How does mind serve the ego, and ego serves the selfish gene… Evolutionary view of ‘team you’
Tuesdays are my days to interface with people who are neither my readers, nor my clients.
Ordinary people. And although it is very frustrating to me, and maybe even them, I learn a lot from these unpleasant interactions.
Ever since I read The Selfish Gene, a book, and even more since I read the book ‘Why beautiful people have daughters’ a look on life through evolutionary psychology, I am trying to match what I read with what I see, hear, and feel.
It’s a fresh new way to look at people, and a lot more forgiving than the right-wrong paradigm most of us look through.
The Selfish Gene theory, and Evolutionary Psychology suggests that we humans are vehicles for our genes, whose only purpose is to procreate. Looking through this frame, the purpose of life is procreation: the more you can have your genes represented in the gene pool, the more successful life you’ve had.
This, at this point in life, is an evolutionary stable strategy, but it is being threatened by by different thoughts, teachings, inventing purposes, your desire to live a fulfilling life.
Your desire threatens to upset the evolutionary stable strategy that’s been humming for millions of years. And it is important to know that what being human with uniquely human desires, is largely threatening to the current evolutionary stable strategy, that all life, your life, is in service of the selfish genes, procreation.
Many humans want life to be about more that just procreation. Many humans want to have higher purpose, higher ways to be fulfilled than through procreation.
This desire to be higher minded, is threatening humanity with widespread unhappiness, because it is not innate to fulfill on this desire. It is fought, every step, by the selfish genes.
The selfish genes are winning…
It takes hardly any effort to procreate, but a lot of effort to elevate your actions to match your desires.
Also, procreation starts with pleasure… and ends in work, but the other kinds of joy starts with work, a lot of work, and maybe ends in joy.
The genes support the work of supporting the offspring, but don’t provide any direct or indirect support to the kind of work, the kind of grind that it takes to experience happiness, fulfillment, abundance, that your human side wants.
The capacities most people have, enable them to live the human animal life.
It takes a lot more capacities to successfully participate and win in the human type of achievements.
What are capacities? The building blocks of human type of achievements?
Sustained effort… deferred gratification… humility… curiosity… allowing… being open… loving the grind… seeing the big picture… being guided or guidable… resilience, flexibility, self-trust, courage… a sampling of the available capacities.
There are 160 of spiritual capacities, activatable. A ‘normal’ human has between 1.
Although it is possible to turn on capacities in an extraordinary life, I have not seen it among my students: it is not possible in an ordinary life lived ordinarily to turn on spiritual capacities through living.
And unfortunately, even though I can turn on capacities, they will be turned off, by your own genes, because they are not needed for the ordinary life you life.
So, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Extraordinary life or spiritual capacities that make it possible?
It seems to me that people who have the extraordinary life, extraordinary (for them) circumstances, are in need of more spiritual capacities, so when these capacities are turned on, they are put to use right away.
But unless the the way you live your life catch up with the results the capacities can produce, the capacities will turn off.
Isn’t this a glum view of the present situation?
Glum or bright: this is how it seems to be.
Humanity, if it continues living the way it’s living, is heading towards extinction.
Because as long as the selfish gene is the only thing that is driving human action, humans will continue to use up the planet and destroy it at their own detriment.
Some cultures are credited as high minded, caring about life in general, but all of these claims are fraudulent.
Example: Native Americans. They care about life about as much as anyone else, or maybe less.
There is no ethnicity, there is no group that cares more than others… although there are individuals, and the individuals may concentrate in one ethnic group more than in others… but once there is assimilation, mixing, intermarriage, all the high mindedness goes up in smoke…
So what is there to do, if your desire is strong, and your misery is even stronger? What if you have the ambition to cause yourself to live outside of the boundaries of the selfish gene dictated life?
The chicken or the egg will be a big issue for you.
My methodology is to first allow your only non-gene-driven aspect, the consciousness to get to see the big picture.
In the gene-driven-life you live in your mind and through your mind. The mind is limited and limiting.
It only knows what you put into it, and even of you try to put in your mind, it is only willing to accept what already fits what’s already there… small picture, skewed, wrong, and gene driven. Designed to keep the status quo.
The consciousness, the only non-animal part of a human is non-physical. It is your bridge to the higher paradigm, the paradigm inside which fulfillment is a normal goal of a person.
Taking consciousness to a tour around life, your life, and life in general, is my methodology.
In my 67 step coaching program I use someone else’s program for that… even though I already have 140 or so videos of my own.
But for the purpose of introducing life to consciousness, Tai Lopez audios are better suited.
You listen to the audios. The audios are mind to mind… But you’ll do the program differently. You’ll allow the audios to take you to places you would never get to if you continued doing what you have always done.
You commit to looking. To the degree that you look beyond where you have always looked, you’ll start to allow consciousness to see.
My hunch is that people won’t look wide enough in the first round… in the first 67 days… and some won’t even look the second time around.
When you have too few capacities, spiritual capacities, your mind and the genes are in full control.
But eventually, if you do the steps faithfully, regularly, often, and fully, to the degree your current capacities allow, you’ll get to a place where you can alter things in your life to make it other than ordinary… in some regards.
And that is when you’ll be ready for more capacities, the capacities that allow you to succeed in the more than ordinary life you now operate in.
Slowly but surely, you’ll grow… beyond the limitations of the selfish genes, and the closed mind.
You’ll become a human being… the next paradigm… with its own rewards that are impossible in the current, the human paradigm.
Is there anything you can do to make this process faster?
Two things:
1. Do the 67 steps in theta mode… I’ll train you to be able to do it (t
2. Add my “old style” activators to your regimen.
I think that my 140 videos, most of those are activators, can make the process a lot faster.
I am still working on the technical side of things, but if enough people ask for them, I’ll make them available on a subscription basis, two videos a week.
Let me know if you are interested. If I get enough interest, I’ll invest the time and energy to solve the technical problem I am having with the scheduling of the videos.
Here is a form you can let me know. Or just comment…
Great questions. 1. you need to be in theta mode for the activators to work.
2. why would anyone not want to do the 67 steps?
The real answer is: if your life is not expanding then YOU are not expanding either. And what will take you to look at areas of life that you don’t want to look? so, if you are not doing the work, then don’t do the videos.
Hi Sophie – I have a couple questions:
(1) Do we need to be able to connect to be able to use the videos?
(2) Would the videos be beneficial to people who are not doing the 67 steps?