2.
The least you should know about your options
You have two basic options.
Your life can be an upward spiral that constantly expands your life
experience, leading to greater fulfillment, happiness and peace of mind.
Or your life can be a downward spiral that limits your life experience,
leading to lack, frustration, fear, anger and the sense of struggle.
The difference is in the choices you make.
You are always choosing. The question is whether you are making conscious
or unconscious decisions.
If you make choices based on incomplete understanding, you will experience
limiting consequences. In order to deal with these consequences, you
are likely to make other unconscious choices and this inevitably leads
to even more limiting consequences. Continued over time, this can lead
to a state of mind in which it seems like all your available options
lead to limiting consequences. This is a state of ignorance, a state
of spiritual blindness. Taken to its extreme, it makes you feel as if
you have no choices, you have no options in life. This is a state of
spiritual paralysis, spiritual death.
Choices based on ignorance lead to more ignorance, and this downward,
self-perpetuating spiral can be broken only through an act of will.
You must decide to take back your power to make conscious choices. You
must be willing to make choices for yourself and you must be willing
to reach for the understanding that will empower you to make conscious
choices. Only by making conscious choices can you escape ignorance and
spiritual death.
Once you have become enveloped in a downward spiral, it will take effort
to break free. You cannot break such a spiral by continuing to apply
the same approach to life that caused you to enter the spiral. You cannot
solve a problem with the same state of consciousness that created the
problem. Thus, you must be willing to change something.
If your life is to change, you must be willing to change yourself. You
must change your attitude and your approach to life. You must be willing
to reach for an understanding that you do not currently have, “With
all thy getting, get understanding.”
In order to change your life, you must learn to make conscious choices,
choices that lead to liberating consequences. Such choices must be based
on a higher understanding of life, and to find this understanding, you
must be willing to look outside your current knowledge and beliefs,
outside your current mental box.
When people cannot break free of a downward spiral, there can be only
one reason. They have become mentally or emotionally attached to a particular
belief system or world view, and they are not willing to look outside
their current mental box in order to find a higher understanding. This
attachment to current beliefs, this refusal to leave one’s mental
prison, is the main factor that keeps so many people trapped on a treadmill
of struggle and suffering.
The key to all progress seen in human history is that in every generation
a few people were willing to reach for a higher understanding of life,
they were willing to think outside the box. Yet in every generation
the majority of the people refused to leave their mental prisons. Thus,
your first choice on the path to a more rewarding life experience is
that you must choose to look outside your mental box. You must decide
to look for an understanding that goes beyond your present beliefs.
You must be willing to reach for the truth that will make you free.
To start the process of making your choices more conscious, you must
begin by realizing that choices are not made in a vacuum. Any choice
you make is an expression of your current state of consciousness. A
choice is an expression of how you see yourself, how you see the world
and how you see your relationship to the world. Your overall world view,
your basic paradigm, has been built over a long period of time and it
has been influenced by many ideas, some of which are incomplete or erroneous.
The key to changing your life is to uncover the erroneous ideas and
replace them with a higher understanding. When people fail to improve
their lives, it is ALWAYS because they cling to an incomplete or erroneous
idea and they refuse to question it.
They might have been programmed to fear that “bad things”
will happen if they question the infallible doctrine. Or they might
have been lured into the prideful attitude that their belief system
is the highest possible, is the absolute truth, and thus there is no
need to question it.
The equation is simple. For every question you could possibly ask, there
is an answer that will expand your understanding of the topic in question.
Some questions do not have direct answers because they are formulated
based on incomplete knowledge. Yet even for such questions there is
an answer that will increase your understanding and thus empower you
to ask better questions. So if you have a question and have not found
the answer, there can be only one explanation. You have not looked for
the answer in the right place, you have not asked with the right frame
of mind.
The reason is that you have confined your mind to a mental box, often
defined by an outer belief system. As long as you refuse to look for
answers outside that box, you are at an impasse, a spiritual catch-22.
You will not be able to escape this paralysis until you decide to look
outside your current mental box.
3.
The least you should know about where to find answers
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Copyright
© 2005 by Kim Michaels |
