Whoever loses the capability for inner silence, loses contact to himself and soon won't be able to think clearly any more.

One of the interesting characteristics of the Ego Tunnel is that it creates (as Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo called it) a robust "out-of-the brain experience", a highly realistic experience of not operating on internal models, but of effortlessly being in direct and immediate contact with the external world - and oneself.

What many people don't see is that there are abundant examples of phenomenal opacity: It is one of the most interesting features of the human conscious model of reality that, first, it can contain elements that are not experienced as mind-independent, as unequivocally real, as immediately given, and second, that there is a "gradient of realness" in which one and the same content can be experienced transparently or in an opaque fashion.

Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.

Speaking as a phenomenologist, it seems to me that a considerable portion of mind wandering actually is "mental avoidance behaviour", an attempt to cope with adverse internal stimuli or to protect oneself from a deeper processing of information that threatens self-esteem.

A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place.

The self is not a thing, but a process.