The Universal Formation of Ego, the psycho-neurological Adam and Eve moment

In this blog, we assert that the "ego" is a pathology.   All modern human beings live a life within the "ego" and experience themselves as the ego.  The pathological ego is the foundation of all the mental illnesses described in psychology, and the ego is a dissociative state of reduced awareness characterized by analytical thinking in an audible voice as well as repetitive emotional states stemming from malformations within the sympathetic nervous system.   We will detail the mechanisms of the formation of the ego and demonstrate how this pathological experience impacting all people was an inevitable consequence of our evolution.     

We will also offer our own definitions for the terms used to ensure readers understand the context intended.  The term "ego" will likely have a unique meaning in the context it will be used here.  The other very important philosophical consideration is the need to use neuroscience and physiology when looking into the developmental realities of the mind.  Given the mind is a manifestation of a physical brain, it is absolutely mandatory that we dive into the physiological realities of the brain to connect the psychological experiences to neurological processes to eliminate any need for subjective assertions that have no neurological explanations.   

What we are suggesting as the primary cause of the ego are neurological positive feedback loops in the sympathetic nervous system, where the fight or flight mechanism that was a necessary evolutionary dynamic of our ancestral past did not evolve to work within a mind that developed the ability to experience awareness of its own experiences.   We will take a brief look at the normal mechanisms of the sympathetic response in animals to correlate these dynamics to the formation of the ego.

The "fight or flight" mechanism is a profound neurological experience that serves a vital role in the survival of animals.   While we typically consider the fight or flight mechanism a reaction, we will take a more careful look to find that the response has two distinct phases as well as a proportionality that relates to things like proximity of threats as well as a hierarchal capacity to gauge the risk of multiple threats to enable decisions when multiple threats are encountered.

The first phase of the sympathetic response is one that I term "something is wrong here".   Animals need to have the ability to detect, locate, and identify specific threats that use various means to avoid detection and therefore the response to potential threats happens in stages.    The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for arousing animals from sleep where the parasympathetic nervous system is active.  The initial phase of sympathetic activation is sensitive to all forms of sensory stimulation, and in particular, sudden changes.    The first phase involves a heightened sense of alertness, fear, and curiosity as the animal is compelled to locate the source of the threat in its environment.  The awareness is an expansion of the visual and auditory field of focus as the specific threat is not yet identified.   If no threat is located after inspecting the environment, the animal can relax back into normal autonomic activity.   If the aninal locates a threat, the second phase is intitiated and the "fight or flight" state of consciousness occurs.

"Fight or flight" activations involve a dramatic cognitive and emotional change in the animal.  When a specific threat is isolated, an involuntary and profound reduction of awareness is what generates the experience of "fight or flight".   The response itself is termed after the decision-making apparatus of this response, where all the potential behaviors are eliminated from the awareness of the animal and fear subordinates all other emotional states.  The collapsed awareness forces a fixation and attachment to the other animal as the objectification process makes the other animal occur as responsible for this profound state of fear or rage.   The only way to alleviate this state is to remove the stimulus, aka by destroying the threat or running from it to safety.   The sympathetic nervous system blocks the awareness of any environmental stimuli not necessary for survival.   This mechanism doesn't stop the formation of cognitions from the environment in the various areas of the cerebral cortex related to the world the animal lives within, but those elements remain "sub conscious".   The fight or flight "tunnel vision" is a result of a neurologically mediated division.   This temporary segregation forms two distinct domains of consciousness, the dramatically redacted momentary awareness and the "subconscious" where the vast majority of the awareness of the environment is hidden from view and only revealed if deemed relevant to the survival.  The "subconscious" is a temporary domain beyond the inflexible focus.  To prioritize the fight or flight mechanism, the sympathetic nervous system dramatically reduces the potential for any other instinctive behaviors that would compromise survivability through this significant transformation.   The subordination of awareness as well as normal emotional responses ensures that fear is the only driving emotional state and the animal is forced to address the threat.    

