Testing the efficacy of IDL is intrinsic to its process. It deals with highly subjective phenomena, including dreams, mental images, and transpersonal experiences. It is not only to be expected that we will project our hopes and fears onto our experience but that we will encounter significant resistances from a practice that challenges the assumptions and perceptions upon which our identity is based. Therefore, for both reasons, tendencies to see what isn’t there and to deny what is, validation, both personal and collective, is essential.
Our sense of self will fight to maintain its congruence, relevance, and control. Think of what happens when you flick a spinning gyroscope with your finger. It will sway and perhaps move, but it will right itself and continue to spin on its axis if it can. Your waking identity functions in much the same way. When you do an interview or apply a recommendation in your life you are perturbing your identity “gyroscope.” It is not going to surrender its stability just because you had an insight or healing, balancing, or transformative experience. It will do whatever it can to integrate that experience into its ongoing stability.
This is exactly what IDL wants to have happen. Instead of challenging our scripting and sense of self we want to broaden and contextualize them, supporting the continuing utility and relevance of what has worked where it remains adaptive, while amplifying alternative perspectives that reflect the priorities of innate life compass, accessible for everyone.
While IDL theory grounds your practice and outreach to others in a cognitive knowledge base, practice grounds your practice in experiential validity. Students of IDL need both. They need to know why they are doing what they are doing and to be able to explain it clearly to others. At the same time, they need to practice what they preach, to embody the structures that make sense to them and that heal, balance, and transform their lives.
Amplifying Waking Resistance Strategies
Your waking identity is not neutral. Like a gyroscope, it is a stability-maintenance system. Its job is coherence, predictability, and control. Expect anything that threatens structural coherence to be metabolized, reframed, or discarded.
Your waking identity, called a “core identity attractor basin” from an evolutionary perspective, has many tools and strategies at its disposal to maintain its stability. Here are a number of them. As you read them, consider how they may assert themselves in your life. Think about how they might impact on your learning and application of IDL.
Rapid Incongruence Dissolution
Our core waking attractor basin, with assistance from biology, does not just “forget” dreams and interviews. It does much more than that. It supports selective recall, remembering “safe” portions while forgetting destabilizing ones or those it deems irrelevant to its interests. It encourages emotional flattening, reducing the felt intensity of challenging material. Things that were inspirational, insightful, or transformative at the time will in retrospect seem less so. It also reinforces narrative re-assimilation, the reinterpreting of the dream, interview, or transpersonal experience so it confirms your sense of self. You remember the interview, but in a domesticated form. This is why subjects are asked at the conclusion of the interview, “What did you hear?” This not only helps to integrate what was heard and experienced into waking awareness before it is forgotten or altered. It also provides a great deal of insight into how waking awareness is already selecting out that which “fits” and ignores the rest.
Cognitive Bias Reinforcement
The first level of defense is, “I already knew that.” What is ignored is how the interpretive reframings provided by interviewed perspectives differ from the initial associations and interpretations the subject had of their dream or life issue. Of course there will always be a sense that we already knew what comes up because after all, reframings come from perspectives that are intimately invested in our lives. The focus of IDL is not on insight or gaining new information but on shifting life priorities into greater alignment with those of our emerging potentials and life compass. That is a big and important difference. It answers waking identity when it attempts to maintain control by saying, “I didn’t hear anything new.”
Various cognitive biases jump in to maintain the stability of waking identity. Hindsight bias says, “That seems obvious now.” Attribution substitution says, “That shift came from therapy/time/maturation.” Confirmation bias says, “What I am hearing aligns with my current worldview and identity,” selectively noticing that which is self-validating. Identity defense bias says, “Reject anything you heard or experienced that implies you are less adaptive than you believe you are.”
