The Greatest Gaslighter Ever!

Hey everybody, it's Craig Boreth for our inaugural episode, I want to introduce you all to the greatest gaslighter of all time,  Responsible for more human suffering than all the con artists scammers, telemarketers and political consultants combined.   This particular gaslighter is so good that most of us go our entire lives, and never have any idea that we've been conned. 

 Any guesses, who I might be talking about.  For some folks of a religious persuasion.  He might be thinking, oh, he's clearly talking about the devil.  After all, as everybody knows...

 ”The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.”

Well, Kaiser San Jose has a point. , oh, sorry. Uh, spoiler alert. I mean, Kevin Spacey has a point.  But no, I'm not talking about the devil.

To find out who is the greatest gas leader of all time,  stick around for The Great Ungaslighting.  

When I was a kid, our seventh-grade class was split into two groups. One group went and spent three or four days in Washington, DC. The other group went to New York City.  I was in the New York group. And I have no idea how much they paid those chaperones to corral a bunch of hormone-addled 13-year-olds around Manhattan for four days, but I can guarantee you, it wasn't nearly enough.   

We did all the  New York touristy stuff. We went to the Statue of Liberty. We went to the Museum of Natural History. We went to a Broadway show. We went to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, starring none other than David Cassidy as Joseph. It was, it was late-career David Cassidy, but it does give you some sense of just how old I am. 

But over all these decades. There was one moment during that trip that I remember like it was yesterday.  We all went downtown to this dark little gallery called Holographic Studios. It's basically a hologram museum. The guy who founded it and who took us on our tour. Is still there today, still running tours. His name is Jason Arthur Sapan. But everybody knows him as Dr. Laser.  So he was guiding us through, he's very enthusiastic showing us how holograms work and talking about the physics of light and lasers and things like that.  And he says, and I quote.  "Nobody ever actually sees anything.  All we see is light reflected off of things."  

I thought that's just the coolest thing I've ever heard.  He basically took something that's clearly physically true.  We need these rays of light to reflect off of things and get into our brains so we can create an image of what we're seeing, what we think we're seeing.  But for the first time in my life someone had explained reality in a way that was distinctly different from the way. I, or all of us experienced it in our day-to-day lives. And at that point, when, as a kid, I didn't really grasp the philosophical implications of that statement.  I just knew that it was a cool idea.  It really wasn't until I started thinking about this podcast, considering all the ways that reality isn't the way we think it is that I began to understand how that moment influenced the trajectory of my thinking over four-plus decades.  So, what does that actually mean, “We don't see anything all we see is light reflected off of things.” Well, to me. It means that while there is some objective reality out there. There are trees and houses and cars that actually exist.  None of us, not a single person, not a single living creature.  Has direct objective access to it. Each of us creates a unique version of all those things. Which exists only in our own minds.  And yet we all believe almost all of the time that we just go through the world and we just kind of experience reality. We think of our minds as cameras, just recording everything we see and experience. 

But as I found out recently, The mind doesn't really work that way.  There's this great Ted Talk called "Why Aren't We Awesomer?" by world-renowned coach and mentor and mediator  Michael Neill. I'll post a link to it in the show notes.  You should definitely watch it. It's brilliant.  But here's what Michael Neil says about how the mind works. 

 ”The mind does not work like a camera, the mind works like a projector.  The projector of mind takes the film of thought and projects it onto the screen of consciousness, and it really looks like it's happening out there, and we experience it in here, and it's scarier, it's exciting, or it's awesomer, it's terrible. But none of it's actually happening outside of our own minds.”   

And here's the kicker:  Our own minds convince us that. They're not doing exactly what they're doing.  There's a quote from quantum physicist, David Boehm that explains this perfectly.  He says: 

“Thought creates our world and then says I didn't do it.”  

So as you may have figured out. The greatest gas later of all time is our own mind.  Our minds convince us there's one reality.  And we all live in it. And if you live in that world, the thought of changing that world is totally daunting. If it's just one objective world. How can I possibly change it in such a way that everyone who experiences that one objective world will notice the difference? You can't, or very few people could plus. There are plenty of people. And we'll encounter many of them in future episodes who want things to stay exactly the way they are now. 

