Beliefs – your operating system for life

What you habitually put your attention on is driven by your underlying beliefs. If you believe the world is abundant and that prosperity is your natural state, your attention will be on those aspects of reality that support this belief and you will see opportunities for wealth creation wherever you go. I like to call beliefs your inner operating system because, just like a computer operating system, they are the hidden formulations that control how you think, react to situations, and create your reality.

Beliefs are concepts that we make up on our own or that we take over from someone else or from society as a whole. We accept the concepts as true, even if we don't have concrete evidence to support them. Usually, we adopt concepts as beliefs because they seem true or because the person giving us the concept is an apparent authority and appears truthful. It's certain that many of the beliefs we have about health and healing have been taken from what doctors tell is curable and what isn't. We accept what they tell us as the truth because we perceive them as bearers of the truth. In the world of hypnosis we call these messages suggestions. Nobody forces you to adopt a suggestion, but if it's phrased just right and delivered with authority, it dives straight past the conscious mind's critical faculty and embeds itself in the subconscious.

Beliefs are part of long-term memory and are a function of the subconscious mind – and the subconscious will accept anything as true if it comes from a perceived authority or if the message is repeated often enough. This is why

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advertising works so well – by simple repetition of a message your initial skepticism is over-ridden and you begin accepting the message as fact. This all happens below your level of conscious awareness – unless you actively do something about controlling it.

When we look at how beliefs are created, it becomes clear that there are two ways we can live our lives:

 The default way – we observe nature, perceive a pattern, and construct a belief around it.  The manifestation way – we decide what we want to believe, then go to nature to find evidence of it.

The manifestation way is the exact opposite of the default way, and is unfamiliar to many of us because it's not the way we are taught.

In whatever way it's created, a belief becomes the template for all future experiences. If you passively come to the belief, based on one or two bad relationships, that all men/women are untrustworthy, you will go into the next relationship subconsciously believing your partner will betray you. This suspicion will be enough to alienate your partner, re-creating the experience of your partner leaving you and confirming your belief that partners can't be trusted. To break the cycle, you need to realize there's a hidden negative belief at work and jump across to the 'manifestation way' where you consciously decide to believe that partners are worthy of being trusted. Of course, it's not always that easy just to go and change a belief, because at first we seem to have mounds of evidence to support the negative belief. 'Every one of my partners has dumped me – of course it's true that men/women are untrustworthy, darnit!'

It's enough to begin by realizing that for every bit of evidence proving the negative belief, there will be other evidence proving a positive belief. The first step, then, is letting go of the insistence that your 'evidence' proves anything. It simply shows where your attention has been, and the direction of your attention can be changed at any time. It might take a little self-awareness and presence, but it can be done.