah, but don't worry about that.

Let's get back to the solution. No, we're getting back to the problem. We're getting back to the drinker drug. So addiction is the problem posing as a solution. Oh, you got a pain in your shoulder. I got a pill for that you can drink for that.

Wife's a pain in the butt. Just drink till you don't care anymore. You know, you're paying the butt drink until you don't care about you anymore. You know, can't sleep at night. Drink yourself to sleep, take a pill for that. snort a line, you know, it's the problem posing a solution.

So the ego is the same thing. It makes you feel pain and it says Don't worry I'll distract you and make you feel better. I'll come up with this great solution like drinking, drugging, sex, gambling, all these distractions to make the pain go away. So it creates the pain and then says, I'll help you solve it. And most the way most the time, it's not even solving it. Sometimes it's just the problem posing as the problem.

It puts you in the problem, then what you do you sit in it, you sit in it like an asset and it just burns you. It's nasty. The ego is nasty. It is not your friend. That's why I say take the Zen course because why you really need an in depth education on how to get away from this thing. So we actually defend our ego.

Remember, we think we are the ego. So we defend it. Like when somebody says something negative about us, we feel like we have to say something back. Why? To defend the ego. Otherwise you yourself in a quiet mind, the youth The Observer the real you wouldn't care what somebody said about you.

Somebody says to me, hey, Paul, you're a jerk. I don't even understand what that means. Because my ego would say, hey, you can't say that about me and it would get all upset. But the real me says, Well, I know I'm not a jerk. So, obviously, you're confused. Okay, we got a confused person in front of us.

I can't get upset about that. I could feel pity my heart for him. But that's about it. I can't get upset. Why? Because not true.

I don't feel the need to defend myself because I know it's not true. When you're not sure, and your ego is never sure. It's always insecure. It's like, hey, it's got to defend itself. You can't say that to me, and I'm going to get you back and I need revenge and bla bla bla bla, that's the ego. You yourself don't care.

Or if somebody came up to me and said, Hey, Paul, you're a jerk. And I thought about it for a minute I go. You know what? I haven't checked on that for a while. Thank you. I'm going to watch for a day.

And I'm going to see what I'm a good guy. And when I'm kind of a jerk, and I'm gonna look at that two ways, sometimes I'm a jerk to other people. And sometimes I'm a jerk to myself. I better live with that for a day and see if you're right or not. Because you might be seeing something, you know, you so you're either wrong, and I have to feel bad about that. Or you're right and bless your heart for telling me.

It's the ego that feels bad when people say things about you. So we have all kinds of different defense mechanisms to protect this false ego. Let's take a look. Now some of these are helpful. Most of these are hurtful, but these are your basic defense mechanisms. Now there's more.

But remember, this is the course on why people do what they do. So a lot of why they do what they do, is them acting out These defense mechanisms, so I'm going to spend a little bit of time with them. Not too much time, but some. The first defense mechanism is acceptance. Hey, they said something about me, you know, that's gonna happen X number of times in life, I best, you know, just let it go. You know, if it doesn't apply, let it fly, you know, and have some acceptance.

That's a good defense mechanism. Now, sometimes it's a bad defense mechanism. If you're in an abusive relationship, and somebody says, You're a jerk, and you go, Oh, my God. Yeah, he's right. I'm not always nice. And I had his dinner late.

And did you know, you started accepting that? Hey, I am a jerk, man. Maybe Maybe I should apologize. You know, how can I do better? I know I gotta turn this around. I don't want to feel like a jerk my whole life.

That's the wrong kind of acceptance. Okay, but it's common, isn't it? acting out, hey, you can't talk to me that way and blah, blah, blah, blah or, you know, I act out a different You know, I go home and you know, kick the dog or something, you know, or you know, grumpy with my wife or whatever, that's another kind of acting out. avoidance, I just start avoiding, you know, people places and things that cause me pain. Now, avoidance can be helpful, you know, if you have nasty people in your life and you don't want that kind of negativity and you don't want to feel bad, avoiding them is a beautiful thing to do. I used to call it the proximity rule, you know, I try to you know, almost like a restraining order I try to restrain myself I keep myself 100 feet from any negative people.

