I enjoy reading stuff on the manosphere, but the one concept I strongly disagree with is the idea that you can or should “kill your ego.” It is impossible to kill your ego, and more importantly, you need your ego to navigate the world, to know what to focus on and what to ignore, to know what to do and what not to do, to differentiate between bullshit and truth, and to avoid threats. The goal is not to “kill” your ego, but rather to manage it and “fix it” when it is wrong.

The must important thing to realize about your ego, which literally means “I” in Latin, is that your ego is not “you.” You are a real thing with objective characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses, but you also have the ability to make conscious and rational decisions based on new information, which means you are (almost) infinitely malleable and have (almost) infinite potential. Your ego, however, can only characterize you in terms of your limitations, so it leaves out the potential that you possess when creating its model of you.

Because there is no way to know how much potential any particular person has, many cultures have identified the “essence” of a person with their “soul,” a transcendent, divine “thing” that is indestructible, connected directly to God, and has infinite potential. I am not a fan of religion, and I hate to inject religious language into my articles, but I cannot think of a better concept to characterize the true essence of “you” than your soul because your soul is separate from and higher than your emotions, your internal maps, and even your thoughts. One other way to characterize your essence is your ability to make conscious, rational decisions, but as we will learn, your “rational” thinking ability is often hijacked and tricked by your emotions, so even your “rational” thoughts can be tainted by ego. You don’t have to believe in a soul if you don’t want, but you should extract the important lesson that you should view “you” as separate from your thoughts, emotions, and internal maps, and that “you” are infinitely malleable and have infinite potential.

Your ego is an attempt by your subconscious mind to create a model of “you” so you can navigate the world, but as we will learn in this article, this model is often at least partly inaccurate in important ways and often skews overly negative. More importantly, there is much our subconscious mind does not know about the world or how the future will unfold, so our ego is often overly narrow minded and pessimistic. Your ego is a useful tool that “you” can use to accomplish your goals, and you should ultimately try to mold your ego as much as possible to tackle the world with hope, positivity, and optimism, but you should be constantly careful to realize that your feelings, beliefs, and even your thoughts may not be accurate representations of the world. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said that most people live in a fantasy world built by their own mind. Your goal should be to make your internal map as accurate as possible, but one of the hardest things a human can do is to tell the voice in their head that it is wrong.

To manage your ego, you must do the following things:

1) Keep your “soul” in charge and use your rational thinking ability to fix and manage your ego

2) Adopt a new set of beliefs about the world that will cause your rational and subconscious minds to work together to build a more positive map of the world.

3) Constantly test your own boundaries using exposure therapy and prove to your subconscious mind that the threats its perceives are not as bad as it thinks.

4) “Trick” your subconscious mind into becoming more positive by showing it positive images.

5) Engage in activities that flush out your negative emotions, like lifting, art, meditation, etc….

What is your ego?

Your “ego” is your subconscious internal map of the world and your subconscious internal map of yourself. Those two maps correspond – your subconscious builds your internal map of yourself based on what it thinks the world is. Humans evolved to build these maps to keep us safe from threats and to guide us towards pleasurable things. If we see in our internal map a clear path to a pleasurable thing we feel confident and motivated to energetically pursue that thing. If we see a path to something we want blocked by threats, we become anxious about that path and look for alternative paths.

Our subconscious internal maps seek to guide us towards many things, including food, shelter, warmth, sex, affection, relationships, etc… But the two most important pleasures for human beings are 1) feeling accepted by the tribe, and 2) feeling like you have contributed to the tribe. Depression is a failure of #1 and anxiety is a failure of #2. To feel like you have contributed to the tribe, you pursue some grand purpose with the feeling that you will certainly defeat any challenges on the way to that purpose (confidence). I call this pleasure journey pleasure, and journey pleasure is strongest when you feel you have 1) ventured into the unknown to pursue desirable resources, 2) defeated threats and challenges blocking your way to those resources, and 3) returned those resources to the tribe to distribute to the members of the community.

