You are not the voice talking in your head.

Suppose you were looking at three objects — a flowerpot, a photograph, and a book — and were then asked, “Which of these objects is you?”

You’d say, “None of them! I’m the one who’s looking at what you’re putting in front of me. It doesn’t matter what you put in front of me, it’s always going to be me looking at it.”

You see, it’s an act of a subject perceiving various objects. This is also true of hearing the voice inside (your head). It doesn’t make any difference what it’s saying, you are the one who is aware of it. As long as you think that one thing it’s saying is you, but the other thing it’s saying is not you, you’ve lost your objectivity. You may want to think of yourself as the part that says the nice things, but that’s still the voice talking. You may like what it says, but it’s not you.

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind — you are the one who hears it.

If you don’t understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of “trying to find myself.” They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.

If you watch it objectively, you will come to see that much of what the voice says is meaningless. Most of the talking is just a waste of time and energy. The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it. It’s like sitting down at night and deciding whether you want the sun to come up in the morning. The bottom line is, the sun will come up and the sun will go down. Billions of things are going on in this world. You can think about it all you want, but life is still going to keep on happening.

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These passages are from The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, by Michael A. Singer. The strength of this book lies in the simplicity with which the author describes concepts that others find difficult to put into words. For example, this one line is ridiculously simple but so damn powerful — you are not the voice talking in your head, you are the one listening to it.

I paused reading the book for a few days, and decided to listen to that voice in my head. I was amazed at how good my mind had become at generating constant chatter — replaying my feelings about a recent conversation, narrating my todo list but adding new caveats each time, assembling some new worry about my kids, or if nothing else, inducing guilt for the Nth time on a past incident or a career move (the guilt trips usually happened when I was alone, or when I woke up too early). Once I internalized that I am the listener, I started seeing patterns and recursions. Sometimes I was amused by the nonsense the mind generated, but more often I just wanted it to shut up.

To strengthen my experiment, I started referring to the mind as a another object, a habit that my four-year-old son quickly imbibed. He surprised me one day by saying “Mumma, my mind is telling me to eat this cake, even though I know it’s time for milk.” Later, he remembered an old incident at the park and said, “I don’t know why but my mind does not forget the day Aakka (a friend’s nanny) was rude to me.”

Effortlessly he had drawn boundaries between self and thought. For me, it’s going to take a lot more practice to play listener. But just knowing that I am the listener, has made it a little quieter inside.