Beliefs *
CORE BELIEFS
BELIEFS CONDITION OUR PROGRAMMING
Where are the boundaries of conscious experience and self, and why do these boundaries exist? How do they develop in interaction with parents, carers and others? In what ways are they conditioned by prevailing systems of belief, philosophy, sociocultural history, and environment?
How is adult experience and sense of self altered by psychological, social or spiritual development? How does subjective experience relate to intersubjectivity? How do changes in conscious experience affect one's sense of self, for example through meditation, mysticism, or in pathological states?
Trances people live are a psychological kind of Virtual Reality, a simulation. These trances contain the preprogrammed parameters for our scripts, games and rackets...the random human software we have adopted over the years.We have intrapersonal trances and interpersonal ones, as well – rapport, envy, admiration, phobic trances, fight trances, love trances, reactions which constrict our attention. This programming can be over-written with a variety of behavioral, transactional and depth psychology techniques.
TV and RPG games can put you in a suggestible trance, as can the white line fever of driving. We have roles which we enact with our social mask, the persona – personality quirks, power struggles, cultural scripts, subcultural scripts, family scripts, psychological scripts.There are persistent themes in Greek mythology and children’s stories. Your favorite fairy tale can reveal a lot about your self-image, as winner/loser, persecutor/victim.
All of this is tied up with inhabiting certain virtualities.We spontaneously create our own trance phenomena. They help us deny, delete or overlook data and dissociate when we engage in self-defeating and self-destructive behavior. But they happen when we fall in love, too. The chemistry of love correlates with that of Obessive-Compulsive disorder.
These are virtual states are degrees of fixation and preferences, tuning out other signals. Deep trance phenomena are the glue of our chronic behavioral patterns. This is how symptoms are created and maintained. The trance is a non-linear continuum that connects related episodes that alter our experience of ourself, a set of identifications and attachments. You are more than your behaviors, feelings, thoughts, or beliefs.
Likewise, the effects of what Jung called archetypes, gods and goddesses, can autonomously "possess" us with trance-like states that have characteristic beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. These include archetypes of the persona, shadow, anima/animus, trickster, wise ones, self, etc. My online book PANTHEON describes them: http://mythicliving.chaosmagic.com
EVOLUTION OF BELIEF PARADIGMS
The sophistication of our beliefs about the way ourselves and the world works has evolved over time. But not everyone lives in the Present, with a belief system that is consistent with our current rational knowledge. Beliefs are influenced by emotional and psychosocial pressures.
Many people are firmly invested in the spiritual practices of by-gone eras, for good or not so good. Regardless, time and technology march on, impacting our psychophysical organism with challenges never faced by humanity before. The future-oriented are already living there. As has been pointed out: "The future is already here; it just isn't evenly distributed." To truly live mindfully in the Now, which is all we ever actually have, is to live at your Cosmic Zero Point http://myzeropoint.50megs.com
For thousands of years, tribes were so well adapted to their environments, they had little need to evolve. Their worldviews and reality differed, but not so overwhelmingly as for repressed cognitive dissonance to drive them to higher-numbered stages
Belief systems are like reality wormholes into the past. Part of us can live in the 14th, 17th, or 19th century, depending on eclectic spiritual ideas we have embraced or gotten stuck in. The same individual, such as a religious scientist, can embrace conflicting beliefs from different centuries. Compartmentalization is the only way to deny this cognitive dissonance.
Self-regulatory techniques can be adopted without this psychological baggage, with or without maintaining the spiritual or religious context. Somewhere on the planet, humans are living in every niche of the evolutionary belief spectrum. Which existential experience you perceive depends on the filters of your options (environment), beliefs and values.
Each stage represents a limited understanding and repressions until its liabilities force us into the next stage. Alternating stages are self-expressive and social. First new traits and states are emergent; then they stabilize. Our archetypal experiences can be regressions or expressions of our present highest state of development or emergent, then stabilized intuitions of still higher states. Each stage is a worldview with its own needs, belief style and existential ground. Each is its own trance state, a lens through which the world is perceived with certain distortions. Each can be a trap of complacency as we enjoy its rewards.
Stage 1: Archaic: Survival, the Ground Zero of Existence. Self-preservation, isolation; antisocial. Paranoid or idiosyncratic beliefs.
Stage 2: Tribal: Truster/Trickster. Social; love, belonging. Self-sacrifice vs. selfishness. Transgression; taboo. Ethnocentric magical and superstitious beliefs.
