Unfortunately there are many prominent examples of Enlightened/Awakened/Integrated individuals who act like destructive fools and ruin their lives and reputations, often through patterns of abusive behavior. When this happens over and over, I don't think it can be written off as "oh those people weren't actually Enlightened." Rather, I think there's something in the bootstrapping dynamics of tinkering with your own psyche that predictably (sometimes) leads in this direction.

My own informed guess as to how this happens is something like this: imagine your worst impulse arising, and imagine that you've been so careful to take every part of yourself seriously that you take that impulse seriously rather than automatically swatting it away with the usual superegoic separate shard of self; imagine that your normal visceral aversion to following through on that terrible impulse is totally neutralized, toothless. Perhaps you see the impulse arise and you understand intellectually that it's Bad but somehow its Badness is no longer compelling to you. I don't know. I'm just putting together the pieces of what certain human disasters have said.

Anyway, I don't actually think you're wrong to think integration is an important goal. The problem is that integration is mostly neutral. You can integrate in directions that are holistically bad for you and those around you, maybe even worse than if you never attempted it in the first place.

I feel that focusing too much on myself is kind of a bad habit, or at least it makes me unhappy. (Bertrand Russell noticed the same.) It's more fun to do things or hang out with people.

I liked the post, but

While integrating the self, we build the focus and trust needed to have a say over our system 1.

sounds like it's coming from the frame of System 1 and 2 being clearly distinct and System 2 being superior, when actually it seems to me like System 2 extends the capabilities of (and is reliant on) [LW · GW] System 1 for its functioning.

I'm mostly on-board with this sentiment. To anyone getting excited about integration, note this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] of mine about potential ways you can accidentally think you're integrating more, while actually putting up more walls (and this post is related [LW · GW], less on general integration and more paying attention to emotions).

I agree. I'll make a bold claim here that I've made elsewhere (sometimes using different language), which is that I wasn't really a rationalist until stream entry. Before that I was just pretending to be a rationalist. By extension from one example (albeit with lots of experience [LW · GW] and related evidence that makes me think this is likely valid), I suspect no one is capable of systematized winning without stream entry, mostly because the kind of unification of mind and agency needed isn't present before hand. That doesn't mean winning without stream entry should be discounted, but it does make it fragile and contingent because it's not robustly systematized since the person doing the winning isn't yet capable of robust systematization.

To put a different frame on it, many rationalists like to talk about being "aspiring rationalists" rather than using the rationalist label directly because to them "rationalist" suggests some ideal to which one aspires but cannot be fully realized (this is especially true if you think of being a rationalist in Bayesian terms and then have to come to grips with being a finite, embedded being rather than a Cartesian being with hypercomputation). In that framing, I'd say being an aspiring rationalist without stream entry is like being a starfish aspiring to become a fish: the gap is so wide it causes a type error. Luckily, unlike this unlucky starfish, humans can transform themselves into the thing that can be an aspiring rationalist.

(There's a likely objection here that some would say I'm not a rationalist, making it likely someone would discount this on those grounds. I would instead say that I've transcended what many people think of as rationality, but that doesn't mean I've rejected it, only come to see it as valuable only up to a certain extent where it functions. That's a topic for another time, but wanted to put that here since it's relevant to evaluating my claims.)