Meditation on an Inner Voice is #13 from the middle section, Noon, in A Million Different Things: Meditations of The World’s Happiest Man. It’s concerned with an inner voice or spiritual helper.
By David Stone
Follow Me, Paul McCartney’s deceptively simple song, suggests that McCartney has had experiences like my own. There’s something or someone somewhere, as I first read from Arthur Conan Doyle as a teenager, “trying to help.”
Of this, I have no doubt. Nor, apparently, has McCartney.
My partners are always available. It’d be misleading to describe their involvement as being like a contained intuition, but it would also be a mistake to describe it as anything less than intensely personal.
The closest I get to a description is a direct and short connection to Jung’s collective unconscious. A massive shared awareness where we might get access to knowledge about things we’ve never learned.
But it’s much more personal and intimate than that, at least as I experience it through the filter of “me.”
My own inner voice sometimes seizes a moment and intervenes voluntarily. I have had my transcendental cage ineffably rattled more than once.
An easy example, very early one morning… I get out of bed early, usually around 3:30 or 4:00. I adopted this habit because it allowed me uninterrupted hours to concentrate without taking anything away from my life. As Dr. Dyer promised, my early morning habits have added significantly to the rest of it.
Before the rest of the world gets rolling, I’ve spent at least an hour writing, a half-hour or so meditating and whatever it takes to catch up on whatever morning’s news wants my attention.
First, though, being a lucky guy with two cats who like to share this early, often crepuscular hour, I take their food containers down from the cupboard (where they’re stored to keep these eager felines from helping themselves) and put a measured amount in each of their bowls.
A unique thing my wife and I both do after each feeding is hide a second helping of dry food around our apartment. This gives the cats a chance to hunt, exercise their senses and use memory for assistance.
Searching out food, they also get some exercise, jumping up and over and conquering obstacles. Since ours are indoor animals, we try to increase opportunities for them to do what nature designed them to do.
Meditations on an Inner Voice: A Conversation
For me, however, after thousands of food-hiding excursions, embarking on another, pre-coffee, at 4:00 AM seems a little tedious. Especially on days when I’d pay good money for one more hour of sleep.
I’m in the habit of silently conversing with my inner self, both casually and seriously, as appropriate, and on a day when my energy was lagging, going from room to room, strategically hiding cat food, I flipped a comment to my inner being that, “This is probably pretty boring for you.”
I imagined an entity embedded in realities so deep and remote few of us will ever touch them might find sharing my predawn routine dull. Startlingly, I got an instant verbal response. It was as clear as any I’d received before.
“We enjoy doing anything with you” is what it said.
The affection was so loving and kind, a lump immediately caught in my throat. I almost cried, standing there in the near dark, a handful of kernels between my fingers. Fortunately, no one besides the cats was around to witness my momentary breakdown.
Time has passed, but in that moment, I’d have had a hard time offering a sensible explanation. My experience now seems practical and down to earth. But that was neither. It was as if God spoke up, reminding me, “I’m here, and nothing you ever do is trivial.”
With meditations on an inner voice, once something like that happens, you can’t ever go back. Doubts arise. I’m as human in that way as anyone else, but for me, they vaporize like mist from a hilltop. I know my doubts are mist and that real trees wait for the sun behind them. Now, staying tuned is almost as routine as breathing. I can do it on purpose, but no matter what, it’ll take place anyway.
David Stone is a New York City writer. His other books include Amazing: Truths About Conscious Awareness and Messes I Made While You Were Waiting For Godot, a novel.
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