Voice-over

[From Bill Powers (960504.1100 MDT)]

Bruce Gregory (960503.1140 EDT) --

So you misspent part of your youth in "est" -- I misspent part of mine
in dianetics. We seem to have come out of these experiences with one
most valuable understanding:

     I noticed that it somehow stunned the perpetual "voice-over" in my
     head into silence. (What's the point of paying attention to your
     voice-over if it's just a mechanical subsystem blathering on
     because that is what it was designed to do? Sort an internal
     3CPO.) I found, in Bill's words, the only "sense of self" that
     remained was a sense of calm watchfulness.

The "voice-over" is what I would now refer to as the activity of a set
of levels ranging from categories through sequences to programs. This is
the "rational mind," which is thought by some to be the pinnacle of
human achievement. The ability to establish premises, develop methods
and rules and algorithms, and work out the implications in a systematic
and orderly way is certainly a skill that is extremely useful and to be
valued, but it can also make one a slave to intellect, just as a
physical-development enthusiast can turn developing the useful skills of
the body into enslavement to them. The intellectual obsession can trap
one within a systematic framework in which rational processes, based
largely on imagination, take the place of present-time perception at
other levels, particularly lower levels where experience is less remote
from the real world. This kind of rational obsession, at any level, also
obscures higher levels of perception, so one forgets to ask questions
like "Why am I doing this?" One pulls the covers up over one's head and
loses oneself in the comforting intricacies of solving the problem at
hand, playing the game for its own sake instead of as part of living a
life.

I suppose it takes a bit of obsessing to get really good at anything.
Since we have only a limited lifespan, making a place for oneself before
time runs out probably demands focusing on one level, one kind of skill,
at the expense of others. But even if this is how life works, we can
still back off from the whole thing occasionally, and try to see both
above and below the levels of experience where we have settled into our
grooves.

In my youth I did a good deal of reading about Yoga and Zen and other
such stuff, mostly because people kept coming up to me and thrusting
books into my hand. I wasn't impressed by most of the whistles and bells
of Eastern philosophy, but eventually I decided that there were probably
a few people who had really understood something, with the books that
have reached us in the present being what was left after a long game of
Telephone (I whisper a message to the person on my left, who whispers it
to the next person, and so on until it's gone all the way around the
circle; then the last person says the message out loud and everybody
cracks up. "The dog went Thursday to the wedding?").

The method of levels came out of wondering (quite early in the
development of PCT, in the '50s) about self-awareness. Whatever else was
being sold by a particular philosopher, one message that came through
very frequently was that there really isn't any self to be aware of --
that when you're aware, you're always aware of something else. I finally
concluded that the original ungarbled message must have been that of
course there is a self, and an I, and a personality, and an ego, but
that you know about these things only as objects of awareness. As soon
as you notice them, you can't help also noticing that you're looking AT
them, from somewhere else. They are attributes of learned brain
functions, but they aren't the Observer.

The problem is that when we try to _think_ about these things, we have
to use whatever abilities we have built into our brains through
experience and reorganization. Even talking about them requires using
the language we have learned. So even if you have experienced this state
of "calm watchfulness," it has little significance until you work out a
way for subsystems in your own brain to live with the idea that they're
not the highest authority around here. This isn't easy, and I don't know
anyone (emphatically including me) who has it all nailed down.

People come at this idea from all sorts of angles. I read a great book
about an alcoholic woman who worked as a railroad laborer (really). She
had developed a total distrust of her rational mind, because it kept
working out reasons why she owed it to herself to take another drink.
She never got around to saying what it was that was doing this
distrusting, but it was clear that to her, her rational processes were
an "it", not an "I". She could see them working away, and felt the urge
to identify herself with them and go along, but somehow managed to
remain apart enough to see where they were leading.

The "voice over" is what some Eastern Philosphers have called "monkey-
chatter." When you become the monkey, it all makes sense to you, and you
happily follow along with whatever the chatter suggests, as if it were
Truth Embodied. But when you manage to stand back a bit, and view the
chatter simply as activity in a learned system, its recommendations
suddenly become a lot less compelling. You start considering other
things, such as whether logic is really the answer to the problem at
hand. Sometimes it's clearly not. Then you can let the monkey chatter
until it gets tired and falls silent, after which you do what's right.
In the best of all possible worlds, you wake the monkey up when it's
needed, and when it's done its job you send it back to sleep.

