The nature documentary voiceover

This week I’m not offering a new inquiry but sharing from the transcript of the Nondual Inquiry Lab. We were looking at doership with the inquiries from the book Seeing No-Self and it was powerful. You can listen to the recording on the website but I think it’s helpful to read it as well.

So here it is.

Let it sink in slowly …

It’s like the voiceover on a nature documentary, humanizing the animal behavior by implying agency. That is what the brain is doing all the time in the human. This is a human body-and-mind-organism just spontaneously being lived by life, but there’s a narrator in here that narrates it as though there is a self with agency making things happen.

And I believe that if I don’t narrate thinking and doing to myself, thought and action won’t happen. But this is only a voiceover added onto the nature documentary that is our life.

The human bodymind comes with a narrator. Whatever the body is doing or thinking, it’s just happening. It’s nature naturing. It’s the human humaning. The body is moving and the narration is happening. So we’re just the nature documentary plus an added voiceover claiming doership. It comes along with the organism in our case.

The narrator narrates as though you’re the thinker, the actor, the chooser and decider. It will even tell you, “Oh, this is me observing myself in the nature documentary. Look at how well I’m seeing this, doing the nondual inquiry.”

It’s all still the voiceover in the documentary. We never leave the nature documentary because we are nature. We’re just nature that comes with a voiceover. And who knows, maybe dolphins narrate being a dolphin to themselves. But we think we’re special and have free will simply because we narrate that to ourselves!

So right now, notice your breathing. Suddenly it seems like you’re doing the breathing, right? But that’s only because our attention just went there and there is an internal narrator saying something about doing the breathing. It’s just happening. This body, including its mind, is a set of processes, a system that simply runs, just as a bird is a set of processes, only that the bird doesn’t have the voiceover as far as we know.

What makes this so complicated to see is that the voiceover narrates its own agency to itself.

That’s the only thing making us believe we have agency, that our thoughts tell us that! But if we look, if we just notice what is going on, there is no indicator that we can make anything at all happen. Thoughts just come, including the thought to inquire into thought.

So imagine you were told from birth that you make the sky blue. Because of you, the sky is blue. You adopt thoughts that say, “Oh, look how beautifully blue I’m making the sky today.” And that narrates itself to itself over and over, and by the time you’re whatever age you are now, you’re completely convinced you are making the sky blue, because you’ve been narrating that to yourself for decades.

We’re brainwashed into believing that we’re doing our lives. It’s only the narrator creating that illusion. We’re told we’re doing the thinking, making at least some actions of the body happen, and are in charge of choosing and deciding. But when we look at this directly, is there really a doer or author of any of it?

🙏 Kat.

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Katrijn Van Oudheusden
Am Heiligenstock 30
61200 Wölfersheim
Germany