How We Became Who We Are

I love this quote attributed to Buddha: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is every thing. What we think we become.”

If I were to say that you are what you think and that you have made yourself who you are, you might feel uncomfortable and want to quit reading or, if I were there with you, challenge me. I ask you to just hold the information being presented here as if it were simply a possibility until you complete the lesson, such as, "Oh, that might possibly be true." It is okay to disagree with some but not all of this information. Please just hang in here.

What does the combination of our beliefs, attitudes, and values mean? What does it represent? Think about these questions for a moment to see what you come up with.
I maintain that, other than my body that acts as a container and sensation register, I am my beliefs, attitudes, and values. In fact, I present myself to you, right here and right now, as a combination of my beliefs, attitudes, and values. That's who I am. But then how do we get our beliefs, attitudes and values?

As you may know, 80% of who we are now, we became at an early age. The estimate I've heard in the last few years is by about age three. So 80% of our personality is formed by around the age of three. After that, we simply develop strategies for living. Children are like sponges. They simply absorb information that then forms who they become. A casual remark by a parent becomes an absolute truth. Decisions made at this time are long lasting. And, unfortunately, we live in an unconscious society where off-hand but cruel comments made to our children are seldom taken back with an apology. Instead we try to justify them with thoughts such as, "They'll never remember what I said." or even worse, "Well, they deserved it." And in doing so, a travesty is committed.

The four major influences from which we get out beliefs, attitudes, and values are:
• our family
• our peers
• our culture and the environment, and
• the media.

We have to ask, Are we conditioned by these four major influences, or do we have something to say about what we absorb? I maintain that it is through interacting with our family, our peers, our culture, the environment and the media that forms the basis of our personalities, which leads to who we become. We form our beliefs, they aren’t attached to us by others. While having influence, they do not have the power. We do. And this happens by three to five years old! With our limited fields of experience!

And from these areas we develop both positive and negative beliefs, attitudes, and values, which from here on I will refer to as beliefs. And rather than referring to them as positive or negative, I will call them life-affirming or self-defeating beliefs – the ones that support life and the ones that damage or defeat life and our selves. And how have we gone about putting our beliefs into life-affirming or self-defeating categories?

It is our perception--how we see the world.

Our perception is the mechanism that determines the outcome of those experiences. Our perception shapes the messages we get from life. And don't we trust our perception? Don't we generally believe that dial on our gas tank when it says half-full? That is, until it is stuck and then we run out of gas. There are many incidents in life where we find that our eyes fool us. Five witnesses to a crime may come up with five different and contradictory descriptions of the event and the suspects.

So I present myself to you as a combination of both my life-affirming and my self-defeating beliefs, and I base all of these beliefs on my perception, which may or may not be accurate. Perception has nothing to do with the truth; it is just a particular way of seeing things--a point of view. This means that someone can be raised in the very best of circumstances with excellent parents and--based upon how they perceived the world, themselves, and others as a child--they still develop self-defeating beliefs. I overheard two elementary teachers talking about me. One of them used the word, “chubby”. I forever afterward was embarrassed by my physical presentation.

Perception leads to thoughts, and our thoughts create our reality. Our mind and our thoughts are very powerful.

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