The Internal Dialogue

By Rande Howell

Though a positive, successful, and engaging person, Pam avoided prolonged looks into her mirror. When she was brushing her hair or applying make-up, she stayed focused on the activity – but would intentionally not make eye contact with herself. Except sometimes. On those occasions a tirade of negative judgments erupted in her thoughts.

If she didn’t avoid the negative assessment machine in her mind by distraction or busyness, the stream of thoughts that flooded into Pam’s awareness would chide her, “Your nose is too crooked. Your skin is a mess. You’re getting wrinkles under your eyes. You’re too fat. Nobody would give you a second look. You need surgery to look better.” In these moments, Pam would cringe and feel the familiar black pit in her stomach suck the positive energy right out of her. And she would begin to doubt herself and her ability to create a rewarding life.

The strange part of this internal conversation going on in her mind was that Pam knew there was no truth to the accusations. Pam has a dancer’s body and is a highly accomplished dancer. In addition, she teaches dance to serious students. She also is a sought-after model due to her beauty and flawless complexion. Over the course of time, she has attempted to debate the negative voice and has tried thought stopping, positive affirmations, and positive thinking. And for awhile these techniques worked – then, like a thief in the middle of the night, the character assassinations would creep back into her thoughts and cast seeds of doubt in her mind.

Pam’s current stategy, common for many people, for dealing with this discomfort was to avoid the discomfort of this internal dialogue by busying herself with work, activities, or friends – anything to distract herself from listening to the critical Judge living within her.

The Internal Dialogue: You and Your Thoughts are Different From One Another

What Pam is experiencing in the example above is her internal dialogue masquerading as thoughts in her mind. This particular conversation is between a harsh critical voice and her self doubt. And like Pam, all of us have some variation of this internal struggle, whether we like to acknowledge it or not. The key is whether we identify with it as who we are.

If you have ever been conflicted about something and were of two minds about it, you have experienced the internal dialogue first hand. Most of us simply pay it no mind and believe that “it is only our thoughts running through our mind”. However, not being aware of it or not understanding it does not stop the force it exerts over your life. It drives our lives. It is like driving on a freeway while looking through binoculars. You are at the mercy of chance to see and understand the world you are attempting to negotiate.

The Internal Dialogue Goes Underground

Most of us are aware of this internal dialogue, but we push it away (much like Pam in the example above). We never mention it to others because of what they might think. This is our loss. Gaining a window into this internal dialogue is essential if we want to discover a deeper purpose, meaning, and joy for our lives. As we learn to observe the voices that lie beneath our thoughts, the transformation of body, mind, and Spirit becomes possible. Learning about these voices within the self is crucial for creating lasting transformation.

There is a lot at stake in this inner struggle going on within the internal dialogue. Staying mindless keeps Pam (and us) aimlessly drifting in the currents of life. Things happen repetitively that we do not understand. What is revealed in Pam’s internal dialogue is that the self is composed of a number of voices – some good, some bad. Let us explore this further.

Like Pam, many of us don’t even realize that an internal dialogue is happening in our mind. This is what I call “mindlessness”. To be blind to the internal dialogue of the mind is to be swept along on the unseen currents of life. Those who are swept along are blind to it – and to its power. Others hear an almost inaudible whisper that is moving too fast to comprehend. Still others hear the internal dialogue and it makes them uncomfortable and they do not understand it. So they avoid listening to it, and this limits their lives.

The Internal Dialogue Creates the Box of Our Comfort Zone

Instead they will distract themselves so that they are not aware of it. They busy themselves with work, conquest, exercise, drugs, sex, the latest toy, or whatever is necessary to distance themselves from the discomfort of getting out of their comfort zone. Others come to live in fear of the negative assessment machine in their mind and shrink their lives into a comfort zone so that they will not be noticed. The comfort zone locks them into familiar, habitual ways and they get stuck in old repeating patterns. This is called a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Very few people learn how to observe the internal dialogue, question it, and explore the design of its nature. It is through the exploration of these voices within the mind that we set ourselves free of their control over our lives and tap into the potential that lies buried within us. There are some negative aspects of the self that have to be observed and confronted, and there are some powerful parts of the self that we need to awaken. It is in awakening these empowering parts of the self that we change the historical script of our life and find new life.

