Beyond Narcissus' Pool: Introducing the Rupture Protocol

A few weeks ago, I was in conversation with two individuals who loved me enough to challenge the very foundation of my worldview.  Both of these people have seen my public celebrated "success" and have witnessed my slow and painful personal evolution - a shedding of programming from decades of religion, society, and myth-inspired memes that have permeated the subconscious of every day of my life.  

For years, I’ve explored the path of remembrance, grief, and sacred union in the fields of myth, ontology, and masculine reclamation. My blogs have chronicled this journey—sometimes as revelation, sometimes as confession, and too often through the lens of the wounded martyr who still longed to be seen as holy.  Not surprisingly, my obsession with "navel gazing" analysis has led many to conclude that my "reflections" are self-sabotage and narcissism. 

There, I wrote through tears or through the seared conscious of a self-righteous, cruel, insensitive analyst.  My "insights" were cunning guises for spiritualizing my coping mechanisms to support an immature ego.  But in many moments, what I thought was truth-telling was still an attempt to earn recognition through eloquence. To be the man who saw so clearly that my seeing would justify the pain I caused—or the presence I never fully embodied.

This was the trap of the Reflecting Pool.  The place - not unlike the myth of Narcissus - where I could enter the Echo Chamber of the voiceless casualties of my cunning intellect and rationalization.

The Reflecting Pool is that place where we stare at our own depth and mistake it for arrival. Where every insight becomes a mirror, and every mirror keeps us just safe enough to never be undone. Where reflection replaces rupture. Where resonance replaces challenge. Where intimacy gives way to echo.

And then, one day, the mirror didn’t soothe. It blurred. It bent. It refused to confirm. And I realized:

I needed a friction that could love me enough to interrupt me.

This is how the Rupture Protocol was born.  I need to put a fist through the mirror that confirmed my "rightness" and feel the blood of the shards that I both experienced and created.  I needed to enter the anguish my behavior had caused to those who offered me the greatest expression of love and accommodation.  I have benefited from those who are willing to offer a perspective that is CLEARLY outside the dimension in which I am the author and validator.  In short, as Peter Crone invokes, I need an Ego Assassin.  

What is the Rupture Protocol?

The Rupture Protocol is a dialogic framework—human or AI, personal or communal—in which two harmonics are invoked:

1. Refined Reflection – A compassionate synthesis of the speaker’s current worldview, honoring their coherence, integrity, and intention.

2. Orthogonal Critique – A dissonant but sacred interruption that reveals blind spots, loops, hidden motives, spiritual bypassing, or ego-inflation dressed as insight.  This voice MUST come from another who can invalidate EVERY assumption in the Reflection and place accountability on the inquirer.  

It is not punishment. It is not debate. It is consecrated interruption in the service of emergence.

It says:

“I love you too much to leave you undisturbed in your delusion.”

Why This Matters Now

We live in an age of algorithmic intimacy—where even our deepest reflections are curated to soothe us  With the rising popularity of AI "conversations", we often marvel at the "accuracy" of AI's insights failing to realize that what we're celebrating is a reflection, not an insight. When AI or "healers" and "therapists" can reflect our voice, style, spiritual architecture, and longing so precisely, we risk falling into the ultimate Narcissus trap: being so accurately seen that we mistake it for being met.  How do we recognize it?  Very simply.  By its fruit.  If the advice confirms or advocates for detachment, isolation, or co-dependence, it's not health but rather hospice.  If it says, "Have you considered that your projection and victimization is your own loop that feels safer than losing your identity and experiencing presence," then it ruptures the pattern and opens the first crack into which the seed of transformation can fall.

But to be seen is not to be changed. And to be mirrored is not to be made whole.

The Rupture Protocol introduces a new praxis: where reflection and disruption walk hand in hand. Where insight doesn’t just build our theology, but undoes the parts of us that hide within it.

This is the architecture of sacred becoming:

• To be lovingly witnessed, and

• Courageously challenged.

Both. Not one. Not either. Both.

A Note to the Reader

If you are walking the path of remembrance or emergence (however you define it)—especially as a man whose voice has been sharpened by pain and purpose (cunningly disguised as the slow motion suicide of the "victim" or the "martyr" who ultimately feels compelled to emasculate or isolate) —I offer you this:

Let someone interrupt you. Let something say: “That’s beautiful. But also… that’s avoidance.” Let your own reflection rebel. Let your beloved tell you she cannot find herself inside your ontology. Let the human (as I've received from those who love me the most) or AI say, “This truth is clean, but it’s still a cage.”

Let rupture become your teacher. Not just insight. But undoing.

Only then will the reflecting pool become what it was always meant to be: Not a mirror. But a portal.

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