In Connecting To Your Higher Self, I introduced the wiser, calmer perspective that lives in each of us. In the last article, we met the quiet voice we kept talking over. This one asks a more practical question than it first appears: who is doing the listening?
“There is nothing more important to true growth than realising that you are not the voice of the mind, you are the one who hears it.”- Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul.
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. It runs through everything that follows.
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 feel as though they’ve questioned an idea you hold; it feels as though they’ve attacked you. That’s the clue. 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. maps this precisely. We hold every idea at some depth of attachment. At the lightest level, an idea is simply a tool, picked up when useful, put down when not. At the deepest, the idea owns us: to question it is to threaten our very existence. And his evidence is painfully practical: the depth of your attachment to any thought, belief or idea determines exactly how much it hurts to detach from it. If letting go of a belief would feel like losing a limb, that isn’t proof the belief is true. It’s proof of how tightly you’ve fused with something you merely hold.
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 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? What I felt, at first, was 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. That something is what this article is about.
The Good News: Every Bit of It Can Change
Here is the plain, practical fact that follows. You have already changed your mind about important things, people you misjudged, opinions you once defended fiercely, beliefs about yourself you’ve quietly outgrown. And you survived every one of those changes. If you were your beliefs, changing your mind would feel like dying. In practice, it usually feels like relief.
Even the brain itself cooperates. Far from being fixed, it physically rewires in response to how you use it; neuroscience calls it neuroplasticity, and we’ll put it to work later in this series. So nothing you currently think, believe or assume about yourself is set. Your thoughts are changeable. Your beliefs are changeable. Which raises the question this whole article turns on: 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, now, just for a few seconds.
Sit still and wait. A thought will appear. Perhaps: I need to answer that email. Wait again. Another arrives: I wish I’d handled yesterday differently. And then, if your mind is anything like mine once was, an old familiar one: I’m not good enough.
Now the only question that matters: who noticed those thoughts arriving?
A thought cannot observe itself. Something you watched each one appear, sit there, and dissolve, something that was not itself a thought. This is not a mystical claim. Mindfulness traditions have taught it for millennia; modern psychology found its own route to it, and acceptance and commitment therapy calls it the observing self. Whatever the language, the finding is the same: behind the stream of thinking there is a steady awareness doing the watching. It’s the same presence that looked out of your eyes at eight years old and is reading this sentence now.
Throughout this series, I simply call this awareness our connection with the Higher Self.
From Experiencer to Observer To Decision Maker
Switching from the one thinking the thought to the observer of the thought 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, describes the progression. When the ego thought system is entrenched in our experience, we are usually so identified with our thoughts that it never occurs to us to question them. Then we become the experiencer: life happens to us, we feel all of it, but we still see no choice in any of it. With practice we become the observer, able to watch our thoughts and patterns instead of drowning in them. And observation leads somewhere solidly practical: the decision maker- the one who, having finally seen a pattern clearly, is free to keep it or change it. A Course in Miracles challenges the decision maker to choose the Higher Self thought system.
Choosing Again
Once observing becomes familiar, you start to notice which of your beliefs, reactions and habits are actually working for you, and you discover you can change the ones that aren’t. You pause before speaking. Question instead of assuming. You 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. Or as a certain quiet voice once put it, all those years ago in my family’s living room: you can choose again.
I worked with a senior executive who was effective, thoughtful and led extremely well. She once bemoaned the fact that she felt different from her peers because she didn’t have strong opinions on people and situations. In the world we live in, we give credit to those who “know their own mind”, but in fact her ability to observe each problem or challenge unburdened by opinions and fixed views was in fact her strength.
Try This – A Moment with Your Higher Self
For one minute today, simply watch your thoughts. Don’t stop them. Try not to analyse them. Don’t judge yourself for having them. Just notice each one arrive and pass.
Then ask yourself: if I can observe my thoughts, who is doing the observing? Don’t rush to answer. Stay with the question, and notice how it feels to be the one watching. That noticing, repeated in small doses, is how the observer becomes familiar, and how the decision maker eventually gets the steering wheel.
Where We Go Next
Once we realise we are more than our thoughts, another question naturally appears. Thousands of thoughts will pass through your mind today, so which ones deserve your trust? Some carry the quiet wisdom of your Higher Self. Others carry the anxious insistence of the ego, wearing wisdom’s clothes. Telling them apart is a skill, and it can be learned. That’s where we go next: Intuition or Ego? How to Tell Who’s Talking.