“The man who thinks he can, and the man who thinks he can’t are both right.”
– Confucius
Belief is a simple concept, yet terribly complex. Allow me to share a personal experience in order to help ground belief into the world we live in. As a teen I was playing basketball with a group of friends after school. The realization came to me – not based on prior performance, mind you – that I could not miss a shot. I shot from 3 point, I shot from half court, I threw it up from three quarters of the court, and they all found their way into the net. This belief (or knowingness) continued for a good 15 minutes to the point where it felt absurd. It felt like a cosmic joke. Think of video games with cheat codes enabled, where there is no point in even playing. It wasn’t until I made a conscious choice to miss that I did – and upon doing so, the feeling flowed out of me and I was back to normal – but I’ll never forget that BELIEF that I KNEW that I couldn’t miss.
If you’ve had a chance to review prior articles on what is real, and reality filters, you have the foundation for explaining the phenomenon of belief. Our beliefs literally create the world we live in. A belief can be something as simple as needing to go to college in order to be successful. Someone with this mindset would find it very difficult to succeed without going to college because of this belief. However, the world is full of successful people that chose not to go to college and were not confined by that limiting belief. Someone with the belief that they are not attractive, no matter how many people tell them otherwise, will never feel attractive until they choose to change that belief and deconstruct the elements that caused it. Someone who believes their partner will cheat will often perpetuate that very thing happening as a byproduct of their belief.
This also means that collectively, we are maintaining and enforcing beliefs. The societal structure at large is contingent on these beliefs that we have established and are perpetuating in one way or another.
As with all things in life, belief can be used to our advantage, or disadvantage. Creating beliefs that promote well-being and circumstances to our advantage is one of the most promising things we can do and we’ll discuss how later in this article.
Dr. Bruce Lipton does an amazing job of explaining how our mind (conscious and subconscious) adopts beliefs and behaviors, which we’ll call programs. He explains how up until about the age of 7, a child’s brain is operating in theta, allowing it to absorb information from its environment. Everything the mother and father teaches him/her, the neighborhood, school, TV and so on, is all downloaded into this developing being. Often this information can be self-destructive. Consider a family that has negative beliefs relating to money, passing on that mindset to the child who will very likely struggle with money as they become an adult. Abuse is often repeated by the child… you get the idea. For these first 7 years, the child is just a sponge to everything in its environment, which become subconscious programs that determines how the child views and interacts with the external world (in their unawareness). After the age of 7, new programs are created through habitual behavior.
These programs (stored in our subconscious) take over whenever someone is actively thinking. Dr. Lipton explains that we spend about 95% of our days thinking, which means that we’re pretty much always being ran by these programs, that we (in most cases) haven’t consciously created, and simply adopted.
So here we are as adults, still holding onto all this information that was programmed into us as children and it’s running our lives (in many cases poorly). Now that we recognize this, let’s talk about fixing it.
One way to override the programming that we picked up as children is to go back into the theta state and input programs and beliefs that promote our well-being and growth. This explains one of the reasons why meditation is so beneficial – you can train your mind to drop into theta and use recorded messages to reprogram your subconscious. Simply create a vocal recording with all the beliefs and programs that you want instilled into your subconscious, drop into a meditative state and have that recording playing back to you. You can use audio created by others, but I recommend creating your own recording and using your own voice in order to bypass any deception filters you may have in place when you ‘feel out’ someone else speaking. We all have a BS meter that helps us determine what resonates, or if someone is genuine. Using your own audio allows you to circumvent your security measures and simply receive the gift of your own intention, without aversion.
As expressed earlier, habitual behavior is another way to input information into our subconscious – by willfully creating patterns of behavior that promote well-being, your body will be able to run those habit patterns without effort.
Journaling is a tool that ties hand-in-hand with this type of recultivation. We can use a daily writing ritual to reflect on the events in our day – the things that excited us, were uncomfortable and everything in between. Our ability to take objective note, honestly, gives us a great tool to bear witness to our own socio/psychological mechanisms. It allows us to chart our progress over time, where we may otherwise find it difficult to truly acknowledge our growth. And for those of you caught in a perpetual state of gas-lighting, it allows you to embolden your own voice and diminish the weight of others. The world is feedback, but we are always the navigator.