Dont bother changing Beliefs, become aware of them

"It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place," said the Red Queen to Alice.

Our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, a system that evolved to assure not truth, logic, and reason, but survival. To believe something needn't involve actively reflecting on it.

Because of the survival value of beliefs, disconfirming evidence will rarely, if ever, be sufficient to change beliefs, even in "otherwise intelligent" people.

Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time. Our beliefs can be regarded as the blueprint by which we create our reality. They are an integral element of the design of this physical dimension we operate within.

Our beliefs continuously influence our perception of the world and our perception of the world is an action of interpretation of our reality. Things that are learned early in life are the hardest to change or unlearn. Early conceptions of the world, even if lost to consciousness, remain a part of our memory and may influence our behaviors in some very interesting ways.

A core belief has enough strength to so focus our perception that we perceive from the physical world only those events that correlate with it. The belief can reach into the most intimate areas of our lives and no evidence will be forthcoming to disprove it because we will only be able to perceive that which confirms it. Thus, it becomes invisible to us.

The information that we receive is tremendous, but what we allow to come through is limited to what we believe in, that is what we have already experienced, and what make sense to us.

You cannot see something that goes against your belief.

The truly amazing part of all of this is not that so few beliefs change or that people can be so irrational, but that anyone's beliefs ever change at all.

The idea of getting rid of your negative beliefs and replacing them with the beliefs that reinforce your behavior in a more productive pattern is the biggest contradiction.

If you initially think of yourself as not a valid one, the one with the wrong beliefs, or wrong anything for that matter, you already are setting yourself up for a failure.

Change requires a period of adjustment, a break in period before this new thing feels like your own. And who knows if it will be as good as the ones you've thrown away. Something new always implies a gamble, a risk. Who knows if the new purchase or a new behavior will ever feel as familiar as what has been given up.

As illogical as it may seem on the surface, the ambivalent wish to change and to say the same is pivotal in our understanding of why self-defeating, pain producing behaviors persist over time.

Understanding how disruptive and agonizing change can be helpful to us in understanding why real change takes such a long time.

All your beliefs are not better or worse than any one else’s. As a matter of fact, most of them are the same. Becoming conscious of our mental process is what transforms our behavior and attitude, and gives us a realization to accept what is, which in turn creates an inner peace.

Sometimes, the review process--the getting to know ourselves--holds some very real surprises as well as confrontation with some real contradictions that exist within our personality.

Should you examine the beliefs... that seem so natural to you, that you do not question them, you may find surprises. For you cannot separate what you 'came with', and what you 'added unto' that.

"It never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else" ... Vilayanur Ramachandram

Ability to alter beliefs in response to data is a true gift; a unique, powerful, and precious ability.

It is genuinely a "higher brain function" in that it goes against some of the most natural and fundamental biological urges. Awareness is a key! Detachment is a "higher brain function".

Stop following, start thinking on your own!

We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong. Bill Vaughan

The Search Box is set up against my favorite sites, that dedicated to study of consciousness, beliefs and related subjects.