No, mostly the voices in your head are produced by psychological mechanisms. Identifying with those voices is one of the basic mistakes that humans make which prevent them from recognizing what I call “true self.”
Your mind makes a model of the world that you live in, and it makes models (more than one!) of the self. It does this for prediction and control, it needs to be able to anticipate what will happen in response to a given action, for example, so it needs to have a model of self and world.
Being biased toward “survival of the ego”, the mind does a lot of internal scenario-building: mocking up imaginary situations in which you take some action and then simulating how others will respond, etc. The voices represent the viewpoint of yourself or others, as imagined in these mock-ups. At other times, the mind reviews your actions and thoughts and presents them to an imaginary jury to judge them, or imagines what others must think of you, and so forth.
The basic theme of all this internal drama is to refine and sustain the self-concept web. To the degree that you believe you’re defined by the self projected by those mechanisms, you tend to just not notice the lack of “grounding” or authenticity inherent in the voices and images and thoughts of that constructed identity.
That results in an overall “poverty of freedom”: if you believe that you are that persona, then a large portion of the mind’s resources are devoted to the maintenance of it. Ego maintenance becomes the 800-lb gorilla in the mind, and other possibilities of being and thinking and self-expression are ignored or unexplored.
Recovering your freedom and authenticity requires you to take ownership of those mechanisms — to see them for what they are, accept them as the product of automated thinking, but not fall for the illusion that “these thoughts tell me who I am.”
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