The only reason you’re even undertaking a resolution is because you’re unsatisfied with yourself the way you are. You’ve operated under the assumption that you need to improve when in fact you need to understand. Your real self is already beautiful, capable, valuable and worthwhile but your ego doesn’t believe that. When you talk to yourself all day? That’s your ego.

Mental health, clarity and confidence emerge quite naturally when you quieten and disengage from your internal story. That’s why kids are so confident and can learn to walk and talk so fast. Until you can talk to yourself–no ego! So there’s no voice limiting you. You’re brilliant, enlightened and free.

Most people try to stop the negative voices and switch them for positive voices but frankly that’s people who are pretending to understand this stuff. If your teacher is recommending that as your ultimate goal then they can’t teach you this because they don’t know it. Yes, a positive voice is better than a negative one, but that’s like saying you want a holy ego. That’s not really what to shoot for. Again: you want to understand. And that’s a big thing, so we’re doing it in little pieces.

We’ll start with attacking the credibility of your story. You think you’re talking to yourself about yourself but you really aren’t. You are a story telling itself a story, so in no time you’re totally lost inside the thoughts. When you first hear that voice in your own head it’s so startling that a kid will always ascribe the voice to a toy or an invisible friend. Then before long the invisible friend is comfortably living inside you. Worse, your ego soon has roommates. [Insert foreboding music.]

Telling your invisible friend to go away seems like a good idea until you realise that it’s your invisible friend saying that. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. Rather than argue with it, you want to evaporate your ego by being indifferent to it. And we can take a big step toward that today, because you actually think you’re ego’s talking to you about you.

I’ve been teaching people for 25 years that they should ignore their internal story because it’s a lie. Not a little lie. A total lie. You are a complete fiction. Can you see if you can come to truly grasp that, that you are instantly much better off? It would be like if your ego was your child and all of the school reports about the child’s behaviour came from a chronic liar. In the end you have no idea how good you are unless you’re being someone intentionally.

For now we’ll skip the intentional part and we’ll focus on recognising the lie. Your identity is only a memory of who you believed you were, just as your worries are your fears about who you might be. But not only do you believe things about yourself that are unfair, you believe things that never even really happened.

If you ever studied this as intensely as I have this is quite obvious. People believe all kinds of things about themselves that aren’t true so how do you know who you need to be if you don’t even know who you are? And if you doubt this, just as with everything I’ve taught, science always catches up because frankly I learned it through experiments too. It’s just no one thinks a a five year old with a head injury would be doing brain and thought research all day because no one else that age spends their entire life thinking about thinking.

A scientist from near my home and who now lives in Britain has done what to you will be shocking research. I’ve noted it many times before in this blog, but below is an short video of her explaining how she proved that you really are a fiction. I doubt she has any idea that you’re 100% a fiction, but we’ll start with some doubt. That’s actually a pretty decent achievement. So watch this video and then I’ll give you today’s exercise.

Are you starting to get an inkling of how big and serious this is? Your ego is your history and you have almost no idea what yours or the world’s history really is.

Why pay attention to a story if you can’t be sure it’s true? Rather than making it go away, why not just ignore it the way you ignored people that you don’t respect? If someone has zero credibility with you are you offended by their insults? No, because you don’t choose to believe those because you don’t trust the source. You have to stop trusting your own ego.

So here’s exercise one: Before the end of the day you and your partner(s) in pursuing peace of mind are going to compete to see who can find the most examples of you making a past belief-shift. This would be examples where you could say for instance, “I kept wondering what I was doing wrong in my marriage and then I realised I’d innocently married the wrong person,” or “I always thought I was stupid because my Mom said so, but then I had a great teacher who showed me that I had a specific kind of intelligence.” These are when you changed your story.

To be clear, your new story was also a lie, but by recognising that it’s always changing it’ll feel less powerful and you’ll start to see why some cultures don’t even name your identity. That voice is always an opinion and even that comes from someone just as confused as you.

Find your examples of when you changed from someone into someone else and then use your thinking usefully; to meditate your ego away. Use that close inspection as the heat that evaporates your ego. It doesn’t matter who you are today because you clearly change who you are anyway.

Make your list. Meditate on each example. This is no small thing. This is proof that you are an ever-changing fiction. Make your list. Evaporate your Self. This is step one. I’ll see you tomorrow.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.