If you are sensitive to people’s opinion of who you are, including your closed ones, then there’s real danger that you might abandon yourself in order to conform to their idea of who you are. This will create endless misery, because there’ll always be separation, creating a split in your psyche, where one part is always in conflict with the other part.
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And their ideas of what things are good! They seep into us, become us
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I think this happens when we consider someone to be authority regarding life and accept their views uncritically without any examination.
In the former case, it’s avoidance of the pain of upsetting the loved one with us, or their judgement. The latter happens when we don’t understand ourselves and take others views as proxy and live through them. Authority can’t exist when we understand ourselves.
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The obverse is also true. I was always that guy who was super allergic to any kind of authority. I was quite aggressive and callous when it came to people who wanted exert control over me. I had yet to realize that there is a difference between authority and expertise or between authority and people who just wanted to help me out.
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