Much of our “ego” is centered around accomplishing, or at least feeling like we are accomplishing, these two goals, acceptance and goal-conquering. These desires are never satisfied: to stay alive we need to stay in good standing in the tribe, so we constantly need to feel accepted and like we are contributing. To contribute, we need to feel like we are making progress towards obtaining some desirable resource, and to feel like we are making progress towards a desirable resource, our subconscious needs to feel like there is a clear path through our map of the world to get that thing. We therefore rely on our maps to feel positive emotions, and when our maps are destroyed, we are plunged into anxiety and depression.

Human beings evolved to adapt to and accommodate their environment, so our “identity” is a reflection of what we perceive to be the environment. Or more precisely, our identity is an internal “character” our subconscious mind builds that it thinks will best contend with the world as it perceives it. And of course, most of our psychological issues are the result of inaccurate internal maps. For example, people who are overly anxious or timid overestimate the threats in the world and underestimate their own ability to defeat those threats. People who arrogant underestimate the challenges of the world and overestimate their own abilities. People who are narcissistic are insecure and subconsciously believe that they are constantly on the verge of being rejected by the tribe so they must constantly “fight” to remain in good standing. People who are depressed view themselves as being rejected by the tribe or at the very bottom, with no hope or way to rise through the ranks. Etc…

To put it another way, our ego is the outcome of your assumptions about the world. I ASSUME the world is a place where only assholes can succeed, THEREFORE my subconscious pushes me to become an asshole. I ASSUME that I am at the bottom of the tribal dominance hierarchy and cannot move up, THEREFORE my subconscious characterizes me as a sad bitch that needs handouts from people who are higher than me. These are strongly anchored by our emotions, so our “rational” mind may even realize that these assumptions (and their accompanying emotions) are wrong, but nevertheless we “feel” they are true, so we internalize them and build our ego around them.

Imagine you are an Asian guy and you think (or more importantly, feel) that white women don’t like Asian guys. Your subconscious mind may adjust your internal map and ego to reflect this belief. You now see yourself as a “thing” that white women will never like, and you adjust your behavior accordingly. You may seek to avoid approaching white women to avoid humiliation and rejection. You may see white women as somehow “superior” to you and therefore subconsciously or consciously supplicate to them or debase yourself around them. Worst of all, once you have accepted this barrier in your life, your ego will start wondering what other shit you cannot do.

As you will learn, most of the inaccuracies of our map and our concomitant psychological pathologies are the result of an overly negative and fearful view of the world. One of the hardest things about becoming psychologically healthy is building an accurate, or at least less inaccurate, map of the world.

Problems with Ego

Our ego is important and necessary because it helps keep us safe from threats and stay within the boundaries of what is socially acceptable. At the same time, our maps are often inaccurate, which means that our ego becomes “wrong” as well. For our evolutionary ancestors, wandering into a threat could have meant death or permanent expulsion from the tribe, so fear is our strongest motivator and humans evolved to build maps that were overly negative. Your subconscious mind will happily give up the opportunity to get 10 “wins” in your life if it means you avoid 1 loss because in the jungle, a win was a small amount of food or sex, but a loss meant death. As you can imagine, this type of thinking is no longer relevant for most modern humans. There are still things that can kill us, but most of the shit we fear (rejection from a girl, not advancing far enough in our career, people not liking us, etc…) will not lead to our death, or even anything close to it, so it makes no sense to be overly cautious about pursuing those things.

Even “positive” psychological maladies like narcissism and the positive side of bipolar syndrome are usually the result of fear. Narcissists feel intensely insecure (insecurity is the feeling that you are on the verge of being kicked out of the tribe) so their mind tries to create a series of maps that it thinks will lead them to acceptance and status. But because narcissists see themselves as on the “outside” of the tribe, they are desperate for acceptance, so the paths their subconscious mind to acceptance and status draws are ham-handed, weak, primitive, laughable efforts, like “maybe if I brag about how awesome I am, people will believe me and accept me into their tribe.” In other words, a narcissist is like a crackhead trying to scheme a way to get a few dollars to get high again. In a related way, impulsivity is often the result of feeling like you are on the verge of being kicked out of the tribe, so your subconscious minds wants to consume as much resources as it can before it ends up in the jungle where it will be slim pickings for a while. People with intense anxiety also act impulsively because their subconscious mind sees all their paths to meaningful goals (which produce dopamine) blocked with threats, so they seek dopamine from cheaper, easier sources (drugs, pornography, etc…). As we will learn, even people that are overly optimistic often operate from a place of fear – their internal maps shows them (false) easy paths to the things they want, but they are too afraid to tear down those maps and replace them with more accurate ones.

