Perspective: Noticing the Ego

“This idea, that our ego isn’t the be-all and end-all, flourished in Asia for centuries before landing in California in the 1960s. Thoughts were illusions, the swamis and lamas maintained, and nirvana lay on the other side of ego death. But, for modern Americans, all those earnest (and sometimes addled) attempts to transcend the self didn’t turn out to be that practical. To make sense of today’s fast-paced world, we need our egos to navigate our relationships and responsibilities. We just don’t need to use them like Maslow’s hammer, turning everything around us into a psychological problem to beat on.

Instead, we can stay above our storytelling mind and simply monitor the knobs and levers of our neurobiology. And while this may seem far-fetched, top performers are already there. Tibetan monks can shut off their default mode network (or inner mind chatter) almost at will, SEAL snipers tune their brainwaves to the alpha frequency before locking on to targets, extreme athletes smooth out their heart rhythms right before dropping into a mountain or wave. They’re deliberately doing an end run around their conscious minds. They’re accessing more efficient and effective ways of being, and they’re doing this exactly backward from how most of us have been taught.”

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-tibetan-monks-navy-seals-have-commonand-how-we-can-steven-kotler