This is my answer to this question on Quora:
How does a person learn to think for himself or herself?
The thing is, your opinions, your beliefs. Are they really your own? Are you really thinking for yourself?
Or are you thinking from a place of collective imprinting of all of the opinions and propaganda and society rules that have overtime shaped your personality, which is conditioned by your unconscious emotional patterning and beliefs/opinions/habits you have collected since you were born?
Therefore are your opinions and ideas, actually yours? Or the work of emotional and social programming groomed into you since birth?
What if thinking for yourself in completeness is actually by letting go of everything that you thought you knew. BY not attaching any thought or opinion to any label or emotion. By letting go of the ego that defend you and puts you in survival mode. To realize that everything you thought you knew is actually not the truth for yourself, but instilled into you though propaganda of the media and others people’s opinions your way of upbringing, and indirectly subconsciously picking up your parent’s habits. When you are a child from 0–7, that is when your brain is like a sponge and you are most easily programmed.
Maybe thinking for yourself and having a mind of your own is to completely be aware and detach from all society rules and social conditioning, and man-made rules, ideologies, political views, music, movies, opinions, all other content that have been propaganda from the start to make you think in a certain way. Because you want to fit in and keep up with the trends, that others have created.
Mix that into the way you were raised and the events that shaped your life, things you heard growing up, things that traumatized you or made you happy. Things that make you “lean” a certain way because of how you were emotionally programmed, to find an identity within yourself and mold into who you envision yourself to be.
What if that was all made up. And the only way to think for yourself is to not think. And to just be. Just completely be without any labels or attachment or any opinion or belief. Or free yourself from the ego that wants to protect you from being wrong due to your own insecurities and lacking.
What if the actual way to think for yourself is to just let things be, and just enjoy the present moment, and realize that that is all we have. And not think or try to be someone or a certain way, just for external approval, but just learning about who you actually came here to be without the outside noise from society, but finding it from your inner world.
Realize that you can recreate your own reality, and rewrite the stories you tell yourself. And start over with a blank set of thoughts and beliefs that have no attachment or meaning and don’t define you. Belief and thoughts that have no pre-programming and bias, just from what you are experiencing in the present, so you can finally listen to the emptiness and start realizing for yourself what is true for you without any noise and start developing your new consciousness again from there.
There can be so many realities, which one do you choose to create for yourself?
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