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.

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.

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?

It has been noted many times and in many places that separation, from each other and from the whole of the Universe, is the veil. Our separateness is what gives rise to fear and anxiety, to aggression and depression, and to our need for comforting ideologies and belief systems. The Ego, by painting a consistent picture of dangers and possible pitfalls, makes everything conform to this interpretation and thus keeps itself in business.

In my forthcoming book, Hoodwinked: Uncovering Our Fundamental Superstitions, I start with a simple but completely non-intuitive premise: What we think of as the physical world is actually a description of the world and not the world itself.

It is not my purpose in this post to argue that premise; I do that in the book. Rather, I want to look at the concept of the Law of Attraction from the perspective this premise represents.

Larry gave this talk on December 8, 2020 in Carbondale, Colorado at A Spiritual Center. He shared his experience one day many years ago when the world became something else 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.

Do you find yourself trying to understand why people are acting the way they are?

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.

"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!

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?

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.

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!