Beware the voice in your head!

Beware the voice in your head!

We are at the place where we established that YOU are not your self.

The challenge was that while you are able to separate your Bible and your clothes from you there was not as much clarity when you were asked to separate your self from YOU.

You agreed that YOU spoke to your self. That suggests that YOU and your self are not the same.

Why then was it so challenging to separate your self from YOU?

The point is that you have been lulled into accepting all that goes on within you to be YOU. The reality is that you are a victim of identity theft. An impostor has slipped in mostly unnoticed and taken up residence in you under the guise of being the real YOU.

The real problem is that the identity theft has been so slick that the vast majority of persons do not even realize that there is a false self in place. They mistakenly see this impostor as themselves. They think: “This is who I am!” They live that lie to the point where in some instances the two are undistinguishable to them.

The failure to recognize the impostor and to blow the whistle on the threat of identity theft gives the impostor more strength. The impostor thrives on the ignorance and lack of attentiveness and takes over more and more of what should be YOU.

The impostor is usually identified as the EGO. I like to bring it closer home by identify the impostor and identity thief as the voice in your head. That voice in your head seeks to control your every thought, word and deed. The voice in your head seeks to filter everything that comes into you through your past experiences and your natural tendencies. The voice in your head seeks to achieve nothing less than to shape your entire reality.

Mother goes to the pool with little Jimmy. She lays on her lounge chair and falls asleep. She is awakened later by a commotion as some other pool user has found Jimmy at the bottom of the pool.

What is your reaction to that story? Would you say that mother acted responsibly? Would you say that she was careless? Would you be stunned that an adult, parent could be so unthinking?

Single mother tells her 2 young boys that she has to go to a party. She is going to lock them in until she gets back. She shows them where the candle and the matches are in case of a power outage. The boys are at the stage where their curiosity knows no bounds. They are driven by the need to experiment and investigate. Risk and danger are not concepts that are at the forefront of their minds.

Not surprisingly, they manage to burn the house down with themselves in it. So again the question is: What is your reaction to this incident? What do you think of that mother? Is she criminally liable for the deaths of her children?

Yet another case: Parents of young teen need a night out. Baby sitters are not available. Mom is reluctant to go. Teen encourages Mom to go. She “needs the break and to connect with Dad”. He will be OK. He will not answer the door and will be alert to what is going on outside. Go!!!

Mom and Dad leave. Not long after young teen gets on the phone and calls his crew over for their own party. More adult things take place at their party than at Mom’s. When Mom & Dad get home things might not have been put back in order but they are in no state to notice anything. The remaining scent of something having been smoked is linked to the mix of tobacco and pot on their clothing. Mom scoots up to see her Angel apparently fast asleep in bed and gives him a loving smile.

Are those parents living in a fool’s paradise? Are they unconscious as to what teens are up to theses days? Do they need a reality check?

Friends, as you look on with disgust and dismay at these so-called parents and marvel at their lack of awareness and responsibility, I put it to you that these are parables and that you are those parents!

No way, you say. But substitute the voice in your head for the children and look at how you have been managing it. Are you not guilty and falling asleep while the voice in your head runs loose unattended - Where it gets you to think, say and do things that you would never think of doing if you were fully alert?

Have you not given the the voice in your head the equivalent of a blow torch for a present and left it unattended? You do this by thinking and acting in ways that give the voice in your head dominion over the real YOU.

Have you not been guilty of thinking that this voice in your head impostor is soooo cute? You just love this person that he says that you are. This is my Angel, my star… I just love this ME. We live out the identity that the voice in our head has created for us and mistake it for us. That way we give it total freedom to run wild and do just as it pleases!

That is how you are with the voice in your head. It is so slick that it lulls you into virtual unconsciousness and in that state you fail to identify it as being different from who YOU are. You fail to recognize it as an impostor and it grows in strength and makes its theft of your identity more and more complete.

Some of us get an awakening and we start to question the voice in your head. The level of this consciousness determines the degree to which we actively monitor and separate ourselves from the impostor self.

Make no mistake! An unrecognized voice in your head has greater potential for harm than any toddler or devious teen. Impostor voices in heads have been responsible for millions of lives through wars and murder, genocide. Unchecked false selfs have caused and continue to produce untold pain and suffering. A failure to identify and take control of this self that wants you to think it is YOU is a grave error.

