Before we are born, "our self" is inside us ready to mould our identity. Unfortunately, as we are born and grow older, we identify ourselves with our external world - family, friends, other people, the culture at large - regards us.
More and more our identity and name come to mean something else, something other than independent sense of "I am" inside us. More and more "I am" now identified with just those conditions which other people can see and know or which are put into us by external influences, and this includes our thought and opinions, which come to us from outside, and many of our emotions, our likes and dislikes, our ideals and values, our sense of self respect and place.
And more and more we identify ourselves with our bodies, with pleasures and pains and the changes that take place in them, including, of course, the intensity of sexual awakening and sensation and all the emotions that are attached to sexuality.
We identify ourselves with our social class or ethnic group or gender or nationality or any one or more of hundreds such aspects of our communal life.
At the end we could not find "our self" anymore. We are lost . . .
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