Session 614

Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter 2: Reality and Personal Beliefs

Session 614

You form the fabric of your experience through your own beliefs and expectations.  These personal ideas about yourself and the nature of reality will affect your thoughts and emotions.  You take your beliefs about reality as truth, and often do not question them.  They seem self-explanatory.  They appear in your mind as statements of fact, far too obvious for examination.

Therefore they are accepted without question too often.  They are not recognized as beliefs about reality, but are instead considered characteristics of reality itself.  Frequently such ideas appear indisputable, so a part of you that it does not occur to you to speculate about their validity.  They become invisible assumptions, but they nevertheless color and form your personal experience.

Some people, for example, do not question their religious beliefs but accept them as fact.  Others find it comparatively easy to recognize such inner assumptions when they appear in a religious context, but are quite blind to them in other areas.

It is far simpler to recognize your own beliefs in regard to religion, politics or similar subjects, than it is to pinpoint your deepest beliefs about yourself and who and what you are – particularly in relationship with your own life.

Many individuals are completely blind to their own beliefs about themselves, and the nature of reality.  Your own conscious thoughts will give you excellent clues.  Often you will find yourself refusing to accept certain thoughts that come to your mind because they conflict with other usually accepted ideas.

Your conscious mind is always trying to give you a clear picture, but you often allow preconceived ideas to block out this intelligence.  It has been fashionable to blame the subconscious for personality problems and difficulties, the idea being that early events, charged and mysterious, lodged there.  In this country several generations grew up believing that the subconscious portions of the personality were unreliable, filled with negative energy, and contained only locked-up unpleasant episodes best forgotten.

They grew up believing that the conscious mind was relatively powerless, that adult experience was set in the days of infancy.  These concepts themselves set up artificial divisions.  People learned that they should not be aware of “subconscious” material.

The doors to the inner self were to be shut tight.  Only lengthy psychoanalysis could or should open them.  The normal individual felt that he had best leave such areas alone, so in cutting off these portions of the self, barriers were also set up against the joy of the inner spontaneous self.  People felt divorced from the core of their own reality.

The concept of original sin was a very poor, limited and distorted one, but at least along with it went rather simple procedures: Through baptism you might be saved, or through certain words or sacraments or rituals redemption could be found.

The idea of the tainted subconscious, however, left man no such relatively easy way out.  The few rituals possible required years of analysis, which only the very wealthy were privileged to experience.

About the same time that the idea of the unsavory subconscious arose so strongly, the idea of the soul went out the window.  Millions of people therefore believed in a reality in which they were deprived of the idea of a soul, and burdened by the concept of a very unreliable, if not definitely evil, subconscious.  They saw themselves as vulnerable solitary points of egos, riding perilously and unprotected upon the tumultuous waves of involuntary processes.

At about the same time many intelligent persons were realizing that organized religions’ ideas of God, and of heaven and hell, were distorted, unjust, and smacked of children’s fair tales.  For these individuals there was no place to look for help.

Under the circumstances, to look within would have seemed foolhardy, for they had been taught that this within contained the source of their problems to begin with.  Those who could not afford therapy tried the harder to inhibit any messages from the inner self, for fear they would become swallowed by the savage infantile emotions.

Now first of all, there are no limitations or divisions to the self, though for purposes of discussion a word like “ego” may be used here because you understand what you think it means.  You can indeed depend upon seemingly unconscious portions of yourself.  As you will see later, you can become more and more consciously aware, therefore bringing into your consciousness larger and larger portions of yourself.

You breathe, grow, and perform multitudinous delicate and precise activities constantly, without being consciously aware of how you carry out such manipulations.  You live without consciously knowing how you maintain this miracle of physical awareness in the world of flesh and time.

The seemingly unconscious portions of yourself draw atoms and molecules from the air to form your image.  Your lips move, your tongue speaks your name.  does the name belong to the atoms and molecules within your lips or tongue?  The atoms and molecules move constantly, forming into cells, tissues and organs.  How can the name the tongue speaks belong to them?

They do not read or write, yet they speak complicated syllables that communicate to other beings such as yourself anything from a simple feeling to the most complicated information.  How do they do this?

