What if your beliefs are wrong? Well, one thing is certain, as long as you live according to beliefs, whatever you believe conscious and unconscious, you will experience as your life.
Core beliefs create misery or happiness, wealth or poverty, health or disease, loving or hateful relationships. Beliefs are not magic, they are instructions that program behavior and interpret events. Beliefs literally create and attract all the people, circumstances and events that make up your life.
Your core beliefs deserve to be examined and re-examined. Is it time to look at your life’s circumstances and address what is not serving you? For instance, conflicts in your relationships, the quality of your health, high levels of stress, dissatisfaction with your job including your performance or your income. Are you living by your chosen values and ideals? For resolution to all these inquire into your belief systems. Your belief system contains the power to align and actualize your greater potential or deny it.
Beliefs are self-perpetuating mental programs that act as useful (transitional) tools for learning how to survive and function in life. Beliefs are also responsible for generating and sustaining your ego identity. Up until you reach adulthood you need an ego identity to integrate well in society. Once you are an adult the next level of personal development is to transcend your ego identity. This requires that you begin by becoming aware of false beliefs and release them. This stage of development is the aware-ego.
Unless you continually upgrade core beliefs and eventually replace them with true knowingness your false beliefs imprison your Soul’s creativity and Self-expression.
Instead of seeing Beliefs as either right or wrong is best to view beliefs as true or false keeping in mind that truth is relative to the context you are in. Truth changes as you gather new information and greater self-understanding. This occurs naturally every time you gain wisdom from difficult experiences.
Normal people are ignorant of the power and limitation of beliefs systems. This ignorance is the outcome of an even deeper and more tragic inheritance: a pervasive lack of Self Knowledge. Our culture does not teach individuals to discover who they are at the core of their Being.
Living your adult life identified with your ego prevents you from knowing and being yourself naturally.
Beliefs are necessary to experience separation
Every biological species on our planet inherits an instinct to survive, we are no exception, however, life has evolved through us into a very intelligent animal with three brains: the reptilian (in charge of survival instincts and regulating all bodily functions as sub-conscious mind), the mammalian (emotional center capable of nurturing and bonding) and the new brain (neo-cortex), the one capable of self reflection. The new brain separates us from other animals in the sense that we can think about our experiences and most important reflect on who we are.
Children learn to function and relate to others by developing a sense of being a separate individual. Individuality starts out as a mental and emotional identity, the ego. This identity is made of self-images. A self-image is a mental representation consisting of core beliefs about how the world is and who you are. Each self-image has a distinctive feeling or emotional atmosphere associated with it. People who don’t develop a stable self-identity have a compromised mental health and have difficulty relating to others intimately.
Self-images are constructed out of beliefs. And beliefs are constructed out of memories of experiences with strong emotional content. Beliefs are the building blocks and the glue that holds your ego identity together as a personality. Your ego is the mechanism to think and feel you are separate from others.
The trap of self-images
Every self-image has a counter image attached to it. The nature of the ego identity is to make sense of life by separating everything into parts and dividing the parts into opposites: good and bad, hot and cold, short and tall, pleasurable and painful etc. When it comes to creating a self-identity based on self-images, the ego all-ways uses the memory of past experiences. Ego creates beliefs out of experiences by how the experience felt: pleasurable=good, painful=bad and weather or not an experience is safe= feels good or not safe= hurts.
From this limited logic a child internalizes images of himself relating to each parent. He assigns himself and the parent a “good” and “bad” label. And so it is that your ego identity is made up of good and bad self-images of you in relation to good and bad images of your parents. The good child relates to the good parent and the bad child relates to the bad parent. A parent becomes internalized as part of a negative (bad) self image when they fail to: protect, nurture, play, listen and interact with the child in a way that generates a sense of safety, value, joy and well being for the child.
