There Are Two Of You (And No I’m Not Seeing Double)
Why the voice narrating your world is not who you are and what you can do to reveal your true nature.
“Our true nature is like a precious jewel: although it may be buried temporarily in the mud, it remains completely brilliant and unaffected. We simply have to uncover it.” — Pema Chödron —
Ifirst started the journey to realize who I truly am several years ago. While in undergrad I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely read it too. It’s a manual for all of us spiritual beings having a human experience (i.e. everyone) and should be recommended reading for every person on Earth. For me the takeaway is this:
Just be here now. Everything you need is here. And when you drop into the now, you meet who you truly are. Which is everything. And also nothing (that can be defined).
While I was reading The Power of Now I felt a shift in me and my family and friends said they saw it too. And some of that stayed. But for the most part after I finished the book for the first time (I’ve since read it a few more times), I went back to “business as usual”. Because the conditioning in me is deep. You are this and you are that it tells me. Labels layered on top of one another. It’s hard to shake that (although that in itself is a limiting belief).
Shortly thereafter, I read Tolle’s A New Earth and took the course he led with Oprah Winfrey. It was transformational. That said, the way I interpreted the book (with my limitations at the time) was that it was largely about the“I” that my human self had long identified with. The one with all the labels.
Among many other things, in A New Earth Tolle explains how our human egos get triggered and why that is. The pain body in our human selves — the ones that identify with all the labels — meet the pain bodies in others. When that happens, a reaction can ensue — unless we create space for a different outcome. But while understanding that was useful, it didn’t prompt a deeper knowing of who I am if I’m being completely honest.
I am not my thoughts
And then a few years ago I read The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. And. It. Changed. Everything.
Singer’s own spiritual journey began when he started to really think about the voice in his head and where it came from. You know what I’m talking about. The voice that narrates your life. We’ve all got one — or at least most of us do. Singer calls it the “inner roommate” and argues that:
the narration makes you feel more comfortable with the world around you. Like backseat driving, it makes you feel as though things are more in your control.
This “mental manipulation of the outer experience”, as Singer refers to it, enables us to create our own reality with boundaries that are finite. As such, it is our thoughts that create our experience. This culminates in what Singer calls our own unique “presentation of the world”. We therefore experience the world as it is filtered and interpreted by our minds, not as it truly is.
The human brain processes — or at least has the capacity to process — 11 million bits of information every single second. But our conscious minds can only handle between 40 and 50 bits of information every second. To make sense of the world our limited human mind filters those 11 million bits of information. What we see as a result is shaped by our very own preconceived notions of and rules about how the world works.
In this episode of Short Wave on NPR, behavioural scientist Pragya Agarwal, author of Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias, explains that our brains process information according to our programming. And our programming includes a spectrum of unconscious biases which we may or may not be aware of. Our world is shaped by these biases and what we see affirms them. As Agarwal says, “it’s a self-perpetuating cycle”.
We can upgrade our subconscious minds to see a different reality. This article by
offers some tips on how to do that. But our human experience will still be curated. Isn’t there so much more to us than that? The answer is: Yes, yes there is.
But first back to the inner roommate . . .
In The Untethered Soul, Singer argues that the reason the mind talks so damn much (my words, not his) is because that’s the job we gave it to do. In narrating our world, our inner roommate is protecting us. But it’s also providing a buffer that prevents us from truly living. Singer argues that:
True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection.
No big deal right?
The way we do that is by coming to know the one who watches the voice inside our heads. Because we cannot be both the voice in our heads and the one who watches it. In other words, if we recognize the voice, we’re not it. And that’s where the two versions of ourselves come in. As Singer writes:
Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization that the only way to find peace and contentment is to stop thinking about yourself. You’re ready to grow when you finally realize that the “I” who is always talking inside will never be content. It always has a problem with something.
So, in order to free ourselves from “problems” (because as we’ll come to know they are not real), we need to become disassociated from the part of ourselves that always has a problem. It’s simpler than you might think. Not easy. But simple. Singer explains how to do this.
First, you have to create a little space between the having of a problem and the response to it (if one is even required which more often than not is not the case). When your mind presents you with what it calls a “problem” first ask yourself: Who is it that sees this as a problem? What part of me?
Then you go inside and do a little digging. And then once you can see that, “Okay, this part of me is feeling this way because of these reasons”, you ask yourself, “Who is it that sees this?” And I would also ask who is the “me” that is having the issue?
Because as Singer argues, the fact that you can notice that part of you is disturbed by what it calls a problem means that you are not that part of you. As he writes:
To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them.
Just by observing that you are separate from your inner roommate, you are on the path to inner freedom.
Attaining true inner freedom is an inside job
Singer explains that in order to attain true freedom we need to break the habit of solving our problems from the outside, through external action. He argues that the only way we will truly solve our problems — or what we perceive as problems — is to go inside. And ultimately, we need to let go of that part of us that is having problems.
The first step you’ve already done. You’ve recognized that the part of you having the issue, whatever it may be (and sometimes the issues are truly ridiculous, at least for my inner roommate), is separate from the part of you recognizing it. Now you can dig deeper.
What’s its damage and why?