The atoms and molecules of the tongue do not know the syntax of the language they speak.  When you begin a sentence you do not have the slightest conscious idea, often, of how you will finish it, yet you take it on faith that the words will make sense, and your meaning will flow out effortlessly.

All of this happens because the inner portions of your being operate spontaneously, joyfully, freely; all of this occurs because your inner self believes in you, often even while you do not believe in it.  These unconscious portions of your being operate amazingly well, frequently despite the greatest misunderstanding on your part of their nature and function, and in the face of strong interference from you because of your beliefs.

Each person experiences a unique reality, different from any other individual’s.  This reality springs outward from the inner landscape of thoughts, feelings, expectations and beliefs.  If you believe that the inner self works against you rather than for you, then you hamper its functioning – or rather, you force it to behave in a certain way because of your beliefs.

The conscious mind is meant to make clear judgments about your position in physical reality.  Often false beliefs will prevent it from making these, for the egotistically held ideas will cloud its clear vision.

Your beliefs can be like fences that surround you.

You must first recognize the existence of such barriers – you must see them or you will not even realize that you are not free, simply because you will not see beyond the fences.  They will represent the boundaries of your experience.

There is one belief, however, that destroys artificial barriers to perception, an expanding belief that automatically pierces false and inhibiting ideas:

The Self Is Not Limited

That statement is a statement of fact.  It exists regardless of your belief or disbelief in it.  Following this concept is another:

There Are No Boundaries Or Separations Of The Self.

Those that you experience are the result of false beliefs.  Following this is the idea that I have already mentioned:

You Make Your Own Reality

To understand yourself and what you are, you can learn to experience yourself directly apart from your beliefs about yourself.  What I would like each reader to do is to sit quietly.  Close your eyes.  Try to sense within yourself the deep feeling-tones that I mentioned earlier (in the 613^th session in Chapter One).  This is not difficult to do.

Your knowledge of their existence will help you recognize their deep rhythms within you.  Each individual will sense these tones in his or her own way, so do not worry about how they should feel.  Simply tell yourself that they exist, that they are composed of the great energies of your being made flesh.

Then let yourself experience.  If you are used to terms like meditation, try to forget the term during this procedure.  Do not use any name.  Free yourself from concepts, and experience the being of yourself and the motion of your own vitality.  Do not question, “Is this right?  Am I doing it correctly?  Am I feeling what I should feel?”  This is the book’s first exercise for you.  You are not to use other people’s criteria.  There are no standards but your own feelings.

No particular time limit is recommended.  This should be an enjoyable experience.  Accept whatever happens as uniquely your own.  The exercise will put you in touch with yourself.  It will return you to yourself.  Whenever you are nervous or upset, take a few moments to sense this feeling-tone within you, and you will find yourself centered in your own being, secure.

When you have tried this exercise several times, then feel these deep rhythms go out from you in all directions, as indeed they do.  Electromagnetically they radiate out through your physical being; and in ways that I hope to explain later, they form the environment that you know even as they form your physical image.

I told you that the self was not limited, yet surely you think that your self stops where your skin meets space, that you are inside your skin.  Yet your environment is an extension of your self.  It is the body of your experience, coalesced in physical form.  The inner self forms the objects that you know as surely and automatically as it forms your finger or your eye.

Your environment is the physical picture of your thoughts, emotions and beliefs made visible.  Since your thoughts, emotions and beliefs move through space and time, you therefore affect physical conditions separate from you.

Consider the spectacular framework of your body just from the physical standpoint.  You perceive it as solid, as you perceive all other physical matter; yet the more matter is explored the more obvious it becomes that within it energy takes on specific shape (in the form of organs, cells, molecules, atoms, electrons), each less physical than the last, each combining in mysterious gestalt to form matter.

The atoms within your body spin.  There is constant commotion and activity.  The flesh that seemed so solid turns out to be composed of swiftly moving particles – often orbiting each other – in which great exchanges of energy continually occur.

