Changing your beliefs can be painful

John Smallman

Many of you are finding life very trying at present as various issues that need your attention rumble around just below your level of conscious awareness, stirring up your emotions and making you feel sad, depressed, irritable, and plain angry. Maybe you have tried sitting with those feelings in an attempt to identify their underlying cause, and then release them. And it is quite likely that you have had difficulty making any progress because the feelings, the inner discomforts, remain, even though you cannot identify any issues that might be causing them. Just relax as best you can and accept the moods as they flow through you, and intend to release them. They may last a day or two but they will pass, and when they do, you will feel lighter and more buoyant.
All feelings, all moods, all emotions pass; they are only temporary, although they may be repetitive. The more you can relax and accept them in the moment – without acting on them but acknowledging them and intending to release them – the more effective will be your intent to let them go. At times what you feel or think may seem outrageous, and you may say to yourselves: “How could I have thoughts or feelings like these!? They are totally unacceptable!” Do not let them worry you; everyone experiences emotions, thoughts, and feelings that “good, loving people could not possibly have!” Your ego is just trying, and quite possibly succeeding, in distracting you by drawing you into judgment. Thoughts, emotions, and feelings are just part of the illusion’s energy flow – meaningless, unless you focus on them, encourage them, or act on them.
You give meaning to your lives by paying attention, developing your thoughts, engaging with them, and then making decisions and acting on them. Until you do that, they have no meaning. You choose to seek meaning in Reality by focusing there, or in the illusion by focusing there, and because the illusion distracts you with thoughts and emotions of safety and survival, that is where you mostly end up focusing your attention.
The thoughts on which you choose to focus your attention determine how you experience your lives. It is always your choice. Many thoughts flow through your mind daily as you dwell in the illusion, and it is always your choice which ones you attend to and develop. You need to remind yourselves frequently that you, that all sentient beings, are perfect divine beings eternally and infinitely loved by God. And because of that you are – every one of you – of infinite worth and value. In the illusion, practically every culture engages in judgment, and judgment leads to doubt, fear, guilt, and a sense that others are more valuable than you, as you struggle with shame and embarrassment over aspects of yourselves that you find unacceptable and which you know others would judge most harshly, and rightly so if they knew of them.
Be kind and charitable to yourselves; accept yourselves because you are totally acceptable, having been created perfect by God. Once you start truly accepting yourselves just as you are, you will find yourselves engaging less and less frequently in behavior (thoughts, words, or actions) that you, and you feel sure others, judge as unacceptable. It really is a very basic fact that if you believe that you are unacceptable, then you will engage in unacceptable behavior, and if you believe that you are acceptable, then you will not. It is simply that you act on your beliefs to prove to yourselves that they are valid, so if you do not like yourselves then change your beliefs! They are not set in stone and can be very limiting and destructive. And you most definitely can change them; after all, it was once believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and if you disagreed, you were judged to be dangerously sinful.
Of course, changing your beliefs can be painful because you have invested so much of yourselves in them. And to admit that you were wrong can make you feel ashamed because you fear the reactions of others when they hear about it. So start with small prejudices or viewpoints that no one else knows about, and you will be amazed at how much lighter you feel when you release yourselves from them and allow yourselves to acknowledge their invalidity and experience the freedom of no longer being governed by the constraints they imposed on you.
To awaken is to embrace your true state – which is limitless. When you look around, you cannot avoid noticing the restrictions that beliefs place on those who adhere to them, and conversely, the freedom enjoyed by those who are open-minded and willing to question and examine their own beliefs and those of others. All your technological progress has occurred because previous concepts that were found to be unsatisfactory were questioned, and found to be erroneous and unduly restrictive. Beliefs can be useful as steps on the path to knowledge, much as are hypotheses, but when enforced as self-evident and unchangeable truths, they prevent knowledge from growing. The same is true for spiritual beliefs, which are basically human ideas about God, authoritatively enforced, which again prevents meaningful discussion and the growth in understanding that would follow.
So practice being free, by questioning your beliefs and assumptions, and discarding any that no longer serve you. Enjoy the lightness you experience, and then do some more questioning. Understand and accept with compassion the resistance or refusal you meet in others, without trying to persuade them to change. Be gentle, otherwise you will just replace one set of invalid beliefs with another, as you judge others wrong for not questioning theirs. Love is always gentle and compassionate, so treat yourselves and all others with gentleness and compassion, and continue to grow lighter and freer as the moment for your awakening approaches.

With so very much love,

Saul.

Source:
http://johnsmallman.wordpress.com/