The ego is “healthiest” when it feels comfortably accepted into the tribe and making progress towards accomplishing meaningful, positive goals. Humans evolved to feel like the tribe is the repository of all the resources we needed, so a person who feels comfortably ensconced in the tribe feels satiation and abundance. People who feel comfortably accepted do not feel scarcity, and do not act impatiently, impulsively, or in ways that maximize short term pleasure at the expense of long-term gain.

The ego will not feel “healthy,” however, if it feels like you are on the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, on the verge of getting kicked out of the tribe, or like all your goals are blocked by threats. So managing your ego is most often an exercise of eliminating false negativity from your map, but it sometimes requires you to add some negativity to your map once you learn of a threat you didn’t realize was there. But even our failure to accept necessary, negative truths about our reality is the result of fear. Our brain is very reluctant to change a map that it thinks will lead it to a positive outcome because it fears it will never find another map to that positive outcome. If you think that you can only be happy by dating Katie, and then you find out Katie cheated on you, your subconscious mind may try to “ignore” the fact that Katie is a schisty bitch because it thinks Katie is your only chance at happiness and if you leave her you will die alone.

To summarize: your maps could be inaccurate because they are overly positive or overly negative, but in both cases the inaccuracy is often because of fear.

Several other things cause our maps to become inaccurate:

First, the world is infinitely complex, but our subconscious mind builds our maps based on the thin slice of the world we actually experience, which means that if our experiences do not accurately represent the reality of the world, then our map will be inaccurate as well. For example, if you are an Asian guy and you have never seen an Asian guy actually succeed with a white girl, and you have only seen Asian guys get rejected by white girls, your subconscious mind will build a map where it is impossible for an Asian guy to get a white girl. Why wouldn’t it? It doesn’t know better, and logical arguments aren’t persuasive to it.

The fact that your ego builds itself based on its experiences can create a dangerous feedback loop. If you are an Asian guy who thinks that white women will never like Asian guys, you may never approach white women. But if you never approach white women, then you will be less likely to see a white woman like an Asian guy, which will in turn strengthen your internal map’s belief that white women never like Asian guys. You create your own reality with your actions, and if you act based on certain assumptions about reality, then the reality you create will reflect those assumptions. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our internal maps also become inaccurate because our subconscious mind builds our internal maps using visceral images that provoke emotion rather than cold, rational facts. Imagine our sad Asian guy approaches three white women and gets rejected by each one, and then his subconscious mind builds a map wherein white girls never like Asian guys. Now imagine you tell our sad Asian guy “I have lots of rational, logical, empirical data that shows that white women sometimes like Asian guys.” Even if he “believes” your rational facts, his subconscious mind will still think that white women do not like Asian men because the subconscious mind was “taught” that fact by an emotionally significant experience. He will still feel anxiety when approaching white women, he will still feel like it is an impossible task, etc…

Our map-building circuits are very old from an evolutionary standpoint, much older than our rational brain, so “rational” arguments are not very persuasive to it. Plenty of people hear the “truth” but they fail to internalize and accept it because our internal maps are more respondent to emotion. And because our subconscious mind is so responsive to emotion, our internal maps are often rough drafts and lack nuance.

A major problem with our internal maps are overly negative is a lack of nuance. For example, let’s say our Asian friend approaches a white woman, but does so timidly and anxiously, and then gets rejected. The “right” lesson our friend needs to learn is “women, white or not, do not respond well to timid and anxious approaches.” However, because our subconscious lizard mind is crude and un-nuanced, the “lesson” it might learn is “white women do not respond well to approaches for Asian men” so now his map is much more negative that it needs to be. I have coached a lot of guys, and usually they do 95% of things right, but they have one or two sticking points that keep tripping them up with every woman they approach. But their subconscious mind doesn’t realize they are doing 95% of things right; the subconscious mind just sees a 100% failure rate, which makes them feel completely worthless.