The reduced awareness is needed to induce the experience of "fight or flight".   Neurologically impairing the brain this way blocks access to neurological pathways related to the nearly infinite potential behavioral responses.  Another reason this evolutionary mechanism is needed is that animals do not have any underlying awareness for the reasons driving their behaviors.   Many instinctive behaviors are emotionally compelled, but the animal does not have any underlying awareness of the reasons for these behaviors.  All animals will be compelled to eat when they experience being hungry, but do they understand the role of food in protein synthesis?   Do animals eat because they understand that eating provides nutrition?   Do animals mate because they want to have offspring?   Do animals run from a predator because they understand they may die if they are captured?   The animals eat because of hunger, and if you fed them appetite suppressant drugs they would probably starve.    Because of the role of emotion and instinct in animals, the fight or flight mechanism needed to prioritize fear by subordinating all other emotional experiences by inhibiting the transmission of those neurological outputs that involuntarily and ongoingly form as a result of sensory stimuli.   The subconscious mind describes total sum of awareness including emotional states and behavioral drives that are beyond the momentary awareness of the animal but are still present as cognitive products of the brain as it absorbs sensory information.   The system prioritizes the transmission of elements of consciousness that are relevant for survival, so this reduced consciousness is more of an involuntary and inflexible prioritization than a reduction of cognitive processes.   In order to find the exit, the mind must be aware of the entire environment to direct the mind to find the exit.  You would need to have eliminated the non-exits to arrive at the fixation upon an exit.   

Understanding the formation of subconscious as a temporary phenomenon is important for looking at the role of fear in human beings as it relates to creativity, intelligence, and awareness.   It's also important when looking at the neurological mechanisms of dissociation, typically considered to be an avoidance of fear when it's actually a neurological reduction of consciousness due to the fear itself.  

The last consideration is my proposed mechanism for the formation of individual fight or flight reactions in animals.   To make this short, I believe that the fight or flight reaction is orchestrated by reproducing the emotional and behavioral responses to specific threats by forming non-experiential memories that are merely captured neurological patterns in the brain during a first time reaction.   The mechanism is useful in reducing mistakes by replication of previously successful behaviors that are reproduced by bypassing the need to more complex cognitive processes as the neurological "map" of a reaction is what is stored as opposed to a specific memory.    When an animal enters into "fight or flight", the neurological patterns associated with this specific threat are captured as the products of the individual areas like the visual cortex, auditory cortex, olfactory cortex, all emotional centers, and the unique behaviors that the animal engaged in.   Anything that the animal experienced has correlated neurological patterns, and these patterns are what is saved since they are a reliable source of information concerning the unique external threat and the behaviors generated to survive.  So, each predatory threat to a rabbit for example, is a unique sensory map that when a threshold of patterns unique to the visual, auditory, or olfactory are observed, the same emotional and behavioral patterns will be replicated but not by the original process buy by reproducing the neurological product of more complex cognitive processes.   This lack of experiential memory is a primary expiation for the formation of ego, where we find an arbitrary event to be the cause of all suffering in human beings.

When an animal enters into fight or flight while observing a new threat, the neurological patterns associated with all of the sensory experiences are being stored in the formation of a "trigger".   A trigger is an involuntary reaction to a particular grouping of neurological pathways and has been formed to reproduce the same emotional and behavioral drive that is specific to this particular pattern.   This is how animals create unique fight or flight response to unique environmental threats.   The way a rabbit responds to the sound of the wings of an owl will be different that the way it reacts to the smell of a rattle snake nearby.   Since different threats present different mechanisms of locomotion, the way a rabbit will evade an owl will be very different from how it behaves when it encounters a coyote.    The fight or flight mechanism is such a critical behavioral mechanism that raising a wild rabbit in captivity and releasing it to the wild would result in a likely death as it would not have any awareness of the risks present in its environment and it would not instinctively respond in time to the sound of hawks wings flapping.   The reactions are more of an escalation, as the sympathetic nervous system is always active and animals specifically scan the environment for the patterns that are associated with individual threats and engage in behaviors that are sensitive to the unique threats present in the environment.   The fight or flight response trains the animals to the changing ecosystem each generation, thus accounting for changes and also enabling a species to adapt to different habitats with unique predator and prey species.   If animals had instinctive fight or flight reactions that were pre-determined at birth, that would devastate survival rates as the animal would not adapt to inevitable changes to the ecosystem and lose its ability to migrate.  The neurological memories reduce the cognitive burden by merely using afferent neurons in the brain to capture the neurological activity associated with specific threats, and efferent neurons to reproduce the same behavioral responses while inducting the inhibitory cognitive impairment to induce the reduced awareness of "fight or flight".

