What Are Thoughts?
I confess I do not know the answer.
But if you are reading this, it is likely that you spend most of your day with a voice talking inside your head. You probably think this voice is you. That the voice is yourself, like a miniature person inside your head, surrounded by a shell that it controls. I spent most of my life believing this.
“While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging ‘center of narrative gravity’ (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.”
With meditation, you come to realize that the voice inside your head is merely another element of your consciousness. It's akin to the sensations you feel, the sounds you hear, or the light that enters your eyes.You are not your thoughts. You are the sum total of your awareness, and the voice in your head is another sensation or effect that you experience.
“The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not ‘the thinker.’ The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence.”
This sounds confusing, but it’s critical to understand. We spend most of our lives lurching around on the whims of this “thinker”. This constant conversation in our head drives our daily activities and behaviors. And he/she is quite often dead wrong. How many times has the voice in your head caused you to worry unnecessarily? Or to completely misread a situation?
He didn’t answer my call… He must be cheating on me… Oh here he is, he was helping his grandmother unload the groceries.
There are unlimited scenarios where this plays out. And yet, we continually listen to this crazy voice in our head as though it’s our brilliant, intuitive self guiding us through life – no matter how often he/she is dead wrong. In fact, it seems that the only difference between a crazy man talking to himself on the side of the road and ourselves is some sort of social conditioning to not speak the words in our head out loud. We engage in the same conversation, ours is just not spoken.
Even more concerning, the voice in our head is also our biggest critic. No other person speaks to us as negatively as this voice. He/she tells us all kinds of terrible things about how dumb we are, how bad we look, how we f’d up again. But we continue listening, as though this voice is someone with a valuable opinion we should listen to.
With meditation, you learn a lot about the voice. You learn how to quiet it temporarily. If I focus closely on being present, and a thought arises, I can actually sense where it comes from. It tends to emanate or appear from the back right side of the area which feels like where I sense my head to be. (I phrase it like that because meditation also demonstrates how these locations are somewhat of an illusion from the perspective of awareness.)
When you meditate and a thought arises and you focus on it, you can also watch it quickly unwind. It seems to evaporate, similar to a passing sensation or a noise that quickly fades away. This is a powerful understanding, as the problem of being ruled by “the thinker” is not the thought itself so much as getting swept away with it. You latch on to it, obsess over it, and let it descend you into chaos. Learning to watch the thought pass gives you power and control over your state of being.
“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.”
But meditation has never taught me what exactly a thought is. It has still been a mystery to me why this crazy voice appears.
A few years ago I read a few books on Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and I recall reading something that suggested the voice isn’t even your voice. It’s often a recording of others, such as your parents or siblings, from when you were younger and you are replaying those people’s voices in your head. I am not sure about that, though at times I have observed that my inner voice says things like my parents used to when I was a kid.
But more recently, I came across an interesting concept in Joe Dispenza’s Evolve Your Brain:
“Another way to think of the memories and experiences we can recall is that they are the ‘voice’ we hear in our head all the time… the voice we hear in our mind is just memories of the past, and that when we are in the midst of change, this voice is the loudest. Few people ever say aloud all the things they think or feel. But the voice we hear in our head is how the body tells the brain to think the way it is feeling.”
He discusses the feedback loop between the body and the brain. Emotions are housed in the body, and the feelings are created by various chemicals, including serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline and oxytocin. His argument is that, over our lifetimes, the body becomes addicted to certain chemical releases in different situations. The voice in your head is the body’s signal to the brain to create these chemical releases and give it the fix it craves.
“We now know that when we respond to the feelings of the body by thinking the way the body feels, the brain will manufacture more of the same chemicals, feeding the body the same chemical signals for it to experience. This is how we maintain a ‘state of being.’ Any repetitive feeling, whatever that feeling is, creates a state of being—be it happy, sad, confused, lonely, unworthy, insecure, joyful, or even depressed. A state of being means that the feedback loop between the brain and the body is complete.”
Now, to me, if this is true, this is an eye-opening and empowering concept.
Consider that the voice in your head is not only not “you”, it’s a signal from your body to release certain chemicals that the body relies on in that situation. If you are about to speak in public and your mind is going a mile a minute, that’s not “you” thinking through every detail of the presentation and what could go wrong; that’s your body signaling your brain to release adrenaline and other chemicals that it has become accustomed to in that situation.
This perspective is empowering because it implies that your negative thought patterns are akin to an addiction. By consciously choosing not to indulge in the chemical reactions your body craves, you can modify your thought patterns. Over time, your body will adapt to new chemicals released in different situations, ultimately changing the nature of the voice in your head.
I described in “Meet Nappy” the practice I am undertaking to work on this. This is a work in progress for me but I am seeing and sensing improvements by engaging in the practice each day.
I understand that this perspective invites skepticism. But whatever your thoughts may be, the main point is simple and clear: your thoughts are not you. You are not the thinker.
Realizing this fundamental truth is the beginning of self-discovery.