Our maps are also often wrong because our subconscious mind does not like to change our maps. The world is infinitely complex, and our maps are our only source of stability and positive emotion in a sea of chaos, so our subconscious mind tries its hardest to keep our maps stable and intact. As Jordan Peterson has famously observed, the “unknown” induces anxiety in humans, and any part of the world that our subconscious mind has not created a map for is effectively “unknown.” We rely on our maps for positive emotion, because our maps tell us how to get to pleasurable things – without our maps we are adrift in a sea of terrifying unknown with no clear path to good things. Because we are so terrified of the unknown, we try to desperately build a map to figure out everything. If our map is somehow wrong we need to deconstruct that part of the map and reconstruct it to be correct, but the process of deconstruction and reconstruction requires us to go through a period of chaos and anxiety while we are trying to figure out how to correctly reconstruct that map. That period of chaos is terrifying, so we often prefer to stick with the wrong map than to risk plunging back into chaos. I believe that part of our fear may come from the thought that if we deconstruct our maps, it will be too difficult for us to put it back together again.

Because of the fear of changing our maps, humans often become dependent on overly simplistic religions, ideologies, political parties, beliefs, or life plans. We sometimes even have a sneaking suspicion that our beliefs may be wrong, but we are too afraid to change our maps.

Imagine you are a hardcore Christian and most of what you do and believe is based on the Bible. You are a hard-working, kind, faithful person because of Christianity. You have avoided drug addiction, poverty, failed relationships, and many other bad decisions because of your Christian beliefs. Now imagine an atheist comes up to and makes some intelligent, logical, well-reasoned points about why Christianity is wrong. Even if the atheist’s arguments are persuasive and make sense to you, you may still try to ignore them because you are afraid that if you abandon Christianity your entire internal map will be gone and you will be plunged back into a chaos were life is meaningless, nothing makes sense, and you may be tempted by all the bad decisions you previously avoided. That may sound silly to you if you are not a Christian, but it only sounds silly to you because you already have a non-Christian internal map so you don’t realize why a person would need to rely on a Christian internal map.

People are also reluctant to change their maps because they have a deep, psychological need to have the most “positive” map possible. Our map is our reality, so we want to have the best reality possible, even if it means ignoring inconvenient facts and living in delusion. This causes us to forego taking risks because if we take a risk and fail, our reality becomes worse, but if we never take the risk, we can always comfort ourselves with the idea that we might have succeeded. In other words, we would rather have uncertainty in our map than a definite negative. For example, imagine our Asian guy who thinks white women do not like Asian guys might see a white woman and subconsciously think “she might like Asian guys, but probably not, so I will not approach.” The rational thing to do would be to approach to capitalize on the chance that she likes Asian guys. But if he thinks that he will probably get rejected, he will subconsciously refuse to approach because he would prefer to live in a reality where she MIGHT like him rather than one where she DEFINITELY does not like him.

It may sound like I am contradicting myself by saying that our maps are often overly negative and built from fear, but also that our mind wants to keep the most positive map possible. This contradiction can be resolved as follows: our subconscious mind wants to keep the most positive map possible, but because it gets an inaccurate view of the world and because it gives too much weight to possibly negative outcomes, it almost always creates an overly negative map. Our subconscious mind is like a crackhead fiending for crack (positive emotion), but who also thinks that everybody is a cop that is about to arrest him (threats). The crackhead realizes that some people may not be cops, but he keeps his map “positive” by assuming that everybody is a cop so he doesn’t take the risk of getting arrested.