No, it is a tragedy.
Matt 2:16 Massacre of the Innocents
16 Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men.

Indeed, in its unidentified, un-tutored and un-checked state the voice in your head will lead you to lose your soul. The voice in your head is caught up with things, with thoughts and with emotions. That is what Christians understand to be the world.

The world is at one end of the spectrum and God at the other. Focus on the world – the things on which the voice in your head is consumed – leads to a lack of connectedness with God. There is no space for God in the thought processes because the mind is too busy with other things.

Matt 16:26 For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

A failure to muzzle and bridle the voice in your head will also condemn us because it moves us away from being able to observe the two great commandments – Loving God and Loving our neighbour as ourselves.

Mark 12:30 And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment.31 And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

The voice in your head is dysfunctional. It always has a hidden agenda. That is why Christ requires of us that we deny that SELF. Your salvation can only come when you recognize it for what it is and take care to separate your core, true self from it.

Once you make the distinction, your responsiveness to the Gospel call becomes easy. The cares of the world no longer choke the Word and it bears fruit in your heart. You recognize that you are creature of Almighty God and that you are in a sinful state. You accept the need for you to take steps to change your status and to change your ways. You are willing and ready to announce to the world your belief that Jesus is Lord. You accept and are ready to put on Christ in water baptism for the remission of your sins and to walk in the newness of life.

As a baptized believer you have to be alert to the wiles of the voice in your head. It is my view that the voice in your head operates on the basis of text book marketing principles.

It starts out with a clear vision and mission as its charter. It gets it direction from that understanding of its mission. The vision and mission of the voice in your head is to seek supremacy for itself. The hidden driving force is always similar: Need to stand out, to be special, to be in control, to have power, to get attention, to get more. Alternately, the voice in your head feeds the need to feel a sense of being different. (I am not like that). “I am humble and shy. I am not like that at all.” It is the same game but a different approach. No one is to be left out.

A core principle of marketing is the need to differentiate your product or service from the others. The marketer’s role is to so position his product or service in the mind of the consumer as to make them accept that it is not the same as other products and service.

That is the role of the voice in your head . Its constant goal is to present its version of YOU as being different – even unique. You are not the same as others. The underlying principle is the same: If you are the same you do not stand out.

We will develop the voice in your head and marketing in a follow up session because getting clarity on that will help us to uncover some of the slick moves that the voice in your head uses to get us to do what it prompts us to do.

As you move to try to find out who you truly are, you reflect further on the voice in your head. The search for who you are is greatly assisted by knowing who you are not. You must understand that YOU are NOT the voice in your head.

I want to spend a few moments reviewing the Beatitudes (a charter for Christian living) in the context of this deeper understanding of the role of the voices in the heads of all of us.

Matthew 5
3 “ Blessed are the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
To be poor in spirit is to refuse to accept and be identified with the enrichment of wealth, adoration, pride that is offered by your false self – the voice in your head. It is a refusal to rely on the lifts in spirit that we can get from attachment to the trappings that may bring happiness for while but inevitably fade away.

4 Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted.
This highlights the value of suffering as a pathway to more lasting comfort. Suffering also helps to bring us to accepting our reality. As we strip things and thoughts and emotions away or as we accept what is, the voice in our head loses it power and we renew our connectedness to God – that is why we are blessed. When we examine our suffering from our core self we no longer resist it. We accept it and in turn we understand it better and it becomes easier to bear. (See below)

5 Blessed are the meek, For they shall inherit the earth.
The tendency to meekness takes you in the opposite direction to where your false self would have you go. In the humble state of meekness the continuous search for more is brought to a halt. You are able to come to the realization that the only lasting joy comes from your connectedness to God. James 4:10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.

6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled.

Hungering after righteousness is to move toward God and away from things and ideas and emotions – the things that preoccupy the voice in your head. Those things can keep us so preoccupied that we shut out thoughts of our Creator and the respect and obedience that He requires of us.

