I think you may have just sold me "by demonstration" :-)

You took my references to "sunk costs" through to mercilessly harsh criticism of yourself (yes, kind of to the point of a strawman) without apparently flinching at all. And when you quoted my numbered arguments that amounted to "pretend these appeals won't move me, then what?" (nailing me on the fourth noble truth with respect to other people in the process), I sort of cringed in precisely the way that I imagine you're talking about when you said:

My former self of two year ago continuously looks like an elephant in porcelain store (Dutch idiom; don't remember if American use it). I can expect to cringe at the blind, egoistic sinner I am now if I keep up meditation.

Except, of course, my "self-reflective cringe-inducing period length" was a day (plus you holding up the mirror) rather than the two year period that you mentioned. The implication seems to be that I'm not self reflective enough to avoid cringe-inducing stumbles on even this small length of time :-/

At this point I have one more question (plus I'll send to a PM after this): How do you pragmatically handle being surrounded by people with substantially less emotional and intellectual self control than yourself?

I imagine that your self control lets you, to some degree, decide how to feel about social interactions, but I would guess that many people could be annoyed by your unflappability unless you did something weird like "pretending to lose control" every so often. I'd be worried that if I developed a similar ability, people might interpret my equanimity as arrogance, or something similar.

Or another potential social hiccup: The "honest judgment of your eyes" seems like something that might cause people with poor self esteem or a measure of guilt to avoid you (as though you radiated an ugh field?) because your presence leads them to imagine themselves as they imagine that you see them, while not feeling that they even have the ability to repair the flaws thereby revealed. If they avoid you, the data wouldn't be in front of you to detect or fix.

Or another way of getting at the concern would be to ask how - if you successfully hold yourself to a standard that prevents you from retrospectively cringing at years distant behavior - how do you deal with the implicit threat to other people via the logic of social loafing?

These kinds of social difficulties seem like major worries when I ponder the kinds of self improvement that you are displaying. If I infer that several years of vipassana meditation could help to develop similar levels of self control, I would want to know before beginning that I wasn't setting myself up for some kind of social pariah status from which I may not be able to retreat.