Understanding Yourself

Last week on vacation I had a lot of time to think and reflect about everything. A thought that came to my mind from a book I’ve been reading was that most of us are living in an illusion based on someone else’s beliefs.

There are two main parts to our mind: the conscious and the subconscious. The subconscious is formed the day we are born and it stores all the early outside information that we receive from people all around us. It has no filter so we basically believe everything we hear and feel. All the information that we come across before our conscious mind develops is shoved into our subconscious as the “truth.” While all of this is going on in our subconscious mind prior to puberty, we do everything by instinct. We do what we feel is right and what we want without caring about the opinions of anyone else. Once our conscious mind develops after puberty, our conscious mind believes it is in control but in reality it is controlled by the beliefs we are carrying around in our subconscious minds from the day we are born. Once this transition into our developed conscious mind occurs, we stop following our instincts and we start making decisions based on other people’s opinions and not what makes us happy.

Instead of following our instincts and our hearts, we start investing in what other people think we should be investing in. As we continue to follow other people’s opinions, our inner fortunes begin to fade away and it isn’t until we reconnect with who we really are and start investing in what WE believe that we start to live the life we’ve always wanted. So, moral of this long story is that until we realize that what other people believe and think is irrelevant, disregarding actual valuable constructive criticism, that we cannot live the life we want without the unnecessary stress and everything else interfering with how we want to live.