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. Obviously, we can't live solely in our virtual-world because we have to eat, drink and interact with the real world in order to survive. We have to maintain a connection between our virtual-world and the real-world, so we project our virtual-world and virtual-self out onto the real-world. This gives us the impression that we (false-self) are living in the real-world. We perceive the real-world with our virtual-world seamlessly projected over it...read more>>>...