?The latter part of a wise man's life,? said Jonathan Swift, ?is
taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions
he had contracted in the former.?
The awareness to see one's own follies, prejudices, and false
opinions is in fact essential to overcome one's psychocultural
programming.
But before we discuss awareness, we should look at how we went
about assimilating programs that didn't benefit our evolution.
Apart from what we have been told about the nature of reality,
we also actively programmed ourselves on what things meant.
Unfortunately, most of our programming was done when we were
children. At that time, we did not have sufficient knowledge or
experience to sift through the absurd to uncover the profound.
While many of the belief-systems we adopted as children were
designed to help us survive, they may have had a deleterious
effect on us as adults. Since these programs for the most part
arise from the unconscious, we may often find ourselves
responding childishly to challenging events rather than
summoning our adult power to move through the problem.
As a child, for example, I adopted the belief that if something
did not work out for me, my best option was to move on to
something else.
This program created failure and frustration in my adulthood.
As an adult, I noticed that this program to negate effort made
my life very difficult.
But by practicing sufficient awareness to notice the pattern and
choosing to learn to persist in every endeavor, I noticed a
critical shift in my life experience.
What I noticed was that when I applied my new decision to
persist when things were not going my way that even seemingly
impossible things would turn in my favor.
A program, then, is a repeated pattern arising from a previous
decision. It is usually one made as far back as childhood. It is
an early and immature decision that creates disharmony and
dysfunction in one's present life.
Cultivating awareness breaks the cycle of living out decisions
made in childhood.
Awareness is noticing a recurring life situation that disturbs
happiness and success. It is inquiring into the original
decision that set the life-denying pattern into motion. Once a
person sees the program that has been silently and almost
invisibly running their life, they can redecide how to live
their life and organize their experiences in a more meaningful
way.
About the author:
Saleem Rana got his masters in psychotherapy from California
Lutheran University. His articles on the internet have inspired
over ten thousand people from around the world. Discover how to
create a remarkable life. Free information.
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html
Copyright 2005 Saleem Rana. Please feel free to pass this
article on to your friends, or use it in your ezine or
newsletter. It's a shareware article.
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