Since a very early age – I don’t remember when, i have been talking to myself in my mind.
An ongoing narrative about myself, life and others.
Over the years it developed into an automatic habit and eventually took on negative “tapes” and would run these tapes. It also includes the ability to play songs in my head and hear them almost note for note.
These both served to take me out of the current moment slightly – thus avoid pain suffering and embarrassment and insecurity -at least to some degree -or so I thought.
I also become very good at rehearsing what I would say and do in coming situation. I effectively ran simulations of all possible outcomes so I would be ready.
This also avoided real feelings and being here now to a great degree.
I did – at times over the years – notice that I could suspend this narration. When an insight or intent or will arose, I could simply not generate the narration and go right to action. Or, when watching a sunset, for example, simply watch it and have no narration. But these were few and far between.
Even when I was practicing for real in the early 2000’s and I noticed this, there was an intuitive sense this was the thing to do – but I did not pursue it.
Talking to myself is very familiar and comforting. It’s like having a friend to talk to and talk back 24×7. Like a security blanket or frankly even masturbatory.
Fast forward to the last few weeks. As the Realization hit: First There is only the Source manifesting as all and I am that source as well – the belief in Joe as the doer and separate self began to vanish and the negative parts of the personality – sadness, worry, insecurity, fear dropped away and the second Insight I am that hit with rock solidness. But I think only the belief went away. There was still the narration. Good narration – no old bad tapes, so a huge improvement and resulting change in personality – but still narration and so stull a “self”.
And again came the impulse to practice stopping the narration.
One thing I’ve been struggling with almost daily is the idea of no-self. It’s talked about a lot and I just did not get it.
Finally, today, I worked through this at length with Dave and as he explained the sensation of no one watching the sunset, just watching or no one doing. I thought: He is talking about when I suspend the narration!
Because that’s the exact experience! When I suspend the narration and there is the insight/intent/will bubble up and it goes straight to action – word or deed – there is no “sense of being the doer” nobody in the middle so to speak.
And when I suspend narration when there is a stimulus – like a sunset – there is only watching the sunrise happening -no experiencer to know there is sunset being watched. And even then only in hindsight is an experiencer injected.
But in reality there is no one here -no experiencer, no knower no doer. Never was.
When people have intense experiences – walking, sports, sex, drugs, there is no narration, but they may go back and in “hindsight’ fill in the imaginary self as the doer.
My text to Dave:
Because
At the core
There is no one here and never has been.
Wow 🤩 to type those words and feel it head to heart
Rock solid.
Or balls to bones if you prefer the matrix.
I prefer yours.
And nothing to be scared of
Or sought after or attained.
It’s a stopping, a dropping of a mental ‘tic’ essentially.
Like saying ‘Ya’ know’ after each sentence.
I see this as a conditioned habit. Probably so severe in my case that for most people the Realization is enough to snuff out the narration if there was not much there. Their’s went to “automatic” – while mine stayed manual. I have to remember to do it; It becomes part of my main practice. I wonder how this will work in mediation.
But in my case, it was strong enough to keep going on its own.
And I was scared of what no self would be like. And resistant to it.
Now I think it will wind down on its own little by little until there is just the intent-action or watching a sunset.
I think this is what Papaji is talking about when he says just stop thinking for one second.
If I do not suffer and do not seek – why bother with it then. Well, there may be a slight polluting of the direct experience of Self.
And the narrative can get in the way and sustain the ego. I would say it is the final remnant of egoic activity.
It will cease and probably all that will remain is the memory of a long time spent over-thinking things.
I should add – when I suspend mind talk – practice no-self — now that I know what it is called — the results are better- direct, insightful, compassionate.
Example – clerks at Hallmark and Costco.
Mckenna was right: we create the story of a false self to protect us from the unacceptable truth of no-self. It is simply not acceptable or us not to exist – to be sock puppets on the hand of the One.
From December 12, 2009:
Sensory forms versus thought forms – each sense of the object – is a separate thought form. I saw this early on , that the juncture of sensory thought forms, and mental thought forms, this juncture is made real by me, and is the “self” that is “assumed’ or filled in by the mind. If there is seeing, there must be a see-er, and in that instant “i” as seer seems to exist. Such is the nature of perception and thought: if there is a thought, there must be a thinker and I am the thinker.
But no, simply an illusion, the mind filling in pieces.