BELIEF IS YOUR CHOICE

What is a belief but a practiced thought? It is an idea you picked up some time ago, and accepted. Once you accept an idea, your mind, your vision, your physical eyes, all are now primed to find confirmation of the belief. So primed, you see it everywhere. This makes it seem even more true to you, since it is constantly confirmed.

A statue of a cheeky cherub, chin resting on hand, lying among pine needles, as though he is observing humans with amusement

You choose what you see

Did you ever have the experience of learning about a new concept, such as “cognitive dissonance”, or “survival of the fittest”, or “magical realism”, and then see examples of it everywhere? Friend, these examples were there all the time. Remember that everything exists all at once but you choose what you see.

You didn’t see them before because you didn’t have a name for them. Now that you know what to call them, you will see them. This is how ideas are formed, and given birth into conscious recognition. You name something, you frame it, define it as you wish. Secondly, you practice it in your consciousness. It takes only seventeen seconds for a new connection to form.

Of course you choose your beliefs. If you didn’t choose them, it would not be possible for people to have differing beliefs. You have to assent to them before you can start giving them form and repetition. The longer you have held a belief, the more obvious and irrefutable it will seem to you. You will wonder how any reasonable person could disagree with you. You will find many opportunities to reaffirm your beliefs. Most of you will do this for a long time.

You can challenge any belief

The problem is that you often choose your beliefs in a very flimsy, haphazard way. Some other person may say or act out fearful thoughts: one race is better than another, violence can be used in the service of peace, compromise is weak. Very often, without one second of conscious examination, without holding them up to the light, you accept these ideas. After that, it is all about the polishing of them into firm beliefs.

We all think our beliefs are right and true, and that the one who disagrees with us is wrong.

How dangerous it can be to pick up an unexamined belief! It’s like eating any old piece of garbage you found on the ground. You don’t know where it came from.

A large question mark looming over a dark background

All questions enable consciousness

What if you picked up, “All men are cheats”, or, “I can’t do anything right”? You would be programmed to see evidence of those beliefs everywhere you looked. How chaotic and upsetting life would be. If you have a belief that is not serving you well, hold it up now to examination for seventeen seconds, or even longer. All questions are good, because they all enable consciousness.

Take the belief, “I never have anything to say.” Have you always thought this? Can you remember a time when you didn’t know this? Have you heard any other person voice this belief about you? In what situations do you notice this belief? Perhaps at gatherings where there are people you don’t know. How do you appear to others at those gatherings? What are you thinking in those moments? Do you have fearful, paralyzing thoughts? Could you see yourself without this belief?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see it as something separate from yourself, a piece of ragged, useless clothing that you could easily discard? You could be free of this thought, if all you do is invite it out into the light and examine it every time it occurs to you.

Apply the same examination to every new belief that suggests itself to you. Ask yourself: will this belief serve me well? Take only the beliefs that will serve you and your brothers well. “Together we can do anything.” “Inclusion is always better than exclusion.” “Peace in the world will come when we have inner peace.”

And polish them.

I want to be different

Multi-colored night sky merging with sea and receding fingers of land.

Photo credit: Kristopher Roller

ORIGINAL SIN: THE START LINE

Original sin is not something frightening and biblical; it is just the condition into which you were born. It is what you agreed to, when you came to this plane. It is the starting line.

“Original” means “from the beginning”, meaning the beginning of physical life on this plane, as you know it. It’s as though you just woke up here. This is all you know.

“Sin” doesn’t really mean what you take it to mean. It sounds like something bad that you did and need to be punished for. But “sin” has a simple and precise meaning: “to miss the mark”, as an arrow does. To make a mistake, to see things wrongly, not to realize, to be blind, oblivious, unknowing. These are all meanings of original sin. It is what you have to wake up from.

You have all had that moment of complete and sudden understanding about something you had been getting wrong, and now see rightly, and in that seeing alone is the behavior dropped. If you like them, these little wakings up, epiphanies as you can call them, then it can easily be arranged that you will have them more and more. Dwell on the insights you have been given, give thanks for them and pay attention to them. Each time you do so, you are creating a channel of energy between these happy enlightenments and the Sender of them.

Original sin is nothing to be afraid of. When you fear something, your instinct is not to deal with it, thus ensuring your slavery before it forever.

Is this a way for an enlightened being to exist?

When you fear something, you should rather wish to disable it instead, to shine the light of your holy, dispassionate attention onto it, and question it. Why are you here?

Name your worst fears now. What are they? Your husband is an alcoholic, your son wants to live as a woman, your wife is leaving you, someone else is going to jail, or does drugs, or is not normal, will never be able to support himself. Find out your worst fear and ask it: why are you here? I cower before you: why? You keep me subservient and afraid. Why am I choosing this? Let me see you for what you are, just a set of well-practiced thoughts that I polish every day by my constant attention.

