A QUICK SUMMARY OF WHO YOU ACTUALLY ARE
AND WHO YOU ACTUALLY AREN'T, BUT MIGHT BELIEVE YOURSELF TO BE
I suggest that you also take a look at the longer, more detailed set of pieces on who you really are. They might seem a little convoluted or to have too much detail in the diagrams.
However, it is essential that you understand who you are and are not. Otherwise, your primitive mind will react often if it "thinks" what you acquire and what you believe are "in fact" YOU. If you believe that, the primitive mind will "have to" defend those, as if they were necessary to being able to survive - and that will be a massive waste of energy and of emotions that do not feel good.
By being clear on who you are and who you are not you will be freeing yourself up from lots of negative emotions and lots of not-so-logical actions (actions that cause damage through stress and harmful chemicals that are involved in "correcting for" the supposed danger.
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I'll do a brief treatment here, but it is essential (since this is so vital) that you read and understand the more detailed discussions. Study them until you agree with them (or write me a rebuttal that is better!).
The "actual YOU" is only your extraordinary, human conscious awareness and your huge ability to learn and think and create meaning which is then experienced. Even though you technically "have" a body (which includes a brain), it not YOU, at the core of your "essence". We can, however, create a category called "YOU plus" since the body/mind is absolutely a necessary part for our awareness functioning. (This is "the soul" of a human being before adding the artificial spiritual whacky stuff to it. It does not exist outside the body or in its own place - it is present in the brain system, yet it is not the brain.)
I am not the patterns/recordings within my brain - and I can't "be" them, since I can change them. I am not my thoughts (as I am the one who thinks them). I am not "my inner child", as there is no such actual being that exists - all that is left are "memories" (aka brain patterns/recordings of data that include emotions and a negative or positive connotation).
I am not my beliefs, for they are just something I make up and acquire over time. They either serve or don't serve me - but I am not them. Therefore, I need not defend them against anyone else's opinion. It is useless to get into an argument to defend a belief, yet we seem to be confused about where we end and our beliefs begin - all beliefs are outside of the YOU.
If you have a belief, say, that the x political party is the best and someone else says something bad about it and if you're confused and think the belief is part of you, you will react, and possibly even get into an argument - for no reason at all. The only reason you would defend against something is because in the haze of thinking we believe we are protecting our survival.
We lose relationships because we're stuck in "being right" (defending against our being wrong). However, there is no literal value in being right
