Who Is Doing the Listening?
Before we can get better at hearing it, it is worth asking who exactly is meant to be doing the hearing.
It’s two o’clock in the morning. You’re replaying a conversation from this afternoon, editing your lines until you finally say the clever thing. Then you’re rehearsing tomorrow’s difficult meeting. Then, for no reason at all, your mind serves up a mistake you made years ago, followed by its verdict on you as a person.
The voice never stops. And because it never stops, we make an understandable assumption: it must be me.
But pause for a moment, because there is something odd hiding in that assumption. Who is listening to all of that thinking?
Hold onto that question.
Holding On to Thoughts
Notice how we introduce ourselves: I’m an accountant. I’m a worrier. I’m not a confident person. And notice what happens when someone challenges an opinion you care about. It doesn’t always feel as though they’ve questioned an idea you hold. It can feel as though they’ve attacked you.
Somewhere along the way, we stop having thoughts, beliefs and ideas and start being them.
In The Five Levels of Attachment, Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. explores how tightly we can attach ourselves to our ideas and identities. At the lightest level, an idea can be picked up when useful and put down when it isn’t. At the deepest level, questioning the idea can feel like questioning who we are.
We put on identities the way we put on coats, and there’s nothing wrong with wearing them. The mistake is forgetting that none of them is our skin.
I learned that the uncomfortable way. When I left my job of twenty years, I expected to feel free. Instead, I felt I had lost a huge part of my life. Who was I without that job? Without that role?
At first, I felt unravelled. So much of what I’d called me turned out to be a role I had been wearing. And yet something was still there, intact, watching the whole undoing.
The Good News: Every Bit of It Can Change
You’ve already changed your mind about important things: people you misjudged, opinions you once defended fiercely and beliefs about yourself you’ve quietly outgrown. And you survived every one of those changes.
Even the brain itself changes in response to experience and repetition, as we saw in the Introduction. Your thoughts can change, your beliefs can change, and your assumptions about yourself can change.
Which raises an intriguing question: if all of that can change, what is the part of you that stays?
The One Doing the Noticing
Don’t take my word for it. Test it.
Sit still for a few seconds and wait for a thought. Perhaps: I need to answer that email. Wait again. Another arrives. Now notice what just happened. You were able to observe the thought appearing.
Psychology has its own language for this capacity. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, for example, includes the concept of the observing self: the perspective from which we can notice thoughts and feelings without being entirely defined by them.
Within Living From Your Higher Self, I use that capacity as an important doorway into our connection with the Higher Self. Because once we can observe a thought, something very important becomes possible. We don’t have to believe it automatically.
From Experiencer to Observer to Decision Maker
Switching from experiencing a thought to observing it is not the end of the road. It’s the doorway to choice.
A Course in Miracles, one of the most important teachings in my own journey, helped me understand this progression. When we are completely identified with our thinking, life simply seems to happen to us. We react and feel and often see no alternative.
Then we begin to observe. We notice the thought and recognise the pattern. Eventually, we become what Ken Wapnick, interpreting the Course, calls the decision maker: the part of us that, having seen the pattern, can decide whether to continue with it or choose again.
That’s where this becomes intensely practical.
Choosing Again
Once observing becomes familiar, you start noticing which of your beliefs, reactions and habits are actually working for you. You pause before speaking, question instead of assuming and choose instead of automatically repeating yesterday.
Nothing about your circumstances needs to change first. The washing still needs doing and the meeting still starts at nine. But where there was only reaction, there is now a decision.
I once worked with a senior executive who was effective, thoughtful and led extremely well. She bemoaned the fact that she felt different from her peers because she didn’t have strong opinions about people and situations.
We live in a world that gives great credit to people who “know their own mind”. Yet her ability to observe each problem or challenge without being burdened by fixed opinions was one of her greatest strengths. She had space in which to choose.
Your thoughts can change, your beliefs can change, and your assumptions about yourself can change
Try This: Who Is Doing the Observing?
For one minute today, simply watch your thoughts. Don’t stop them. Don’t analyse them. Don’t judge yourself for having them. Just notice each one arrive and pass.
Then ask: If I can observe my thoughts, who is doing the observing?
Don’t rush to answer. The question itself is enough.
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Connecting to Your Higher Self: Discovering the Wisest Part of Who You Are