The first fight or flight response of a human child's life causes the formation of ego.   This experience is inevitable and not caused by trauma in most cases as it is any arbitrary activation of the sympathetic nervous system.   The ONLY reason this happens is the formation of self awareness, aka, the notion of "me".    The simple explanation is that when the child around the age of 5 for a "normal ego" experiences thier first sympathetic reaction, the first phase is initiated as the universal experience of "something is wrong here".    This can be anything, any sensory stimulation like a loud sound or something like one parent yelling at the other in another room.   It does not matter what the external stimulus was, the experience of all children is exactly the same.   The child will initially identify the source of the stress reaction, but the child will also notice the physiological and psychological changes the reaction is causing themselves.   In this momment of self observation, the child will experience "something is wrong with me" and this observation creates the first "trigger" as the sympathetic nervous system captures this state of fear and anxiety as the cause of itself in a overlap of the afferent and efferent neurological pathways of the sympathetic nervous system.   This observation will initiate a full fight or flight reaction where "me" is now objectified as a predatory threat to "me".   The result is a complete dissociation into self evaluation.   The child will immediately collapse into complete terror as each observation physical and emotional changes are perceieved inside the context of "something is wrong with me".   The child will feel abandonded as anxiety at the age of 5 has been solely experienced as "seperation anxiety" so in a sense, and artificial abandonment is generated.   Unable to perceive any sense of security, the child feels confused and paralyzed.   A deep sense of brokenness is resultant from having no behavioral response and total loss of all awareness ensues.  This moment generates an observation of the antithesis of all positive emotional affect which generates a long list of "triggers" a positive feedback loops of objectified "me" experiences.   "not good enough" is the fear that compels running/avoidance in animals dominates the child.   In this state of dissociation, the audible voice is formed as a need to "figure it out" is caused by a loss of awareness.   The child will imagine they need to "be perfect" as way to avoid this feeling of being "not good enough".   The caregivers are also going to be objectified as predatory threats.   This mechanism of "figure it out, be perfect" is the universal behavioral response of all egos, and each reactionary "trigger" is now the neurological equivalent of specific environmental threats that when activated cause an immediate reaction that reproduces confusion and the emotional states are stuck on as positive feedback loops that mandate breaking with external validation for the opposite.   The fear of rejection, failure, not belonging, abandonment, helplessness, powerlessness, etc. are all sources of anxiety.   "Something is wrong with me" is the first phase of the animal fight or flight reaction, but as a positive feedback loop this experience can lead to rumination and is the basis of self-inquiry where the other triggers are located and applied.  The system is also hierarchal where abandonment is the most emotionally significant as it carries a sense of hopeless despair.   The hierarchy of triggers is like an animal kingdom where the avoidance of abandonment will lead to confusion to avoid acknowledging objective reality where another trigger can be activated instead.   This is why people stay in abuse relationships, as the fear of abandonment is avoided as a predatory threat and the person will subconsciously choose "not good enough" to enable hope to retain relationships pending validation seeking as way to please the other person in the relationship.   These emotional states subordinate all normal emotion and cause all people to experience the existence of other people in terms of how these people impact one's own emotional states.  This is why the pursuit of happiness is a universal one, and why human beings have such profound perceived emotional needs.   The entire subjective experiences of all people is lived in a significant reduction of consciousness, where understanding the world through analysis perpetuates the dissociation from normal awareness, and a massive amount of imaginative and cognitive power is replaced by a hierarchy where each person attempts to stabilize themselves emotionally and settle the instability of a life lived one crushing reaction after the next.  

