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Creation of the False-Self
The previous section described who we really are, but that is probably not who we think you are. The "I" that we think you are is probably not who we really are. Unless we are Self-realised or enlightened, we are “asleep” to our true nature – we have forgotten who we truly are. We live from a self-created (false) centre of consciousness which is known as the ego-self.
When we were born, our personal consciousness was undeveloped and inexperienced, and we had very little understanding of the world outside of us. As we learnt about the world we gradually constructed a mental model of how we believed things were out there. The more we learnt about the outer-world, the more complex our inner-world model became. Over time, it developed into a meticulously detailed virtual representation of reality. The virtual-reality world inside our mind was a near-perfect representation of the real world, but it was (and still is) coloured by our beliefs and distorted by our misconceptions.
Our interactions with other people helped us to fit them into our inner model, and their interactions with us helped us to develop our own concept of self and fit that into our inner model. The concept of self that we developed through our interactions with others was that we are a separate individual contained within a physical body. This was very different to our inherent sense of true-Self, which is pure, radiant, infinite and one-with-everything. So, at this early stage of life we had a sense of two different selves – our true-Self and our "false" mental concept of self. The two selves were so different that we didn't know which one to go with – we didn't know who we were.
Our parents related to us as if we were a separate individual in a physical body (our false-self); not as if we were an infinite radiant being (our true-Self). They interacted with our false-self and pretty much ignored our true-Self. Only our false-self got validated, so we eventually went with that one. Essentially, the false-self came into being because we were not seen for who we truly are. Our false-self became our identity and our virtual inner-world became our home.