How I first became aware that my ego could raise my eye pressure

This is a story about my first clues into the role my ego played in my intraocular pressure fluctuations (and spikes). This happened in 2006 or 2007 after I had started self-tonometry and had been doing it long enough to see a clear relationship between stress and my eye pressure.

A long-time friend invited me to an informal dinner with a world-famous celebrity. I had met the celebrity previously and we got along fine. We shared a common interest in health topics, so the conversations were always interesting.

Before going to dinner my IOP was in the teens. We had an enjoyable time at the dinner. The celebrity, the celebrity's friends, my friend and I all enjoyed the conversation and we had a lot of things to talk about. Everyone wanted to know my opinion on various health-related subjects and I was happy to share my knowledge. I was often the center of attention and I enjoyed that.

Driving home from the dinner I felt happy. At home I checked my intraocular pressure, expecting it to be low. To my surprise it was greatly elevated -- into the 30's! (IOP that high was pretty rare. Furthermore, my IOP was usually near its low point at that time of day, and it also tends to be lower after eating a meal.)

Being a researcher, this raised a number of questions for me and I began a very scientific quest to find answers based on my IOP data. More than a year elapsed before I understood in detail what had happened the night of my dinner with the celebrity. And finding the answers ultimately depended on skills I had gained from more than 15 years of practical research into consciousness. My deep familiarity with non-mainstream knowledge of how the mind works enabled me to eventually gain insights into this eye pressure situation. Therefore, I understand if this isn't obvious to everyone. I'll do my best to explain the basics in this blog post, but I also recommend that interested readers study the ego in greater detail. You may be surprised to know that the best discussions on this topic are found in spiritual texts, not psychological texts. The ancient traditions (Ayurveda, etc.) provide a much more detailed understanding of the ego than most modern text books. (A good lay discussions on the ego can be found in Eckhart Tolle's book.)

I'll explain exactly what I came to understand on the basis of the shocking finding that my IOP jumped into the 30's -- after what I thought was a fun and relaxing dinner. However, I need to point out that my understanding came together on the basis of repeated episodes similar to this one over the following months (and years). Those repeated episodes allowed me to test various hypotheses using reliable IOP data from my tonometer.

What I eventually realized is that my ego was the most fundamental factor responsible for my IOP spike at the dinner with the celebrity. I wanted to make a good impression on the celebrity. I wanted to be liked and respected. On a subtle level I felt it would be valuable to be liked and to eventually become better friends with the celebrity. This desire to make a good impression created a subtle tension in my body. Through Serene Impulse, which I learned later, I eventually gained the skill to feel this effect in my physiology. However, and more importantly, I also measured it with instruments in later tests and found that my physiological reactions showed quite high levels of stress. (I measured vasodilation, finger and hand temperature changes, galvanic skin response, breathing patterns, heart rate patterns and several other things.)

Previously, I had been completely unaware of the stress in situations like this dinner. This was due to several things. I had trained myself, as most of us have, to ignore or block out subtle feedback from my body. I had the idea that uncomfortable emotions were something to be suppressed. And I lacked the skill and training to recognize the physiological symptoms that were present. So while I would have sworn that I was relaxed and having an enjoyable time, my body was in fact in a very stressed state.

There was also psychological stress, although I did not recognize this at the time either. But any time we seek to control an outcome that is beyond our control, we will be under stress. In this case, I wanted the celebrity to like me. Obviously, no matter what I did or did not do, the other person could come to not like me for any of an infinite number of reasons that I might never know. What another person thinks is completely out of my control. So trying to achieve control of that leads to stress, even if we don't have immediate awareness of that stress.

I later observed subtle changes in my breathing patterns and even changes in the way I communicated in situations like this. When I am trying to control what another person thinks about me, one result is that I spend a lot of mental energy planning what I'm going to say. All this inner mental activity is a type of stress. (This is called being like a duck -- calm on the surface, legs paddling furiously under the water.)

In fact, I have now confirmed that any excess mental activity, whether related to stress or not, will affect IOP. When I quiet my mind (and have few or no thoughts), my IOP will drop instantly. Much of our excessive thinking ("self-talk") is generated by the ego. But that's a topic for another article.

I'll say a bit about my definition of ego. The more important it is what other people think about us, the stronger (more active) is our own ego in that situation. Over time I had the opportunity to measure my IOP in response to various dinner situations and I did find that the more importance I placed on whether the other person liked me or whether I made a favorable impression, the higher my IOP. That's why the dinner with the world-famous celebrity had such a pronounced effect on my IOP. 

A friendship with this celebrity, of the type my own friend had forged, had the power (I believed) to change my life. I had seen my friend benefit financially and more. He was flying around in a private jet, going on vacations all over the world, and staying in hotels that cost more for one night than I paid to purchase my first house! He was receiving expensive gifts, regularly eating in the best restaurants and living a life of luxury. He was also attending special events as a guest of the celebrity and enjoying privileges that could not be bought at any price. Although I was not consciously thinking about any of this (and, indeed, I didn't really want that kind of lifestyle), at some level I had placed a lot of importance on being liked by the celebrity. I call that an effect of the ego. But it is far from the only effect of the ego. (Other details will have to wait for another article.)

In summary, several things became clear to me as a result of my investigation of the post-dinner IOP spike:

• At the time I did not know how to recognize my own states of stress. This is an effect of the ego.
• At that time I was out of touch with my own emotions. This is also an effect of the ego.
• I had already documented that stress raised my IOP, but this was the first clear example of a stressful situation that did not feel stressful to me (at the time). With my greater awareness now, it certainly would feel highly uncomfortable and stressful to go back into that psychological and physiological state. I would clearly recognize it as stress now.
• Therefore, this dinner, based on my physiological state, was in fact another example of stress raising my IOP. The source of the stress was my ego.
• This situation helped deepen my understanding of the ways in which the ego underlies almost all psychological stress. Without ego involvement, we would have almost no stress.