We have to become aware of the war being waged in our minds. Once we grasp that thinking is simply a biological activity, a powerful question can surface – who, or what, is in control of the perception and thinking apparatus of our mind? The answer will surprise you. Thought is important, but it is the voice (or aspect of the self) that controls the thought that keeps us from becoming who we were born to be and transforming the potential of our lives.

Internal Dialogue:
Conversations in the Mind that Shape Our Perception of the World

To wake up to the internal dialogue opens the door for you to become an active participant in the creation of your life. We are all born into and adapt to a world of established patterns of perception. This is how we come to know our world. These perceptual patterns govern how we understand the world and what we see as possible in our lives. These historical patterns of perception are called conversations or narratives and become our comfort zone.

These conversations become us long before we develop the capacity to become aware of them. Once established, they become the world we live in. We don’t have patterns and internal conversations that govern our perception, they have us! If you want to transform your world, you have to have to learn how to identify the conversation that controls the thinking in your mind. And you have to learn to break free from the hold the narrative has over your life.

Breaking Free of the Narrative of the Comfort Zone Creates New Possibility

Let me give you an example of how this works. I work with an attorney who is employed by a large, high powered, litigating law firm and he is very unsatisfied with his life. In fact, he has become “depressed”, and feels hopeless. Yet if he could look at depression as a conversation, rather than a condition, a new world would show up ripe for transformation.

He feels like a victim (is consumed by a conversation of victimhood where he has always had to sacrifice his needs to win approval). With his wife and kids accustomed to an affluent lifestyle, he speaks to me as if he is trapped by his job. This produces his despair. He sees no escape from his dilemma and beats himself up for even wanting to change his life. He lives all week for the weekends when he can live his dream of having a small scale farm. Yet on Saturday afternoons, he begins to despair that he will have to go to work on Monday.

As he developed the ability to observe the internal dialogue and woke up to the conversation of victimhood going on in his mind, he also began to realize that these did not have to be the thoughts that controlled his life. He was able to label the participants of this internal dialogue as the Prosecuting Attorney (who wanted conviction) and a Victim (that beat himself up for not being good enough).

Simply becoming mindful of these two different conversations in his mind – and no longer identifying with them as who he was – gave him a new freedom. In that freedom he discovered that he could awaken other voices that could contribute to his internal dialogue. He found a Courageous Self and a Confident Self that, with practice, he could invoke to be part of the internal dialogue in his mind. He also discovered a Divine Voice living within him that (to his amazement) he had never connected to even though he was a practicing Christian.

As he developed these aspects of himself (voices within the self), his internal dialogue shifted. He no longer was trapped in a “victim conversation”. Discovering he could call up courageous and confident elements of himself into the thoughts of the internal dialogue created new possibilities for his life. Now, instead of drifting mindlessly in the currents of life, he began to learn how to navigate its currents. In doing so, he became a participant in the creation of his life. And yes, he is moving from being stuck in unseen patterns (comfort zone) to consciously designing the patterns that create his life.

Transforming the Conversations of the Self

This opportunity, this choice, to become a participant in the design of your life is available to all. What is required is the motivation, skill development, and discipline needed to learn how to observe the patterns and internal conversations that drive your life, disrupt them, and begin consciously developing new patterns and conversations.

As a human being, it is the greatest gift we have been given. The criterion is to recognize that the gift was not designed to serve the Ego. Rather it is built to serve a purpose greater than the self. Our job is to accept the gift, nurture the gift, and to bring forth the light that lives within us into the world.

It is at this moment that we begin the journey to becoming fully human. In the words of Nelson Mandela from his 1984 inaugural speech:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…. Your playing small does not serve the world…. We are born to make manifest the glory of God within us….. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. We are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Rande Howell writes about Igniting the Spark of Your Potential and Creating a Lasting Transformation at www.randehowell.com

Time is an engineered concept

Time is defined by humans as something that moves in a neat straight line manner at constant speed.

By defining it, and implementing and honouring the definition, we breathe life into "time".

So we 'create' time. Breathe life into it. By consensus. And so it exists.*

Consensus Reality is a powerful concept. These links cover it quite well:

1. Princeton:Consensus Reality

2. Wikipedia:Consensus Reality

3. Huffington Post:Challenging Consensus Reality

If we did not create time, if we did not define and honour a neat, simple, straight line time, we would not be able to make sense of the world.

