5th post of Todd Murphy’s 3rd Lecture (14:07 – 16:44)

14:07 to 16:44

We maintain the world through a constant process of reconstructing it primarily through the words we use. Whether hard things are hard and soft things are soft and squares are square and circles are circles we don’t need internal dialogue to maintain. But our sense of ourselves, our thoughts about ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, are very much dependent on words, and maintaining a constant stream of words in our minds. And this tends to keep the whole process going.

Without that process things start to fall apart quite quickly.

And in fact shutting off the internal dialogue is one of the core processes of many spiritual disciplines and it’s function is to break down the world a bit, make our sense of ourselves a bit fuzzier so we’re not so locked-in and it allows an opportunity for other things to come through.

Our self-esteem, and again that is the same self as in “the sense of self”, our self-esteem rises and falls according to what other people say to us.

Someone say’s, “You’re cute” and we feel good.

Someone say’s, “Oh, those shoes are awful” and we, it’s our shoes it’s not ourselves but still tend to be a bit crest-fallen when that happens.

Somebody say’s, “You’re hired” and we feel great, the approval, the acceptance that goes with this.

Someone say’s, “You’re fired” and we feel awful, the seeming rejection that comes with when your boss gives you your pink-slip and tells you, “It’s time to go”. We take these things very, very personally.

A string of words from a teacher, “Your doing great” and we feel wonderful. Or, “You didn’t pass the test” and we feel horrible.

Our self-esteem depends very much on the words that we have coming into our minds and the stories we tell ourselves in our minds tend to buttress our self-esteem.

Benjamin Franklin once said that he didn’t understand this Christian thing about vanity and pride. He said that he had given himself many happy evening hours simply sitting in front of the fire and remembering all the fine and wonderful things he had done in the course of his life and how he could tell himself, “What a cool guy I am”. And he actually managed to bolster himself-up and I don’t know the details of that but I am sure that he did that in times in his life when things weren’t going so well far more than when things were going along, as he might have said, “swimmingly”.

(16:44)