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“The human mind’s innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being.”

“Imagination and recollection of cherished memories of the pastimes are closely related. We do not recall memories verbatim. As our perspective changes regarding our place in the world, we shift through our recollections and revise our memories. People possess the ability to edit their memories by repressing unbearable episodes and highlighting incidences that generate fond memories. How we perceive and comprehend ourselves in the past, the present, and the future shapes our evolving sense of self. Humankind’s ability to repress unpleasant events and humankind’s ability to act as the solo editors of our germinating awareness of the world that we occupy is ultimately responsible for activating our metamorphosing sense of identity.”

“Human history is the ancient story of the umbilical conflict between a lone individual versus a cabalistic society. A love-hate relationship defines our personal history with society, where the suppression of individuality for the sake of the collective good battles the notion that the purpose of society is to enable each person to flourish. A conspicuous feature of cultural development involves societies teaching children the sublimation of unacceptable impulses or idealizations, consciously to transform their inappropriate instinctual impulses into socially acceptable actions or behavior. The paradox rest in the concept that in order for any person to flourish they must preserve the spiritual texture of themselves, a process that requires the individual to resist societal restraint, push off against the community, and reject the walls of traditionalism that seek to pen us in. The climatic defining event in a person’s life represents the liberation of the self from crippling conformism, staunchly rebuffing capitulating to the whimsy of the super ego of society.”

“The ongoing struggle to achieve a profound harmony between the deepest and most conflicting impulses of human beings instates the murkiness of my soul. The battle against the amorphousness of sin and depravity, and seeking unity and clarity, trace their origins to the primeval fire that launched humanity. This ancient warfare for control of the soul allows me to create myself. Because of the primordial inconsistences between ecstasy and reason, I am the repentant artist of my being. I am a beardless, sensuous, and androgynous sculptor, the redeemer and the transformer of my naked self.”

“People exercise the freedom to present themselves from a vast array of precepts. The modern human mind can engage in reflective thought and selectively determine how to organize the elements of perception. We can consciously elect to depart from stereotypical behavior and transcend the heretofore-established biological behavioral preferences. People can elect to hold prejudices or not, can make rational or irrational decisions to engage in war or not, and can take deliberate steps to arrest destruction of the ecosystem or not. Holding ourselves in check by placing a brake upon the human propensity to strike out in instinctual behavior is a distinct human quality. Restraint from instant gratification of strong impulses represents a unique human behavior trait. By intentionally refraining from committing an instinctual action, humankind asserts its sovereignty from its biological constitution. Unbound from the limitations of its biological nature, a person can employ the mind to devise alternative behavioral choices and the results of numerous behavioral choices culminate to provide a person with a sophisticated definition of the self.”

“Consciousness is the fabric of human reality. Consciousness allows humankind to engage in reason, make sense out of things, apply logic, verify facts, and adjust our actions based upon deliberate decision-making and hierological beliefs. We possess the ability to change our perspective, modify how we think, and alter our emotional responses. People can assimilate their thoughts and align their goals premised upon guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community or personal ideology based upon practical skills, wisdom, virtue, goodness, and community goodwill. Humans exhibit a creative spark that enables them to employ both their hunches and rational thoughts to adjust to changing situations. We can make logical, aesthetic, moral, and ethical judgments. The ability to modify their thinking patterns empowers all humans to alter their functional reality. By integrating our consciousness around our purpose in life, we can each become congruent in our daily thoughts and deeds.”

“Withstanding the onslaught of life’s rapidly changing demands produces an inevitable sense of foreboding, which menacing energy spurs us to create, nurture, and protect the identity foliage that we till from the charred sphere that we exist on. Identity maintenance requires the cyclical rotation of our mossy perception of who we are and who we want to be. In setting our formative goals, we contrast the character traits exhibited by people whom we wish to emulate with the behaviorisms of people whom we do not wish to imitate.”

