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Illusion of Self

Life hack: You are not your thoughts, your body, or your experiences.

I have recently re-joined the cooperate world, and the concepts I wish to introduce this week are some of the most inspiring I learned on long-term leave. I trust that I can use these concepts to maintain the contentment and peace I found on leave and I hope you find them useful.


The thoughts I wish to share with you come from two books that I can’t recommend highly enough.

1. Solve for Happy[i], by Mo Gawdat, the bible to find true happiness and contentment

2. The untethered soul[ii], by Michael Singer, tells the greatest reflections on the true self


Grand Illusions. Illusions we gain from our conditioning

Solve for Happy introduces the concept of grand illusions. These are illusions that we gain from society or due to a lack of inner reflections which take us away from contentment and peace.


"Who does the voice in your head sound like?"

The first one is the illusion of thought. I was once asked, “who does the voice in your head sound like”? I found that such a hard question to answer at the time. My first reaction was there is no voice in my head. However, if we reflect a little we realize there is voice chatting all the time in our minds. It’s telling you to worry about the project you are working on, will you deliver on time. It is telling you how much so and so hurt you last week. If yours is like my brain it grabs hold of a thought and tells you it again, and again, and again. It may even be speaking these words on the screen to you. It was such a revelation for me recently that I realized my brain speaks the words on the page to me when I read, how strange and cool is that?


"Our Brain talks to us using language"

Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky[iii] noticed that when we have thoughts our voice box has tiny muscular movements. He believed that our thoughts are developed by internalising our out-loud speech. As mentioned in Mo’s book when you first learn speech as a child you just say everything you notice, car, bus, train, juice, mummy, etc. Then as we develop we realise it isn’t cool anymore to say everything we are thinking out loud anymore so we start internalising our speech. This goes wrong when we start to identify with our inner speech, if we have fearful thoughts, we think we are a coward. Also when we get lost in the conversation going on in our heads and fail to observe the world outside.




This is built on in The untethered soul, which describes how our brains are incredible machines and receive so much sensory input every fraction of a second. To manage all this input the brain has to judge, assign and label everything going on, building a model of the world outside. The brain gets happy when it recognizes something that fits its model and it will repeat that to you via inner speech. This is how we can get stuck in the conversation in our heads, in the confirmation of our brain’s complex model, and fail to observe the world outside.


You are not your thoughts

However, you are not your thoughts. When the brain is silent for a few precious seconds you do not cease to exist. For example, when you just wake up, or you are out in the forest fully aware and listening to the birds you have no thoughts you are just observing but you still exist. When the meditating ninjas clear their minds completely, they still exist. When you were a baby and had no inner speech you still existed. Therefore, you are not your thoughts.


I am, therefore I think

As Mo puts it so well, you exist and therefore your brain thinks and not you think and therefore you exist. If you have a scary thought you don’t have to be fearful or think you are bad, you can say to your brain “thank you for the warning, but you are just frightening me and it won’t happen so please be quiet for now!”





Easier said than done. It is really hard to calm the mind down and not to get caught up in the endless chat and model-building of the brain. A couple of tricks I have found that helped me were:

  • Giving my brain or the characters in my brain a name and telling them to shut up if they keep repeating themselves.

  • Looking up, when outside just look up and marvel at the clouds or sky, and listen to the birds. Bird song has become fascinating for me recently, it is great to calm my mind and bring me into observing.

  • Having cues to remind yourself you are not your thoughts and you can ignore them. For example when you sit at your desk every day.

  • Meditation, practising meditation is the best way to gain awareness of your brain and its chitter-chatter. The more you do the more you gain awareness. I used to struggle with meditation and gave up before, saying it was not for me. But I came back to it recently and found a technique that works for me, using imagination to focus the mind.

Humans can become the walking dead

Something I heard that resonated was, humans, are the only animals that can become the walking dead, zombies. When you are lost in the model inside your head and are no longer actively observing the world.





Why does time fly as adults?

When you are trapped in your brain's model, the world is passing you by, and time flies. I used to complain about, why does time fly so fast when you are an adult. It was so much better as a child when a day, a week, or a year seemed super long. Now years fly by. There is a theory related to resting heartbeat and time but I also believe it is related to the time you are just observing the world as you did as a child versus the time you are in your head stuck in the model being built and the conversation happening there. You can enjoy life, slow time down, and feel alive by just observing the world and not judging it.


You are not your thoughts or your physical body

The second grand illusion of Solve for Happy is another key one. You are not your physical body. In the modern world, we care so much for our physical body appearance, we care how many Instagram followers like our photos, we buy anti-ageing products, some of us wear make-up, we wear cool clothes, we wear clothes that match the expectations of others, and we identify ourselves by our appearance. We hope our bodies were different and we can become depressed by it.


As described in Mo’s book our physical forms are constantly changing, you were a baby, child, adolescent, young adult, older adult, and even older adult. Our physical bodies are made up of trillions of cells. These cells are constantly dying and being replaced. Our entire physical form is replaced every few years. So if we are our physical bodies, which one of these hundreds or thousands of forms are we?


As Mo describes our true core selves must be permanent if it is not permanent which state are we in? For example, we were a tiny human, a baby, and then we are a child neither of these states is what we are. Therefore we are not our physical selves.





You are not your name, emotions, beliefs, tribe or experiences

Anything that can change is not you as you can’t say which one of those things were you. For example emotions, you were sad, then happy, which one are you? Your beliefs, you can be atheist and then spiritual neither of those defines you. Your name can change, you can change tribe, you are not your processions, and you are not your experiences. Each of those can change.


You are the observer

Both Solve for Happy and The untethered soul describes the real you as the observer. You just observe the world outside, your brain’s thoughts, your changing physical body, your changing emotions, and your experiences. You have been observing since you were a baby and even before you were born. The state of the observer is always permanent. The observer has also been called spirit, soul, consciousness, and many other names in every language and religion.


One way of describing the observer that resonated with me was willpower. You will your physical body to move, you don’t think I want to move my right arm and then it moves, you just will it and it moves. It is that same will that can just observe the brain’s chat and tell it to shut up when necessary.


If we stay as the observer/willpower and observe the world and our brain’s thoughts, if we accept we are not our physical selves or our beliefs then our perception of time slows down, and we are peaceful and content. We learn that negativity and problems are made by the brain’s model and that life is beautiful. We are the observer having a human experience. Enjoy.





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