The Voice in the Head

I have been thinking a lot about a concept covered in Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” – the voice in the head. He tells the story of being on the subway on his way to work and observing a woman having a loud and angry conversation with a voice in her head. The woman is very agitated and upset, and looks down and off to the side into empty space as she continues a conversation along the lines of: “And then she said to me…so I said to her you are a liar how dare you accuse me of…when you are the one who has always taken advantage of me I trusted you and you betrayed my trust…”

Tolle mentions that later, as he is standing in the men’s room at work washing his hands, he thinks to himself, “I hope I don’t end up like her.” A man standing next to him looks briefly in his direction, and he realizes he has said these words out loud, he is already like her, that his mind is just as “incessantly active as hers,” and that really if she is mad, so are we all to some degree. Tolle says:

For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness…at that moment of detachment from my mind, I laughed out loud. It may have sounded insane, but it was the laughter of sanity, the laughter of the big-bellied Buddha. ‘Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.’ That’s what the laughter seemed to be saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be forgotten. I would spend the next three years in anxiety and depression, completely identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awareness returned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of compulsive thinking and of the false, mind-made I. … Thinking is only a tiny aspect of the consciousness that we are.

This might have been part of what Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows is talking about in the song, “Perfect Blue Buildings,” repeating the phrase,

How am I gonna keep myself away from me
Keep myself away
How am I gonna keep myself away from me
Keep myself away...

It's an idea that many of the books I’ve been reading express in one way or another; the AA groups refer to it as “stinking thinking.” The meditation books describe techniques for cessation of thinking, for emptying the mind. My skill is slowly increasing at stepping outside of myself, noticing my thinking, and more importantly countering it when it is causing anxiety, grief, or my personal favorite: guilt.