One does one’s thinking before one knows what one is to think about. – Julian Jaynes

Blindly listening

Most of us think in some form and mixture of words and pictures. And a good portion of that content is repetitive. Time for dinner. Tired. What’s for dinner again? An image of a person you talked to a few hours ago. The same words and phrases stream by all day. The content is often mundane, but it can easily absorb us. You’re probably listening to your thoughts more than you’re reading these words.

This inane chatter follows us everywhere. Whether it’s a holiday in Greece, or starting a new job, you’ll still find the same old thoughts going around your head. The same thoughts, the same suffering. Wherever you go, there you are. It’s a heavily recycled line, but it does occasionally ring true.

Even though we all think, it can be jarring to learn about what other people are listening to. For example, here’s Joe Rogan describing what his inner voice sounds like:

It’s like a general. It’s someone going.. “Shut the [—] up. Go to work. What are you talking about? Why you being such a bitch?” So, he’s kind of a jerk. My inner voice is never wrong. My inner self-correcting voice is always correct. It’s always right. If I’ve done something wrong in my life, made a mistake in my life, said something I shouldn’t have said, that voice berates me.

No matter how silly they might sound to others, we tend to listen to them. We respond and act on them too. We’re reaching toward our phone before we realise we’ve been thinking about calling someone. And if the content is unpleasant, we lurch away. We just glance away from the mirror and sigh, or start to stuff our faces with food, or turn up the music louder.

Talking back

To take a step back from this blind reaction, one thing we can do is to reply to it directly. We can say “yes? what else?”. By engaging with an insulting or judging voice, we might discover it doesn’t have a whole lot of substance to say.

Here’s another tool. It’s called Here we go again.

Step 1: Notice a bit of inner commentary. For the reasons described above, this is hard to do. So maybe you notice a thought that you say out loud like “I’m tired.”

Step 2: Say “Here we go again.”

Step 3: Notice how it feels. You might feel some confusion and annoyance and resistance, a bit like how it feels to try to understand a dream. It will be even harder if you are overcome by a strong emotion. Maybe you might hear another voice say “cut this stupid exercise out, this is a real problem we need to deal with.”

But no matter what the thing is, you can always just roll your eyes and say “here we go again.”

• Small things: I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to get out of bed.
• Big things: I want to quit my job
• Material things: Look at all these dirty .
• Philosophical things: Life has no meaning.

Here we go again. Here we go again. Here we go again.

Use it liberally. Even if it feels silly, it’s almost always better than blindly following the thread of thought.

Here we go again.

Also published on buddhabike.substack