Transcription
Okay, you did the work. You know the ego's an illusion, that there is no separate self. But the voice in your head never got the memo. It's still narrating, judging, replaying every mistake, exhausting you every single day.
Over 30 years I've sat with people who've read every book on awakening. Many have gone overseas, some more than once. A lot of people have gone to workshops, maybe two or three. They can explain perfectly why the self is an illusion. And they're still lying awake at 2:00 a.m. listening to that same voice criticize something they said at dinner. "I understand there is no self," one told me. "So, why won't it shut up?"
By the end of this video, you'll see the one thing every awakened teacher confirms, but seldom actually points to. If there really is no self, that critical voice can't be self-talk. It can't be you. Once you see what it actually is, you stop believing in it, and it stops running the show.
Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Mark Waller. I've been a therapist for 30 years teaching people they are not the voice in their head. Today we're going to go one step further. If there is no self, what is self-talk? Here's some quotes.
Ramana Maharshi says, "When you try to trace the ego, which is the basis of perception of the world and everything else, you find the ego does not exist at all, and neither does all this creation that you see."
Nisargadatta Maharaj from the book I Am That says, "There's no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these define the person. See that you are not what you believe yourself to be."
Adyashanti says, "In truth, there is no self, watcher, or observer. There is only watching and or observing. There is awareness, but no owner of awareness. No someone who is aware."
Now, this has been more or less proven in science. In the '80s, Benjamin Libet found that the sense of self or agency or a doer comes in about .3 to .5 seconds after the brain initiates action or behavior. Well, well, what does this mean? What this means is and he used EEG equipment and hand movements and was basically able to show that the person was not aware that they decided to do something until about a third of a second to a half a second after the brain had initiated the action. Well, this pretty much proves that the sense of being a doer is an illusion, but what happens is the ego mind, the sense of self comes in a fraction of a second later and claims credit for all the action that's taking place.
Self-talk already assumes a self. That's the whole problem. How can that be true? Every teacher, every therapist, every wellness app calls it self-talk. Oftentimes with an emphasis on negative self-talk and that's a problem in and of itself. But that name smuggles in an assumption nobody questions that there is a self in there talking to itself. If the awakened masters are right and I believe that they are, if there is no separate self, then the very phrase self-talk is a contradiction. You cannot have self-talk with no self doing the talking.
If there is no self, then who or what is actually narrating your life? This isn't a semantic trick. It's the question every awakened teacher points to and then kind of leaves is. Tolle says, "Observe the thinker and to his credit he says observe self-talk." But again, usually that's in the frame of reference of negative thinking and negative self-talk. Spyros says that the self doesn't exist. None of them stopped to ask if that is true, what exactly is producing the running commentary in your head? Something's happening. It just isn't you talking to you.
Not one of them ever comes out and says that voice is a thought. Well, maybe they imply it and maybe it's so simple they skip over it because they assume everybody understands that. They validate no self. They talk about thinking in general. Nobody points at the exact voice and says that's a thought right now. The thought that just said, "What if I don't have a thought?" or "How long will I have to wait in order to have a thought?" or "I'm never going to get this right." That is a thought. So, you can agree with the whole teaching and still be fused to your own self-talk because nobody makes it clear to you that the me voice counts, too.
Where does self-talk actually come from in the first place? Well, when children learn language when they're young, they display two specific types of communication. One is social communication. "Hello Mommy. I love you, Daddy." And the other one has been labeled by Piaget and other developmentalists as egocentric speech. Well, what's egocentric speech? Egocentric speech is the child talking out loud to themselves about themselves with no expectation anybody's going to hear them or talk back. That's called egocentric speech. Research has indicated that the more stress the child is under, the more egocentric speech they display. So, what In In essence, they're doing is they're using egocentric speech to soothe themselves and make themselves feel better.
Well, Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, came along and said about five or six, maybe seven years of age, that egocentric speech of a child goes inside and it becomes inner speech, the voice in your head that sounds like you talking to you. And what we do from that moment on, starting in childhood, is we talk to ourselves to make ourselves feel better. That is the purpose of self-talk and that is where it comes from. It is a survival habit from childhood, still running on autopilot when we're adults, decades after you decided you needed it to help you feel safe or okay. You didn't choose it, you inherited it.
Because it isn't self-talk, you can disidentify from it and that's really good news. And finally, experience who you really are. This is the part that actually changes something. If the voice isn't you, it isn't wired to your identity by necessity, it is wired there by habit. You can literally retrain the brain to sever the connection between your true self and the narrator. What a relief that is. I've been doing this for 30 years with people and when they realize this, it affects all aspects of their life.