Oh, stop. When fear presents its arguments to you, question them. What is the worst that can happen? Imagine a thought pattern as a three-legged stool. One of the legs of this stool is your constant attention to it. Right now, the thought pattern is strong and balanced.

What do you think would happen if you withdrew some of the attention you are giving? If you withdrew all of it? With one leg missing, the stool would topple over uselessly. You would have disabled it completely, so that it could not stand. This is how to break out of original sin. By conscious attention.

When I have learned the lesson, I will stop seeing it

FEAR: THE WORST DEVIL

This is the big one on everybody’s list. This is everybody’s worst devil. This motivates you to do almost everything you do.

Just think of all the ways you serve your fears. Every drug you keep in your house represents a different fear. You have anti-depressants, tranquillizers, and recreational drugs to control your moods. You keep Ibuprofen so you won’t have to feel pain. You keep Nyquil in case you get a cold. You keep Neosporin and bandaids in case of injury. Behind the fear of injury is something bigger: fear of infection, illness and death.

Fear of death motivates you to do many things. It makes you afraid to go into hospitals and nursing homes, even doctors’ offices where you could see sick or crazy people. This renders you of course completely unable to help any of these people, and makes you no more well than any of them. Fear keeps you weak. Because of your fear, you are unable to really listen to them. Everything they say only confirms your deep belief that these are places to be avoided.

If you had no fear of death, could any place scare you?

Think about how radically different life would be if you had no fear of death, if you knew it was no more than taking a step into another room.

In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. John, 14:2

Would you always stay in the same place out of fear? Every fear in fact is the fear of death. All unease can be traced to that. So to lose one’s fear of death would be to lose all fears.

Who would not want this?

How would life be once you had lost all fear of death? You would know that every moment is eternal, part of God’s creation. Knowing that every moment would go on forever, you would want to consciously and joyfully participate in each moment, noticing everything wonderful, inspiring, beautiful, quiet and peaceful, enjoying, giving thanks. Who would not want to live tucked under Life’s wing, ever with her, the great mother hen whose heartbeat comforts us eternally?

You can practice letting go your fears one by one, like a hoarder hating to give up one iota of junk. Or you can let them all go together, a murder of crows.

How free would you be if fear could no longer motivate you? What if you remained quiet in the face of fear and observed how quickly it crumbled to bits? When someone else at work did something that you couldn’t do, you wouldn’t have to remind yourself how wonderful and valuable you really are; you wouldn’t have to rationalize that what he did wasn’t that great. You wouldn’t have to feel inferior, worthless or devalued at all.

I want to be real

You would be unable to fear they would discover your lack of value, that you would lose your source of protection, your job with its ego and money rewards. That couldn’t happen, since your source of protection is always with you. You are in its heartbeat. You would know your every need was answered before you could think of it.

Every jealousy would melt like wax before a flame. Jealousy is only an expression of fear. You are jealous of someone because you think they have what really belongs to you. But if you knew your every need was anticipated and abundantly filled, what would you have to be jealous of?

Fear is behind every attempt to control the outcome. You fear bad grades for your kids because it means they won’t get into a good school, will drop out, do drugs, or whatever other meaning you give to bad grades. So you try to control the outcome, rewarding, punishing, worrying, helping your kids too much, and sensing unfairness all around them.

How would a parent with no fears look? That would be a very evolved being because your children provide an intense focus for your fears that most of you can hardly let go of in this lifetime.

Photo by Muhammadtaha Ibrahim Ma Aji on Unsplash

A parent with no fears would be interested in whatever her adult children chose to do; interested to know the reasons and see where it would go. A parent with no fears would be available to help if needed, but satisfied also not to. A parent with no fears would not project negative futures for her children.

Think with a new mind

BLAME, A SPECIAL CASE

The reason you are so in love with cause and effect is that it leads easily into blame, a huge favorite diversion of the ego.

Blame is just a special case of cause and effect. You search out some act that can be named as the prime cause of some negative effect. This allows you to displace anger onto another. Blame. It produces a temporary relief in the sender of that anger. It is easier to blame someone else for the divorce, if the new car got a dent, if the dinner is spoiled, if they didn’t choose you.

You can blame either silently or aloud. If silently, you do it frequently, polishing the stones of anger, betrayal and unhappiness. You can carry on blaming silently for years, for all of your physical lives. If you do it aloud, the person blamed doesn’t want the displaced anger and will fight you to give it back. Back and forth it goes in recriminations, keeping you in the unhappiness you wished to avoid. This makes you upset and solves nothing.

