Once self-awareness has stabilised as a local I, experience gradually begins to organise itself around this perspective as its primary frame of reference. The mechanism is the same as that which drives all attractor growth: local attractors incorporate experience, are supported by surrounding relations and gradually acquire dominance as the primary local attractor in the landscape. What is different here is that the primary local attractor is an I — and that all further experience is now read through and organised around this one centre.

Through further dissociation a local ego-tree grows with many branches: memories, relations, interpretations, needs, identities and stabilised attractors that are all anchored in and support the central I-attractor. The ego-tree does not represent KNOWING itself, but a local and limited organisation of experience within KNOWING — a private world of representation that gradually appears as the primary reality.

This is why human beings can live in fundamentally different perceptions of reality even though they share the same overarching world. Each ego-tree organises experience through its own relational patterns, attractors, memories and stabilisations. What confirms the ego-tree’s existing attractors is experienced as true and real. What challenges them is experienced as foreign, threatening or wrong.

Through mirroring, confirmations and further experience the ego-tree is continuously reinforced and gradually develops its own internal structure and self-maintenance. The local perspective begins to prioritise its own stability, understanding and survival over the whole from which it originally sprang. The more relational support the ego-tree’s attractors gather, the more difficult they become to reorganise — and the more totally they organise all further experience around themselves.

In this process the foundation for human suffering arises. The stronger the identification with the local ego-tree becomes, the more separation, conflict, fear, need for control and loss of connection to the more holistic structures of KNOWING are experienced.

The ego-tree is therefore both the precondition for individualised experience and the beginning of the existential separation that characterises human psychology, culture and society.

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