The stuff, the space outside of your body, is composed of the same elements, but in different proportions.  There is a constant physical interchange between the structure you call your body and the space outside it: chemical interactions, basic exchanges without which life as you know it would be impossible.

To hold your breath is to die.  Breath, which represents the most intimate and most necessary of your physical sensations, must flow out from what you are, passing into the world that seems to be not you.  Physically, portions of you leave your body constantly and intermix with the elements.  You know what happens when adrenalin is released through the bloodstream.  It stirs you up and prepares you for action.  But in other ways the adrenalin does not just stay in your body.  It is cast into the air and it affects the atmosphere, though it is transformed.

Any of your emotions liberate hormones, but these also leave you as your breath leaves you; and in that respect you can say that you release chemicals into the air that then affect it.

Physical storms, then, are caused by such interactions.  I am telling you that you form your own reality once again, and this includes the physical weather – which is the result, en masse, of your individual reactions.

I will elaborate much more specifically on this particular point later in the book (Chapter Eighteen).  You are in physical existence to learn and understand that your energy, translated into feelings, thoughts and emotions, causes all your experience.  There are no exceptions.

Once you understand this you have only to learn to examine the nature of your beliefs, for these will automatically cause you to feel and think in certain fashions.  Your emotions follow your beliefs.  It is not the other way around.

I would like you to recognize your own beliefs in several areas.  You must realize that any idea you accept as truth is a belief that you hold.  You must, then, take the next step and say, “It is not necessarily true, even though I believe it”.  You will, I hope, learn to disregard all beliefs that imply basic limitations.

Later we will discuss some of the reasons for your beliefs, but for now I simply want you to recognize them.

I am going to list some limiting false beliefs.  If you find yourself agreeing with any of them, then recognize this as an area in which you must personally work.

1. Life is a valley of sorrows.

2. The body is inferior.  As a vehicle of the soul it is automatically degraded tinged.

You may feel that the flesh is inherently bad or evil, that its appetites are wrong.  Christians may find the body deplorable, thinking that the soul descended into it – “descent” automatically meaning the change from a higher or better condition to one that is worse.

Followers of Eastern religions often feel it their duty, also, to deny the flesh, to rise above it, so to speak, into a state where nothing is desired.  Using a different vocabulary, they still believe that earth experience is not desirable in itself.

3. I am helpless before circumstances that I cannot control.

4. I am helpless because my personality and character were formed in infancy, and I am at the mercy of my past.

5. I am helpless because I am at the mercy of events from past lives in other incarnations, over which I now have no control.  I must be punished, or I am punishing myself for unkindnesses done to others in past lives.  I must accept the negative aspects of my life because of my karma.

6. People are basically bad, and out to get me.

7. I have the truth and no one else has.  Or, my group has the truth and no other group has.

8. I will grow frailer, sicker, and lose my powers as I grow old.

9. My existence is dependent upon my experience in flesh.  When my body dies my consciousness dies with it.

Now: That was a rather general list of false beliefs.  Now here is a more specific list of more intimate beliefs, any of which you may have personally about yourself.

1. I am sickly, and always have been.

2. There is something wrong with money.  People who have it are greedy, less spiritual than those who are poor.  They are unhappier, and snobs.

3. I am not creative.  I have no imagination.

4. I can never do what I want to do.

5. People dislike me.

6. I am fat.

7. I always have bad luck.

These are all beliefs held by many people.  Those who have them will meet them in experience.  Physical data will always seem to reinforce the beliefs, therefore, but the beliefs formed the reality.  We are going to attempt to knock down such limiting concepts.

First of all, you must realize that no one can change your beliefs for you, nor can they be forced upon you from without.  You can indeed change them for yourself, however, with knowledge and application.

Look about you.  Your entire physical environment is the materialization of your beliefs.  Your sense of joy, sorrow, health or illness – all of these are also caused by your beliefs.  If you believe that a given situation should make you unhappy, then it will, and the unhappiness will then reinforce the condition.

Within you is the ability to change your ideas about reality and about yourself, to create a personal living experience that is fulfilling to yourself and others.  I would like you to write down your beliefs about yourself as you become aware of them.  Later you can use this list in a way that you do not now suspect.