Monday, June 12, 2006

Observe Your Own Mind So You Can Stop Feeling as If Beliefs Just 'Happen' to You.

If it feels as if your beliefs just show up fully developed and you have nothing to do with how they came to be a part of you, it's because you've not developed the ability to observe your own mind.

Yet most of your beliefs were probably "absorbed" from your family when you were younger. The rest of them have been gleaned from the community you grew up in and from the culture at large. The process of acquiring them was invisible to you, so you didn't notice you were doing it.

President John F. Kennedy once said, "Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

Be willing to endure that discomfort of thought. Gaining awareness and accepting personal responsibility for your beliefs and behaviors is an acquired skill. If it wasn't demonstrated for you when you were growing up, or you haven't intentionally studied it, chances are you haven't a clue about how to do it.

Your Statement of Truth. A start is to recognize what personal responsibility is not. In the absence of personal responsibility, all you can do is blame others for your difficulties because it looks to you as if they *are* to blame.

But when you assume radical personal responsibility, you live in a truth that proclaims,

I am responsible for how I allow others to affect me. In a world of forces beyond my control, I can learn to be the keeper of my own heart and mind.

Even when things appear not to be going my way, and I am upon an emotional sea of crossing and diverging currents, I can still navigate my way to my ultimate good fortune.

I proclaim that I am not a victim of the world I see. I am a co-creator of it.

Let love and wisdom be my moral compass, and let clarity be the wind in my sails.

Layne and Paul Cutright

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