If we gave up time, it would destroy the civilised world. Back to the caves.

You can challenge consensus reality - but do it only when you have the strength to sustain your opposition.

What I like about 'time' is, once you understand it....you can be in it and out of it, both at the same 'time'.

Refer Eckhart Tolle speech on OPRAH and TOLLE.

You can define your own time*. Or lack of it. But consensus time (or clock time) must be honoured.

*If you want. Nothing wrong with it fundamentally.

HOW TIME IS DEFINED AND MAINTAINED BY HUMANS
In 1967 the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the SI second of atomic time as:

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

The definition of the second was later refined at the 1997 meeting of the BIPM to include the statement:

"This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K."

"over the years UTC [which ticks SI seconds] has become either the basis for legal time of many countries, or accepted as the de facto basis for standard civil time"."

Liven Up With Marina Diamandis

The essence of life is being calm and cheerful and motivated.

Everything requires calm handling.

The mind often paints a very dark, unrealistic picture of the future. But not everyone takes this dark negative picture seriously because they are aware it is unrealistic.

Else they can't be cheerful and motivated...

Regular exercise & deep breathing can certainly help. The chatter of the mind reduces when the body gets exercise. The jittery nature reduces when oxygen from deep breathing flows into the brain.

So if your thoughts are killing you...all you need is exercise and oxygen flow into your brain. Nothing else. No medicines, nothing.


And talking of cheerfulness, Marina Diamandis is a very cheerful personality. A treat to watch. And inspiring.

Jain Epistemology & Logic

From the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.Underlying Jain epistemology is the idea that reality is multifaceted.

Anekanta, or ‘non-one-sided’, such that no one view can capture it in its entirety; that is, no single statement or set of statements captures the complete truth about the objects they describe. This insight, illustrated by the famous story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, grounds both a kind of fallibilism in epistemology and a sevenfold classification of statements in logic.

Every school of Indian thought includes some judgment about the valid sources of knowledge (pramanas). While their lists of pramanas differ, they share a concern to capture the common-sense view; no Indian school is skeptical. The Jain list of pramanas includes sense perception, valid testimony (including scriptures), extra-sensory perception, telepathy, and kevala, the state of omniscience of a perfected soul. Notably absent from the list is inference, which most other Indian schools include, but Jain discussion of the pramanas seem to indicate that inference is included by implication in the pramana that provides the premises for inference. That is, inference from things learned by the senses is itself knowledge gained from the senses; inference from knowledge gained by testimony is itself knowledge gained by testimony, etc. Later Jain thinkers would add inference as a separate category, along with memory and tarka, the faculty by which we recognize logical relations.

Since reality is multi-faceted, none of the pramanas [evidences] gives absolute or perfect knowledge (except kevala, which is enjoyed only by the perfected soul, and cannot be expressed in language). As a result, any item of knowledge gained is only tentative and provisional.

This is expressed in Jain philosophy in the doctrine of naya, or partial predication (sometimes called the doctrine of perspectives or viewpoints). According to this doctrine, any judgment is true only from the viewpoint or perspective of the judge, and ought to be so expressed. Given the multifaceted nature of reality, no one should take his or her own judgments as the final truth about the matter, excluding all other judgments. This insight generates a sevenfold classification of predications. The seven categories of claim can be schematized as follows, where ‘a’ represents any arbitrarily selected object, and ‘F’ represents some predicate assertible of it:

Saptibhaṅgī - The Seven Valued Logic

स्यात् अस्ति॥	Perhaps a is F
स्यात् नास्ति॥	Perhaps a is not-F
स्यात् अस्ति नास्ति॥	Perhaps a is both F and not-F
स्यात् अवक्तव्यम्॥	Perhaps a is indescribable
स्यात् अस्ति अवक्तव्यम्॥	Perhaps a is F and indescribable
स्यात् नास्ति अवक्तव्यम्॥	Perhaps a is indescribable and not-F
स्यात् अस्ति नास्ति अवक्तव्यम्॥	Perhaps a is indescribable, and both F and not-F

Britannica Online writes :
As a consequence of their metaphysical liberalism, the Jaina logicians developed a unique theory of seven-valued logic, according to which the three primary truth values are “true,” “false,” and “indefinite” and the other four values are “true and false,” “true and indefinite,” “false and indefinite,” and “true, false, and indefinite.” Every statement is regarded as having these seven values, considered from different standpoints.

