By studying yourself, you can make progress in becoming aware of the ego and how it works. The more aware you become, you can gradually separate yourself from its influence.

I believe there is something within everyone that knows this is worth pursuing but this feeling is dominated by resistance and fear. Everyone has to decide for themselves if and when they have reached the point that they are done deluding themselves.

Your ego will try to convince you that you can remedy this issue intellectually but you can't. It is an emotional issue. You have to go to the dark places in your mind to better understand it.

There's no easy answer, but a good practice to help you develop better thinking skills is a cognitive role-playing exercise. Practice arguing the side against the side you normally take, even if you disagree with that side. (This takes some of the ego out of it and lets you get down to the actual content of the argument.)

But even beyond the cognitive part, try to think about the emotional elements that may affect how the other side is arguing. Why do they believe what they believe? (Emotions impact how we process information. So even if you can't "replicate" the emotional background, knowing what the emotion is and how it affects thinking processes can help. This is almost a "customer service" type of exercise.)

There's no magic bullet, but these types of exercises can help. You can also look into essays written on leadership because you'll see these things addressed there, too.

This isn't foolproof but one way is to go up a tall building with a stopwatch, drop a stone out the window, and see how long it takes to hit the ground. Then see if this correlates with 16 gt squared. If you are real good at mental math the experiment has to be more complicated.

Below is a link to an excellent book that touches greatly on what many are currently discussing in this thread, related to emotion, self-deception etc. I highly recommended it.

Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. It was the Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012 (deservedly so).

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-...aniel+kahneman

No room for honest disagreement, if they dont see your truths its out of fear and self delusion. Very guru of you.

Yeah I saw a documentary about this, it was really interesting.

I get the impression it's not that simple, these types of thinking/tendencies are hardwired, they're not just a habit that can be lost with a bit of effort. And, what would we be without them? Vulcans? Indecisive to the point of a failure to function?

Maybe I'm being overly cynical now but I find the notion that introspection can resolve self-deception to be fairly amusing.

So I think there that you're pretty much describing everyone alive.

I think WN made some good suggestions but that it's an inherent part of our psychology and we'll never be free of it. Perhaps you can now see where I'm coming from in my discussions with you, which is not to say that I'm right, but hopefully my PoV is more understandable and you can understand better why of all the reasons for supporting a belief (of any kind) personal experience is that one I trust the least. I think that our capacity for self-deception has been a 'successful' evolutionary behaviour, it's enabled to us accomplish things we might never have otherwise but that doesn't mean that it will be a long term successful strategy. I think in many ways it's already working against us.

So, I'll continue to smoke (I don't actually smoke), and drive my fossil fuel guzzling poison belching car, and buy products that contain toxins produced by companies that pollute and abuse, and eat foods that are bad for my health etc etc etc because I live in a delusion where it'll all be ok anyway.

I think these are all fairly good points, especially examining other perspectives, and recognizing your ego.

Just to reiterate, I was speaking more about self-deception in terms of motives and justification for behaviors, not about the totality of ones world-view, although there may be some overlap.

I think it depends on what you mean by resolve, and what type of self-deception you're speaking about. Surely we can't eliminate it completely, I think, but these exercises in general are a good technique to catch yourself trying to justify some behavior to retain a high sense of self-worth.

Just yesterday I caught myself justifying something to myself to avoid feeling foolish. With regards to these micro behaviors, I don't see why some general alertness wouldn't work.

Who knows if it's working against us or not, since I can see some scenarios where it would be better for someone to tell themselves some white lies here and there to retain self-worth, where the opposite may result in a depression over something that they cannot change.

We probably should not be speaking in absolute terms to begin with when it comes to something so complicated as cognition.

Like I said above, my concern lies in what I would call micro behaviors or thoughts, not in any sort of meta way. Probably not what you want to hear, but the one thing that doesn't worry me is my meta-beliefs in God and in the world, in general. My real concern is for the way we perceive ourselves and our reasoning for doing things, in relation to what is actually true.

I just made a long post that I lost and was unable to recover like usual, but it probably wouldn't have been that productive anyway since we are so far apart on what is possible through meditation. Though I can probably say that about almost everything that I post on this forum.

I feel your pain, there's nothing like writing a long post to see it vanish. You can usually just log in again and it reappears, fwiw.

As for our world views, we likely can't reconcile our perspectives, but as far as cognitive dissonance goes, we should be on the same page.

Yeah I was unable to recover it that way this time.

I'll just say I'm happy to see you guys bringing up the fact that we make so many errors in the conclusions we reach that are unconscious. I should have just left it at that. Hopefully, you all continue to keep this in mind and it eats at you to the point that you are willing to try things to attempt to solve it.

I was thinking about more in terms of surviving as a species than feeling good about oneself.

Some of our behaviours are clearly a byproduct of biases that evolved because they had a survival benefit, for example, our ability to discern patterns. This helps us find food, know where game is, avoid bad weather etc etc, but unfortunately we're so good at seeing patterns that we also see them where they don't exist and we attribute meaning to things things that are meaningless. We see reason and meaning in what is actually just random data. We make false correlations and establish cause to effects that are not related at all.

Paredolia is a great example, the tendency to see human faces in random data. People seeing the face of Jesus (or whatever) in a piece of toast, or an oil stain, or a melon. The survival benefit of being able to recognise faces is obvious, the unexpected disadvantage is that we see faces where they're are actually none and then assign meaning to it that doesn't exist. Combine that with Confirmation bias and now you have something that supports a belief in a god, where possibly (likely?), there is no god. Do you ever wonder why we no longer practice Augery or Haruspicy? Or more pertinently, how and why we did in the first place?

As a factual correction, paredolia is much broader than this. It's about mistaking random stuff as being significant. This is important because...

I don't think there's anything "obvious" about the survival benefit of recognizing faces. But can be a survival benefit to believing there's significance to something random than not believing. Noises in the dark might be a predator, and there's not a lot of "harm" done to thinking there's one when there isn't.

I don't see much value in that exercise without combining it with extrospection. Self-worth is also not only about you, it also involves the social world around you.