09/09/2025
The Voice That Never Stops🤯
There’s a voice in our head that never shuts up.
Sometimes it speaks in straight lines, but most of the time it’s incoherent, contradictory, and endlessly repetitive. It argues, defends, worries, invents stories, rehearses scenes that never happen, and relives old ones that are long gone.
We take this voice to be ourselves. “That’s me, thinking.” But have we ever really questioned what it is that hears those thoughts, or what it is that thinks them?
Look closer and the trick begins to show. The same brain that produces the thought also pretends to be the listener of it. The thinker, the thinking, and the listener — all conjured by the same stage magician. No wonder we get lost. It’s like a hall of mirrors: reflections watching reflections, convinced they are solid.
This is not just philosophy. Shrinks, therapists, and psychoanalysts all work within the same framework: that there is a “me” with emotions, problems, and conflicts that can be solved. Therapy says: here is “me” with my anger, sadness, or trauma — let’s bring it to light. And after many hours of analysis, catharsis, or self-discovery, we may arrive at an “aha moment”: Now I see! Now I get it!
But what really happened? The analyser (the brain) and the analysed (the anger, the trauma) were both played by the same system. It’s a dog chasing its own tail — exhausting, convincing, but never arriving.
Every emotion seems to need a story. Anger needs a “me” who is angry. Fear needs a “me” who is afraid. Sadness needs a “me” who is sad. Without this fictional anchor, the emotion itself rises, does its dance, and fades away like a cloud passing through the sky. But once it’s tied to a “me,” it becomes heavy, sticky, and endless.
This is why we remain caught. Thought produces a self. That self fuels more thoughts. Round and round we go, believing in a character that has no real existence outside of the story.
Zen points straight into this illusion:
Thoughts are just thoughts. They don’t see, hear, taste, or feel. They are not the one who is aware.
What notices them? Not another thought. Not another voice. Just this open clarity before we paste “I” onto it.
As long as we cling to the story of “me,” we are trapped in self-imprisonment — mistaking the chatter for our life. But when we begin to see it for what it is, even for a moment, the loop breaks. The prison door was never locked.
“To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.”
— Dōgen
-Notes from the Edge of the Path