What's left when that wire is cut is an emptiness. It's the first direct experience of who you actually are underneath the commentary. What we do on this channel is we teach moment mindfulness, which retrains the brain to disidentify from the voice in your head. So, sit with your eyes open and wait for the next thought. And we want to do this with the eyes open because we want to be able to monitor the interior activity while we're in our normal daily lives, driving to work, you know, brushing your teeth, whatever the daily activity is. Not to be confused with prayer or meditation. And what we're doing is passively waiting for the next thought. We're not generating a thought. We're not forcing a thought. We're just waiting for mental activity to start. And the instant we notice that we're thinking, the voice in your head goes away, and you're done. That's it. All you're doing is just noticing your own mental activity.
Well, why does this work, and why does it result in disidentification? Because there are two networks in the brain. There's a network called the task positive network, and it's basically headquartered up here in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. The other network in the brain is the network that creates the narration that talks to you. It's called the default mode network. Well, those two networks are negatively correlated. Have you ever noticed that when you're watching your favorite TV show, there is no dialogue going on in your head. So, when we're focused and concentrating, the task positive network suppresses the activity in the default mode network, and the internal dialogue stops. We're taking advantage of that in moment mindfulness. So, you just notice the voice in your head is speaking. The instant you notice it, it goes away, and then you go back about your business. You don't analyze the thought. You don't talk back to the thought. And you don't judge the thought. Eventually, what happens is you realize that you're the observer and not the thinker, and disidentification happens.
Now, this is an important thing to point out. Disidentification is a result of moment mindfulness. It's a moment of realization that you're not the voice in your head. Moment mindfulness is the process. So, what we're not doing is we're not saying, "That's not me. That's not my thought. You know, I don't like thoughts." We're not trying to have better thoughts. We're not trying to improve our thoughts. What we're trying to do is break the identification we have with thought itself.
All right, what do I mean by that? Well, I've identified this shirt to be my shirt, right? Now, if I took this off and sold it to you, I would no longer identify it as my shirt. The other thing that's important about identification is would it make any difference if I thought I was my shirt, whether the shirt was blue or red? Well, it would make no difference because I'm not a shirt. You are not the voice in your head.
What moment mindfulness does, practiced regularly and very casually, is it breaks the identification and your relationship with thought itself changes. You don't have better thoughts or more positive thought. That's not the point. The point is you no longer identify with your quote self-talk. And that moment of disidentification feels like true liberation.
We do coaching in moment mindfulness. If you'd like some help, there'll be links in the description below, and we're more than happy to guide you through the process because a lot of us are so up in our heads and it's so complicated in there that doing something simple like this really takes some cleaning up on aisle five before we're able to do it.
All right. You don't have to take my word for it, though. Moment mindfulness proves it. As soon as you focus on the voice in your head, it goes away. Watch a thought the way you'd watch it drift by without chasing it or generating the next one. The voice goes quiet, not because you fought it or silenced it or won an argument with it. It just leaves. That's the proof. If it were you, it couldn't leave. Moment mindfulness trains your brain to disidentify.
So, you've done the work. You know the self is an illusion. The voice in your head never got the memo. This video makes the case that self-talk is a contradiction. If there's truly no self, then nothing is talking to itself. What you've been calling self-talk is actually a childhood habit, egocentric speech, turned self-soothing, mistaken for your own identity ever since. Dis-identify from it and you don't just get quiet, you dis-identify. You start living without a narrator telling you what's going on in your life.
You know, imagine this. Let's say you and I went to the top of the mountain. We get to the top of the mountain, there's this gigantic red tree and you're awestruck. You've never seen anything like this. It's hundreds of feet in the air. Meanwhile, I'm standing next to you thinking of the word sequoia. While you're experiencing a tree, I'm experiencing a word in my head. This is the human condition. We're not living life, we're thinking life. We're lost in the world of mental activity and we think that's the experience of life. Talking to ourselves is a poor representation of reality and it causes all kinds of problems. Dis-identify from it and you don't just get quiet, you get the experience of who you actually are underneath it.
You don't have to take my word for it. Moment mindfulness lets you watch the voice leave the room yourself. And remember, life is perfect unless you think about it. Check out my new book called Free of the Mind where we go into this in some depth and check out the description below where there'll be some resources for you and we'd really like to help you on this journey. Be free of self-talk because it's a paradox we don't want you to struggle with any longer. Thank you.
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