The Feedback Loop Assigned Agency by the Mind
Most of us believe we choose. That we deliberate, evaluate, and act. But what if this belief is another habit—an after-the-fact narrative layered atop an automated process? What if the ego—the “me” that claims to choose—is not a self but a feedback loop misidentified and assigned agency by the mind?
In the Diamond Approach®, ego is not an entity but a mental process: conditioned reactions stitched together by memory, sustained by contraction, and arising from the original “No” to the immediacy of now. From that refusal, a pattern begins to form—not as a conscious actor, but as a repeating response recorded over time.
Yet the contraction alone is not the illusion. The mind recognizes that contraction—its recurrence across time—crystallizes the sense of identity. Ego is not just a reflex. It is memory forming meaning. And the meaning is a story: this, what, me, I, do—a narrative the mind constructs to simulate continuity, purpose, and control.
The self is not born in the moment of reaction, but in the feedback: the reaction leads to a story, the story confirms identity, and the identity reinforces future reactions. The loop repeats. The mind tracks the repetition. Then it claims the pattern, names it, and assigns it agency. That’s what we call selfhood.
Break the habit of you.
Recent habit science suggests that 40% of daily actions are unconscious and automatic. But from the standpoint of presence, this statistic may be far too generous. Because unless we are profoundly in presence, everything we do is conditioned. Even the so-called conscious 60% is likely just more sophisticated feedback patterns running under the illusion of deliberation.
From this view, reactivity is habit. Emotion is habit. Interpretation is habit. Even reflection is often just the habit of mental spinning, dressed up as insight. Unless an action arises from the still immediacy of presence, free of past, identity, or agenda, it is not truly free. It is mechanical, familiar, reinforced, and habitual.
The ego, then, is not a solid thing. It is a perceptual echo—a feedback loop that the mind registers as recurring and, through that recognition, names, claims, and assigns agency. That is how the pattern becomes personal, how the loop becomes “me.”
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit)and James Clear (Atomic Habits)describe habit structure as cue, routine, reward. Once this sequence is sufficiently reinforced, it bypasses conscious awareness. Control shifts from the prefrontal cortex—home of attention and what we call decision-making—to the basal ganglia, the brain’s patterning and automation center.
But what is decision-making? Seen through this lens, it is not the act of a unified self in command. It is a closed feedback loop of three interlocking elements: preference, familiarity, and narration. Preference is a bias—a lean formed by history and reinforced by emotion. Familiarity is the felt recognition of “me” within experience—a feedback hum that says, this feels like who I am. And narration is the interpretive voice of the mind, stitching continuity into the moment and retroactively assigning agency. Together, these form the illusion of a self who decides when the pattern was already unfolding.
What begins as reaction becomes reflex. What starts in awareness ends in circuitry.
This same architecture underlies the ego. We are not acting. We are enacting, running the same cue-response-reward sequence in new costumes. We call it personality, instinct, or choice.
But there is no chooser in the loop—only narration after the fact.
James Clear teaches that true habit change is identity-based: to change a habit, become someone new. But what if the inverse is truer still?
What if the someone you think you are is simply the product of repeated reactions?
Emotional habits. Thought habits. Relational habits. Habits of interpretation, judgment, and contraction. These are not traits of someone. They are lightning-fast neural pathways—conditioned circuits firing in response to cues, repeated often enough to register as familiar. Identity is not a person with patterns. Identity is the recognition of pattern, misread as a continuous someone. It is memory forming meaning. And meaning, once named, becomes a mask.
What we call “choosing” is usually just the emergence of a preference filtered through habit, followed by a story about a self that supposedly generated it. That story is where meaning is forged—where memory gives shape to experience and calls it mine.
Neuroscience reinforces this: the brain initiates decisions before we are conscious of them. The mind catches up with the action and assigns it a story: “I decided.” But the decision already occurred. The story is a retroactive fiction.
We call it thinking. We call it freedom.
But it’s just a self-reinforcing circuit misnamed agency. Presence interrupts the loop—not by doing, but by being.
Presence doesn’t react. It doesn’t reinforce. It doesn’t refer back to anything. It is not based on memory, identity, strategy, or preference. In presence, there is no cue to trigger the loop. No craving to complete it. No self to reward.
Presence is the space before recognition. The space where nothing is claimed, nothing is repeated, and no one is constructed.
Break the habit of you.
There’s nothing to do to resolve this. What undoes the loop is not effort, but the gentle pull of presence. It’s the emergence of awareness itself—simple, straightforward, undemanding.
What we call curiosity is the early movement of this magnetism—a quiet fascination with what is actually happening, not the story about it, not the mental interpretation of it, just this.
Just as every stimulus can trigger a cascade of conditioned thought, so too can presence trigger its own unfolding—not into a concept but into clarity, not into an answer but into intimacy.
The key is that attention does not need to leave what is happening. It doesn’t need to chase the thought to understand it, follow the feeling to fix it, or participate in the story to know the truth.
- Let the thought arise. Let the contraction pulse. Let the loop flicker.
- But don’t move.
- Let presence stay home.
What interrupts the illusion of the doer is not doing, but recognition. And recognition cannot be forced—it emerges when the mind grows quiet enough to be drawn into the real.
The ego isn’t a thing to defeat. It’s a mirage built from repetition, mistaken as self. And every time the loop runs, it leaves behind a trail of memory, stitched into meaning, named into a “me.” Meaning becomes identity. Identity becomes agency. The loop continues—unless interrupted.
Even Music Isn’t Yours
Recent neuroscience adds another eerie note to the picture.
A study from UC Davis found that people prone to habit-based thinking are more likely to experience earworms—songs that involuntarily loop in the mind. These unbidden inner soundtracks are not simply annoying; they may echo the same mechanism that forms the ego: unconscious repetition misread as identity.
Like all habits, earworms arise without consent, repeat without control, and sustain themselves without effort. And yet, they feel personal—“my song,” “my head,” “my mind won’t shut up.” But there is no you looping the music. There is only the loop—and the mind assigning ownership after the fact.
Even the soundtrack is an illusion of self.
The real question isn’t how to choose better. It’s this:
What is here when there is no one left to be the chooser? What remains when the feedback doesn’t find a self to land on?
Break the habit of you, and the whole game of becoming dissolves in the presence that never began.
John Harper is a longtime teacher, guide, and human development student whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life, available now on Amazon.