Why? Because they can't shop much farther than that or you know, I won't even Garner their attention I'm outside the zone, the area of operation if you're military, you know, you're not going to get hit because you're not in the Al you know, the area of operation. So stay outside that hundred foot zone and you'll be good. Now, if you're avoiding things like problems or dealing things obviously not good, but avoidance is one of the major defense mechanisms that people use to to survive. And strangely enough, I'm gonna state it exactly this way, their own attack on themselves. Denial, denial can be me denying it to you, even though I know it's true.

Or I partially denied to myself I go, that's not really true, but I'm kind of you know, I take a little bite of the apple, or I completely deny it. That's not true, because I'm just simply ignorant of it. Or there's the kind of denial where I heard it. It was true, but I suppressed it, I let it go. I blew it off. I gave an excuse why it wasn't true.

And later I just plain forgot about it. And it becomes unconscious denial. humor, I deflect I laugh it off. Sometimes humor is a good defense mechanism use too often or you know if it's one of your only tools. Not very good. Human I think that's almost always a good defense mechanism.

Okay? Unless you're just being humble all the time, because you're just insecure. You know, you don't want anybody to think you think you're too great and therefore, you know, you never tried to let your star shine you never say anything. You never take credit for anything you become, you know, mamby pamby, kind of wishy washy, that's not good either. So, again, some are helpful, some are hurtful and it depends upon how you use it. intellectualization big fancy word means you figure out new and exciting ways that this doesn't pertain to you know, I can have six glasses of wine a day because it's essentially grape juice and is full of you know, Rebel flavonoids and flavonoids.

And, you know, my doctor told me, you know, a couple of drinks a day is good for your heart. Remember, he said a couple, not six, a couple is 2120. Look at that lovely couple. There's not six of them. Little reality therapy there, right? Okay, that's intellectualization.

I used to think in recovery because I did a lot of addiction recovery work with people that the smartest people would be, I'd be able to teach them faster because they were smarter. I could teach them higher level things, and they'd be excited about learning. This was absolutely positively wrong. The smarter somebody was, as an addict, the more new and exciting ways their brain could come up with new intellectual ways their brain could come up with why everything I said did not pertain to them. And why they were fine to keep going the way they were going. They were great at defending themselves against logic with their pseudo logic, their intellectualization Give me a good mentally retarded closed head injury, borderline intellectual functioning.

Salt of the earth, moron, and they'd be like, Okay, Mr. Paul, and they listen to stuff and they couldn't figure out why it wasn't true. They would just believe it, then of course, it was true. So that was very helpful. They would follow directions because they wouldn't figure out why they didn't have to do it that way. And they were special so they didn't have to do it. You know that they were unique.

We used to call it terminal uniqueness. You thought you you you were unique. You were special. And it was going to be terminal. You know, you were special. So you didn't have to have sponsors and go to meetings and stay away from your using friends.

No, no, no, no, no, you're one of the special ones that because of you know, all these intellectual reasons, you can still do those things. intellectualization is a mental defect. rationalizations are similar to intellectualization That's why I put them together they're almost the same thing. You figure out a why a reason why it's okay to do something that's actually not okay. So intellects intellectualization you can use towards anything rationalizations are, I'm going to do it. I still got to be able to live with myself and I got to be able to explain it to other people.

It's like buyer's remorse. You know, I bought this fancy sports car. pay too much. It's really 11 but I, I gotta justify it. So I go home and I tell my wife, you know, I don't tell her I spent $40,000 $60,000 on this car. I say no, no, they gave me a good deal.

There's 100,000 mile warranty and you know, sweetheart, you're gonna look greatness. And look, there's their safety features for the baby in a place for the seat and dah dah dah, dah. And, you know, they gave me free oil changes for a year and that's why I bought it. And you're like, no, I thought I looked hot in this car. You know? I love the turbo.

It just stimulated me. I love the surround sound I want on these since I was a little kid. This is on my bucket list. But I'm gonna rationalize it and say it's totally worth it. And it's not projection. Top of the next list is that's not me.

That's you. I'm not annoying. You're annoying. That's why you're so annoyed when I'm around. Not because I'm annoying, but you're annoying. I annoy annoying people, but I'm not annoying.