Stage 3: Egocentric: Power; Esteem; Autonomy, heroic. Unscrupulous Competition/Hero. Shame vs. honor. Exploitation vs. Respect. Mythic beliefs.
Stage4: Moral/Patriotic. Rules; Initiative. Shame and guilt vs. conformity and conventionality; purpose, virtue. Systematized truths. Emotional, nostalgic beliefs.
Stage 5: Materialist. Reasoning; mental analysis. Rational beliefs, truth; goodness; consumerism, greed. Head vs. heart. Progressive if rewarded, compulsive, workaholic. Perspective. Rational beliefs.
Stage 6: Wise Empath. Service, rapport, intimacy, empathy. Politically correct.. Inner wisdom, meaning. Self-actualization. Intuitive, mystical beliefs.
Stage 7: Distancer/Self. Paradoxical; individuated, reclusive; universalist. Deconstruction and Synthesis, gestalt, the big picture. Integral, synergetic beliefs.
Stage 8: Global Village. Complex Dynamic Beliefs. “Express Self Now, but not at the expense of Others or the World, so that Life May Continue.” (Graves) Sustainable beliefs.
As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the primary object of mysticism. Indeed, an experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing (again, according to Jung) para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Jung considers the Self as a repository of all archetypes, which is, among other things, a way of saying that someone advanced in Stage Seven has experienced all the preceding ones, and, as part of a final dialectic between conscious and unconscious, is likely to refine mastery over the preceding ones. (Whitlark, 2006)
What's New with My Subject?
"Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your mind."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
PARTICIPATORY WISDOM: This is the era of USER AS CONTENT. We are creating our own electronic content, digitally documenting and downloading our lives, We are experimenting musically, graphically, and in film with a wide variety of electronica for self-expression and creativity, or recording performances.
Rather than passively watching or consuming content, we are making our own. We are the subject of our own entertainment which has fused with our creativity. There is even electronica we can use to tweek ourselves for an upgrade of our own operating system.
More people are interested in and concerned about the shift from super-imposed myth, religious superstition, corporate imperialism, social conformity, and political propaganda to awareness of the character of the creative process itself.
We can apply this creative dynamic to molding our own lives and character. We can shift personality deficits into strengths by learning focus, goal-setting, and empowering techniques. We can draw from the rich harvest of global spiritual and psychological techniques. They are all available in the post-postmodern medicine bag.
The clarity that comes from self-knowledge and self-determination helps us burrow underneath the cultural distortions of hollow myths from the consumeristic American Dream to the Gnostic Lie of elitist societies, to the multimedia Android Meme, to New Age Utopianism. Each of these well-meaning philosophies has its shadow side of control and manipulation.
Often what we believe is the cure, the panacea, turns out to be the same old poison in another form. Maybe we can't change the whole world to suit our personal vision, but we can change ourselves and that changes the world we live in. We can certainly overwrite the random programming we've gotten stuck in from childhood, traumas, and random cultural injunctions.
SELF-REGULATION: Control of the state of your mindbody is the single most important aspect of self-regulation and self-care. You can change how you feel by changing the state of your mindbody. You can take responsibility for your own states by focusing your mind and regulating your physiology. By increasing your own functionality, you become a stronger force in the world at large by expressing postive, even contagious, values.
Your state determines your quality of life, behavior and performance level. Self-regulation may be as simple as breathing in serenity and breathing out anxiety, diet, simple exercises or other regulatory interventions in your cycles of pleasure and pain. You can perform a self-intervention by interrupting at any part of the negative cycle or trance state with new input. You can break the cycle or trance.
The levels of intensity of pain and pleasure motivate most of our behaviors. We will go to greater lengths to avoid pain than even to seek pleasure. Your state of mind and the self-talk it generates are intimately linked to your values and beliefs. You can learn to modulate your pain-pleasure spectrum in a life-affirming, positive, rather than self-defeating way.
GLOBAL BELIEFS: Find your global beliefs by filling in the blanks as many times as you need to the following:
"Life is ________"
"I am _______"
"People are ________."
Your beliefs target your values by the rule:
if ________, then I'm ________; if this, then that.
It is not that these beliefs are necessarily true. Most often they aren't but are biased by negative self image and external familial, social, cultural influences. Our old behaviors and attitudes have become ritualized, trances we live by replaying old tapes over and over in our heads that correlate with self-defeating patterns of behavior.
CORE BELIEFS: If you change your misaligned or obsolete values, you change your destiny. You can change "This is what I do" to "This is what I did", and move on in your life. Two of the most valuable core beliefs are that the past does not equal the future, and there is always a way if you are committed to yourself.
