A Portrait of Inner Considering
Inner Considering
Inner considering is a form of identifying — which is to say, it is a kind of sleep. It is mechanical through and through, a habitual drain on your energy that owes nothing of consciousness and returns nothing of value.
It wears many faces. The most persistent is the making of inner accounts: a continuous mental ledger in which one tallies up real or imagined grievances, recording what others owe, nursing the feeling of being underpaid by life. Close behind this is the tendency to self-pity — a damp, grey condition of chronic complaint in which life itself is always the culprit and other people are invariably at fault. These are not dramatic sins; they are more like a low fever that never quite breaks.
Then there is inner talking: the unceasing internal monologue that accompanies nearly everything we do, a stream of self-justification so familiar that most people never notice it at all. And fueling all of this is imagination — specifically the imagination of False Personality, that multifaceted mask of self-interest that faces outward toward the world, perpetually anxious about attention, approval, and merit. Inner considering is its native element.
What Can Be Done About It?
The question is worth asking plainly, because inner considering is not overcome by wishing it away or by occasional good intentions.
The first requirement is inner sincerity — which sounds simple but is not. It demands a certain courage: the willingness to look at oneself clearly and to acknowledge what one finds, however unflattering. Most people prefer comfortable conclusions.
The second requirement is non-identifying. Since inner considering is identifying, the remedy is its opposite: learning not to identify — and in particular, not to identify with oneself. This means withdrawing the sense of “I” from those mechanical impulses that generate the whole miserable business in the first place.
The most powerful practical remedy, however, is external considering — which stands in direct opposition to internal considering in every particular. Where internal considering turns inward and stews, external considering turns outward and adapts. It requires conscious effort: placing oneself imaginatively in another person’s position, understanding their difficulties, seeing oneself as they might see you. It is not merely a social grace; it is a cleansing and freeing of one’s inner state. A few moments of external considering can undo weeks of internal considering — a striking ratio, when one thinks about it.
There is also the matter of cancelling inner accounts. This is not a vague aspiration but a specific inner act: genuinely releasing the feeling that others owe you anything. The Lord’s Prayer puts it with characteristic precision — cancel debts in proportion to your canceling the debts of others. The arithmetic is exact.
The inner monologue itself can be worked with. Transforming one-sided inner talking into a genuine inner dialogue breaks its negative momentum and can produce real insight. And through sustained self-observation, a gradual sense of one’s own nothingness emerges — not as a crushing conclusion, but as a liberating one that quiets the endless demands and complaints.
None of this is easy, because inner considering is a mechanical habit of long standing. It yields only to conscious struggle. That struggle constitutes the first line of Work on oneself — and it is a prerequisite for any effective work in relation to others.