When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill (provided he is not wearing a headset of some kind). But we all talk to ourselves constantly—most of us merely have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. We rehearse past conversations—thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said. We anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear. We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our heads who required continuous narration to know what is happening: “Wow, nice desk. I wonder what kind of wood that is. Oh, but it has no drawers. They didn’t put drawers in this thing? How can you have a desk without at least one drawer?” Who are we talking to? No one else is there. And we seem to imagine that if we just keep this inner monologue to ourselves, it is perfectly compatible with mental health. Perhaps it isn’t.
Sam Harris, Waking Up, p.94
But, if we are really alert, we may detect – almost like a shadow, or a pre-echo on old-school reel-to-reel tape – a wordless thought milliseconds before the verbalised thought, with (as far as we can tell) the identical informational content; only we can’t then resist putting words to it and reciting it to, as Harris says, the invisible blind man in our head.
What is going on? The nearest thing to an explanation I can come up with – and I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of years now – is that continual contemplative practice somehow opens one’s attention, one’s witnessing attention, to the actual operation of something Dan Dennett described as “multiple drafts”: one draft, normally unconscious, is actually registering and even reacting to to perception; while another – the conscious, “front of house” storyteller – is constructing his usual narrative scenario dedicated to the maintenance of a stable, but illusory, sense of self.
I’m not sure that any particular consequence arises from this rather disorienting perception, except perhaps insofar as it further dislocates any remaining sense we may have of being a permanent, unchangeable self or “soul”. It is disconcerting, though – for the first few times even scary – so here again I probably should repeat my regular “health warning”! If any reader feels there is a risk of anything like a spiritual crisis being precipitated by this kind of practice, or merely wants to be prepared, there are hopefully useful links to the Spiritual Crisis Network and other resources on my own advice page on this site.
An Open Ground 