Values have means and ends. You need to target your ends, rather than listing means as values. Family, friends, money, relationships all give you something you desire from or through them, such as power, choice, freedom, passion. Even if we hold similar values, we may weight them differently, value them at different levels. The same values can be determined, governed and applied by different internally adopted "rules" by different individuals.
Which is most important to you? Love, security, adventure, success, comfort, outrageousness? What are you trying to avoid by that desire? Frustration, anger, pain, depression, humiliation, embarrasment, disappointment? Which do you want to avoid foremost? Blocks include
Fear of failure
Fear of success
Self-sabotage
Unmanaged guilt
Distractive lifestyle
Chronic depression
Poisonous pedagogy
Professional discouragement
Overwhelming responsibilities
You may find you have conflicting beliefs about yourself, others and the world that handicap your self-expression and integrity. Once you consciously align your values and beliefs you free up the energy of that conflict to direct it toward your priorities and goals.
As well as identifying causes, we need to recognize that no matter how much support or encouragement we get, we are ultimately on our own. Also, no matter how much discouragement or negative energy we pick up, we are ultimately on our own. This realization helps develop four golden virtues: initiative, individualism, character and audacity. Self motivation helps us in the continuous creation of the kind of life we desire, whose realization is self-actualization.
CONSCIOUSNESS and AWARENESS:
Adapting to the Environment
For millions of years to evolve has meant to adapt to the environment. The rule of the dinosaurs lasted nearly 150 million years, while humans have only been here 200,000. In that relatively short time both the environment and ourselves have changed markedly and will continue to do so.
For humans, survival has meant living by our wits. Even newer in evolutionary time is the electronic environment which leads us inevitably into an era where the human race is a mix of natural, transhuman (Homo Mutans) and posthumans (Homo Lumen), enhanced with exponentially changing technology.
Using our wits to enhance our quality of life is natural for us, with both soft and hard technologies. Religions no longer hold a monopoly on mind-altering techniques. The generic aspects of self-regulation, healing, creativity have been synthesized and extracted from their superstitious, pre-scientific contexts.
In the past religions imposed pre-baked mythic structures on the beliefs of their cultures. Before that, shamans held sway over the deeper layers of the human psyche. This was the original form of mind control, often enhanced with psychoactive drugs which alter and condition experiences and behavior by reinforcing cultural beliefs. The modern world has its own drugs, pharmaceutical and electronic which modulate the pain/pleasure spectrum, reinforcing their desirability.
Now we are learning the nature and process of creativity for ourselves and applying it to ourselves. Throughout our history and prehistory, someone has manipulated the minds, emotions and physical health of others. This doesn't mean religion is obsolete, but it has a shadow side in which it competes ruthlessly as a cultural meme for your energy and attention. Like cults, religions aggresively seek to control all aspects of life through needs for belonging.
Perhaps an even greater threat comes from militarily applied technology, and the seemingly more benign though pernicious influence of new media, which has become the fundamental electronic ground of our experience, mimicing a virtual voluntary ESP.
Dr. Nick Begich http://earthpulse.com highlights the post-postmodern technological dilemma:
"From the invention of the wheel to where we are right now technology will double every ten months. At this rate of change there is little time to consider the consequences, much less create solutions, for what we are facing in the future. These new technologies will either free us to our individual higher potentials, as created human beings, or enslave us to the devices of the elite and corporately corrupt governments around the world. In true democracies and democratic republics the average person controls the destiny of nations. In the 21st Century it is technologies that define the strength and power of nations."
Traditionally, all methods of self-regulation of body, emotions, mind and spirit have been tied to religions, with specific and strict rules for living. But when it comes to spirituality, one size doesn't conveniently fit all. Reproduction serves the species - the selfish gene, but self-regulation and self-development serves the individual.
Unfortunately, we've bred ourselves into a population bomb. A staggering 6 billion people strains Earth's resources; growth cannot be sustained at this rate. So reproduction has become self-destructive to the species (and planet) as a whole, though not necessarily for the individual.
Optimizing our potential and regulating our state are two of the most rationally adaptive activities we can engage in and it can be done in a non-religious or spiritual context. We can reclaim our power through self-regulation, education, applied technology and frank discussion of new technologies, planetary stewardship, responsibility and most importantly the opportunity to create real change in the directions we are otherwise headed.
It is time for an awakening of the spirit within each of us that has the potential to reclaim our birthright as human beings. Enhancing human performance or controlling human outcomes are challenges of the century raising serious questions on the ethics of the science of mind control. Control of the human mind by external means is now a reality, both for self-enrichment and for subversive purposes.
Technologies are transforming our lives, raising serious questions about privacy, safety and their proper uses. Military planners and others are attempting to use these breakthroughs to create a more directed and controlled society while ignoring the positive applications of many of these new discoveries.
Where are the boundaries of conscious experience and self, and why do these boundaries exist? How do they develop in interaction with parents, carers and others? In what ways are they conditioned by prevailing systems of belief, philosophy, sociocultural history, and environment?
How is adult experience and sense of self altered by psychological, social or spiritual development? How does subjective experience relate to intersubjectivity? How do changes in conscious experience affect one's sense of self, for example through meditation, mysticism, or in pathological states?
Trances people live are a psychological kind of Virtual Reality, a simulation. These trances contain the preprogrammed parameters for our scripts, games and rackets...the random human software we have adopted over the years.We have intrapersonal trances and interpersonal ones, as well – rapport, envy, admiration, phobic trances, fight trances, love trances, reactions which constrict our attention. This programming can be over-written with a variety of behavioral, transactional and depth psychology techniques.
TV and RPG games can put you in a suggestible trance, as can the white line fever of driving. We have roles which we enact with our social mask, the persona – personality quirks, power struggles, cultural scripts, subcultural scripts, family scripts, psychological scripts.There are persistent themes in Greek mythology and children’s stories. Your favorite fairy tale can reveal a lot about your self-image, as winner/loser, persecutor/victim.
All of this is tied up with inhabiting certain virtualities.We spontaneously create our own trance phenomena. They help us deny, delete or overlook data and dissociate when we engage in self-defeating and self-destructive behavior. But they happen when we fall in love, too. The chemistry of love correlates with that of Obessive-Compulsive disorder.
These are virtual states are degrees of fixation and preferences, tuning out other signals. Deep trance phenomena are the glue of our chronic behavioral patterns. This is how symptoms are created and maintained. The trance is a non-linear continuum that connects related episodes that alter our experience of ourself, a set of identifications and attachments. You are more than your behaviors, feelings, thoughts, or beliefs.
Likewise, the effects of what Jung called archetypes, gods and goddesses, can autonomously "possess" us with trance-like states that have characteristic beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. These include archetypes of the persona, shadow, anima/animus, trickster, wise ones, self, etc. My online book PANTHEON describes them: http://mythicliving.chaosmagic.com
BEGIN WITH YOUR BELIEFSValues control and organize our beliefs associated with those values. They tell us what's important and help us create operational rules for our lives. Some are empowering and some are disempowering. Values determine what we spend our time on by creating what's important to motivating us to spend time on certain things.
How we evaluate that can lead to conflicting values. They arouse emotion. Emotions are there to help us make good decisions. When you are totally motivated what feelings do you have? Notice how important it is and find its value. If something isn't on your list of values, you won't be motivated. If there is conflict, sometimes you do one thing while other times you do something totally opposite. You spend more time on the most important values whether they contribute or stand in your way of taking action.
Values
Value hierarchies are created in youth (uncritical, unfiltered imprinting up to age 7; modelling and hero worship at ages 7-14; chosen socialization from society at large, 14-21) but the conflicts can be resolved by focusing on their order of importance. Safety is the biggest criteria for value choices. Parents, peers, media, church, local culture effect us. So do historical events, pop culture, and cultural differences.
The part of you that creates a sense of safety also resists positive change, consciously and unconsciously. Part of us wants to remain the same despite our conscious desires. There is a price to pay for changes because it involves moving through the fear and pain to create the results we want. Most of th experiments you make in life will come at some expense.
The main distinctions in hemispheric processing are between thinking and feeling; intellect and intuition; objective analysis and subjective insight. The two modes of consciousness can each be the leader or the follower. They may also conflict, one half trying to do what the other knows it can do "better." Each has its own way of keeping knowledge from the other hemisphere, and this is especially true when it comes to memories and patterns locked in deep from trauma and abuse.
VIEW IT AND DO IT
Our way of storing, categorizing, and retrieving information can be changed. Outgrown maps disrupt the creative process through which we realize our values and beliefs. Changing beliefs, cognitively and behaviorally, is quite possible with a few simple techniques, such as being the Watcher, overwriting old patterns and behaviors. FOCUS ON WHAT YOU WANT, not what you don't want.
