After a night of pleasant company, good food and a couple of bottles of red, it occurred to me that a lot of the decisions we make and their subsequent actions may be the truest reflection of who we are! So, if my decisions and what I believe is truly me, then where did this me come from? Where the hell did my beliefs come from?
That night at the dinner party, a women boldly proclaimed that she hated Indians and their awful religious based third-world behaviour. As the night proceeded it occurred to me that she seemed mostly ignorant of Indian culture, so I asked her how many Indians she knew. Her answer shocked me as did my rudeness, yet if she didn’t know a single Indian, then where did her thought come from?
In this case it came from a parent and God only knows where they got it from. It could just as easily have come from the media, which is most people’s only tool for gaining the bulk of their information. It’s quite possible for us to despise an entire race of people without ever realising why? It’s scary when you consider that beliefs like these may be creating who we are.
I discussed this with a friend, who attested to my summations by providing this example. He suggested that ‘if a white man raped a girl, we see this perpetrator as a lone and despicable rapist. Yet, if a non-white man rapes a girl, we see the whole race as rapists’. He made the point that our decision to believe this was made for us by years of media conditioning, ultimately to sell advertising, yet whole societies buy into beliefs such as these.
Alright, if we are the ones responsible for creating our lives then surely we would choose thoughts that manifest into wonderful experiences. Well maybe … at times our own belief system drags us back down to a reality it has decided to believe even though we don’t like it and it doesn’t work well for us.
It seems that we’re our own producers, making our life’s movie and projecting it into our reality as what our eyes see … our destiny … the path laid out before us. We are the leading men and women who get to star in our own production of who we are. We even get to develop the characteristics of that character to enhance our amazing show … right
Personally I’m nothing like a Spielberg, so it would be fair to say that not all of us are going to make award winning movies, or grow into super stars, especially given that the script for our show comes from our own flawed belief system, either conscious or unconscious. Truthfully considered, my creations seemed like B grade episodes from some self-created horror lunacy.
Ah ha … An epiphany … I get it. My beliefs and thoughts create the great drama of my life. So if my show is so bad, then my beliefs must be at fault.
When I actually took the time to think about it, I discovered that many of the beliefs and the decisions I was making in my life were actually being made by others. I asked myself where these beliefs and decisions came from and this was the result: The media, mothers, fathers, family, friends, wives, husbands etc. All beliefs belonging to others, the most prevalent coming from parenting and media saturation, mostly through television.
The truth. We’re not making most of the decisions about who we are. I wasn’t creating my life. I was living unconsciously. Life was dragging me along by the feet and I didn’t seem to have any control over the direction and purpose of my life. Other people’s ideals and negative beliefs were how I was living my life; how is was making my movie! Alright. Stop. Enough.
So, what to do? Firstly, I began to determine exactly who I wished to be and I started to make decisions that reflected that person, taking on-board the old adage that ‘we’re not here looking for self, where here to create self’. I made myself aware of my ‘true’ inner beliefs and began to choose only those that reflected who I wished to be and threw out the others.
It took a while, but I am now something like the character I chose … yes, the one I chose. Now I determine exactly how I feel about mostly everything … Conscious Living.
Here’s how it can have a very beneficial result on your life. I once knew of a person who had suffered a horrible situation. This caused him terrible grief every time he thought about it. Loss … great loss. He said it felt like a fist rising from his stomach and into his throat, choking him whenever those thoughts occurred; day after day, year after year.
He blamed everybody, himself included. It was pain driven by rage, guilt and feelings of powerlessness. He was reacting, but also choosing that experience because of what he chose to believe. So, what did he do? He stopped; literally changing his mind. He now chose how he felt whenever he pondered that situation. Now, because he thought to believe differently, he felt only joy and a myriad of other positive emotions.
This friend learned to trust and appreciate himself, when he started to see who himself actually was. The hidden one, the real one. Now the inside has become the outside. Now he chooses to be happy, joyful and content at all times and guess what? He really is. He told me that he is creating his life exactly how he wants it to be.
Ken "Charlie" Grace 