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Spirituality and Authority

personal development

The principle of authority makes it clear that yielding control of your spiritual life to someone else is a mistake. You must be the ultimate authority in your life—not God; and not some guru, master, or teacher. Your spiritual practice is yours to direct. Feel free to consult with whomever you wish, but don’t forget that you’re in command. You can’t delegate your spiritual authority to anyone else. Ultimately this is a quest you must pursue for yourself.

In order for your beliefs to be aligned with authority, they must be effective. This means that they must ultimately satisfy the following eight criteria:

1.  Accurate. Effective beliefs must be consistent with your observations of reality. Your beliefs can’t contradict any facts you know to be true.

2.  All-inclusive. For your beliefs to be effective, they must collectively address your entire field of experience. If you experience things that lie outside your beliefs about reality, then your belief system is incomplete, and an incomplete belief system can never be fully trusted.

3.  Flexible. Effective beliefs adapt well to new circumstances. They offer appropriate guidance regardless of your career, income level, relationship situation, lifestyle, and so on.

4.  Ethical. It’s never effective to adopt beliefs that lead you to harm yourself or others. Such ideas are rooted in fear and ignorance. Effective beliefs don’t encourage violence or dishonesty.

5.  Congruent. Either your beliefs must be internally consistent with each other, or you must have a clear method of resolving incongruencies.

6.  Consciously chosen. You inherit your initial set of beliefs from your upbringing and social conditioning. But as a fully conscious adult, those beliefs should be identified, examined, and then deliberately altered or reintegrated. This is an ongoing process that can take years, if not your entire lifetime.

7.  Pleasure-increasing and/or pain-reducing. Effective beliefs make you feel good, either by elevating your emotional state or as a side effect of generating the results you desire. Effective beliefs also reduce fear by bringing truth to the unknown.

8.  Empowering. Your beliefs should allow you to experience whatever is technically possible; they should never mislabel the possible as impossible. Subject, of course, to ethical and moral considerations, your beliefs shouldn’t unduly limit your abilities. If you think something is impossible for you, then it must truly be impossible, regardless of your thinking. If a mental shift would alter your abilities via the placebo effect, then your belief is both disempowering and inaccurate.

Take a moment to write down some of your current beliefs about reality. What do you believe to be true about your health, career, relationships, finances, spirituality, and so on? Then go over the eight criteria above to see how your beliefs measure up. If you don’t like what you see, craft more effective tenets to replace the old ones. Remember that your beliefs are not merely observations of reality; they also shape and define your experience of reality. Many of the thoughts you hold most sacred may reveal hidden falsehoods once you take the opportunity to consider the alternatives.

* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina

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