You can create the emotional freedom and life you want as long as you aren't attached to the outcome. Your feelings don't need to be egotistically attached to or identified with the results. It doesn't affect your peace and happiness at the core level, though emotions will still arise and fall away.
Emotions are adaptations that help regulate metabolism and survival. They are inseparable from ideas of reward/punishment, pleasure/pain, approach/withdrawl, personal advantage/disadvantage, even good/evil. You can tell if you are moving away from or toward your values by your background emotions, such as tension/relaxation, fatigue/energy, well being/malaise, and anticipation/dread.
We all have an internal map of reality and our beliefs generate our reality. Our main agenda is to be right about our beliefs. Values are the source and desire for motivation. Motivation comes from values; sense of safety comes from beliefs. If you create a 1 minute movie internally about what you WANT it is more effective than obsessing endlessly on what you don't want.
ENTANGLED MINDS
Visualization is even more effective when you are in a meditative state. Alpha and Theta brainwave states are the fertile soil in which to ground your 3-D holographic visualizations. Your clear images form a template for self-organizing creativity. Create multisensory images, rehearsing your success at reaching your goal, including sights, smells, and sounds. See your thought picture or performance translated into action in the mind's eye. Image streaming can be used for personal growth, setting goals, self-esteem, habit control, achievement, healing, rebirth and more.
Clear mental movies, visions, work much better once you have identified your limiting core beliefs. Then intuitive answers come from the subconscious spontaneously. You see it, sense it, taste it, smell it, and behave as if you have it. You can get a sense of your purpose in life from dreams and visions. Visualization is the ancient method of goal setting that engrains it and embodies it in your whole being. You can expand and prioritize your choices, and prepare for changes and achievements. Bring your future into focus in the present through highly-detailed multidimensional holographic imagery.
The right brain and your subconscious understand the language of imagery and act through your imaginative ability on your internal map. You create a subconscious belief system that harmonizes with your conscious desires for health, well being and success. Ignite your imagination with empowering beliefs. You can attune yourself to ideal creative frequencies of Alpha and Theta that facilitate these positive ideas taking root. Expectation awakens the subconscious. Deploy the hidden resources of your aligned head, heart and guts (felt-sense). Use imagination to ignite positive expectation to change passionate desire from potential energy blueprint to actualization.
IMAGE STREAMING
Image streaming assists belief change by intentionally arousing and deploying your imaginative faculty to create positive change. Doing these exercises increases your imaginal fluency much like practicing a language or musical instrument does, but this is the language of the subconscious - symbolism. It can be used by anyone to increase creativity, connection with and ability to produce imagery. Start with merely closing your eyes and reporting to yourself out loud what you are seeing, even mere blobs or smudges. Soon clearer images of actual things will begin to form and morph before your eyes.
Win Wegner is the pioneer of this process as used in NLP and elsewhere. But it is essentially the same process used for centuries by seers, magicians, and oracles to facilitate communication between the conscious and unconscious mind. Image streaming happens automatically in both free association and hypnotherapy because of the self-observation and verbal structure of the experience. When you enter the slipstream of imagery you are watching the roots of consciousness in the act of creation. This upwelling of the creative forces of life is also the portal to own direct connection with creative Source, our inspiration. This fluency can also be directly applied to pro-active Creative Visualization.
PSYCHOSENSORY EVOCATION: Deeply relax in any comfortable position, close your eyes, and describe out loud the multisensory flow of mental images through your mind. 1. You must describe the images out loud, either to another person or to a tape recorder. Describing them silently will defeat the purpose of the exercise. 2. You must use all five senses in your multidimensional descriptions. Don't just describe how things look. Describe tastes, textures, smells, even the background. 3. Phrase all your descriptions in the present tense, as they are happenING.
Don't be frustrated if the image stream is slow to manifest. You may just see sparkles, phosphenes, vague lights now and then, swirls, patterns, a colour impression. You can try using the after image from a bright light to start you off. Keep describing out loud what you see. This feedback to your auditory system reinforces the impressions. Do this for about five minutes at a time, then stop. Do not censor anything you see to begin with, and do not try to control it.
At first all you may get are vague impressions; this process improves immeasurably with very little practice. Later, you can use it for all forms of creativity, inspiration, wisdom, self-help and problem solving. Entering your stream of consciousness on a regular basis makes you smarter and opens up whole new channels of ituition and communication within your own neurology. It is one of the ancient practices of self-cultivation. When you begin active imagination you may want to visualize a candleflame, or one of the ancient Indian Tattvas or any simple symbol you can manage in your mind's eye.