The trouble with blame is it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who you think caused the unwanted thing. By assigning blame for it, you only affirm its reality. You are saying, “Indeed, this thing that happened has me so upset that I must use it to spread and perpetuate a bad feeling.”

Once blame is assigned, then what? The problem is still there, stronger than ever now since you’ve been paying all this negative attention to it. You are at square one with a vengeance.

Who would want this?

To deal in blame is to be locked into the past. Think of blame as a chain that you must not pick up.

Only when you are ready to accept responsibility for every part of your experience, can any part of it change.

To deal in blame is to be locked in the past

Even if you have some strong blame patterns, they can still be weakened.

Question everything, friends. Especially question your most habitual thoughts, those beliefs that seem strongest, that rouse you up the most. Take out your habitual thoughts about the divorce. Shine the light of truth, honesty and sincere inquiry upon those thoughts. One by one, over and over, entertain each thought and question it for at least seventeen seconds.

Negative thought, here you are again. When was the last time I had this thought? Ten seconds ago. And how long again before that? About two hours ago, I was busy getting the kids ready for school. How does this thought make you feel? It makes me very stressed and unable to think. How often would you like to have this thought? Not at all, no one wants to feel like this. Would it be possible not to have this thought? Possible? Yes, of course, millions of people don’t have it. And so on.

Thus are you the master of your thoughts.

Question reality

CAUSE AND EFFECT

If you believe that everything that ever existed, exists now, or will exist futurely, already exists this and every instant, if you believe that linear time does not exist outside the human realm, where they hop about like fleas, then it is clear there is no such thing as cause and effect.

A cause has to come before an effect, no? But if everything exists now and forever, the idea of before and after is rendered moot.

Cause and effect depends on time

A student comes to class late and a little breathless. “I’m sorry I’m late. I tripped. I’m such a klutz!”

“Did you trip because you’re a klutz or are you a klutz because you tripped?” This makes the class laugh since they could both be true.

Try this reversal with any other cause and effect pairing you have invested your belief in.

Brian is clever because he passed the bar exam the first time he tried, or, Brian passed the bar exam the first time because he is clever?

There is no discernible difference between these two statements. It makes no difference which one is supposed to have caused the other. Rather, we should think of these two ideas, cleverness and passing the bar exam on the first try, as peacefully co-existing in some vector space somewhere, linked together by the act of thinking.

Kathy keeps supporting her son because he’s irresponsible with money, or, Kathy’s son is irresponsible with money because she keeps supporting him.

It matters not at all which condition is supposed to have caused the other, although you could spend a long time guessing there. It only matters that you have linked these two ideas together by thinking about them repeatedly. You have created this reality with your thought. Subject any judgment you have to this questioning, and you will see how you formed it yourself, with your mind.

What the mind has created, the mind can also dissolve.

If linear time doesn’t exist, and cause and effect are meaningless, why are you so married to these ideas? Why do you love them so much? Remember all the essay questions that asked you to weigh the causes and effects of this and that.

Was the First World War caused by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, or the militarization of Germany, or the neural wiring of Kaiser Wilhelm, or the Entente Cordiale, or some other thing you don’t even know about? What caused it the most? What caused it the least? On and on you go, until you realize it’s an endless game, trying to determine what caused what. Rather, they happened and happen still, together. All these events are strands of the same yarn. Everything exists together, infinitely.

I am ready to question my beliefs

ROLES: EXAMINE EACH ONE

All the roles you play in life are limiting. They may feel limiting at the time you play them. Sometimes other people see you as that role and nothing more. You might be the job you do, a wonderful parent, a busybody, an anti-social recluse, the other woman, a hopeless alcoholic, a bad son, a gossip, or any other label you have accepted. The roles you play in life can be regarded as costumes your being has decided to try on.

Roles are costumes

Costumes can be discarded

After you have ceased to play a role, sooner or later, it will seem limiting to you. When you have left a role behind, your being expands like a foot growing out of an old shoe. As important as any role may have felt at the time you were playing it, it fails to contain all of who you are.

No role could.

You are more than this. Whether it was a role you enjoyed playing and excelled at, or whether you fought against it in misery, once it is put by, the being transcends it, thereafter looking back as the graduate might look back on nursery school.

You may completely identify with a role yourself: teacher, mother, sailor, athlete. But whether you assume a role joyfully, or resist it mightily, no role is big enough to contain the real you. The real you can choose to perform these functions beautifully, but always remains more than any function.

So examine each role you assume or resist, giving it your loving attention if you so choose, but never forget the real you is larger than any role.

Roles that bring unhappiness or unease however small, must be dropped.

You would not wear a shoe that bothered your foot.

Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy

Johnny Carson

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Transformational change: the least you need to know