Knowledge is defined as that which reveals both itself and another (svaparabhasi). It is eternal, as an essential quality of the self; it is noneternal, as the perishable empirical knowledge. Whereas most Hindu epistemologists regarded pramana as the cause of knowledge, the Jainas identified pramana with valid knowledge. Knowledge is either perceptual or nonperceptual. Perception is either empirical or nonempirical. Empirical perception is either sensuous or nonsensuous. The latter arises directly in the self, not through the sense organs but only when the covering ignorance is removed. With the complete extinction of all karmas, a person attains omniscience (kevala-jnana).

And now, Continued from The Internet Encyclopaedia Of Philosophy :

In the Seven Valued Logic table - each predication is preceded by a marker of uncertainty (syat), which I have rendered here as ‘perhaps.’ Some render it as ‘from a perspective,’ or ‘somehow.’ However it is translated, it is intended to mark respect for the multifaceted nature of reality by showing a lack of conclusive certainty.

Early Jain philosophical works (especially the Tattvartha Sutra) indicate that for any object and any predicate, all seven of these predications are true. That is to say, for every object a and every predicate F, there is some circumstance in which, or perspective from which, it is correct to make claims of each of these forms. These seven categories of predication are not to be understood as seven truth-values, since they are all seven thought to be true. Historically, this view has been criticized (by Sankara, among others) on the obvious ground of inconsistency. While both a proposition and its negation may well be assertible, it seems that the conjunction, being a contradiction, can never be even assertible, never mind true, and so the third and seventh forms of predication are never possible. This is precisely the kind of consideration that leads some commentators to understand the ‘syat’ operator to mean ‘from a perspective.’ Since it may well be that from one perspective, a is F, and from another, a is not-F, then one and the same person can appreciate those facts and assert them both together. Given the multifaceted nature of the real, every object is in one way F, and in another way not-F. An appreciation of the complexity of the real also can lead one to see that objects are, as they are in themselves, indescribable (as no description can capture their entirety). This yields the fourth form of predication, which can then be combined with other insights to yield the last three forms.


Footnote: Criticism
Perhaps the deepest problem with this doctrine is one that troubles all forms of skepticism and fallibilism to one degree or another; it seems to be self-defeating. After all, if reality is multifaceted, and that keeps us from making absolute judgments (since my judgment and its negation will both be equally true), the doctrines that underlie Jain epistemology are themselves equally tentative. For example, take the doctrine of anekantevada. According to that doctrine, reality is so complex that any claim about it will necessarily fall short of complete accuracy. The doctrine itself must then fall short of complete accuracy. Therefore, we should say, “Perhaps (or “from a perspective”) reality is multifaceted.” At the same time, we have to grant the propriety, in some circumstances, of saying, “Perhaps reality is not multifaceted.” Jain epistemology gains assertibility for its own doctrine, but at the cost of being unable to deny contradictory doctrines. What begins as a laudable fallibilism ends as an untenable relativism.

From The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

Jain Epistemology from Wikipedia
According to Jain epistemology, reality is multifaceted (anekanta, or 'non-one-sided'), such that no finite set of statements can capture the entire truth about the objects they describe.

The Jain list of pramanas (valid sources of knowledge) includes

• Sense perception.
• Valid testimony.
• Extra-sensory perception.
• Telepathy.
• Kevala. the state of omniscience of a perfected soul.

• Inference, which most other Indian epistemologies include, is interestingly absent from this list.

However, discussion of the pramanas seem to indicate that inference is implied in the pramana that provides the premises for inference. That is, inference from things learned by the senses is itself knowledge gained from the senses; inference from knowledge gained by testimony is itself knowledge gained by testimony, etc. Later Jain thinkers would add inference as a separate category, along with memory and tarka or logical reasoning.

Since reality is multi-faceted, none of the pramanas gives absolute or perfect knowledge.

Consequently, all knowledge is only tentative and provisional. This is expressed in Jain philosophy in the doctrine of naya, or partial predication (also known as the doctrine of perspectives or viewpoints).

JAINISM OVERVIEW