These cognitive biases not only happen out of awareness but are persistent and powerful. Their purpose is to make the reinstatement of your stable, current waking identity “natural” and “authentic.” Reinstatement is natural and authentic – within the context of your waking attractor basin. It is not that its perceptions are not useful or even accurate, it is that their partiality leads to developmental dead ends. Its adaptive limitations are exactly where the problem lies.
Response Minimization/Delay Amplification
Here we can gain deeper respect for the cleverness of our waking identity in its determination to stay in control. Learning IDL, like any life discipline, is a course of study and application. Like a child learning to walk or talk, changes may not be noticeable on a day-to-day basis, but are obvious to outsiders who only see the child every week or month. Your waking identity is likely to view slow results from application of your dream yoga as proof of its ineffectiveness. At the same time, fast or significant changes are likely to be reframed as coincidence, while ambiguous outcomes are defaulted to “no effect.”
Security Reassertion Through Over-Intellectualization
Instead of resisting emotionally, the mind may turn IDL into a theory, compare it abstractly with other models, or evaluate its philosophy rather than implement its recommendations. Thinking about transformation replaces transformation. The sense of threat of waking identity is reduced.
“Research Mode” Avoidance
Another powerful defensive posture is for waking identity to abstractly “evaluate” the method while rarely operationalizing it. We remain in meta-analysis instead of behavioral experimentation. Analysis replaces doing the yoga.
Emotional Displacement
When discomfort arises we can redirect into surfing the internet, anger at national leaders, blaming teachers and society, or losing ourselves in our favorite addiction. We can redirect into critique of institutions and other people. Systemic anger, fear, grief, or goal confusion can replace interior adaptation. We can feel fully justified in our emotions while their function is to protect our waking worldview and control.
Fossilized Attractor Reinforcement via Busyness
There are always “good” reasons for avoidance: “I don’t have time to reread interviews.” “I’m too tired to incubate dreams.” “I’ll record dreams tomorrow.” Micro-avoidances stabilize macro-identity.
Additional Waking Defense Mechanisms to Watch
As if those defenses that your waking identity has at its disposal to fend off disturbances to its equilibrium were not enough, there are a number of even more sophisticated ones.
Spiritual Bypass Variant
“I already understand sublimation conceptually.” Understanding replaces surrender. In an integral framework, cognitive multi-perspectivalism is assumed to equal empathetic multi-perspectivalism. Does it? IDL asks interviewed emerging potentials. What do they say?
Competitive Adaptation
Our waking identity uses IDL to strengthen itself, become “more evolved,” or to feel superior in awareness. Just who and what is feeling more evolved or superior?Transformation becomes enhancement of the waking attractor basin. In fact this is what “success-based” adults are looking for. They are seeking higher level development and enlightenment. IDL refers to that as “psychological heliocentrism.” We want to perfect the self by changing it into the Self, one with All. Waking identity supports this project because it increases its control while pretending to give up control.
Cynical Meta-Position
This is a particularly elegant defense: “If only 2% are ready to move from psychological geocentrism into empathetic multi-perspectivalism, and most fossilize instead, then why bother?” Hopelessness becomes a structural stabilizer. Psychological geocentrism is once again maintained.
From recognizing this host of resources our waking identity has at its disposal to defend its control, we can gain greater humility regarding what we are up against. Unconscious incompetence is our normal state when the default assumptions, feelings, and worldview of our waking identity are in control. We experience it as natural and authentic because it is. Again, the issue is not the utility of our waking perspective. There is no argument with its naturalness or authenticity. The issue is in its unrecognized partiality. It is like trying to fix everything with a hammer because that’s the only tool you have.
Knowledge of the strategies our waking identity has at its disposal to maintain control can move us from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, a feeling of overwhelm when we recognize just what we are up against. A lot of people never get past that point. We have to have a clear strategy, strong support system, and considerable patience and determination to work through all that resistance and move into conscious competence, based on accessing, testing, and utilizing a polycentric identity. That is why IDL is a “post-success” process. It requires that its students already have a lot on board.