Who Controls Your Mind?

With complete honesty, make a list of people you like/don’t like. Family, friends, acquaintances, just be honest, and you don’t need more than five in each category.

Now, with all the honesty you can dredge, answer this question; “Did this person do/say anything to make you like/dislike them or were they ‘referred’ to you by another person?”

This isn’t as easy as it seems. Very often we forget the first encounter. We accept a definition of another and run with it. 

Many times because X doesn’t like Y, and we don’t like X, we play the enemy of my enemy is my friend. When we are young we might do something to annoy our parents, (or when we’re old, to annoy our kids)but the
key feature; are we in charge of our own minds, or have we given control to another person?

We all know the man or woman who is ‘owned & operated‘ by a spouse or friend, and have no doubt said something along those lines.  We all know that annoying person who has to make us his/her own mind, and there’s no way we can influence him/her.

But what about the (wo)man in the mirror?

Very often our heads are full of other people’s opinions which we haven’t assessed. Sometimes when we do check out the recommendation/discommendation of another, we have a totally different experience.

Sometimes, alert to it, we go over all the ‘views’ of our ‘Avatar’ and find that we might have given over too much of our volition to their discretion.

If we are alert to it, we might even ponder if we haven’t done the same thing with others, simply accepting their view as canon and not activating our own minds.

Politically, one often appreciates that there are spins put on events and ideas, and if we watch a lot of Television, we know how the writers get us to love/hate a character or ‘deceive’ us into missing a ‘clue’.

Art imitates life.

Look at your list again, with new eyes, and you might be moving a few names.