# Voice-over **URL:** \ **Category:** CSG1996\ **Created:** [May 4, 1996, 6:23pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/voice-over/12135 "1996-05-04T18:23:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1

**Author:** ![William\_T\_Powers4](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/977dab/32.png) [@William\_T\_Powers4](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/William_T_Powers4)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 1996, 6:23pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/voice-over/12135/1 "1996-05-04T18:23:32Z")

[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. ---

**Author:** ![Bruce\_Gregory10](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/9de0a6/32.png) [@Bruce\_Gregory10](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/Bruce_Gregory10)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 1996, 3:24pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/voice-over/12135/2 "1996-05-09T15:24:49Z")

[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)]