You could literally ask that. I do sometimes. And sometimes the answer will come and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s usually about how my fragile ego feels slighted or unimportant in some way. Sometimes I literally will sit with it and soothe it like an upset child. I’ll say to it: “You’re okay, I’ve got you”. In doing that I also recognize that it’s not me.
And because it’s not me and the problems it sees are not mine in a very real sense, I don’t have to worry about it. Once I recognize the voice and its owner and tell it that all is okay, I just let it go.
And that’s all. It won’t be easy at first to let go of the “problem” and the feelings associated with it. But over time it does get easier.
Real spiritual growth, Singer argues, is about not having to take the inner roommate with us everywhere we go. And that’s where we come back to The Power of Now. Because when you’re in the now, truly dropping down into this moment, right here, right now, your inner roommate isn’t there. Singer writes:
At some point in your growth, it starts to become quieter inside. This happens quite naturally as you take a deeper seat within yourself.
Once we do that we can experience a kind of peace and serenity we might not ever have known. But first we have to come to realize that we are not the voice and that we’ve been locked inside our minds with what Singer calls “a maniac”.
We can go much deeper than that. Beyond the limits of what our minds perceive, beyond our conditioning and beyond all the labels. That’s something I’m still working on through my meditation practice but in the meantime I’m also just enjoying life right here, right now.
The essential question for me has been: how can I reconcile my essential self within my human experience?
This is a good question. A fundamental question. Who am I? I know that at the core I am God. That I am not just connected to all things, but that I am all things and that all things are me. This article by
describes that beautifully.
Sometimes words seem inadequate to capture who I am.
I have a journal prompt each morning that asks me to define who I am. I used to write things like I am love or I am the universe or other affirmations that express the true nature of who I am, who we all are fundamentally. And those things are all true as are so many others. But sometimes they just don’t resonate. Lately I’ve just been writing nothing because nothing seems to fit. I’ve been feeling more and more with the idea that I just am. No more. No less.
I’ve recently found the I Am . . . With Jonny Wilkinson podcast and it’s resonating with me so much. Because it’s about stripping away all those labels. On the very first episode of the podcast, Wilkinson asked his guest, spiritual teacher Rupert Spira, for his definition of transformation. Spira responded that it is:
perhaps not quite so much a transformation as a recognition of something that has always been present and is always the case but has not been recognized . . . A recognition of our essential self. Which we perhaps didn’t recognize before because our sense of ourself was so entangled with the content of our experience: with our thoughts, with our history, with our memories, with our activities and relationships.
Spira argues that while we all have a sense that we are ourselves, not all of us know ourselves clearly. This is because our sense of self tends to be influenced by our experiences and conditioning. He argues that our “essential self” is:
That aspect of ourselves that hasn’t been acquired through the course of our lives. The part of ourself that remains when everything that is superfluous to us or extraneous to us has been removed . . . When we say “I am” we refer just to the essential self of being.
Spira calls recognizing or identifying with our essential self, a “psychological undressing”. As he argues and as Singer also writes in The Untethered Soul we often define who we are with labels, some of which we give ourselves, some of which are given to us by society. But when we take everything off and remove the labels what is left over is our essential being. And as Spira notes:
Our essential nature does not share the limits of the body or the mind.
Wilkinson responded that he named his podcast I Am . . . for that very reason, drawing on wisdom of sages who said that “I am is who I am”. He concluded that there is:
Nothing more you can add. Nothing more you can be.
Our labels will change over time. Our human identities will shift and evolve. And the beautiful thing is that we get to decide how we show up in the day to day in our human experience. But our essential selves, the essence of who we are, will always be there. And we can drop down into it in every moment.
I can experience both my infinite self and my human self simultaneously
I don’t believe we have to choose between one or the other. Being human and being infinite. I believe that I can be both my essential self and my human self. And the realization that I can embody both selves wholly and simultaneously changed everything for me. Because while I want to know my essential self, I also want to have fun in this human body. To explore this world. To love and be loved. To live a life well lived — whatever that might look like.
This revelation that I can be both selves has helped me immeasurably in my day to day. For a long time I really struggled with my day to day as a climate policy researcher. Every day I asked myself: how can I focus on things my human self perceives as problems when my essential self knows that everything is perfect?
The answer has been bringing more and more of that essential self into my day to day. And seeing my work as an opportunity to evolve while making change in the world that my human self perceives is needed. Not focusing on what I don’t want but seeing all the beauty in the world as it is and the opportunities to make it even better.
I still want to program my subconscious to see more and to go beyond my limitations with my meditation practice but I’m also more at ease with the world.
I’ve started to see opportunities to drop into the now and meet my essential self and to also enjoy the human experience fully in each moment. What does the here and now feel like, taste like, look like and sound like? To really be here, now, in this moment. And the more I’m experiencing that beauty, the more beauty I see.
My inner roommate still shows up every day, definitely. But now I know how to soothe it. It’s like a very small child getting anxious about what it’s experiencing. It just wants to make sense of it all. As soon as I tell it that all is okay and there are no problems in this moment, then it gets quieter and more often than not goes away entirely. That creates more space to experience the world and to bask in all the good it has to offer. And that is everything.
If you’re interested in learning more from Michael Singer — which I highly recommend doing — he gives weekly talks which you can find here. He also has a new book Living Untethered, a guide for moving beyond the boundaries of our thoughts to experience a more expansive life.
