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.

“To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagine that within you was a genie, a veritable creation machine capable of bringing you anything you desired – good and bad. Let’s imagine that you were unaware of this genie within or had heard about it but disbelieved. Perhaps you’d tried to believe and discovered that it was bogus – the whole thing about the genie within was just so much superstitious mumbo jumbo.

As children, we called it “make believe.” People encouraged us to be imaginative and creative, to fantasize and enjoy. Then, as we aged, the guidance changed. Grow up! Be realistic! “Making believe” became the more serious game of “making beliefs”: judging, drawing conclusions, deciding what’s good and bad, right and wrong. All our emotions and behaviors then follow from the beliefs we create.

Parents, priests, teachers, corporate executives and politicians compete busily to teach us or sell us beliefs so that they can influence our feelings and behavior. They know, and we soon learn, that winning the games of power, both personal and political, depends on what we choose to believe.

Paraphrased, J. Krishnamurti said, “Choice is an illusion. Do I do this – do I do that – all of this is confusion. I can only choose when I’m confused. When I know clearly, there is no choice.” Thirty years ago, Benjamin Libet showed that there is activity in the subconscious within milliseconds before a conscious thought occurs. In other words, our so-called conscious thoughts are given us by our subconscious.