John 4: 13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

7 Blessed are the merciful, For they shall obtain mercy.
Showing mercy is a natural outflow when we look past the voice in the head of others and look beyond the voice in our head. In that state, we recognize that whatever we think we need to be merciful about or to forgive is really nothing more than a need to see ourselves as different, or better, or aggrieved. It is part of the differentiation strategy of the voice in our head. When we operate at the core self level we are no longer distracted by the voice in our head and forgiveness and mercy flow naturally.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God.
A pure heart is not contaminated by the clutter of this world. It is not bogged down in past events and future expectations. The space that is left provides room for God to take up residence.

9 Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God.
One strategy of the voice in our head is to set us apart from others. The more apart they are the more unique we are. Carried to its logical conclusion the voice in our head actually seeks to make enemies of others. As a peacemaker, we seek peace not war and diminish the power of the voice in your head in our lives.

10 Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. 12 Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Persecution brings us back to the role of suffering in destroying the voice in your head and renewing our connectedness to God.

Matt 16:24 Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.

One of the thoughts that the voice in your head fuels is the questioning of the need for suffering – “I should not have to suffer.” The voice in our head resists the reality.

If we examine further the issue of suffering and the voice in our head we gain additional clarity of Christ’s requirement that we take up our cross.

Recall that suffering reflects the loss of something to which we had become attached. In the context of our human existence it is desirable that we become attached to some things. A husband is to love his wife to such an extent that attachment is inevitable.

Parents become attached to their children. Life would be the worse off if those attachments were to be excluded.

It is clear then, that we WILL suffer. Christ says in effect that that is a pre-requisite for following Him. The key is our understanding of suffering and our attitude towards it.

One of the problems that the voice in our head has is a reluctance to accept what is. It constantly strives to resist reality. Resistance actually increases our suffering – it does not reduce it or eliminate it.

Suffering is caused by attachment to the things of this world. We feel pain when things to which we are attached are taken away from us. For this reason, suffering actually has the potential to destroy the voice in your head . When there is nothing left to identify with anymore, who are you then? There is then the opportunity to recognize the ultimate truth that who YOU are is not “I am this” or “I am that” but simply “I am”.

When we question our losses (suffering) we are in fact reinforcing attachment and building up the voice in your head. It does so by inducing the voice in your head to produce thoughts like “This is not fair.” “This should not be happening to me.” “If there was any justice this could not happen to me” or simply “Why me Lord?” or “Why now Lord?”

In that state you are adding emotions to disappointment and that produces more pain and more suffering. Unchecked and unbridled the voice in your head might even step up the rhetoric and the emotions a notch: “For something like this to happen the world must be dysfunctional. Who would want to live in this kind of world? What is point of striving and caring when things are so arbitrary? Why should I care anything about anything since in the final analysis it does not matter?”

Now to disappointment and anger & frustration is added the deeper emotions of resentment and even apathy. The pain and hurt that is caused to self and others in that state can be immense and can continue for a very long time.

Amazingly, that is a state that the voice in your head is happy to accept. For one, self would have taken pride of place. It is now the important consideration. Also, in that state self is guaranteed to receive a lot of attention. Others will pour in their love and self will not go unnoticed.

Simultaneously, self could achieve the objective of differentiation. I am already different from those who are not feeling my pain and in any event my pain could be worse than yours.
So especially in times of trouble and suffering we need to be very aware of the potential actions of the voice in our head.

In a heightened state of awareness, the core YOU is vigilant. YOU recognize what the voice in your head is doing. YOU know that resistance is futile and only extends and deepens the suffering. YOU decide to accept reality….what is. YOU embrace the fact that you are in pain because of your attachment to what you have lost.

YOU have 2 positive roads to travel from that point.

One is that you are pleased to bear the pain because you believe that the object to which you are attached is worth the pain. You also take care to accept that the loss is real and permanent. You are going to have to go forward without it. That is the reality. Skirting that fact prolongs and deepens the pain and suffering.

In that state of conscious acceptance you come to a fuller appreciation of the significance and meaning of your suffering. It makes it so much more bearable. It is a cross that you are willing to bear. You bear it without the toxic emotions of anger, frustration and resentment. You weaken the stranglehold of the voice in your head on YOU and you are now able to achieve connectedness with God and achieve lasting peace.

