Posts Tagged ‘Beliefs’
Terrific!
I am very grateful that you are you and that you are being your own guru. You, by being yourself, are offering All That Is another perspective of itself, the experience of diversity, and the gift of variety. Oneness is enhanced, interestingly enough, through the acceptance of and celebration of diversity.
You have your own unique qualities and natural talents. I fully encourage you to develop them and be totally you, not a clone of me.
You see, I have no interest in converting anyone or convincing anyone to agree with my understandings. It is simply my intention to be myself to the fullest extent possible and share with you what I have to give, but it is ALWAYS up to you what you choose what to do with it. I honor the free will that you have and recognize that your life is yours to live and yours alone. There’s a lot of power in honoring people and allowing them to be, without resistance.
My way is not a better way. It is simply another way.
All beliefs are equally valid, since each belief generates its own self-validating reality.
-Bashar
This is not to say that some beliefs are not more in alignment with ultimate reality, love, and light. Not at all. Read More …
Here’s a fun little dialogue/monologue that went on in my head just now as I kept questioning my beliefs. The beliefs that pop up within me aren’t really taken all that seriously these days…
A: “I know what God is. God is infinity.”
B: “Oh? God is the word infinity?”
A: “No, God is that which infinity points to. It’s everything I can imagine.”
B: “You can imagine everything in the universe?”
A: “Oh, well, God is all the stuff I can’t imagine too.”
B: “Well if God includes all the stuff you can’t imagine, all the stuff you don’t know, how can you say you know God?”
This is just a friendly reminder to keep questioning your understandings. 
We all have thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and ideas about “the way things are” and all these beliefs are very real to us.
The thing is though, NONE of those mental concepts have any basis in actual reality! That is, we literally made them all up… and then forgot that we did so! In some cases, we may have heard something from another, felt that they had credibility, bought into their belief system, and thus incorporated their beliefs into our own belief system.
People tend to believe thoughts, especially the ones they feel are “mine.”
Nevertheless, we can reveal to ourselves that using thought is actually NOT a way to understand absolute truth.
The “How Do You Know” Method
Take a thought, belief, opinion, or idea that you hold to be true.
Now ask yourself, “How do I know absolutely for sure that this is true?”
Whatever answer the mind gives you, to it ask, “How do I know absolutely for sure that this is true?”
The mind will keep giving you back answers and every time it does, again ask yourself, “How do I know absolutely for sure that this is true?”
You must be willing to question every answer the mind gives you for this method to work.
If you keep asking this question, you’ll find that you eventually wind up at, “I don’t know absolutely for sure that this is true.”
It turns out each belief is supported by another belief which is supported by another belief which is ultimately supported by “I don’t know.”
Your beliefs are built upon nothing. They have no foundation at all!
Do this with a few hundred of your thoughts, beliefs, opinions, or ideas, and you’ll come to realize for yourself that thought is not a method for realizing absolute Truth whatsoever.
Question:
Dear Ariel,
I was reading through this site, and found that it goes against the “law of attraction”. because in law of attraction, thinking is good when I can direct them in a positive way. it is not just an ego. If I think, “I am confident that I can do this job and have lots of money doing so.” Then it is a positive thing to think about according to law of attraction.
Another thing is that the imposer article states that incarnation after incarnation brings only suffering.
Law of attraction says that we were not forced to incarnate but rather so eager to jump in again and again because there is so much joy in life.
So, I stopped reading the thing, but the book says that my ego will always come up with ideas so that I don’t have to read the book.
Did my ego mudding my thinking?
Or do I have some valid points?
Thanks, S.
My response:
S, excellent points, but yes, that is your ego looking for an out. 
The two concepts do seem to butt heads a bit.
Enlightenment: Thoughts have no basis to know absolute truth and are therefore not real.
Law of Attraction: Thoughts help create your reality and can be used for good.
