Do you know that thing where you are always having to validate your struggling ego-concept by saying things like ‘the ego-construct is valid’ or ‘the ego-identity is real’ over and over again under your breath, and as a result you’re so damn preoccupied that sometimes you can’t hear what other people are saying to you? This of course may not be such a bad thing – those people might well be trying to undermine you, after all. Let’s face it, they often are! That’s often what they’re at. One thing that I personally have noticed over the years – and I think this is something that needs to be shared – is that even when other people appear to be being friendly and saying nice things they are busy devalidating your ego without letting on that this is what they’re doing. One very obvious example of this would be when the other person (the person you’re talking to) all of a sudden starts winking inappropriately, thereby introducing a destructive note of irony into the conversation. It is just as if they are saying – ‘the ego-identity doesn’t exist,’ ‘the ego-identity doesn’t exist,’ over and over again, without ever admitting to the fact that this is what they doing – which makes the technique all the more effective, of course. Usually however what you’re dealing with is a lot subtler than that – the person you’re talking to might pause every now and again half way through a sentence where they really doesn’t need to pause and so it’s as if they’re having a laugh at me in this way, cruelly undermining my self-esteem. To me, what they’re doing is as plain as day: they’re saying something like ‘the ego is a fake, the ego is a fake, the ego is a fake…’; or ‘the thought-created identity is a big phoney’, ‘the thought-created identity is a big phoney…’ etc, etc, etc. You know the kind of thing. Every time they pause unnecessarily this is the message that they’re giving. Either that or it could be something very similar – it might be an odd expression on their face or it might be the way they pronounce a particular word. This isn’t just a case of someone being obnoxious, someone being a bit of an offensive jerk – on the contrary, it’s deadly serious and totally conscious on their part. They know exactly what they doing and they know how effective it is against me too. It’s what you would have to call a full-blown psychic attack. There’s no other way to put it. In a conventional war soldiers will wear camouflage gear and all of that kind of stuff and they will shoot at you with semiautomatic rifles; in a psychic war however you can’t tell the soldiers from the civilians – the most harmless, pleasant-sounding person could be mounting a very serious psychic attack and you’d never know it. Or at least, the casual onlooker wouldn’t know it. I’d know it, obviously. I’d know all about it. Of course I would. I do have a means of protecting myself however – I can for example visualise a force field all around me that will bounce that shit right back where it came from. ‘See how you like that, buddy boy!’ I say to myself on these occasions. Another thing I do is that I chant a mantra such as ‘The ego construct is valid’ or ‘The self-concept is real’, or some kind of a thing like that. Sometimes it goes wrong of course. Every now and again I might say it out loud in the middle of the conversation and that’s awkward. Of course it’s embarrassing to suddenly blurt out ‘The ego-identity is real’ right out of nowhere, like some sort of plonker. On another level of the game I’m not embarrassed however; I’m not embarrassed because I know that they know what’s going on and so this is my chance to call them on it. I may give them a few winks too, just to unsettle them. Turn the tables on them, just for a change. ‘See how you like that,’ I say to myself when that happens, ‘feels good, doesn’t it?’ That’s one way to defend oneself against psychic attack anyway. There are other more advanced ways that are sometimes used too but that’s the kind of stuff you can’t really talk about. Some knowledge can be dangerous for the uninitiated, as I’m sure you know…