The Anchor on the Evening News of the Mind
The reason we identify with the voice is not because we make a mistake that we could simply stop making. It is because the voice is almost the only part of the process that enters conscious awareness. You are not conscious of neurons firing. You are not conscious of hormones being released. You are not conscious of the brain integrating visual information, predicting danger, calculating probabilities, or activating the autonomic nervous system. By the time consciousness appears, almost all of the important work has already been done. Consciousness receives something like the final draft, not the editing process.
When you suddenly feel fear, you do not witness the amygdala, the adrenal glands, the changes in heart rate, muscle tension, attentional narrowing, and threat detection. What appears in consciousness is simply, "This is dangerous," together with the urge to run, fight, or freeze. The voice then adds its commentary. "I am afraid." "I should stay calm." "I hope nobody notices." No matter how much spiritual advisors imagine it, we cannot directly identify with processes that never become conscious.The phrase "identify with the source of the experience" is misleading. We cannot identify with neural computation because it is inaccessible. The source is hidden from us by the architecture of the nervous system.
What we can do is something more modest. We can understand that the voice is not the originator of everything it reports. That is the shift. Not from identifying with the body instead of the intellect, because neither is directly available in its entirety, instead, it's about realizing that our inner voice doesn't start our thoughts and actions; it often shows up after things have already begun. Think of a news presenter. The presenter tells you about an earthquake. The presenter did not cause the earthquake. Nor does the presenter usually know all the geological mechanisms behind it. They report what has already happened. Consciousness is often like that. It reports, interprets, predicts, and plans, but it is not where most mental events originate.
Is there a solution? Not in the sense of escaping this architecture. As far as we know, no human being becomes directly conscious of synaptic transmission or hormonal cascades in the ordinary sense. That machinery remains unconscious.
But there is a kind of epistemic gain. You stop treating the narrator as the whole story. You begin to ask, "What process produced this thought? What bodily state, what memory, what prediction, what social learning gave rise to it?" You still hear the narrator, but you no longer mistake it for the author. That is probably as far as we can go. We do not become conscious of the machinery itself. We become conscious that there is machinery behind the experience. That may sound like a small difference, but it is a profound change in how we understand ourselves. The voice remains. What changes is the explanatory model we attach to it.
We identify with the ego because only its voice reaches our consciousness, much like we see the tip of an iceberg. We see neither the base nor the forces that create the mountain or its tip.