What It Is

This is the hard part. I don't have words to explain it, and when I had the experience of really knowing fully, I could not think at all for a while. I was wandering aimlessly with a very surprised look on my face and could not form a verbal thought. My Accompanying Voice was still talking to me though. When the shock wore off, the impression went with it. Apparently I cannot hold that thought right now.

Because it has been in my mental experience for as far back as I can recall, and has always said only helpful and supportive things, I don't know what to label that. It knows things that I do not, so it is not "me" as such. But I can't see how it exists outside my mental experience.


My best guess is that inner life is not what we think it is. Perhaps we need to turn our model inside-out and see that we all have many centers of awareness in our minds most of the time. These centers of awareness are about various things, and they might not be verbal. They could be concerned with body movement, like for a dancer. They might be about visual experience, like for a painter or photographer. They could be symbolic, as for mathematicians. So there might not be any words that apply to those parts of our minds, but they are independently functioning and self-determining all the same. This idea is not something that people usually accept, although it is obvious and easy to find evidence for it.

People want very much to think that they are one singular ego, one self. But this is simply not the case. The self is far too complex to hold a single point of view in daily life. We have many bubbles of thought or input-scanning all the time. Animals obviously do, watch them. If we can add on to that verbal ideas, streams and even interchanges, well, being a singular self is just not correct, is it?

If we can model other people with our thoughts, then clearly we can model our own thoughts, in a self-reflexive, recursive way. Writers can create characters and develop stories where those characters do unanticipated and surprising things, even for the author. We do not think of this as madness or fragmented self-awareness. Actually, it seems to require a highly developed sense of self. It would not do to fall in to one of the lives that someone wrote and forget to come back. What stops this happening? How do we know the voice that is "me" among all of the book characters read and written, friend and family personality models, daydreams, wishful thinking and so on? How do we really know?

The Accompanying Voice is never confused, and does not play the game. It is not part of daily life, but it observes what is happening and talks with me about it. Is this a model? A model of what? God?