In another scenario, a second positive option is available. Your awareness of the voice in your head is awakened and you recognize that your suffering is caused by your attachment to something that is temporal. My hand bag has been stolen with all my important documents.” “I am inconvenienced”. “I am a victim”. “ I am angry.”

You might decide that you are not willing to go through suffering for a hand bag and some documents. You immediately consciously accept the loss. “I have lost my hand bag. I will have to replace the documents that were in it. That is the reality and I accept it.” Here attachment is cut off and when attachment is eliminated the power of the voice in your head is reduced.

By handling suffering in this manner we let go of more and more of our attachments or we consciously accept them (take up our cross) and we thereby weaken the hold of the false self – the voice in our head . Taking up our cross is synonymous with the conscious acceptance of suffering.

Christ’s call for us to take up our cross is a call to consciously recognize the source of our suffering to be an attachment to something that must ultimately be broken. Accepting this fact is a necessary step that we must take to achieve spirit maturity. We have to lose the things of this life in order to enjoy the life eternal that is in Christ.

Matt 10:38 And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. 39 He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.

We have to accept that we cannot hang on to what we call our Life –one dominated by the the voice in our head and get the true Life that is in Christ. Painful as it may be, we must come to the acceptance that we will be torn away from some things that we treasure deeply. That brings us to the deeper truth that the only lasting peace, comfort and joy comes from a close attachment to Christ.

In that event, followers are not daunted by the circumstances that would normally be considered to be negative since those situations have the effect of leading them closer to the state in which the voice in your head is stilled that comes with being closely connected to God and away from the world.

I leave you with John 14: 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.


You can have no life outside of Jesus. You must be in Christ to have life. Anything else is a false shell that inevitably falls apart and produces negative emotions – fear, anxiety, anger, holding grudges, sadness, hatred, jealousy, envy. These are closely aligned with the works of the flesh that are listed in Gal 5:19 -21. The untutored, unattended voice in your head is the advocate of the flesh.

The YOU with an tutored and monitored voice in your head manifests the fruit of the spirit:

Gal 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. 24 And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.


Be on guard, be alert. There is an impostor taking over your identity. Once you identify him and monitor him closely the scam is defeated and the TRUE YOU is able to present itself. This YOU is in Christ and is obedient to His will.

God bless YOU!

Who are YOU?

Who are you?

Have you ever spoken to yourself?

Please hold your Bible high for a moment. Now, I want to stand up and put your Bible on the chair behind you.

Next, I want you to remain standing and put your self on the chair beside your Bible.

Why is there so much confusion with that request?

You agreed that YOU spoke to your self. That suggests that YOU and your self are not the same.

Why then is it so challenging to separate your self from YOU?

The issue is that you have been hypnotized into accepting an illusion as YOU. The fact that you and that illusory sense of identity are NOT the same has become blurred.

You have no problem in establishing that your Bible is not YOU. Your chair is not YOU. Your dress or shirt is not YOU. Your self is also not YOU.

What we usually refer to when we say “I” is not who we are. The usual understanding of “I” is a misperception of a false sense of identity. That illusion of self is the EGO.

The EGOIC Mind is conditioned by the past – things that happened (content) and unconscious tendencies (structure). It forms the basis for all further interpretations of reality. It provides the filter through which we screen everything – thoughts, events, interactions, relationships. This illusion – Your EGO – shapes your entire reality.

People try to find themselves in the context of content. It is an exercise in futility. Content is temporal. It is never permanent. We get attached to something. It brings us satisfaction. That soon wears off and we have to search again for something that satisfies this false self – our EGO. And the cycle is repeated.

Spending time identifying how the EGO works so that we can recognize it when it appears is essential to achieving the transformation of our minds which is at the core of Christian living.

Rom 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

If you do not take care to recognize the EGO it will trick you into thinking that it is YOU. You will be lulled into failing to separate the two and to identify with the EGO as if it is YOU.

It is critical to recognize that we are NOT the voice in our heads – the prompter. That voice in our heads is the EGO. It is actually the motivation for dysfunction that you carry around with you and indeed, appears to be YOU.

Humans in the normal state are fundamentally defective and collectively dysfunctional….. Rom 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Sin means to “miss the mark”. There is something in us that leads us to miss the mark…. We do not quite get it.

