Who the heck is inside my head, talking to "me"?

Last night my wife and I spent a pleasant couple of hours at a holiday gathering hosted by a Tai Chi friend. Meeting some new people, we enjoyed stimulating conversation on a variety of subjects.

Including meditation, spirituality, that sort of stuff.

At one point, I said something like:

A few days ago I had a realization that seemed fresh to me, even after more than forty years of daily meditation. Why do I so often feel at odds with myself? After all, who is there inside my head in addition to me?

What's up with my worrying about whether I'm thinking the right thoughts, feeling the right emotions, doing the right actions? Our dogs don't seem to be split up into more than one entity.

Further, I don't even consider there is a single "me" inside my head. Neuroscience, along with Buddhism, sure seems to support the notion that Self is an illusion. 

So if even a single Self is illusion, that voice inside my head which talks to my illusory Self must be even more of an illusion.

The guy sitting next to me turned out to be a member of a Zen meditation group. He made some cogent comments about death, selflessness, and other subjects that I've forgotten. Wish I could remember more of what he said.

Anyway, it's a fascinating subject: who, if anybody, we're talking to with that inner voice which babbles on inside our heads so frequently. 

A 2011 blog post, "The self as illusion," went into this.

Comments

[William Harryman]

What you are asking about is multiplicity, the sense of having multiple selves, most of which are often in the background and outside of awareness. But when they are activated by an emotion, an experience, a person, a fear, and so on, then they rise to the surface and can even hijack the personality for a while.

In contemporary psychology they are called "parts," ego states, subpersonalities, complexes, etc. But from the Buddhist view, they are even less "real" the illusory self that we live with daily.

According to neuroscience, our false sense of a singular self is actually constructed from the experience of all of our parts, likely an evolutionary trait to keep us alive.