Insights from The Seer's Explanation

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.

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.

As I write this, the lead story is that Russia is invading Ukraine.  It feels to many people like yet another setback for those of us whose desire for peace and harmony seems to be consistently thwarted.  The story this morning is all about bad behavior and punishment, or at least about consequences, for that behavior.  When I think about the history of this and the previous century, I find it hard to identify any occasion on which punishment and consequences have actually rid the world of the bad behavior they were designed to counter.  Why is that?

But what if the Universe, the Oneness that is obscured by the Ego’s commitment to separation, intends to show us the emptiness of the Ego’s promise?

The validity of the Law of Attraction is easier to accept if we shift our understanding of the world.  We are taught that we exist in a context called "the world."  And yet, all we know about the world is interpretation of sensory input, and that interpretation exists within our awareness.  In that context, the Law of Attraction is much easier to accept.

Larry gave this talk on December 8, 2020 in Carbondale, Colorado at A Spiritual Center.  

He points out that we live in a world made up of our own interpretations, and that we mistake that set of interpretations for the durable world we assume exists.  He tells the story of his extra-ordinary experience in which the flow of interpretation we call the world was made to stop by a set of circumstances contrary to that flow.  Extra-ordinary experience has the power to redirect the trajectory of one's life, and he talks about how that happened for him.

We ordinarily think of our ego, our egotistical selves, as being some kind of character defect.  So we pretend to apologize for it, and sometimes we try to hide it.  But what if there's a completely different way of looking at ego that helps to explain why people behave the way they do?  What if you could step back and see everything that's happening in this election season as the behavior of some global "Thing" that we're all swimming in?  So you have ego... don't take it so personally!

Do you find yourself trying to understand why people are acting the way they are?  This could be your relatives and friends, and it might extend to politicians and complete strangers.  What if we looked at our collective psychology as a Thing that is used to being in control and wants to stay that way?

How can we find a stable place to stand amid the uncertainty and confusion of the current era?  I have been recommending taking a step back for a broader view.  How can we do that?

When we can't change a situation, we're told to accept it.  Passive acceptance feels like resignation.  But active acceptance feels like a new beginning.  What's the difference?

There’s a lot of fear going around these days about the coronavirus.  In response, there are actions being taken, and some frantic, knee-jerk reactions taking place.  And… there’s a fair bit of acting-out going on as well.  As a society, this thing is making us crazy.

Should we wear masks?  Should we visit family and friends or go to the grocery store?  Are we washing our hands enough?  Will this be the new normal?  Will this permanently devastate our economy?  The quest for the correct answers goes on 24/7.

I’m convinced that it’s worthwhile to seek a broader view when the one you have doesn’t feel very good.  What, then, might present itself as a broader view of the coronavirus and the way the pandemic and social isolation are impacting most of us these days?

"I" may well be the most misunderstood word in the English language.  That’s because when we use that word, we are most commonly using it to point to something that’s not real, that’s not actually who we are!

It is possible (and desirable) to separate the Ego from the one who identifies that Ego as belonging to him/her. And unless we make real for ourselves that the Ego is invented by us, and it is distinct from who we really are, we will commonly refer to that Ego, that aspect of our personality, as “I”.

This misunderstanding leads to the frustration and misery one would expect if we are under the illusion that we are putting in all this effort to make something other than who we are, happy!

The evolution of homo sapiens to a new kind of human being doesn't require a different body or a larger brain.  Nor does it require a catastrophe and millions of years.  Instead, it happens within a living human being when the Ego is seen to be what it is: distinct from who we really are, and not even real!  

A lot of people feel like the world is a mess right now, and that things seem to be getting worse.  Is there a way of thinking about the state of the world that affords us the possibility of recovering some leverage, some power?  This is part one of a two-part approach that may change the way we think about all that.

I have found that the way to ease my mind and my heart is to take a step back and seek a broader perspective.

Pretty much all of us are thoroughly conditioned to think that the physical world is what’s real. Less tangible things, like thoughts and feelings and flashes of inspiration and intuition, are relegated to some other category. They’re certainly real to us, but we tend to call them fleeting, perhaps, or ephemeral, or just intangible. And experience… well, our experience is obviously real, but most of us would find it pretty hard to define.  Let's look into this question of what's real, and allow ourselves to be informed by quantum theory, arguably the most battle-tested theory in all of science.

Imagine yourself as a singing bowl.  The Universe strikes you with its velvet mallet and you "sing" your mix of notes, your chord.  Maybe that's a way of visualizing how you create your own experience!