While analyzing our beliefs, it's important to understand which ones are based on objective experience, and which are based on wishful thinking. (hint: It's often the opposite of what we think).
Recently, I was on this podcast, and the inquiry was about analyzing our core beliefs, presumably in the hopes of shifting to a more rational belief set.
However, few beliefs are rational. In truth, every belief fills a need: that's why it was adopted. As children, when we adopt beliefs, we usually adopt the ones that make the most primal sense; are the most comforting, for instance, or protect the ones we love that need protecting.
There is no 'objective' experience. There is no 'authentic story.'
I often console myself by saying something like 'that is their path; that is their destiny; that is their journey', when I see someone suffering. Especially when it is by choice (and most suffering is BY CHOICE).
I've heard (by one of those Instagram gurus) that this is 'spiritual bypassing'. (It's a marketing tool to be contrarian; to say something that is the opposite of what people think, and defend it in an interesting way). Again, I think that's an oversimplification.
A belief system could be spiritual bypassing, if you're relinquishing power by adopting it as a mantra, or giving up in the face of adversity. It's hard to say what spirituality even s, and no one knows what consciousness is, so what is bypassing where again? I think of clouds passing over mountains.
For me, this idea that 'we are each on our journey' is based on my personal experiments with the conept: 'things happen for a reason'.
I've experienced this as an intuitive feeling, a visceral experience, and also through reading and learning from seers and prophets (the least trustworthy source listed - seers and prophets are also stating their own subjective experience, by the nature of their being human). We want them to be our objective source, however that would just be too easy. We are meant to seek meaning and find it, I think, rather than be handed it on a platter.
So in a sense, every duality is an oversimplification. Humans exist between dualities. According to Rudolf Steiner, it is almost their reason for being, to act as a bridge between heaven and earth, and also Lucifer and Ahriman.
The Yin Yang symbol has haunted me from a very young age as a timeless expression of the black and white, yin yang duality, because the human is the whole symbol: the dance of dark and light. Throughout graduate school I attempted to craft a more suitable 'spiritual image' than that, always falling short.
So the trinity, three, often gets us closer to the truth of what we are. As does the unity, ONE. (Gurdjieff and other systems include a third force: Affirming or Positive, Denying or Negative, and Neutralizing).
This is all very exciting, because we craft our own world, literally.
If you ask someone: 'what happened', you'll get as many stories as there are individuals. It's not a 'flaw' in the system, or inaccurate perceptions (though there are those!).
It is the nature of experience.
So how are you telling your story? Are you telling your story so that you're the hero, or the victim? Some people may deify victim-hood (culture teaches us to do this lately), and some people may even exalt the villain in their story as the shaman or guide.
This is why it is essential to explore the archetypes you resonate with, and that seem to spiral around you wherever you go. Your 'Constellation'.
I'm putting together a course now around this journey, from cocoon to fully fledged soaring flower. It incorporates the states and stages in the Hero's Journey, inspired by a lifetime of mythological study by Joseph Campbell.
It's a mammoth task, but let us begin simply... with the way you are telling YOUR story.
One of the last clients I worked with in California finished off our process by writing and publishing a book about his life. As new awarenesses came to light, it became painfully clear that needed to re-craft his myth from the ground up. (It is a luxury that too few of us afford ourselves).
It was a profound excavation of long-forgotten memories and 'sacred' somatic sites. The astonishing thing was, that as we wrote, the old characters re-entered the story in unexpected ways. I mean, literally. People long-thought gone showed up at the door; old letters were discovered to throw our narrative into a tailspin. They defied being defined They surfaced again, in real time, to complicate matters AND to enrich the story.
So how are you telling yours? Is it in a way that allows you to soar? Are you the hero, or do you look outward for heroes to follow?
There are no wrong answers here, just questions worth asking.
Usually the answer is something like this: I've been cast outside of my own body, of my own experience: now I'm 'over there' somewhere, somehow.
How do you recenter your life experience here, in the heart space; in the solar plexus; in the gut?
"The center of the universe is in the pit of your belly"
-an old Zen saying.
Profound in its implications, because without an observer, is there a universe? And the observer, YOU, is the vantage point of the divine. So how are YOU expressing in this lifetime?
Now we are getting somewhere.