“Self-identity depends upon our manner of apprehending the world. Life for me is primarily about distilling patterns, attempting to sift between the ordinary and extraordinary events of daily of life in order to weave a mosaic that defines and clarifies the reasons behind why and how I live.”

“Our evolving self-concept guides our daily actions, organizes our information processing, and fosters a stout mental predisposition that assists our ego maintain a fibrous self-image. Self-concept is not restricted to a bare assessment of what role we presently fulfill in society. Our self-image is an endogenous alloy that includes an agglomeration of past selves and possible future selves. Future selves or ‘possible selves’ represent a person’s ideas of what they might become, what they aspire to become, and what they are afraid of becoming.”

“Selfhood allows a person to hold a sense of a personal narrative comprising of a sequential autobiography of his or her life experiences. Selfhood embraces a social identity, a moral identity, emotional identity, behavioral identity, and an ethical identity. Selfhood comprises other feelings related to self-esteem. Selfhood entails numerous personal assessments and its spackled span includes evaluation of a person’s abilities in relation to other people. Selfhood includes comparing and rating a person’s level of intelligence, personality quirks, and physical powers with respect to other people. It also encompasses a personal image of a person’s body type, and a lengthily list of other observable facts including assessing a person’s comparative physical, mental, and psychological strengths and deficits.”

“Some prejudices and fallacies of the human mind are understandable on a theoretical basis, but practically impossible to implement. As matters now stand, I have little choice but to recognize myself as possessing a personal state of conscious awareness and presupposing that my active state of mental awareness constitutes a personal identity. Acknowledgement of my ignorance begins with the opening admission that the concept of a self delineates the most that I will ever understand in life. Although it might be a spectacular illusion to perceive the self as the unchanging nucleus at the center of my being, from a human evolutionary standpoint and to develop and carryout strategies necessary for personal survival it is a useful illusion. Belief in a self allows a person to integrate streams of information and resolve conflicts between competing values and goals. Absence of a self-identity and devoid of the specific goal of seeking personal self-realization, would not only jeopardize human survival on a daily bases, but it would render life utterly meaningless, making a person’s ontological existence a triviality. Lacking a philosophical status of fundamental ontological event, human life would be a windowless absurdity. A person must perceive oneself as an actual entity in physical Minkowski space, not merely as a philosophical concept in order to engage in the necessary activities to perpetuate personal existence and import meaning to personal efforts. Accordingly, I elect to perceive the self as an actual entity, not as a mere abstraction, composed of a single, definite set of well-defined ontological criteria. Self-perception guides future behavioral choices, frame intellectual inquires, and the evolution of the self represents the ultimate level of personal achievement in pursuit of my goal of attaining self-realization.”

“Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli. Our ability to think, learn, and comprehend is closely aligned to the complexity of our lives. People tend to develop the qualities and traits that they need to live. Survival demands that our cognitive abilities and emotional cordage match the challenges presented by our environment. Our capacity to plan correlates directly to our cognitive abilities and the desire to alleviate our present level of anxiety.”

“The ontogenesis of our conscious self and the concinnity of our shadow spring directly from our seedlings saturated in the rich milieu of our nation’s external and internal conflicts and our personalized social, political, and cultural interactions. We either actively or passively participate in the explosion of culturally significant experiences. We exist in a fish bowl where the aquatic pool of collective experiences influences us. We are each bystanders in the present chapter of history’s bloodbath, standing either as willing or unwilling witnesses to the vertiginous acceleration in violence that rocks the cradle of civilization. We cannot witness blood spilling in the streets and be present in an age of rampant desecration of forest, seas, rivers, tundra, and deserts of this world without holding ourselves accountable for either our activism or passivity. Our acceptance or resistance to the pervasive cultural chauvinism of our age frames us.”

