Who Is the Judge?

To come to this clearer idea of how to rise above the behavior bothering us, we need to explore the notion of self. We want to know exactly who this judge is. Armed with this understanding, we will be able to figure out how to manage the programmed responses we fall into.

One way to approach the subject is to consider what it would be like to have no self. The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , describes what it would be like to be a person from ancient times, before the self evolved as part of humanity. Following his lead, lets try to imagine being without a sense of self. Picture yourself driving a car. Of course, as an experienced driver, you usually end up thinking about other things while youre driving. The car seems to drive by itself. Somehow your background consciousness does the work. For example, driving along, seeing a stoplight, putting your foot on the brake, waiting for the green light, looking both ways, proceeding through the intersectionyou do these things unconsciously while your thoughts are elsewhere. Now heres the key: If you subtract those elsewhere thoughts, you have what life would be like without a self. Just observing the objects of the world and responding to them. Self, it could be said, is an add-on.

What in fact is happening in such situations? The meta-level you is busy chattering away to itself while the object-level you deals with the driving. You are the person driving the car while the self is the one with all the thoughts.

Now imagine just driving! No chatter in your head. Imagine just walking somewhere and being aware of the walking without any worry, or tightness, or craving for affection. Some would say this is the goal of Buddhist meditation: to be attentive to the here and now. Others would suggest that this would be optimal human experience, perhaps the stuff of self-actualization. Still others would suggest that this is the way to play a good game of golf. It requires that the sense of self be set aside while the rest of you is engrossed in the present.

How wonderful it would be to stay at the object-level when we want to! We would set the stage to be free of hurt feelings, worry, a sense of insecurity, the anxious need to control. We could look to action plans to address problems rather than looking backwards to place blame or hold on to our regrets. To gain this versatility, we could learn to see ourselves more realistically . We could invest just a little bit more selectivity in our thoughts. We could resist the temptation to go from facts to judgments .