The real problems arise when the monkey becomes a 600-pound gorilla.
Since this gorilla is rational, but not smart, it can decide that there
really is no such thing as awareness, and set up defenses against
outside interference. Or it can decide that whatever is pushing it
around must be something supernatural, and turn into a 600-pound
religious fanatic. Or it can even decide that rationality is no good for
anything, and set up a logical system in which anything goes, or in
which certain modes of rational thought, such as mathematics or system
design, are the Root of All Evil. As I said, it's rational, but not
smart.

How the monkey does chatter on.

···

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Best,

Bill P.

[From Bruce Gregory (960509.1025 EDT)]

(Rick Marken 960508.1830)

  Bill Powers (960507b) on thinking about thoughts:

  Since nobody has done much posting since Bill posted this beauty , I
  suppose it left everyone in the same state as it left me: speechless
  awe.

Amen!

(Bill Powers 960504.1100 MDT)

  The method of levels came out of wondering (quite early in the
  development of PCT, in the '50s) about self-awareness. Whatever else was
  being sold by a particular philosopher, one message that came through
  very frequently was that there really isn't any self to be aware of --
  that when you're aware, you're always aware of something else. I finally
  concluded that the original ungarbled message must have been that of
  course there is a self, and an I, and a personality, and an ego, but
  that you know about these things only as objects of awareness. As soon
  as you notice them, you can't help also noticing that you're looking AT
  them, from somewhere else. They are attributes of learned brain
  functions, but they aren't the Observer.

A most vivid description of the workings of the observer was given by
Stephen Levine in his lucid and graceful classic, _A Gradual Awakening_
(Anchor Books, 1979). I quote a passage to give the flavor of this
gem to those who may not have come across it:

  "A Train of Thought

  "An image about practicing meditation that may be helpful is that of
standing at a railroad crossing, watching a freight train passing by.
In each transparent boxcar, there is a thought. We try to look
straight ahead into the present, but our attachments draw our
attention into the passing boxcars: we identify with the various
thoughts. As we attend to the train, we notice there's supper in one
boxcar, but we just ate, so we're not pulled by that one. The
laundry list is the next one, so we reflect for a moment on the blue
towel hanging on the line to dry, but we wake up quite quickly to the
present once again, as the next boxcar has someone in it meditating
and we recall what we are doing. A few more boxcars go by with
thoughts clearly recognized as thoughts. But, in the next one is a
snarling lion chasing someone who looks like us. We stay with that
one until its way down the line to see if it got us. We identify with
that one because it "means" something to us. We have an attachment to
it. Then we notice we've missed all the other boxcars streaming by in
the meantime and we let go of our fascination for the lion and bring
our attention straight ahead into the present once again.

  "We stick to some and we don't stick to others. The train is just
there - and the silent witness who's standing at the crossroads
also seems to be there. Those are the first stages of trying to be
mindful, trying to stay in the here and now.

  "Then, as we're a bit more used to being aware of the contents, we
start noticing the process of the train going by - just boxcar after
boxcar - and our attention doesn't follow every stimulus: we don't
keep getting lost down the track in the past or anticipating what's
coming from the future. So, we're looking straight ahead, not
distracted by any of the contents, when all of a sudden one of the
boxcars explodes as it goes by. We're drawn out into that one, we
jump into the action in that boxcar. Then we come back with a wry
smile full of recognition that it was just an image of an explosion,
just a boxcar thought. And, again, we are straight ahead with just
the process of passing boxcars, when there we are beating our wife in
one of the boxcars. There's all kind of stuff in the mind. And we're
going to follow it, to be pulled by it, until we start seeing the
impersonal, conditioned nature of the contents and recognize the
perfect flow of the process itself.

  "Then, we notice as we look straight ahead that we're starting to be
able to see between the cars. And we begin to see what's on the other
side of the train, what is beyond thought. We experience that the
process is occurring against a background of undifferentiated
openness, that, moment to moment, mind is arising and passing away
in vast space.

  "As we experience the frame of reference in which all this melodrama
is occurring, it begins freeing us from being so carried away - even
by fear. We start seeing. "Ah, there's the exploding boxcar trick
again," or "There's the angry boss one again." Whatever it is, we
start seeing it as part of the process. We see it in context. The
small mind that identifies with all of that stuff starts becoming
bigger and bigger and bigger, starts encompassing even itself in a
mind so vast it has room for everything and everyone, including the
train and the observer. And, then, even that fellow standing at the
crossroads watching turns out to be just the contents of one of those
boxcars, just another object of mind. And awareness, standing
nowhere, is everywhere at once."

Bruce G.

Bill Powers (960504.1100 MDT)]