Beliefs I

This will be the first of a series of articles based on the teachings of Celebrity Author James Arthur Ray.

What you believe you'll achieve is the driving factor of your results: your lack of abundance in terms of money, piece of mind, relationships, physical health, or anything else. This is the cumulative effect of your current total belief system, which is exactly what it sounds like - the totality of what you believe, your habits, experiences, values and assumptions.

Most people try to change their results by dealing with the effects, throwing new solutions at the results, thinking they're going to change things. But if you want to change the results, you must deal with the cause. You have to change what you believe.

One of the reasons it's so hard to change what we believe is that we don't understand how those beliefs got into our heads at the first place. Why do we believe what we believe?

Well, for one thing, our unconscious programming and our overidentification with the culture around us keeps many of us from creating an independent sense of self, our unique identity. It's a rare individual who begins operating authentically by living a more closely examined life.
If we want to change our total belief system, we need to bring our unconscious beliefs into our consciousness, examine whether they are true or useful, heal them, change them, and release them if they're not.

It was Socrates who stated, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.'

Your programming comes from deep-seated values, beliefs and assumptions that are fixed or locked into your consciousness. Again, most of these are gifts you received at a very early age from your parents, grandparents, teachers, religious sources and anyone else in authority, typically during the ages of three to eight.

Sociologist Morris Massey conducted exhaustive research on personal values and found that most of our core level values lock in at the age of thirteen and rarely if ever change. What that means is that most of the people you interact with on a daily basis are thirteen-year-olds walking around in thirty-, forty-, or even eighty-year-old bodies.

According to Massey, your values only change if you experience what he called a significant emotional event, or SEE - something that rocks your world and causes you to step back and reconstruct your viewpoint.

Most often your conscious mind isn't aware of everything your unconscious mind is putting out, yet your programming, or total belief system, continues to operate as though everything you think or believe is literally true. It's not.

Thankfully, because you've chosen your own beliefs to start with - even if you did so unconsciously - you can now learn how to choose new ones consciously for new results.