We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are, or as we are conditioned to see it.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we really are.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....

In having a flawed sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment.

Attachment to the false view of self means belief in the presence of unchanging entities which exist on their own. To break through this false view is to be liberated from every sort of fear, pain, and anxiety.

We see people not as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange."

"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature." This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences."

It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries; that it is so small and so needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume; and that as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or a species, we can be immune to what we do to other beings.

We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become. I'm not sure why it must be so, but it is.

Whatever it be, whether art or nature, that has inscribed in us this condition of living by reference to others, it does us much more harm than good. We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.