Most human decisions are made in a fight or flight Paradym where emotional consequences are perceived as the primary influence.   This is why people live in pervasive patterns of behavior and have very little awareness of this in the moments in which these decisions are made.  Consider when someone asks you for help.  Have you ever felt afraid to say "no" out of fear of conflict or guilt?   Have you ever felt compelled to be "nice" although doing so didn't necessarily reflect your true feelings?   Have you ever justified saying yes to something you didn't really want to do but saying no seemed to be more risky?  Have you noticed how many of your decisions are made to avoid the greater of two evils?   Have you ever noticed how much you dislike disappointing others?   How about your own fear of rejection?   When you think about the future, how much do your own fear play a role in your imagination and how does an imagination contaminated by fear impact someone's life?    When you consider the fear of rejection, the person does not really identify the fear as the issue but the potential for being rejected by the other person.  In the real world scenario, the person will be very sensitive and attempt to avoid rejection by impressing or making someone happy.   Wanting to appear confident, many people seek to improve themselves in many ways as to avoid rejection.   When talking to someone while the fear of rejection is palpable, how does this impact the person?  How does this fear impact the other?   The fear of rejection IS the only cause of rejection because if the fear was not there at all, the interaction would not be within the context of a potential rejection.   If their reaction to the interpretation of rejection was just entirely absent, how would that impact the interaction?   Consider the fear of rejection mandates and arbitrary goal to symbolize the antithesis of rejection, like getting a phone number.   Consider that success is the universal anti-failure remedy that drives everyone in an effort to overcome the "not good enough" trigger.   The ego is a Chinese finger trap, as failure will produce the trigger one is afraid of and avoiding.  Success validates whatever ways of being the person conjured to overcome the fear of failure and thus they validated the fear as confirmation of the underlying notions its associated with.  We validated that we are not good enough by trying to overcome it or by avoiding.  We procrastinate as things we deem important to us are seen as important due to their potential emotional impact on us.  This upcoming test can make you feel "good enough" or "not good enough".   The ego produces a yo-yo effect, where our emotional states are generated by external triggers and validation.   What makes theses emotions pathological aside from the arbitrary reactive nature of them, but the fact that human beings are the only ones with emotions that define our relationship to ourselves.   Animals have emotions that only pertain to external phenomenon.  They experience emotions too, but those emotions are connected to objective external factors and are temporary.   Emotions are what add context to life, but emotions do not come from life out there.   They are just intended to enable the successful navigation of life.  We are able to compensate for these devastating internalized reactions, but what would happen if animals had the same fear of rejection?  What would happen in an animal missed a kill and returned home to its cubs and felt like a failure?  What if the mother cheetah was too afraid to fail at hunting so she avoided leaving the den?   When you consider the role of emotion in animals from an evolutionary standpoint, and then imagine how any species of animals would do if you gave them normal human emotion you can start to really notice how profound the ego is in devastating our experience of being alive.  

The truth is the "ego" is a profound intellectual disability which is the primary cause of the wide range to intellectual and creative expression in human beings that is not observed in any other species.   The level of sympathetic activity will be directly related to the neurological blockages that replaced the limitless imagination of a curious child with the ruminating internal monologue that people are convinced is "thinking".   The reality is, the loss of present moment awareness is in part due to the observation of the inner voice of understanding.   The suffering of ego is the reason for all goals, and goals are based upon the fantasy of a "someday" future where we are healed, successful, proven, loved, and where we borrow happiness from this future to have hope.  This is why we need to believe in ourselves, as we are trying to overcome our own projected fear.  

The ego is the basis of all patterns of behavior, prolonged sadness, and all heartbreak.  The ego is also the cause of the experiences of "trauma".   We have all experienced traumatic experiences, but these experiences are made significantly more impactful as a stimulus for the same triggers.   Since the triggers are reactions that define oneself, the false interpretations of self that have been long associated with past traumas are not caused by the trauma as the misinterpretation was already destined to be the emotional response to the traumatic event.  Since these are fight or flight based reactions as positive feedback loops, when someone seeks mental health counselling they will already be stuck within triggers.   When they are directed to look at the past, the manner in which they contextualize past experiences will be given by the emotional dynamics present when they reflect.   Keep in mind, the imagination needed to have the fight or flight mechanism included to early humans could use the imagination in planning and fear would play an import role in objectively forming potential future plans so imaginary scenarios would have a solid foundation in reality.   This is why looking at past traumas can lead to constant suffering by simply activating more reactions and falsely assuming these emotions are related to the memories when the visualization is causing the triggers in the moment and therefore the memories themselves do not have any experiential value in escaping suffering.  

This is the formation of the pathology of ego, and in the next post I will detail the methodology for escaping it.   The experiences of enlightenment are real, and now understood as a neurological restoration to normal.   The above explanation is secondary to the discovery of the original moment in coaching sessions where people are able to fully escape this trap and find a staggering level of self awareness are large amounts of the subconscious mind is united with the experience of the moment.  Present moment consciousness is what happens with the disappearance of the objectified "me" in the fight or flight vanishes from ones experience, and this reveals the truth of all people.  We were never broken, and there is nothing wrong with anyone.   The time to wake up from this grey area in human history is here, and ill continue to share my experiences as this is just a simple introduction of what's to come.  I hope to help the world of academia in a meaningful way so we can bring the good news to mankind and empower a rapid awareness and awkening.