One of the most empowering choices you can make is to decouple your spiritual beliefs from your identity. Despite how firmly held your beliefs may be, they can never define you. If you change your faith, you’re still you. A fixed belief system can only limit your ability to grow; it’s like permanently closing one eye and denying yourself access to your natural stereo vision.
Personal attachment to beliefs, especially cultural and spiritual beliefs, is unfortunately very common. While experiencing a belief system from the inside is generally a wise choice, equating your identity with any fixed notion is a disempowering mistake. As the principle of truth reveals, beliefs are lenses through which you can view reality. Every lens reveals some aspects of reality while hiding others. The more lenses you experience, the more complete your understanding of the whole. Even if you become incredibly attached to one particular lens, it remains simply a lens and cannot define you. Attachment to one specific view of reality limits your power and curtails your ability to connect with people who hold different lenses.
This is a difficult concept for many people to accept because we grow accustomed to identifying with our beliefs. It can be disconcerting to stop identifying with any fixed ideology and to realize that all beliefs are lenses and cannot define us. Social conditioning tells us we must turn one particular set of ideas into our personal identity.
Are you a capitalist? A Christian? A skeptic? The way these questions are asked assumes you must respond with a yes or no. But this is like asking if you’re an eye, an ear, or a nose. It would be more sensible to ask questions such as “Do you understand the viewpoint of Christianity?” instead of trying to equate it with your identity. When you start linking specific beliefs to who you are, you artificially restrict your sense of self. This practice violates the principle of power.
Belief identification is a source of social conflict as well. Disagreements, arguments, and even wars are caused by an inflexible attachment to a fixed perspective. It’s far more productive for us to learn to see reality through multiple lenses and seek higher truths together instead of fighting over who holds the most popular lens. Spiritual lenses are inherently value based, so they don’t represent truth by themselves, although they can reveal different aspects of truth.
When people ask me what religion I (Steve Pavlina) am, I tell them the question doesn’t make any sense. I’m a conscious being, not a religion. While I understand the perspectives of many popular belief systems, having experienced several of them firsthand, I don’t identify myself with any of them. I see my beliefs as a toolbox of lenses to choose from; they’re an extension of my sense. When working on my computer, I’ll pay attention to what my eyes are seeing. When talking on the phone, I’ll shift my attention to listening with my ears. When I’m doing my taxes, I might adopt a very earthy, atheistic perspective. When I’m discussing the life of Jesus with someone, I’ll consider reality through a Christian lens. When I meditate, I might adopt a Buddhist or New Age philosophy. I select each lens based on how empowering it is for me in the moment.
When you first attempt to perceive reality through multiple lenses, especially those that seem to inherently contradict each other, it will feel as though you’re trying to do the impossible. You’ll be like a newborn baby trying to make sense of garbled blobs of light, noise, and pressure. You may feel overwhelmed and frustrated, as if you’re flooding your mind with utterly useless information.
Be patient with yourself. With sufficient practice, you’ll gradually learn to combine data from multiple viewpoints into a single coherent picture. At first, it will take considerable conscious effort as you mentally switch between different perspectives, asking questions such as: “How would a Buddhist view this situation?” or “How would a Christian solve this problem?”
Eventually, your subconscious will learn to do it for you, and you’ll begin to sense the big picture that emerges from multiple viewpoints. As this begins to happen, you’ll unlock a new level of clarity, like an infant realizing for the first time that the floating blob is its own hand. It won’t be a perfect clarity, but you’ll likely find that some problems that previously plagued you become much easier to solve.
In order to align yourself with the principle of power, you must shed limiting viewpoints that disempower you. Imagine trying to understand the intricate connections between your financial situation, your religious or spiritual beliefs, and your emotional states. Common cultural belief systems only offer a very dysfunctional understanding of these links, which helps explain why so many people struggle both financially and emotionally, despite investing a great deal of effort in their spiritual practice. But when you examine the connection from multiple points of view, it’s easier to see the big picture. This panoramic view can enable you to find a practical solution that allows you to enjoy positive emotional stability, financial abundance, and deep spiritual development without so much struggle and conflict. By examining your problems from different philosophical viewpoints, you empower yourself. Holistic solutions finally start to emerge. You gain the ability to solve problems you were previously unable to solve.
For example, one way to balance yourself financially, emotionally, and spiritually is to center your life around service to others. If you focus your efforts on genuine value creation and contribution, you’ll eventually be able to manifest happiness, wealth, and a sense of meaning. If you look at this situation financially, it makes sense. If you look at it emotionally, it also works. And if you look at it spiritually, it works there as well. When considered from multiple vantage points, the effectiveness of this solution is readily apparent. Yet most of us are socially conditioned to overlook the simplicity of across-the-board, high-level solutions because we cling to fixed belief systems that prevent us from seeing the big picture. We live in a manner that actually prevents us from solving our most challenging problems.
A sound spiritual practice should be flexible enough to help you handle the mundane parts of your life without having to compartmentalize them. Your spiritual beliefs should empower you to be able to pay your bills, resolve relationship problems, and feel good emotionally. A fragmented approach can’t achieve such results. A multi-perspective approach works best because it brings you into alignment with truth, love, and power. Ultimately, the general solution to all your problems is to find the place of alignment with these principles, and a multi-perspective approach helps you achieve greater alignment than a fixed perspective.
Equating your identity with one spiritual viewpoint (such as “I am a Christian”) is like blindfolding yourself and plugging your ears. It’s a very disempowering approach to spiritual growth. Let go of such limits, and free yourself from a fixed perspective. Be open to using all of your spiritual senses, especially if you start picking up information that disagrees with what you’ve been taught to believe.
How can you effectively train your spiritual depth perception? Find others with different belief systems that seem to empower them in some specific way, and learn from them. Study people from other cultures. Find out why a Buddhist monk seems so calm, why an athlete can maintain such a high fitness level, or why a billionaire is able to enjoy so much financial abundance. Read books written by such individuals, meet them in person if you can, and find out what makes them tick.
Through such studies, you’ll learn that certain perspectives are more likely than others to yield positive results. For example, if you can’t get yourself to meditate regularly, then obviously you perceive reality differently from someone who meditates every day. But if you could learn how such people see the world, you could model their beliefs to improve your results. How do those individuals view things, and how can you use their perspective to improve your own meditation practice? What are they seeing that you’re overlooking? What senses are they using that you’re ignoring?
A multispectral philosophy of life—that is, one that combines input from multiple perspectives—aligns closely with what’s considered common sense. When you find your beliefs incongruent with what your common sense is telling you, perhaps you just need to view the situation from another angle. This is more effective than clinging to limiting ideas that get in your way. Your common sense is probably right.
We all have a tendency to fear and resist the unknown, so the notion of giving your beliefs so much flexibility may give you pause. Will you lose your sense of self? Will you become totally amoral and ungrounded? In my experience, these worries are unfounded. Allowing yourself a greater richness of perceptual channels will only increase your power to make decisions that align with your most sacred values and morals.
The point of spiritual exploration is to help you make conscious, empowering choices. Cloudy or incomplete perceptions reduce your ability to do so. The richer your field of input, the better your decisions will be, and that in turn benefits all the lives you tough. In order to bring more power to your spiritual path, you must remain open and receptive to all points of view. Whenever you close your mind to new ideas, you fall out of alignment with power, and your spiritual practice will suffer as a result.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina