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Seeing Through the Eyes of Others
Our minds are filled with opinions that are not our own.
Each of our minds is a room for rent, and tenants come and go, some only visiting and others establishing permanent residence. Though we find ourselves in solitude, the specters of our acquaintances continually hang round us. We may find ourselves daydreaming up a conversation with an imagined reconstruction of a friend, so that we talk to ourselves as if through them.
We look at an item of clothing for sale and the suggestion that some one of our friends would love it comes to mind. We do something embarrassing, and though no one is around to see it, we imagine what some nitpicky acquaintance would say. We wish to give way to an impulse for cowardice or indiscipline, but our friends and family stand round as solemn tribunal in the court of our mind, to look on us with judging eyes, though in reality each of them is off tending to their business, and concerned only with the imagined tribunal encircling themselves.
And though these images of others come to mind, society seeps into us in far more insidious ways. We find a thought floating up from somewhere deep within us, a judgement of another for being at odds with some value that we do not even truly esteem, or if we do, cannot point to a reason why we do. The foundation of our mind has been…
