Your thoughts and ideals or someone else's?

As complex as the human brain is, it can work in very simplistic ways. A colorful working analogy is that hallway closet you have in your home or apartment that is filled with tattered old photographs, unique mementos and gifts of yester-year. You get the idea. This closet contains a collection of items from years past that you rarely use, yet somehow it survives the annual garage sale and that monumental move when you vowed to throw it away. You continue to hold on to old record albums in spite of not even owning a record player. You have clothing so vintage your children ask to haul it out for Halloween. You keep family heirlooms and souvenirs because they are visual records of your past. They are tangible evidence of who you are, where you come from, and where you’ve been. You may even sometimes rummage though the items and take a trip down memory lane.
The mind works in much the same way. Your brain has billions of neurons that are storage facilities for everything that has transpired in your life—classroom studies, late night television, old girlfriends or boyfriends. Everything that has entered your mind through schooling, parenting, and your own personal adventures directly relate to who you are today. Yet, while it is relatively easy to discard old items from the closet when ambition strikes, old memories are far more permanent. They constitute the growing archives that influence your life by regulating your self-esteem and creating control patterns; hard-wired behaviors we adopt unconsciously through the actions and reactions of others around us. Social immersion can clutter your mind with memories, beliefs, and opinions so vast and contradictory that it blurs the boundary between what is and is not real. Most of us believe we have an unbridled grasp of what is real and true, yet the majority of what we learned at a young age was taught to us by others. How can we be confident that the knowledge presented to us is the truth untainted by someone else’s perspective?