To simplify, I will include in my definition of “thinking” many of those mental processes that go on subconsciously. We experience what we think about ourselves and pretty much everything else. The reality we live in is the one we create in our minds. All the mind has ever had to go on to build its picture of reality is the binary data coming in from the senses. This binary pattern of nerves firing (1) or not (0) is the only objective data the brain has ever had available from which to create the virtual reality world in which we experience life. Everything else is a subjective creation of the mind based on its past and present observation of firing patterns of these nerves. Everything we experience in life, including ourselves, is an hallucination of mind, and it is helpful and important to keep in mind that this hallucination is subjective and often quite inaccurate. Yet we only realize this when the senses send in data that dramatically misaligns with this virtual reality mind construct, only then do we suspect it to be an hallucination.

We can never actually know what others are thinking and feeling about us, we can only imagine it. We communicate who we think we are to the world in many different ways, many of which are outside of our conscious awareness. About the best we can do is try to be the person we believe we would like to be. This is integr-ity, the integration of our beliefs and values into an entity, an image that we imagine as self. To the extent we are successful, we will communicate the nature of this entity to the world. How others interpret it has more to do with their own internal subjective inaccurate hallucination of reality as it does with anything else.

While the mind may look to information coming in from the senses to help create its present moment, it will inevitably interpret that information based on its existing picture of the world and of self. Whether we are “good enough” to others or not, if we believe we are not, then this is what we will experience in the reality our mind creates for us, even if others actually see us in a much more positive light. That said, eventually we will find a way to communicate our negative beliefs to others about the nature of the entity we see as self, and eventually they will come to believe us. Here is where that self-fulfilling prophesy comes into play. We believe ourselves to be not “good enough” and eventually, we communicate this in enough ways that others come to believe it as well. Then they will eventually communicate their belief back to us, which we will take as evidence that we were “not good enough” all along. It can be a vicious circle. The first step in getting off this crazy merri-go-round is realizing that the self we see as “not good enough”, is and always will be a subjective and inaccurate creation of the mind. Once we see it as such, we can begin to question the accuracy of this image and attempt to bring some objectivity to our experience of “self” and hopefully start to undo some of the damage done by negative messages we received over our lifetimes. Messages, that like all messages, were often inaccurate on the part of the sender and/or misinterpreted by our own minds.