A typical negative self-image is “I’m worthless”, this painful self-image is usually covered up with an opposite feel good self-image such as “I’m better than others”. The negativity of “I’m worthless is sustained by a painful and false core belief such as “I’m stupid” and therefore “not lovable”. The positive self-image exits to compensate and somehow generate deserving value by having a belief that drives performance such as “I’m smart”.
Summary: every positive self-image has a negative self-image attached to it. Every self-image is sustained by a constellation of beliefs. Each corresponds to memories of repeated experiences that had a strong emotional content and left a deep impression in the mind and Soul of the child.
The impact of core beliefs
A core belief is both a self-definition and an interpretation of an emotionally strong experience that was reinforced many times. Core beliefs are the foundations for all sophisticated beliefs people have as adults. Core beliefs operate unconsciously most of the time. They filter what is perceived and mechanically determine behavior.
Children generate beliefs by memorizing how early experiences felt and classifying them according to pain or pleasure in order to decide if they feel safe or not-safe. When a child does not feel safe their intelligence will figure out a way to adapt by behaving in a way that minimizes the threat they are experiencing. Beliefs are based on memories of what happened and how it felt.
Our animal nature, the ego identity, is driven by life’s mandate to survive. Therefore, the ego’s goal is to feel safe and feel good. The great challenge with this mandate is that children are conditioned to accept conflicting beliefs in order to survive. For example, “boys don’t cry”, “girls don’t fight” or “children should be seen and not heard”. These instructions on “how to be” deny the child’s authentic nature, which is to be curious, active, feel deeply and react with strong emotions when a need is not met. Core beliefs destined for survival break up the wholeness of our being. The end result of this mental conditioning is to suppress inner drives and eventually act them out. Either way the ego maintains a core inner anxiety associated with not feeling safe and not being authentic. Self-images get in the way of being natural.
Are your beliefs expanding or limiting your Imagination?
Imagination is an inner resource to respond appropriately to any given situation so that who you are, moment to moment, is congruent to what is happening. Your ego uses imagination to recreate how you have been taught to be. This limiting use of imagination is the price the ego pays to feel safe.
Now we get to see clearly the impact of “wrong/false” beliefs. Not only do beliefs determine what you are able to perceive “out there” and what it means, beliefs also determined what you are capable of doing and becoming. Your core beliefs define you as an image of you based on how you were treated as a young child.
If you were loved and respected adequately, you felt valued and safe to be yourself. If you were forgiven when you failed and encouraged to succeed you developed confidence in yourself, if you were taught respectfully to help and be obedient you develop trust in authority.
If you were judged, critized and harshly punished you felt not safe and you learned to distrust authority and associate love with hurt. If you were punished and shamed for making mistakes you learned to fear authority and be insecure. In general most people got a mixture of healthy and unhealthy behavior from their parents. This means you probably have healthy and unhealthy self-images sustained by true and false beliefs about you.
Do you take risks? Are you happy with change? Do you aspire to learn and do new things? Do you consider yourself resourceful? Do you consider yourself courageous?
If the answer to these questions is no or not really or may be then, your imagination is compromised. In order to grow out of the safety of the familiar and the predictable you must let go of who you believe you are and dare to discover your True-Self.
Believing vs. knowing
Every belief is subject to a memory. This means you reference yourself from the past and how you felt then. When a memory of you determines who you are, what you can do and how you behave, well, you are neither authentically you nor are you able to access new inner resources. When a person matures and begins to trust themselves and what they know they develop common sense. This immediate capacity to access knowledge exits outside any childhood conditioning. Common sense is the beginning stage of discovering how to relax and trust in yourself. Beliefs trust the past and constantly recreate it.
You were not born to limit life to feeling good and safe. You are here to create a legacy, to contribute and live life fully and passionately. Unless you discover and challenge your core limiting beliefs you will not be capable to imagine a life greater than what you already know. Do you have a grand vision for your life? Are you in love with life? Are you exited and passionate? About what? Is it meaningful? Do you love you and others with all your heart? What if you dared to?
Written by Osiris Montenegro
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