Self-analysis requires reconsideration of who we think we are. Self-awareness requires us to reassess where we came from and where we are going.

We are conscious beings always experimenting with the mystery of becoming our ultimate manifestation.

A strict self-image demonstrates a predisposition to maintain a rigid explanation and definition of a person. Our self-image becomes self-perpetuating because of the tendency of the mind to exhibit partiality regarding what we attend to and a preference in what we are prepared to accept as true about the world and ourselves.

We cannot measure a person’s value to the human race by tabulating the size of his estate. We must judge each person by his or her final contribution to humanity and nature.

Every step in life is a testing ground. Some active and perceptive people never stop blossoming regardless of what experience they encounter while other people seem to wilt with the slightest provocation.

The human mind is the artist of our mutable state of inwardness. External action signals to other people our inner composition. We control our present state of happiness. Each personal action taken or not undertaken subtlety or profoundly alters whom we were, influences whom we now are, and amends who we might become. Our shifting self-image controls our present state of personal happiness.

The road to self-improvement does not begin with the realization of other people’s scorn. Personal salvation commences with the determined excavation and displacement of a crusty layer of self-denial, which defense mechanism camouflaged my intensifying sense of self-repugnance for how I acted in this earthly life.

A person without a crystalline sense of self lives a mythless existence; they lack a definitive path to follow in life. Deprived of a solid sense of self, dispossessed of a connection to the past, destitute of a grounding sense in the present, a person leads a leaden and aimless existence.

It is understandable why a person might shirk a brutal self-assessment until the unforgiving talons of a reckless life rips their thin skin covertures into shreds leaving a person ensnared in their destructive thoughts and lacerated with bolts of self-incrimination.