Finally, we cannot change our subconscious maps too radically because we rely on our maps for most of what we do. Our conscious mind cannot make a rational, well-thought out decision with respect to every single thing we do throughout the day, so we need to rely on our subconscious maps to guide us. About 5% of what we do is conscious, everything else is subconscious or automatic. We especially rely on our subconscious maps in social situations: most people’s social behavior is based on subconscious adjustments to other’s reactions. Because we have such a strong need to be accepted by the tribe, if a high-status person expresses pleasure at something we did, then our subconscious map knows to do that again. If the high-status person expresses displeasure, our subconscious map colors the neural network associated with that action as a “threat.”

As you can probably guess, you should not completely rely on other people’s reactions to guide your behavior in social situations, nor should you completely rely on your internal maps because your internal maps may have been built on bad feedback from people who were morons and did not have your best interests at heart. At the same time, however, you cannot just completely dump your internal map and consciously analyze every single thing you do in social situations like some kind of autistic person: that would be way too much to remember, you would like a soulless robot, and you would miss out on the internalized knowledge embedded within your internal map. Instead, you need to fix your ego.

Fixing your Ego

The first step in fixing your ego is realizing that it is good for you to occasionally dissolve and reconstruct your map. Even though dissolving your map is painful, it is worse to have an inaccurate map. While it is inevitable that your map will never be perfect, you should want your map to be as good as it can be.

To feel comfortable dissolving and reconstructing your map, you must have faith in your map-building abilities. As stated before, people are afraid to dissolve their map because they think their current map is the best they get, and if they lose it they will not be able to replace it with something better. You must overcome that fear. I think your faith in your map-building abilities springs from your beliefs. For example, I believe that the world is governed by rational laws that can be understood by humans, which means that everything about the world is “understandable,” so if ever find yourself adrift in chaos, you can eventually rebuild your map by collecting information and putting that information using your own mind. I also believe that humans have almost limitless potential to create their own reality, so no matter no who you are, most of the limitations that you perceive in your map are either constructions of your own mind or can be overcome.

I also believe that human beings can eventually overcome any limitation, so it is better to face our threats and challenges head-on rather than running from them. I also believe that facing our threats will cause our internal map, and therefore our reality, to be better in the long run. For example, let’s say our Asian friend says “I would rather live in a reality where the white woman MIGHT like me rather than one where she DEFINITELY does not like me.” The right answer to this guy is not “you should approach her anyway because she might like you. And if she doesn’t like you, you just have to deal with it.” Instead, the right answer to our Asian friend is “you should approach her anyway because there is a 100% chance that your reality will improve if you approach her. If she likes you, great, and if she doesn’t like you, you will learn a lesson that will help you with future approaches. No matter what happens, however, your overall reality after the approach will be better than your reality before the approach.”

This is an extremely important point. If you do think have full faith and confidence that you reality will improve if you push your boundaries, your subconscious mind will not want to do it. We simply do not want to venture into the unknown if it means we might get eaten or may never find our way back to the tribe. Whenever your rational mind has decided it is safe to push your boundaries and take a new risk, you must push that new boundary with the feeling and confidence that you will definitely succeed, even if your rational mind understands that you may fail. The good news is that once you successfully push your boundaries a few times, your subconscious mind starts to realize that the grass is indeed greener on the other side, and pushing boundaries is ultimately a beneficial exercise, which will cause your subconscious mind to automatically generate positive emotions when venturing into the unknown in the future.

Of course, I cannot rationally or scientifically prove any of these beliefs. They are more like articles of faith or religion rather than empirically demonstrable facts. But humans have discovered since the beginning of time that to succeed, sometimes you need irrational, unfounded optimism based on unprovable beliefs. If you watch interviews with successful people, they often reveal that part of the reason for their success was a completely irrational belief that they could succeed, an irrational belief that many people do not have. If you only base your internal map on your own experiences and what society tells you about reality, you may find yourself with an unnecessarily limiting map. I am not a fan of religion, but I think one advantage of religion is that it gives people hope that the “facts” as they see them are not all there is, and the “facts” can be broken to create a better reality. One of the disadvantages of the scientific materialist worldview is that people feel trapped by the material facts and scientific laws in the world, and feel like they cannot overcome their limitations.