That makes sense. Sure, why not? repression. This is called emotional stuffing. Just push down the pain push down the pain. We used to say people like this were emotionally constipated, and they need to take a big emotional dump that made me laugh my ass off when I was a young therapist on the first day of the job, and they're talking about emotional constipation, you know, I'm like, I must have been like, 23 years old at the time.

And I'm like, you know, still in my early early 20s, which is like late adolescence, and I'm giggling You know, it was like somebody told a fart joke. They said, constipated funniest thing I've ever heard. But that's exactly what you are. You've been stuffing all this crap, and eventually you're full of it and you've been repressing, and you literally do need to take a big mental dump and get rid of it. So they weren't wrong. self serving bias.

We talked about this. A couple of course chapters before we shake things through our biases. To make ourselves okay with things to protect our ego, and to defend ourselves. So it's also a defense mechanism. It's not just something that warps reality, it warps reality to defend us comparing, well at least I'm not as bad as so and so, or I'm doing better than so and so so I guess I'm doing pretty good. Sometimes we even compare against ourselves, at least I'm not as bad as I used to be.

You can see where some of these things are not healthy comparing, okay, wishful thinking. wishful thinking is, well, maybe they'll they'll be kinder to me tomorrow, maybe things will get better tomorrow. Maybe that won't happen again. I remember my mom she used to do wishful thinking. She heard a sound in the car and then eventually, you know, her brakes seized up, she could have died. She said, Well, you know, I heard there was a noise in the car, but I thought maybe after a while it kind of go away or to get better.

And I said, Mom, you don't know a lot about cars. I don't know a lot about cars. I'm going to tell you one thing I know about cars. Now wait for it. They don't heal. She was using wishful thinking.

She thought magically, there's also this magical thing in wishful thinking magical thinking they're interchangeable, that the car might heal over time because that was the only way her logic could have been right. Oh, I thought maybe will go away. It would the car would have to heal. It would have to heal. I said, Mom, this isn't gonna happen. That's what wishful thinking is.

Blaming. Oh, I've got all these problems because of bla bla bla bla bla and they go down there excuse list of blaming everybody in there, brother. It's always anything except me. Now there's sometimes when you blame stuff, and it's true. Why were you late? It was just snowing outrageously and you're not lying.

It was that's blaming, you're blaming it on the snow. But you know what the story Did it. So that's not blaming in the therapy sense or this kind of sense. So we blame everything. Rarely is it actually that thing like the snow or the traffic that we laughed about in an earlier section. But we do it over and over and over again and you got a really catch yourself, say, is it really this?

You say? Well, I hear people all the time. They say, Well, I can't get ahead because my boss is a jerk or you know, the company's keep me down. No, you can't get ahead of your job. Because your boss doesn't work for you. Why?

He's been there longer, he's got better qualification. He must be smarter than you. Or you don't have to be at this job. There's 100 companies that do what you're doing. This is a large company, this a large country, and this is an even larger world. You don't have to be here.

If you're right and you're blaming is correct. And the boss is really keeping you down. He's not keeping you down. He's being himself. You are letting him block you. So is it his fault for holding you down?

Yes. Is it equally and even greater your fault for taking it and staying there? Yes. The correct answer is yes. So, so I can tell you that people have moved on from bad bosses when it really was the bad boss and now they are the boss and the boss's boss. They no longer blame the bad bosses.

Matter of fact, they thank them. They taught the person how not to be that bad boss and how to move on. Okay, passive. Passive just means you take all these insults you take all these things, you just let it go. passive aggressive means you're passive. You act like you're blowing it off, but then you have the little dig.

You know, you're always doing little tiny things. They say what is not worked out will be acted out. Okay? You and your wife argue about the pink color for a room. She says fine, we'll take this one. But you know, she's not really happy.

You can tell by the expression that tonality later that night, you want to have some play times with the wife. Okay? All of a sudden, that ain't happening. She's got a headache. She's not feeling good. She got to get up in the morning.

Boom, passive aggressiveness. Next day you get leftovers instead of you know, fresh cooked food, all of a sudden your clothes aren't clean and all kinds of things. She's ignoring you on and on and on. This is all passive aggressiveness, Bull. Okay, that's it for this section. I'll see you in the next section.

We're going to go over some more secrets of psychology. See you then.