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To be scared 'straight' is to show someone the real death by dispelling their boogeyman. Being scared straight means you run in the right direction. You run away from death, not away from its shadow. If you run away from the shadow, death catches up sooner than it needs to.

The reason a weak ego is harmful is because it dies easily. The pain body mechanism relates to the dead ego and treats dying in a game as a literal death. The pain body is what allows ego deaths to be treated as "losses" thus perpetuating the ego/self illusion.

A strong ego can fight the pain body and have less losses. The hyper-competitive are those who are have fewer losses and many wins precisely because a childhood loss looms so largely in their subconscious..

So a while a weak ego is bad because it can't actually benefit from egoic deaths, the strong ego is good because it reduces the total number of unrealized ego deaths. The hyper-competitive arrogant person is braver and so is assured more virtues.

The strong ego becomes the non-ego when it realizes that its final opponent is itself. Getting stronger to try and beat yourself is ridiculous. You're always just as strong as you. The more you train, the more you train the opponent, yourself.

The weak ego uses its cowardice as a virtue, pretending to be non-ego and shrinking and being small. It fights by being a victim.

The rich and powerful don't spend their wealth and power and influence in the right direction when losing a billion dollars activates the same pain centers as losing your family to a car crash. They overreact hamfistedly to losing a numbers game.

They are too insulated from death and have lost direction of the direction death is coming from. They manipulate numbers to try and prevent the score from going to 0 with the same desperation as saving your kid.

Not that this _isn't_ important. E.g In rick & morty you can destroy a world by setting their currency to 0. But simply recognizing a game for what it is the key. Recognizing game as game is to see that the rules are malleable. If the board game is not fun, we have house rules

A sovereign entity is basically anything that can make "house" rules. The rules are always because it's more fun within said "house" (whether it's a country, or literal house)

Saying another countries culture is shit is like saying your neighbors decoration and taste and the way they poker and cook their food is shit. Sure if they're like beating their kids and each other all the time maybe you should say 'hey, that's shitty behavior'.

But it should be tempered by the distance neighbors keep in order to keep on being good neighbors.

Once the 'house' rule mechanism is identified any game can be unwound and a new one begun even if it takes time. Seeing that reality is nothing/death/consciousness is the way to recognize that everything is a game and that every rule can be changed.

When you see how your 'game' is actually killing people.. that's when you stop.

Imagine a fight you had with a colleague, some string is increasingly aggressive passive aggressive slights. Now imagine their entire family is dying from COVID. See how quickly your anger drops. See how quickly you recognize your pettiness.

That's how quickly a real reminder of death sharpens your senses and stirs you from ego's grasp.

The death signal has started ... Will it reach those who need to hear it in time? It will. Either they will hear from the signal itself. Or from the angry armed mob delivering the message.

But in the case of the latter... they will not be able to act on their new found information. And the angry mob that is now executive leadership? They now have the privilege of realizing just how difficult game design is.

I'd venture to say that this "Neighbors" problem is the key to world peace. Being able to have a close relationship with all your colleagues means you have the skill to solve world peace.

Most of us keep distance through protocols. We're good neighbors only because we keep distance. At large companies everyone maintains this ritualized distance.

At startups you have the potential for more intimacy but more than likely it's a cesspool of suppressed negative emotions. If it feels 'right', it feels like a 'family'... and happy families are so hard to form...

Recognizing that your family relationship is shit (most families are) is the first step to finding a real family sense. If you're stuck thinking your family relationships had no issues you end up aspiring to a past image thus rebirthing old neurosis'

E.g. the girl who goes through terrible boyfriend after boyfriend while her friends can obviously see that's she is going after the same type over and over again.

Realizing that what you're looking for isn't an experience you've actually experienced gives you the 'beginner's mind' to recognize what it is when it occurs.

How do you know you've felt love for example? How do you know you've never felt love? How can you be sure? (You can't)

This Infinite Question Mark (God) is what keeps our eyes filled with wonder rather than shadow.

The optimist goes "Love is real, it's all around us." is just as unbelievable as the pessimist who goes "There's no such things as love." Both are absolute stances towards something that by definition cannot be absolute.

Depression is a feeling that you'll experience your life in circles. That nothing 'new' can every come into your life. Cutting yourself introduces something 'new', a new negative experience. As does creating something new.

The tortured depressed artist is tortured because their stuck in their own minds going in circles. Getting insanely better at a thing because they're stuck. Normal people would have moved on. But they're obsessed.

They think that by drawing THE perfect donut THIS time, they'll have drawn the Donut of God and so reach just once, the feeling of perfect love.