Are your beliefs shaped by your experience or do you experience what you believe?
Your answer may depend on whether you live your life defensively or proactively. Defensive attitudes around your beliefs mean that your experience shapes your beliefs. In your life, you’ve experienced X,Y, or Z and you’ve come to believe certain things as a result of those experiences. The end result is one in which we have to constantly defend our positions regarding X,Y, or Z and our beliefs therefore reflect a fundamental limitation in our thinking.

Continued from Confessions of a Spiritual Couch Potato : Part II: With slight raspberry overtones, this deliciously simple book never fails to leave me with whispers of its sweet after note. It was the perfect complement to the first four courses. I read a few of my favorite passages and settled down for a long overdue session with myself that required only my presence and willingness to sit in silence . . .

Coming out the silence of the fifth course, I gradually became aware, first of my breathing, then my body, and finally the world around me. Soon enough, my head was filled with the usual chitchat that I often likened to a tree full of monkeys arguing with the parrots next door. I caught myself thinking random thoughts about TV, snacks, and my favorite beer.

The other day I was thinking about my body and wondering where I went wrong. How could I have have gotten so out of shape, so off my diet, so neglectful of this beautiful physical expression of myself without even noticing the downward slide into that inglorious realm of existence that’s come to be known as being a couch potato?

Couch potato. The term itself conjures up images of some dim, vegetative consciousness happily ensconced in its living room watching TV and self-fertilizing with buttered popcorn and beer. Where did I pick up that identity? My father was a workaholic and anything but a couch potato. I would have classified him as more of a healthy ear of corn: fast growing with golden tassels blowing in the wind.

A characteristic of the modern age is that even though we know we are connected to the big wide world at large, we usually live our lives in our own private little mental ecology with little thought to that big world out there. Our little internal world seems big enough — or is it that the outer world is just spooky enough that we cannot understand the concept of it all?

When it comes right down to it, it is a bit scary and overwhelming. At least inside our own heads, we can attend to things and not give it a second thought regarding the hows, the whys, the whens, or the wheres. It is all inside our head! Yes, the entire world contained within the space between one ear and the other.