The core cause is this false sense of self – the EGO. The EGO is caught up with the physical, with thoughts and with emotions. That is what Christians understand to be the world.

The world is at one end of the spectrum and God at the other. Focus on the world – the things on which the EGO is engaged – leads to a lack of connectedness with God.

Mark 4:18 Now these are the ones sown among thorns; they are the ones who hear the word, 19 and the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.

One fundamental problem is that the EGO tends to equate HAVING with BEING. It produces this illusion of ownership. That is the idea that having gives us a feeling of security and makes us stand out. The EGO thrives on comparison. We compare ourselves with others and how they view us is how we see ourselves.

The problem is that things are temporal – they are not permanent and consequently the EGO inevitably leads to heartfelt dissatisfaction and a sense of incompleteness. There is a sense in which we are “not enough.”

There are some concepts that go to the very structure of the EGO. We grapple with them daily. “Me”, “Mine”, “More than”, “I want”, “I need”, “I must have”, “not enough”. It is critical that you identify them and their actions in you. Failure to do so will give them control over you and you will find yourself acting out the unconscious thoughts that are tied to those words.

It is important to recognize that none of the things that the EGO seeks will satisfy you as long as the Egoic Mind is in place. No matter what you have or get, you will not experience lasting joy. You will be constantly seeking after fulfilment.

Ecc 1:14 I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.

Spiritual maturity is tied to our ability to clearly see and live out the reality that what I perceive, experience, think or feel is ultimately not who I am. Who I am cannot be found in things that continuously pass away.

1 John 2: 16 For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. 17 And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.

For this reason it is important to learn more about your self so that we can identify it in action. Once you recognize the EGO, it is weakened. It might survive and reoccur from time to time but recognition weakens it and its hold on you.

EGOS live on Identification and Separation.

We have looked at its identification with having things as a means of gaining satisfaction. There is also identification (attachment) with the human body. The EGO is clever enough to draw attention to itself by being concerned with physiques and external attractiveness. Bear in mind that the EGO can also strengthen itself by creating illness.

The EGO is also attached to thoughts and to emotions.

The EGO also thrives on separation. For the concept of egoic “I” to flourish it needs the opposite thought of “Other”. The further the distance of “Other” from “I” the more “I” stands out. This drive of the ego to be separate actually fuels a need to find fault with others and to complain about them. When we put down others it makes us feel superior. Fault finding is a core function of the self that you are at risk of thinking is YOU.

Matt 7: 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye?

Complaining and its emotional counterpart Resentment add energy to the false self. When we complain, we add emotions to it. We feel bitter, angry, aggrieved, offended. This strengthens self.
It has been observed that the egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and mistakenly take as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself.

The key is to recognize that the actions of the EGO is not who they are nor is it who you are. When you look through the EGO to the sanity that is in every one at their core essence you are able to go beyond the EGO in yourself and it also helps to correct the collective ego problem.
It is important to note that resentment is not limited to persons but also to situations which give the false self even more scope.

This capacity to look beyond and to avoid reacting to the Ego-driven actions of others is the essence of forgiveness. Forgiveness undermines a key strategy of the EGO. Forgiveness comes naturally when you recognize that the only purpose of grievance and resentment is to strengthen a false sense of self and to keep the EGO in place.

Whatever the behaviour that comes from the EGO, the hidden driving force is always similar: Need to stand out, to be special, to be in control, to have power, to get attention, to get more. Also, the need to feel a sense of separation (I am not like that).

The EGO is dysfunctional. It always has a hidden agenda. That is why Christ requires of us that we deny ourselves (that false self).

As you move to try to find out who you truly are, you reflect further on the EGO. The search for who you are is greatly assisted by knowing who you are not. We must understand that we are NOT the EGO.
Who you think you are is directly linked to how you think others are treating you. That shapes how you think about yourself. If you think that others are lavishing love upon you, you think that you are loved person.

One important consideration is that whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are in fact withholding from the world! So, if you feel that you are missing something – start giving it. If you do not think that you have it – act as if you do and it will come to you. Then you give it and in turn you will receive it.

Luke 6: 38 Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.”