Once you’ve developed a set of beliefs about the world, you can slowly “fix” your maps with your rational mind, and by “fix” I mostly mean remove unnecessary negativity. Of course, there is some negativity you need: for example, you should not run into the street thinking that cars cannot hit you. I see a lot of guys on the manosphere tell you to “kill your ego,” but I disagree with this approach because they seem to advocate completely dissolving all of your maps and acting like a psychopath. This advice is terrible because 1) nobody can actually do this, including them, 2) removing all of your boundaries will just make you an offensive, annoying, douchey asshole. These guys are creating an army of socially clueless, pushy, mean dorks that have no sense of social boundaries and will repeatedly fail. Counterintuitively, these guys will become even more depressed and build even more negative maps because their attempts at “killing their ego” will just produce more failure. Of course, I realize that the manosphere guys give this advice because most of their audience are overly limited and bounded, and need to let loose, but there must be a happy medium between timid dork and insane psychopath.

The good news is that your rational mind can identify what threats on your map are real and which are not, and it can build a set of nuanced behaviors that will carry you to the things you need while simultaneously avoiding pitfalls.

For example, our Asian guy might say that white women do not like when guys approach them and whip out their dick. And he would be right. That is rationally not the right thing to do, and it is fortunate that his subconscious mind has also internalized that fact, such that even if you paid him $5,000 to a group of women with his dick out, he still would feel immense anxiety while doing it.

But if our Asian guy says that Asian men should never approach white women, that statement is just wrong from a rational point of view, and his rational mind probably recognizes that it is stupid to generalize all white women as not liking Asian men. Our Asian friend may have even seen white women with Asian men. So how do we use this rational knowledge to actually reprogram our friends’ mind into approaching Asian women?

As we’ve discussed, you cannot fix your internal maps with rational arguments, so you need to “teach” your subconscious mind the truth about the world with visceral images that speak to your emotions. There are two ways to teach your subconscious mind: 1) with real images and 2) with fake images.

Obviously, reprogramming your subconscious mind with real images is more effective than reprogramming it with fake images. The best way to teach our Asian friend’s subconscious mind that an Asian man can successfully approach a white woman is for him to actually see it happen or better yet, for him to actually do it and succeed, preferably multiple times. If he gets a few successful approaches in, his subconscious mind will stop coloring white women as “threat” and perhaps start to view them as “prize” and he will feel less anxiety when he sees white women.

If our Asian friend is too crippled with anxiety to approach any white woman, we may need to slowly train his subconscious mind using exposure therapy. First, he makes eye contact with a few white women. Nothing bad will happen (probably), so his subconscious mind will realize that making eye contact with white women will not lead to anything harmful. Next, he practices saying hi to white women. Just hi, nothing else. After his subconscious mind learns that nothing bad happens after saying hi, and in fact good things often happen, he can move onto approaching, starting a conversation, etc…

Exposure therapy works not just for approaching, but for any other action for which your subconscious mind sees a barrier that does not actually exist. You can use exposure therapy to keep boundaries, to prioritize your own enjoyment rather than focusing on pleasing others, to leave shitty situations, to escalate things with women you are interested in, or to expand beyond your comfort zone in any other way. It may take a long time to get where you want to be because your subconscious map is littered with so many fears and negativity that it will take a long time to uproot each subconsciously-internalized threat.

One of the cool things about exposure therapy is that it works even if you fail. For our Asian friend, even if the white women reject him his map improves because his subconscious mind learns that rejection is not that bad. Most people are afraid to approach women or challenge other social boundaries because their subconscious mind is afraid not only that they will be rejected by one person, but that they will be rejected from the tribe in general, which would hypothetically cause a series of other terrible consequences to follow. We are subconsciously afraid that not only will this particular person reject us, but that everybody in the vicinity will think we are a fool, our friends and family will find out, and we will never be able to show his face in public again. Of course, that sounds insane to any rational person, but that is why we are so afraid of approaching strangers: we are wired to think of ourselves as living in a tribe and rejection from that tribe is the worst possible thing that can happen. And when our subconscious mind sees that those terrible consequences do not happen, it feels less anxiety in the future. Instead of “I will be humiliated and die alone” the threat that the subconscious mind fears becomes “this girl will be rude or short with me” which is a much less dangerous threat.

