If you are to write down all that you know about yourself, what would you write?
It is part of every human being upbringing to learn how to judge everything including himself. Family and society make tremendous efforts to teach children what is good, what is appropriate, what is that in which you should be competent, and how to be competent. Parents mainly, then family, school, society and media are relentlessly bombarding individuals with concepts and standards that are deemed to be essential for making him fit in society.
Most of what someone knows about himself comes through his early age. Parents keep giving feedback on his qualities, their importance, behaviour, and so on. The feedback might be benign and might be harsh according to how far he is from the common known standards.
At early age a child has no clue assessing the standards he absorbs. He has no means to know how relevant and correct what he is being taught about himself. He is being taught anyway.
As an adult, old lessons had been deeply stored in his subconscious mind affecting every inch of his being from a hidden place where awareness has no reach. Adding to old lessons what media and advertising campaigns persistently telling him about who he is and who he is not.
Along the way to feel competent and acceptable the individual unconsciously sucks in the standards, concepts and judgments imposed upon him from the external world. If these standards are not compatible with whom he is, the he falls prey to negative self image which eventually leads him to be self-conscious, unconfident, distressed or even suicidal.
One needs to quit trying to be fit for sometime and recheck how he perceives himself and against which standards he judges it and whether these standards are of his own are borrowed from the external world.
I advice on having an experiment on what do you know about yourself. For sometime imagine you are completely do know nothing about yourself. Discard the thoughts of how good or bad you are, how competent for something or not and how healthy or not. Release your impressions about yourself. Let your mind perceive you as if you have just been born.
Thanks :)
