Hey there! Buddy, speaking! Yessir, your ego! Your pleasure-seeking pain-avoiding wired-for-business hyper viper! Yes, it’s me! Me as you! The voice in your head that never shuts up! That likes and dislikes, desires and fears, judges and labels, worries and wonders, remembers and imagines, plans and organizes, reacts and repeats?! So times a-wastin’, dude! Pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er!
Self-criticism is the inner equivalent of repeatedly striking my head with a mallet.
You are not the thoughts in your head. Not even remotely. You are the awareness of the thoughts in your head. Awareness is the great power, the universal intelligence. That’s who you are!
For a long time I believed everything that the voice in my head told me. It was like being tutored by an over-adrenalized howler monkey. I broke down, lost my health, left my job, got depressed—all the usual hell. In the absence of elders, it can take a lot to gentle a man. To draw him inside.
Involuntary thinking is: (1) Compulsive, having no off switch, generating by one estimate 85 thousand thoughts per day. (2) Negative, punctuating its bleak, fox-holed landscape with volcanic bursts of catastrophism. (3) Repetitive, donkey-walking the same block in the same neighbourhood, day after day. (4) Future-based, in which unruly and profligate dimension it fattens itself on worst-case scenarios.
Men's Work 