Learning to Soar!

One reason self-help books often fail to produce desired results: Everyone has a system of beliefs that serves as the foundation of his or her consciousness. A system is a composed of three or more related parts which, together, form a complex whole. The cumulative effect at any point in time is always a function of the interactions among the parts. Whatever you experience in your awareness is always the collective effect of all the beliefs – attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, perspectives, values, expectations, hopes, fears, and attachments – that are involved at the time. Your beliefs dramatically influence both what you notice and how you perceive it in any situation. Therefore, your belief system greatly determines your experience of reality. Your belief system operates in your consciousness the same way a computer’s operating system determines how it handles any software application you might try to load and run. A single error in a single line of code in a computer’s operating system can block the computer’s capacity to run software. If it runs at all, it’s unlikely to run well until corrections are made. A dysfunctional belief is one that is out of sync with the fundamental realities of human life in time and space. It’s the biological equivalent of ‘bad code” in the “operating system” of your consciousness. It inhibits or blocks your capacity to accurately perceive what’s going on. If you can’t perceive accurately, you can’t relate effectively. In pursuit of your ideal life, you can make all sorts of investments in “personal development” software applications. You can read the latest self-help books, listen to the best CD’s, watch the very best videos. You can pay big money to sit at the feet of the latest gurus of spirituality, self-actualization, or success in business. But if you have dysfunctional beliefs still lurking in your “operating system,” none of those “best programs” will “run” as effectively as they should. At best, you’ll see only modest results from even your most determined efforts. This is the fallacy of so many self-help resources: they fail to address the limitations imposed by dysfunctional elements in a person’s belief system. Until your belief system is cleaned up and running smoothly, the reality you most want to experience – being able to soar into your own unique version of heaven – will remain largely inaccessible, no matter what strategies and resources you use, and no matter how much self-discipline you apply or effort you make. Most people have little or no awareness of their belief systems. Imagine a fish that has never known anything other than being completely surrounded by and suspended in water. That fish cannot possibly have any perspective on water, because the presence of water has been part of every moment of its awareness for its entire life. The fish has no way to distinguish water from any background, because for the fish, water is the background. For most people, the existence of a belief system and its impact on consciousness is similar. It’s background. Because it’s been there every waking moment of your life, it seems invisible. It doesn’t even seem to exist until you look carefully. But it’s an important part of the sorting mechanism that determines what sensory information will be delivered to your waking awareness ness and what will be ignored. Once new information arrives in your brain, your belief system determines how it will be perceived. Before any new information comes to your conscious attention, a part of your brain examines each new bit and asks, “Is this harmful, or helpful? Is this important, or not important? If it’s important, how important is it? Is it important enough to adjust my understanding of who I am and change my way of operating in this and all similar future situations?” Every iota of information that arrives in your brain goes through this kind of analysis. It’s happening all the time, and it happens so quickly that you’re not even aware of it. Yet, it determines who you are and how you proceed in your life at every moment. If you want the experience of your life to evolve to feel more like your own personal version of heaven, if you want to soar, you must become aware of your belief system, understand how it operates, purge any dysfunctional beliefs, and learn to manage it intentionally. Where did your belief system originate? Assume with me for a moment that when you came into the world as an infant, your consciousness was like a blank hard drive in a computer. (A person who believes in reincarnation may react to this opening assumption by asserting a belief that previous incarnations can also contribute to the content of a person’s belief system in the current lifetime. But notice: that belief would not make sense without a prior belief that reincarnation itself is a real phenomenon. Is reincarnation real? For those who believe it is real, it most certainly IS “real” in the reality they experience. For those who don’t believe in reincarnation, it’s NOT “real.” Both beliefs are real, both are true, and each belief leads to its own legitimate reality. That’s the way beliefs operate. (This is just one example which illustrates why it’s important to recognize how powerfully beliefs determine reality!) Continuing from the original assumption, it makes sense to imagine that at the moment of your birth, no operating system had been loaded onto your hard drive, and none of the beliefs that eventually made up the earliest version of your belief system had been formed. You absorbed your initial belief system from your primary care-givers. Their biological relationship to you made no difference at all. They might have been parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, an aunt or an uncle or the lady down the street who took care of you while your Mom or Dad was busy earning a living. In all of the time your caregivers were feeding you, clothing you, and keeping you clean, they were inadvertently projecting themselves – including whatever dysfunctional beliefs were still lurking in their operating systems – into you. They probably had little or no awareness that this was happening, so in most cases, it would be a stretch to say this process was intentional. Just by making you the focus of their attention, they were making you real in their own perception, and in the process, they were imprinting you with the beliefs from which they were living. Being completely innocent and vulnerable, you inevitably absorbed at least some – maybe even most – of their dysfunctional beliefs.