Believe it or Don't: How Your Beliefs Shape Your Results and Experience of Life,

Believe it or Don't: How Your Beliefs Shape Your Results and Experience of Life,
and What You Can Do About It
by Bill Harris, Director
I've written about this topic before, but since what you believe is such a powerful part of what determines your results and experience of life, I've decided to revisit the topic in more detail.
Let's start with a definition of beliefs: Beliefs are those things we trust to be true, and which are instrumental in creating our actions and our experience of life.
As you may know by now, I am of the opinion that living with suffering and emotional pain is not necessary, regardless of your past or present circumstances. In addition, there are definite ways to change your life to one in which you can choose to be happy and peaceful all the time.
Whether you can see it or not, you are the creator of your life, your reality, and all your responses to whatever happens around you. You may be creating all of this unconsciously and automatically, but, nonetheless, what happens, and how you respond to it, comes...
...from you.
While outside events may trigger a response or an action in you, all your responses and actions originate from something inside of you, even if the process is hidden from your awareness.
There are two keys to ending suffering and living a happy, peaceful, and conscious life:
* First, you must end your resistance to people and situations being as they are. Instead, you must develop the ability, emotionally, to let whatever happens be okay-even while you may be taking action to change it.
* Second, you must develop the ability to choose, and then create, the moment-by-moment results and responses that best serve you.
Ironically, if you're letting whatever happens be okay, it ultimately doesn't matter what results you create, at least in terms of your level of emotional suffering, since when you are not attached to your results, your level of inner peace and happiness remains the same regardless of what happens.
On the other hand, the more you emotionally allow people and situations to be the way they are, the more the resulting inner peace gives you the ability to be effective in creating the results you want.
One of the little mysteries of life.
How, then, are you creating the outer results and inner responses that create your experience of life? And how do you make this process conscious and volitional, rather unconscious and automatic, as it is with most people?
The results and responses of your life flow from a whole variety of internal mental filters, processes, and strategies--what I call your Internal Map of Reality. You could call it the software that creates your life. Your beliefs are very important part of this internal map, and how beliefs contribute to the results you get in life, and how you can take control of this process, is the subject of this article.
Important principle #1:
Based on early life interactions and experiences, especially with our primary care-givers, we all develop beliefs about who we are and what our relationship is to the rest of the world.
We don't choose these beliefs. We soak them up from our life experiences when we're too small to have any way of evaluating them. Beliefs become core components of how we see ourselves, other people, and the world.