Eric Oliver

And it gets even more complicated because once you start looking at your cellular structure, you begin to realize there is no single being there.

For example, each of our cells contain mitochondria.

And mitochondria are interesting because they have an entirely different DNA than the DNA that programs for us.

And so, in a lot of ways, we're an amalgamation of two different species at the cellular level.

And then, of course, we're multicellular, so we're all of these cells coming together and carrying around also a microbiome with thousands of other species kind of living in and amongst us.

And even this sense of perception and consciousness that we have is really the orchestration of all of these cells coming together.

And once you begin to appreciate that that's your physical reality, that that's what's behind this experience of being, you realize there's not really a single solitary I there.

It's much more of a we.

It's exactly right.

And one way to think about that is that your self is not a solitary thing.

It's a process or more accurately, a set of processes.

And these processes sometimes work together, but sometimes they work at cross purposes.

So you have a cellular self, which is your cells metabolizing energy.

You have an animal self that's there making maps of reality and making predictions about what it thinks is gonna happen next.

Of course, we humans have language.

So we have this linguistic self where we've created culture and laws and morals and identities.

And those are a big part of our self processes as well.

And so a lot of these oftentimes are in conflict with one another.

Like what our animal self is either predicting or wanting or desiring may be very, very strongly at odds with what our linguistic self tells us we need to be doing at that moment.

Right.