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Ego Fortification, Continued Learning I

Fortifying and Stabilizing the Ego thru Continued Learning
You always need to pay attention to pay attention to the way your ego is developing by becoming aware of your changing attitudes. These changes come about because, although you record a lot of material at an early age, it doesn't stop there. You continue storing new material throughout your life. Although this later material may be less powerful in its overall impact, it does have an impact.

Being burglarized, for instance, can make you feel insecure and change your attitude in this regard, similarly for being raped. Rape can change your attitudes to life itself as well as the opposite sex. The bigger the emotional impact of an event, the more likely it is to have a lasting effect.

So we need to due our housekeeping and make efforts to fortify and stabilize our personalities on an ongoing basis, because we do adapt to minor experiences as well, but not so noticeably. The impact of major traumatic events is just so much more noticeable and immediate, while a string of minor occurrences has a more insidious effect, although it may be just as lasting.

It can be very difficult to pick up the changes brought about by minor events; the best way of dealing with this is to start a policy of continually fortifying or strengthening your ego and stabilize it to prevent your ego spinning off in unwanted directions. You might already have certain attitudes which are counter-productive, and you need to work on them to prevent them getting worse. Continuing education and learning about the way things work can be a good way of doing this.

The point of this is that, unless you pay attention to deliberately fortifying your ego and stabilizing problematic aspects, changes will be made by default. Some of these changes may be beneficial, but many will be very bad, because negative traumatic events have a much bigger impact. This is because of their relative scarcity and the way we focus on them because of our early not-OK conditioning. You can have a hundred things go well as usual, but two or three negatives can make you feel you've had a terrible day.


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