The basic component of our internal world is an association. It could be something very simple – like this person, or this food, or this colour is good or bad, or something more complex – like a goal in your life, or an opinion about yourself or others in terms of specific performance- like a money management or a weight management. The most important starting point in our internal world improvement is an improvement of our associations. Some of our associations are productive, supportive and beneficial, and others are not so much…
Synonyms to associations are: beliefs, superstitions, prejudices, racism, generalizations, knowledge…
We have acquired most of our associations randomly and they make us the way we are… one of my friends recently said about my opinion about some matter, he said to the other person about me something like “I told you that those Easterners can not be trusted”… In other words he thinks that my personality is related to a geographic area to which I am or I was related to at some point in my life… He has a stamp for different group of people and if you belong to that group, you, as a person contribute to his enhancement and refining, and reaffirmation of what that stamp means for him.. He doesn’t see you as a person, he is seeing you as a part of the group that he attributed you too, and, if he doesn’t like that particular group, then he already has an opinion about you..
Needless to say that my opinion (another kind of association) about him has changed as a result as well…
We can’t be free from our associations, they help us to automate our thinking process, without them our brain would constantly overcompute over and over again the basic pieces of information, but we need to work on refining of our associations by scrutinizing them by our logic to make sure that our associations truly reflects what we believe about ourselves… Our development and growth are comprised from acquiring new information and improving our associations based on that