Delusion

Unfortunately, sometimes you cannot program your subconscious mind with real images because you often find yourself in new situations with new people, which your subconscious often senses as the “unknown.” Every person and situation is different, so your subconscious mind might say “it doesn’t matter that those other girls liked you or you were successful in those other situations. This situation is different so therefore we cannot rely on our previous maps that show a clear path to the goal.”

In novel situations your subconscious mind often defaults to the negative because it evolved to see the unknown as full of threats and no obvious path to take. In those cases, you may need to “trick” your subconscious mind into with fake images so it will have the confidence to push through. You may also need to trick your subconscious mind if you have a strong rational belief that you can accomplish a goal but all of your actual efforts have failed. Our Asian friend may rationally “know” that white women will accept Asian guys, but he has been rejected by all white women he has ever approached, so he must delude himself into believing that he can succeed with white women until he actually starts succeeding with white women. Interestingly, most men with self-limiting beliefs “know” from a rational standpoint that their beliefs are wrong, but yet they cannot get themselves to get over the internal emotional block that prevents them from going for what they want. And even if your rational mind isn’t sure that you can succeed at something, your rational mind can at least understand that the consequences will not be as bad as the subconscious mind thinks they will be.

To delude yourself you must create a vivid, detailed visualization in your mind of the transcendent reality you are acting as if you inhabit. The more detailed and vivid the visualization, the more likely your subconscious mind will believe it is real and create the corresponding emotions within you. Our subconscious mind does not think in words, so saying “I’m an awesome guy that can get lots of girls” to yourself will do nothing. Our subconscious mind thinks in images, so you must “trick” it with images.

To delude yourself, then, you need to 1) figure out what emotional state you need to be in to feel confident to pursue a particular goal, and 2) create a set of images to put yourself in that emotional state. For example, in Part 2 of this Series we discussed how the emotional experience that is most attractive to women was one where 1) the man is solidly accepted by the tribe, 2) all the man’s lower desires are fulfilled, and 3) the man is engaged in a fun adventure where he is venturing into the unknown to create a superior future reality. If you do not actually feel these things, you may need to delude yourself into feeling these things by tricking your subconscious mind with the right images. For example, you can imagine yourself as a rich and famous DJ playing in front of thousands of adoring fans and beautiful women. Or you can imagine yourself as an adventurer exploring a psychedelic jungle full of unexpected treasures. Or you can imagine yourself as a hunter in the jungle stalking a buffalo for food. Or you can combine all of these delusions in your head at once. If you have ever been in a situation where you were high status, confident, or loved by women, you can use your delusion to put yourself back in that situation and feel those emotions. You can even overlay the image in your mind onto the real setting you are looking at. For example, if you are at a party where you do not know anybody, you can imagine the party is full of your best friends you think you are awesome, beautiful women who know and love you, and legions of adoring fans.

Your delusion should remedy any deficiency you think you may have. If you are short, you can be tall in your delusion. If you dress terribly, you can be a snazzy dresser in your delusion. If you see a beautiful woman in a bar, you can delude yourself into thinking that you are the kind of guy you think she would like, and then approaching her with that confidence.

People are often subconsciously afraid to delude themselves for a very understandable reason: they do not want to become crazy and lose touch with reality. In other words, they don’t want to create a fake map for themselves because they rely on their map to navigate the world and steer clear from disaster. This is a very valid concern – when we think of delusional people, we normally think of people that are arrogant, obnoxious, or crazy.

To not be swallowed or deceived by your delusions, you must realize keep your rational mind in control. Your internal map is not reality and your ego is not “you.” Your internal map is a representation of the world your mind has created, and it will never perfectly match reality, and while it is a very useful and necessary tool, it is sometimes wrong. The more you can separate yourself from your ego, the more you can safely use it and manage it without “believing” some of the irrational negativity it produces.

I'm not not done with this article. I will post the whole thing later.

My website: http://www.woujo.com