The other day, I was on Google Hangouts with one of my closest friends. He and I met in the elevator on the way to orientation at the hedge fund I worked at. In spite of the fact that we’re seemingly very different, we instantly became close friends. He’s an Indian genius programmer with a PhD who wrote his dissertation on blackbox systems (or something, whatever). I’m a scattered and uselessly overly educated Asian-American New Yorker…I don’t even know how else to describe myself.

I consider him a great philosopher, and many of our conversations over California Pizza Kitchen or dosas or comedy or hiking trips have meandered over the topic of self-development. Many of my greatest life tips have come from him. For example, to feel presence, just pay attention to your feet and how they’re pressing into the earth. Or, focus on one goal or habit at a time until it is ingrained. I know few people who read as voraciously as he does about philosophy, good living, and the spiritual aspects of life. I also kind of feel like he’s memorized the entire YouTube corpus…or maybe the internet at large.

In this particular conversation, I was staring out a some beach and he had just arrived in India. “The mind…it keeps yapping at you, no matter what,” he said. No matter how much we can gain control of our external world, the struggle to gain control of our internal world can be beyond elusive.

It’s true. We may look like we are living the dream, hopping from beach to beach, from one beautiful country to the next. There may be few worries, just some bills to pay, a consulting gig here and there. But we can also be weighed down and doing heavy duty work. The goings on of the mind can be a full-time job.

There is the “reality” of the world and then there is the world filtered through the prism of our mind. And then, there is only the world filtered through the prism of our mind, beliefs, and perceptions. That is the only reality we can know in spite of all the objective truths we use to pin things down and create a ?false? sense of definition.

One of my goals this year and for a lifetime is to start to control the inner critic and voice. I seem to have multiple competing voices and personalities. All of them have great suggestions and also argue with each other about what to do, who to be, how to interpret a given situation.

One may yell, “Hey, take a break. Stop worrying and do nothing!”

Another may say, “Don’t forget all your obligations…and by the way, I thought you wanted to be a productive member of society.”

Still another will say, “Get up and go exercise.”

A fourth will chime in and say, “No, you don’t want to do that.”

Then voices 5-8 may have different tapes playing. Some may be happy memories. Others will be playing tapes of situations that were hurtful. There always seems to be one voice in there insisting that I’ll never do anything good. It reminds me of every horrific stupid thing I’ve ever done as evidence that I’m a loser. Of course, that one even has a counterbalancing voice saying that I’m the best person in the world!

Now it’s time to listen to those voices and also quiet them by being more of the witness to these voices than the voices themselves. It is hard work embodying all those threads of thought and vocalization. In one of the few books I continue to read (and then forget and read), Michael Singer talks about acting as a “witness” to these voices. Instead of absorbing their content, you reach more of a meta-level state of observing and analyzing (and maybe some light mocking) of these voices and patterns.

I suppose I’m figuring out my own personal truths. I realized that when I was interviewed for a podcast last week, and I had very little real “advice” to give the audience. The only thing I could really tell was my story, as authentically as possible with perhaps a little less of an edge than I usually give things.

Okay, meditation time. (Or is it second smoothie bowl time? Both?).