But, if we remember that reality. Is something that we all hold individually in our own minds. Then all I have to do is changed the way I think. Or help someone else change the way they think, then we've changed the world. 

It might seem small, but it's not insignificant. It's actually really important, and getting comfortable with that version of reality and getting comfortable changing your mind and entertaining alternative realities is hugely powerful. 

As the late great anthropologist and anarchist David Graber put it:  

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make.  And could just as easily make differently.”  

And that's what the great and gaslighting is all about, revealing how our world – remember it's all in our heads – has been made.  And doing the simple individual, genuinely human things to begin to make it differently.  Okay. 

So how do we actually do it?  One of the things I want to do on this podcast each week is to give everybody. A little homework, just a little assignment, something you can do a little action you can do in your day-to-day life. That can show you how easy it is to change the world. So for this week, here's what I want you to do.  I'll bet everyone listening has somebody in their life, someone they encounter regularly, maybe it's every day, every week, whatever. And you don't know that person's name. 

You may have known it at some point, but you've long since forgotten it, or maybe you never introduced yourself and you never got their name. But now, since you've seen them so many times, it's super awkward to actually admit to them, hey you, I'm sorry, I completely forgot your name or I never introduced myself and it seems weird that we've been talking to each other every day for 10 years.  But here's what I want you to do. 

I want you to break through that. Now's the time to go to that person and say, hey, I'm really sorry. I've totally forgotten your name. I'm Craig or whatever. And I can guarantee you that. In all likelihood, they felt the same awkwardness that you felt every time you encounter each other. 

And they'll be happy to say, oh, hey Craig, good to meet you. I'm Bill or Jim or whatever.  So now. The next time you encounter that person, that weird vibe, that weird energy that's been there, that's out in the world, that's in both of your realities, will be gone.  And now you can have a more positive interaction with that person and that person with you. And in a small, but not insignificant way, you have changed each other's worlds for the better.  Okay, Give it a try and do me a favor, let me know how it goes, even if it blows up in your face, which I doubt it will, but it might, you never know.  

Let me know how it goes. Send me an email to Craig@angaslighting.com. Or go to the website on gaslighting.com and you can actually leave a voicemail.  Maybe I'll contact you and we'll talk about it on a future episode.  



As I was reminiscing about that seventh-grade trip. That set all of these wheels in motion. I remembered something. I remembered that. I had taken with me this neon blue. Panasonic. tape player on the bus. And I had some cassettes with me. Most of which I had gotten from the Columbia Record and Tape Club, which, if you are of a certain age, you remember fondly. You had an account. Your dog had an account. You had several accounts under fake names. And you just had this constant influx of records or tapes coming in the mail to your house was great.  

I had taken with me a couple of Police tapes that I'd gotten, I think, Ghost in the Machine and maybe Zenyatta Mondatta. I think it was another one. At least one Tom petty tape that I'd gotten, there might've even been a Joe Jackson tape in there. Another thing I was into at the time, which I don't know if it's much of a thing anymore was I had a bunch of comedy tapes that were definitely not appropriate for 13-year-olds. There was Steve Martin’s A Wild and Crazy Guy. There was Rodney Dangerfield’s “No Respect”. Side note, my parents took me to see Rodney Dangerfield live as a bar mitzvah present. I was definitely the youngest person there learned several new words and a few new concepts that I didn't really get to put into practice for a few years, but were definitely helpful. But one of the tapes I had that I had completely forgotten about was a Robin Williams standup tape, which was just brilliant. 

You know, it was just so manic and he just vamped on everything and riffed off the audience. And it was just, it was barely held together. But it was brilliantly hilarious. And.  When I looked up the title of that album, I realized that it may have had something to do with where all of this has come from and where all of it's going.  I don't know if you remember it, but the title  of that Robin Williams album was: “Reality…What a Concept”. 

  Crazy right?

Well, that's it for this week. Thanks for listening everybody. If you haven't already, please follow this podcast, leave a review, which makes a big difference. And definitely share it with anyone you know, who might find it interesting.  Because, the more people who start thinking about this stuff and the more people who start acting on it, the greater the ungaslighting, and the better the world.

Until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, and please use your damn turn signal.