Beliefs and Early Childhood

Your culture's preoccupation with early childhood as a source of reasons for current adult behavior is misplaced. In a nutshell, children are imbued with the love of the creative source and the channel is open until about age 6 or 7 when it begins to close. It is closed by age 9-10. The parents' beliefs are both verbalized and telepathically transmitted. Children can choose or not to adopt parental beliefs but the power pressing the belief forward into the child is great. While in some rare instances children say no, mostly they say yes. Often the beliefs run counter to their own felt sense of identity. Belief harmony is an egoic earth survival feature. A 10 year old will invariably adopt parental beliefs that "don't feel good."

In adulthood you are invited to exercise conscious free will. Unconscious free will is an apparent choosing but without fully understanding your beliefs. Most people never really examine their beliefs with any depth or specificity. You can change any belief, but you must do so consciously.

In most people the leap to conscious awareness of beliefs does not happen. If it does, then belief gardening becomes possible. For instance, suppose you recognize that you believe moral superiority flows from choosing suffering in your own life. In this you see that you make choices that feel bad, i.e., are contrary to your higher self, because you think God will be impressed. This makes you like an evangelical Christian. In this garden you can choose to pull up the core belief in suffering.

Perhaps helpful to you would be the news that God is not impressed by your suffering, not at all. God merely sees you as a fragment of himself who is choosing in free will to suffer on purpose. There is no reason to pity such a being. Is this harsh? Maybe. But think of it this way. You are a fragment of God choosing to suffer. Through you God is learning what it is like to choose suffering in order to please an imaginary being who is impressed with that suffering.

Think of this too. Everyone is a fragment of God. Every good deed and every bad deed is done by God. God is both the Japanese soldier tossing dirt onto the Chinese prisoner in a ditch, and the Chinese prisoner in the ditch being buried alive by the Japanese soldier.

Now add this. God loves everyone equally. Everyone. No one is favored above another no matter how fervently they adore God or seek to do good deeds in his name.

God will not intervene to stop a "bad" event that you have chosen in free will. God knows you are eternal and so do you at a deep level. In this sense, no matter how bad it gets for you, it never really ends in death at all.

One huge cultural belief, especially in Christianity, is the idea that God made Jesus suffer "for your sins" and so it is impressive to God to see you suffer in the same way as Jesus. The cult of suffering for God, in America, is expressed in a cult of suffering in your work. Every time someone tells you how hard they worked at their job, they are in some part referencing their belief that work suffering is pleasing to God.

The key to belief change is not reading a bunch of new books about how to change your beliefs. If you set your mind to it, you can. But you need to figure out what beliefs are fundamental and of those, which hold you back.

For instance, you may have a fundamental belief in your good health. Bully for you. This is one you don't need to mess with.

But what about a fundamental belief that others are more worthy than you? That you don't deserve love? These are fiery hot bad beliefs that can ripple out into all areas of your life.

Ways to identify core hindering beliefs.

One powerful way to identify foundational hindering beliefs is to ask yourself what hindering beliefs can you easily observe in one or both of your parents. Chances are if your parent exhibits a belief, you have it too, even if you think you are "nothing like" your parent. You will take the parent's belief and use it in your own way.

Here's an example: The father was an aggressive bully who complained he was "just a paycheck" to his family. The father often talked about how hard he worked, boasting that he worked harder than any of his co-workers who were, in his view, "a bunch of lazy-asses." The father had had an office job -- his dream occupation -- but was now back to working in the construction trade. In other words, he temporarily held his dream but let it go.

The son grew up never pursuing his first choice for a career, thinking that doing what you really want is unreachable, an act of hubris. In every job, he tended to look down at others for their zeal at doing what he thought was 2nd tier work since none of them, by definition, were doing what he wanted to do.

Seemingly these attitudes are not consistent with each other. But they are. The father believed that suffering in work was a way to prove himself worthy. He lost his dream job because he never believed he was supposed to keep it. Work is for suffering, not joy. Now, toiling in work he hated, every minute spent doing it was a supreme act of will for which he should be lauded. The son, too, believed that suffering was paramount, but in his case it was to always deny himself the joy of doing what he really wanted. He would not even grant himself the dream job temporarily.

Both believed in the fundamental purpose of work to be to suffer in order to prove your worth to God.