“We build a self-image from stored memories including a swarm of physical and social interactions, evocative emotions, and other associative experiences. Selfhood also comes from the language, symbols, and artifacts, which potent combinations create cultural beliefs. We build a self upon real as well as imaginary experiences. A person’s rational and irrational beliefs forge a sense of self. The books that we read, the music we listen to, the films we watch, and what church or other social gatherings we attend constitute meaningful activities that congeal and work together to shape our sense of identity. Cultural determinants drive how we work, play, worship, and raise our children. Culture has its own sources of reinforcement that can influence members of society to adopt an interdependent, communal sense of self, or an independent, individualistic sense of self. Culture is not fate, but none of us is immune from the great octopus of culture; its tentacles touch us every direction that we turn. Our self-identity is subtlety influenced by the prevailing political-social culture as well as affected by our perceived social status, economic or otherwise.”

“With every passing day, we add a page to our personal story, an illustrative script that casts our character shaped by an implacable external environment and fashioned by our supple state of inwardness.”

“None of us commences life utterly alone. We each carry within our granular mass the protoplasm residue of past generations’ ideas, customs, values, infatuations, prejudices, ethics, and mores. The lees wrought from our seedlings contribute to the social order that oversees a newborn’s future. How we conduct ourselves in the here and now emulates our heritage, delineates the parameters of the present culture, and sets the embryonic stage for the emergent ethos of our future and for the generations of people whom we will never meet.”

“We employ education and the convictions gained through the intermeshing of personal experiences and fresh ideas to establish the configuration of our being that in actuality was our mysterious potentiality from the very inception of our birth.”

“Nature and nurture sway us. Our environment and genetic blood bank establish the delineating parameters that make us. Throughout life, many types of opposing forces tattoo us. Rationality and logic allow us to quantify our experiences. We erase many experiences through casual indifference or employ tremendous emotional energy to repress ugly remembrances. Our ability to invent and imagine imbues every person’s spiritual construction with a distinctive lining. Every person is a wee bit crazy; most of us embody a tad of manic forces coursing within us. How these discordant elements of rationality and madness crystalize and fuse together or rebel against each other in the human mind is the mysterious paradox, the prototypical riddle wrapped in an enigma.”

“Self-affirmation, accepting the truthfulness of our being, is the highest virtue. Positing the self is an act of self-avowal. All acts of self-discovery commence with honestly facing personal trepidation while engaging in character building activities that promote internal transformation.”

“Writers use both their blood and their brains to explore the darkest recesses of their pooling self. Writing allows us to harness the whimsy of the collaborative mind and body, pull our tissue apart like taffy, and expose the composition of our life sustaining organs. Telling our personal story forces us to account for any actions that made us laugh, cry, scream and shout, or hide behind a cloak of mootness. Critical examination of the self allows one to disintegrate the envelope of their present personality and make up a new imaging.”

“We become the product of our recurrent thoughts. Writing is one method of explicating upon our thoughts, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas, and editing our fragmented beliefs.”

“Self-knowledge is the foundation stone of every principled person, and any changes of a person’s mutable character commences with an extensive course of self-evaluation. Personal evolution is a product of the independent choices we make. Progress in the development of oneself depends upon how honestly a person judges oneself, and what corrections a person makes to align their character with an ideal version of a self.”

“We script our own psyche. We each journey alone. The path that we take through life proves to be every person’s supreme test of mental, physical, and emotional stamina, and the final determiner of his or her intellectual, ethical, and spiritual attainment.”

“Our personal story has many chapters that reconnoiter universal themes. We each struggle to understand ourselves and aspire to make ourselves known to the world. We struggle to win the love of other people. We seek to pick all the low hanging fruit that we come across in our journey through the corridor of time. We write our story in the Niagara of emotional experiences that flowing watercourse makes us human. We use a profusion of words, symbols, and the nuances pulled from a rich library of language to depict the cascade of our visions, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, dreams, and infelicitous thoughts. We use logical and dialectal thought processes when communing with our inner self. We use self-speak along with the esemplastic powers of poetic imagination, sprinkled with the fizz of creativity, to cohere disparate chapters of our life into a unified whole and relay the effervescence of our story to other people.”

“Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.”

“Each of us is the enactor of our personal saga; we create the phantom of the self. We are the principal character in our personal story, as well as witnesses and reactors to the storylines of other persons whom we adore. We are each the composers of our evolving personal story; we are the protagonist of our personal life story.”

“The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate.”

“Human life might be predestined or susceptible to a modicum of alteration through a determined act of free will. Who is the warden controlling my fate? Can I create a new self-governing overseer to guide me through an underground tunnel of repressed desire? Can I inculcate myself from a diseased mind by discovering freedom from suffering? Can I chisel out a paradigmatic way to live righteously? Can I cut a groove in my heart and discover the lightness of soul that I seek? Can I discover a hidden key of enlightenment that allows me to manumit my enslaved spirit? Can I put an end to the atrocious evilness that haunts my existence? Can I burn a neural route through my brain that releases the intolerable pressure searing my tattered soul?”

“Self-image is the product of our very own spin machine. Revolutions of long-term memories and the gyrations of short-term thoughts fabricate the epicycle of our present self-image. Once a synchronized self-image is developed, the human mind exhibits a tenacious tendency to maintain that centralized self-image through selective recall of prior events and by displaying a corresponding perception bias in interpreting present day experiences. In short, once we come to a firm belief of what we are, we exercise various mental and emotional prejudices to confirm and sustain our self-image.”

“Free will and the choices that we make every day provides for self-identification. We all hold the plenary powers of discretion to script who and what we are. Self-determination comes from refusal to passively accept whatever doctrine is convenient and move beyond glib answers and popular canons to staunch the torrent of life’s abuses. Intensely pushing forward into troubled waters the clear becomes murky, the certain become problematic, and the real become ethereal. Striping our consciousness of all familiar handholds can lead to dissolution of the sense of a transient self. Disintegration of a preconceived notion of self-identity can lead to either psychosis or a degree of self-mastery, depending upon an individual’s ability to absorb and integrate the secret reserves of their psyche power. Self-awareness comes at a high price but it has distinct rewards. Shrewdly shredded of all falsities we can see what is apparent. Brusquely scouring our brain of layers of toxic emotional sludge reveals a sterling center point. Starting anew we can launch ourselves in a more charming and cheerful image that is both natural and necessary to build upon in order to achieve and sustain our robust constitutional fortitude.”

“Only after becoming somewhat adept in a chosen field of study do most people feel comfortable developing their own distinctive style. More than one successful writer, for example, confessed to beginning their writing career by attempting to write in the same manner as the writers whom they admired. Artists, and other genuine people, are never truly comfortable in a fabricated role, living a life of mimicry, adhering to society’s preconceptions. Each person intuitively seeks to place the stamp of an emergent personality upon their greatest creation, the formulation of their self-identity. A person’s self-identity, similar to works of art, is autotelic, they reflect their maker, and are ends all unto themselves.”

“Our performances of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or acting out ideas influences how we perceive ourselves. How we act and how we perceive ourselves affects how other people view each of us. Both personality and praxis affect our self-determination of who we are as individuals.”

“An argument can be made that while all people are born and die and during their lifetime they will lead almost identical lives devoted to fulfilling their will by eating, sleeping, procreating, taking care of their children, and building shelters. This still allows for innumerable personal decisions how to conduct our lives. For instance, identical twins share many physical traits but their personalities vary. How everybody reacts to a physical world, and the mental decisions that they make affects the trajectory of their life. Given the vast world that we must operate within our choices regarding how to live are only limited by our knowledge, ethics, abilities, imagination, and physical constraints. Accordingly, the outcome of our lives is not certain, fixed, ordained, or fated, but rather a mystery that we can assist pen with our conscious, deliberative actions. In other words, we might do what we do in certain situations because who we are, but we have some say in what we are.”