It is a major principal of meditation to “turn off the noise in your head” before meditating. However, I finally got an interesting hypothesis as to why.
Some people who were very expert at meditation discovered that with extended periods of silence in the head, the mind tends to drift to either an unusual degree of focus, which allows it to consider a narrow situation at hand, ignoring distractions; or the mind becomes very unfocused, a very inspirational state of mind for both creativity and “quantum leaps” in problem resolution.
However, the “internal dialogue” disrupts these shifts in either direction, sticking the mind in the middle, where the mind is involved with the overall situation of a person in the here and now.
This middle position is optimal, they concluded, if you are “being chased by a tiger.” That is, it is survival oriented, far more so than with a state of narrow focus *or* inspiration.
So, in the shadowy past, our ancestors came up with the trick of talking to ourselves, and parents unknowingly indoctrinate their children in this technique to this day, “even though tigers are few and far between these days.”
Thus they concluded, if you use any of the techniques to shut up the internal dialogue, that little bit of mind discipline will give you access to both a strong state of focus, and an inspirational unfocused state.
In practical terms, say if you were doing your SAT test. Just the ability to focus on the test and ignore all the distractions around you might be worth 10-20 IQ points. A much more enhanced ability to concentrate.
Likewise, when faced with an irresolute and complicated problem, or just needing a big shot of inspirational creativity, unfocusing your mind could open the gates.
However, there is more to it than that. The internal dialogue, and the vacillations between a slightly more focused and a slightly more unfocused state of mind are very energy consumptive. A person too skilled with talking to themselves both sounds like an “airhead surfer”, and are exhausted by all the energy used to keep them in that state.
When such people use one of the techniques to control their internal dialogue, the change is dramatic. I knew one such surfer airhead type who applied himself to a technique for a good two week, and he was like a different person.
Not just speaking in coherent sentences, but full paragraphs, and his brain filled with energy and good ideas. He was very pleased with the result, but somewhat apprehensive, because were that rate of improvement to continue, he imagined it would be overwhelming.
He did describe his new ability as like having “a knife switch in his head”, so he could turn his dialogue on or off at will.
Unless we develop our will and intent, we are ego ruled creatures, slaved to its whims and desires.
” ...who applied himself to a technique...”
What does that mean?
(The middle setting would be *very* advantageous for a programmer, when one has has the intuition, and needs to turn it into working code.)
Cheers!