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.
When you have to defend any position, you are limiting your ability to bring full awareness into the situation. This limitation results in being surrounded by challenges, lack, and other forms of negativity. Over time, you become keenly aware of life as something that is lacking the strength to exist on its own terms without having to take defensive actions to protect something that is too weak to exist fully on its own.
Taken to its ultimate extreme, defensive living drives individuals to attempt crazy things that deny life in its most wholesome form as naturally vibrant, strong, interconnected, and mutually supportive. When enough people in a society live defensively, suffering is amplified on a massive scale; wars flare up, cruel regimes deny their people good or other basic services, resources are callously depleted, and the predators – or most defensive of all in that society – exhibit corruption and greed in unprecedented ways.
Proactive living means understanding how your experience reflects what you believe.
Proactive living is very simple. If you believe in love, you will experience love; if you believe in suffering, you will suffer; if you believe in the perfectibility of your fellow human beings, you will encounter others sincerely involved in the process of perfecting themselves.
Believing in anything at all is a very proactive and deliberate thing to do. It makes no difference whether the belief is positive or negative; either way, you exercise some form of volitional decision making regarding the belief, you take a proactive approach to shaping that belief and to holding it.
Proactivity goes beyond creating and hold beliefs to actually testing the belief in the very real laboratory of life. When you ask yourself, “Is my take on the situation accurate?” or “Can I count on my partner to back me up?” you are essentially challenging your belief about the situation or your partner proactively.
Your answers to such questions will determine whether your original belief regarding each needs to be abandoned, modified, or kept intact as is. In this way, beliefs become dynamic, even liberating, rather than limiting. With such an approach, your experience of the situation or your partner will change based on your belief. You will experience what you believe.
Untangling the snarls of limiting beliefs in life and learning to live proactively is sometimes a daunting task.
We would all like to think that beliefs can always be clearly identified. After all, they are our beliefs and how could we not be aware of them? How indeed. The truth of the matter is that we hold many beliefs that are hidden from our conscious awareness. We may subconsciously believe ourselves to be unworthy of happiness or incapable of attaining our goals.
We may hide invisible beliefs within other beliefs and adamantly refuse to acknowledge their existence. We may ascribe our own negative beliefs to others in an attempt to deny their reality within ourselves. We can and do play any number of games with ourselves when defending our beliefs. Talk about defensive living!
Most if not all of the complexity of untangling the beliefs that lead to living defensively can be overcome by understanding a few simple principles about the nature of consciousness:
- Beliefs are thoughtforms through which we comprehend and interact with reality.
- Beliefs may be limiting and defensive or liberating and proactive in nature.
- Holding on to a particular belief is an act of separation: you believe this but not that, or you believe something but he believes something else.
- Managing your beliefs grants you the power to restructure your experiences in life.
Belief management guarantees future results you can live with.
You have perfect and utter control over what you believe. Let’s state that again: you have perfect and utter control over what you believe. Because you have the power to control your beliefs, you have the power to control your experiences.
If your experiences are not satisfactory, try to uncover the belief or series of beliefs that is keeping you from experiencing satisfaction. Remember that a belief is only a thoughtform, and just as you can develop your mental abilities along certain lines if you choose to, you can also choose your beliefs or modify or discard them if they do not serve you.
Change any beliefs that need fine tuning. Eliminate the beliefs that keep you from experiencing satisfaction and you will have changed your experience of life. Best of all, your future satisfaction will come more easily because of your willingness to manage your consciousness in this way.
Time spent now shaping your beliefs will result in future gains in all areas of your life, including being able to live your life proactively rather than defensively. It is your choice. Do you choose self-empowerment over self-limitation? Do you believe you can shape your own future? If so, your beliefs are quietly awaiting your decision to start living proactively today.
About the Author
Tim Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He is currently busy working on several writing and editing projects. Please visit Thompson InkWorks for more info.
