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Originally Posted by Andrew Michaels  Could you expand a bit on how you change your mindset? |
I guess the key to the practical application is to let go of other people's reactions, because the impulse to react I think is largely based on wanting to avoid making others feel rejected and avoiding rejection yourself. It's this big hassle of constantly having to manage personal relationships and other people's expectations, of being locked into the constantly fluctuating polarity of acceptance and rejection. And it's painful because the ego relies so heavily on other people's validation.
So, the change in my mindset is to relate to people on a level that is deeper/higher than the ego, which requires that I let go of whatever the result of this approach may be. Maybe people will feel rejected and offended etc., but the bottom line is that I don't want to play on the level of ego anymore, and so need to let go of it completely.
Steve recently wrote an article that relates to this called
Soulful Relationships, and come to think of it I'm sure it must've had something to do with all of this clicking together in my head.
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Originally Posted by Mnemosyne Do you think this applies to people during every/any stage of development? In other words, would a very young child interacting another very young child involve ego activation? |
I think that in general it must be the same thing in some way, although only as complicated as the level of ego development. It's probably just a sensitivity to external stimulus that only becomes a problem because of an extraordinarily noisy and demanding environment; being born introverted into western society is almost like being born a penguin in a rainforest. And then this feeling of not being at home in mainstream society blends into the universal human dilemma of form identification, and introverts develop particular issues that have to do with ego and external stimulus.