The main “problem,” if you will, is that people have lost their conscious connection to Source. They have become completely identified with their ego, their thoughts, and physical reality. Instead of life being a place where they could bring down their connection to Source and create whatever they choose, people forgot about all this and got stuck in physicality as if it was the only reality. This is what the Buddha meant when he said that life is suffering. Life, when identified totally from the ego, IS suffering for the ego itself is the source of all suffering through resistance and judgment.
So we learn that thoughts have no absolute truth, yet any reality (and I mean any reality) can be believed to be true and thus made experiential. Read More …
Today we have a guest post by Jean-Claude Gerard Koven.
Back in 1992, Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise co-starred in a movie entitled A Few Good Men. The high point of the film, in my view, was a classic, heated exchange between their characters, during which Kaffee (the military attorney played by Cruise) says: “I want the truth,” and Col. Jessup (Nicholson) responds: “You can’t handle the truth.”
The movie makes Jessup the villain. That’s not surprising in a courtroom drama that’s based on finding the truth in order to separate right from wrong. But the screenwriters could just have easily turned it all around. If Jessup were editing the script, he would have become the hero defending the American way of life. Unlike Kaffee, who could only perceive truth through the narrow perspective of precedent case law, he saw the bigger picture. In his view, the rigidity of black-and-white morality needed to be bent into shades of gray to serve the greater good.
The truth that Jessup perceived was well beyond Kaffee’s ability to handle. Kaffee’s view of truth was far too limited to contain the reality of Jessup’s world. However what neither of them could see was that “the truth” simply does not exist. There is no universal, definitive Truth (with a capital “T”). The best each of us can muster is our own version of truth, determined by the point from which we choose to view reality. And our only sin is in believing that others must join us in seeing things as we do.
There have always been those among us who, claiming to speak with the authority of God or on behalf of a totalitarian regime, have advocated their version of Truth. These people — not too different in other ways from the rest of us — became ensnared by the assumed validity of their doctrines. Despite their impressive robes or uniforms and their persuasive pronouncements, they turned out to be little more than bigoted bullies who historically have been astonishingly effective in bending our minds and wills.
Perhaps, the time has come for us to think for ourselves. But how can we when our minds are already made up? Someone has already done all the thinking for us. And we, seeking the blessings of our leaders and the safety of consensus, continually nod in agreement. Besides, we enjoy being part of our larger families and we seem to enjoy the comfort of singing from a common hymnal. Read More …
Bill Nye, the harmless children’s edu-tainer known as “The Science Guy,” managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.
As even most elementary school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own.
But don’t tell that to the good people of Waco, who were “visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence,” according to the Waco Tribune.
Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.
But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”
The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.
At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they’d always suspected.
(Originally sourced here.)
Now as humorous as this situation is and as tempting as it may be to either make fun of or defend these people and their positions on religion or science, let’s see if we can step back a moment and look at the larger picture.
This is a perfect example of what happens when people buy into a belief system, no matter how logically sound (or not), no matter who originally sourced the words that people choose to believe in.
Remember, spiritual truth is experiential, not a belief system.
The taste of an apple is experiential, not a belief system. No matter how accurate the description, all words must first be filtered through the speaker’s personal perceptions, thus altering and limiting the totality of the experienced Truth.
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. A few words, or even an infinite amount of words, could not possibly encompass infinity, the entirety of an experience. There’s no way you could tell someone what the experience is like and have them fully understand. The best you could do is help point out a pathway another person could walk in order for them to experience it for themselves.
Once they have done so, words are no longer necessary, for you both already understand experientially and no words need be spoken.
Whenever people get caught in trying to describe or talk about something, it would be very helpful for them to realize there’s no way they could ever describe the experience perfectly, both because words could never adequately describe an experience, as well as because each person’s experience will be personal and unique having been filtered through a person’s individual awareness.
Religion was originally intended to guide people to the personal experience of God, not to be a substitute for it.
Getting stuck on the verbalized substitute will always lead to situations like the one illustrated above, to a greater or lesser extent. It’s merely a matter of degree.
The past few thousand years of history have shown us this.
All beliefs are something to ultimately be dropped altogether.
Yes, even the belief 2+2=4. You can experience it. No need to have a belief in place of the experience.
