Insights from The Seer's Explanation Larry Gottlieb

This talk was recorded at White River Books in Carbondale, Colorado on October 12, 2023. Larry speaks about his education in physics and how certain ideas from that discipline can be brought to bear on why we don't behave in our own best interests.

We know for sure that our rational analysis and problem solving skills are the best tools we have for getting more of what we want.  We know this because everybody says it’s true.  But what if that certainty turns out to be a superstition?  What if we have more powerful tools at our disposal and our belief in the supremacy of rationality constitutes a self limiting belief?  

For example: you consider one of your problems.  You talk to yourself about it.  You discuss the pros and cons of one or more possible solutions to it.  You hear yourself talking about it, and the voice you hear is yours.  That’s you speaking “inside your head,” isn’t it?  It’s sometimes called the internal dialog, and all humans engage in it.

But what if that’s not actually you?

I knew at a relatively early age that what Ronald Reagan called the “shining city on a hill,”  the America of our ideals, was an invention, a romantic notion that made us all feel good.  The overturning of Roe v. Wade shattered that illusion for me.  But it turns out that disillusionment is a good thing.

None of what we remember is real, because it’s not taking place in this moment. And, nothing in the future is real, because it’s only a picture in the mind. So reality isn’t about solidity, or about a particular configuration of atoms and molecules, or even about what everybody knows. Reality is about the present moment, about what you and I are experiencing in this right-now. If you’re in the present, you’re experiencing what’s real. As soon as you think about it, it’s not real anymore, though it can be useful to think about it. It’s about now. It’s about time.

In a previous post, I suggested that one of the most fundamental misunderstandings we humans labor under is that an ego is a part of ourselves.  In psychoanalysis, for example, the ego is the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity.  We think it's a part of who we are.

Instead, I think it’s more helpful to think of the ego as a construct, a conceptual entity each of us created in order to get along in life.
It’s essentially a story about ourselves as individuals.  And it serves interests that are not ours.

Last time, I made the following argument: that it’s helpful to consider that we human beings live in an ocean of Ego.  Like the fish, we’re not aware of being immersed in that ocean, because we’ve spent our entire lives in it and so we have nothing to compare it to.

That viewpoint seems to me more workable than thinking that ego is a character defect or liability that each of us carries around and which needs to be punished or minimized or gotten rid of entirely.

The ocean in which each of us is submerged is our individual belief system.  And our belief systems, though they differ in some respect from one another, are all based on some common fundamental misunderstandings that we’ve all inherited from the culture into which we were born.  That commonality is what forms the ocean of Ego.