Excerpts of Chapter 2
REALITY AND PERSONAL BELIEFS
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.
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.
Your conscious mind is always trying to give you a clear picture, but vou 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.
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 fairy 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.
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.
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.
Now, separately:
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 be continued…
