What you’ve been doing is wiping your inner mirror. Up till now, there’s been a blur between you and your real self but as you drop identifications, your image becomes clearer and it may surprise you. You’ll discover likes and dislikes that you hadn’t acknowledged. Conditioned as we are to accept other people’s definitions of us, this emerging individuality can often seem like self-will run amuck. It isn’t.

The second is not to assume you already know everything there is to know about yourself. There’s a lot more comprising your entirety than you realise. Thinking that you presently understand yourself is like gazing at the tip of an iceberg and taking for granted you’ve seen the whole thing. In actuality, most of what you do and say is determined unconsciously. Most of our behaviour, for example, has been learned by unconsciously imitating others. People are strange. It’s as if we have an inborn mechanism that automatically makes us imitate anything we see or hear.

Almost everything we do and say is because we’ve heard somebody else do and say it first. I did an experiment once to see if others could be influenced to behave differently without their knowing it. I gave it a time limit of one month. Everyday I repeated the same nonsensical gestures over and over again while talking with them. Guess what? Before the month

was up, two others were already performing rudimentary versions of my silly displays. — Spiritualendeavours.com