About: The hidden beliefs creating our life

All experiences begin with thoughts, because in thought lies intent. Thoughts and beliefs create feelings, which lead to attitudes and behaviors. This is what results in life circumstances.

In making changes, then, we must always begin with our thoughts.

The problem lies in our not actually knowing what we really think and believe.

When we look out over the ocean, we see the waves, the birds and the boats, we well as the swimmers and the islands. But for the most part, we cannot see what lies under the surface.

It is like that with our thoughts that have gone into our unconscious. They are out of sight, but they are not out of mind.

How images come about

When a child has a painful experience, it feels like life and death. To survive what feels like a life-or-death experience, the child will draw conclusions about life that are intended to keep it safe.

The Pathwork Guide calls our many wrong conclusions “images.”

Images are generalizations about life that are primitive, ignorant and illogical, although they follow a certain logic of their own.

As the child grows older, these thoughts don’t hold up to close examination. So they sink into the unconscious.

There, they have great power to do damage. For images aren’t simply ideas we hold in our minds. They are emotionally charged conclusions that became embedded in our whole being.

In their wake, they bring about disappointing life experiences that are the exact opposite of what we consciously desire. Images, then, are what we need to surface if we want to understand the root of any unfulfilling patterns in our lives.

How images play out

Images are formed when a child is quite young, so they are usually constructed with a child’s vocabulary. “People want to be mean to me” is an example, not “I experience hostility from people in authority.”

Such a generalized conclusion is something the child of an aggressive Will Type parent might believe to be true about people in authority.

This person then goes through life unconsciously believing that every boss is a potential enemy. Consciously, they just want people to be nice to them. But due to this image, the person will show up defended behind a mask.

Then the other person—because of their own unresolved issues, and in response to the mask being presented—may indeed react unkindly.

The pain of this feels like proof that the image was true all along. Which seems to justify the need for our defense.

This underground dynamic causes a person to go through life with a narrow and skewed perception of reality. We are in a trance. Not seeing the whole truth—and not seeing other people in the truth of who they are—life situations are erroneously interpreted to be intentionally hurtful. And the person reacts accordingly.

This explains how in our blindness, we continually recreate life experiences that seem to validate our misconceptions.

When these beliefs surface, there will be a recognition that says, “Yes, this is what I have always believed was true.” So we are not searching for some idea that will seem completely foreign to us.

Yet, until we surface it, this hidden belief will remain just beyond our grasp.

___

Learn more in:

• Bones, Chapter 9: Images and the deep, deep damage they do
• Get a Better Boat, Essay 15: Suffering? It’s time to search for images

Getting started

Images create an inflexible, rigid mass in the soul substance. These will stay with us until we begin to do this work of self-understanding. Only by surfacing them can we see how our unconscious desires conflict with what we think we want.

What stops us from immediately diving in and discovering what lurks below the waterline of our conscious awareness?

Pride—that’s what stops us.

We don’t want to be wrong. Because in the dualistic way of thinking, being wrong is bad. And for the child, that seems to confirm being worthless.

Surprisingly, just seeing these hidden beliefs does not stop them from operating. We need to be willing to feel the associated buried feelings so we can stop defending against the threat of pain.

In addition, we need to employ our healthy ego to access our Higher Self to find the truth of the matter.

Then we can begin the gradual process of re-educating and maturing the inner child: “It is not true that people intend to be mean to me. Sometimes they lash out due to their own issues. But this does not mean that they are personally out to get me. I can use my communication skills to ask questions and seek to understand the other.”

The Prayer of Saint Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
And where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
And where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
And to be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

Asking for help

Our Lower Self wants to always have its way, without ever having to pay any price for this. It is a spiritual law, however, that to have what we want in life, there is a price we must be willing to pay.

What is the price: The effort of self-confrontation. Alternatively, living a life in which emotional reactions and negative patterns of regularly recur is the price we pay for our beliefs that go against truth.

The spiritual Law of Brotherhood says we don’t have to do this work alone. And that more help is given when we reach out to another.

In truth, to see our own blindness, we typically need the patience, skill and guiding hand of someone else—a therapist or a trained spiritual healer—who can help hold the light while we look into these hidden inner spaces.

Origin of an Image

1. Childhood hurts cause unhappiness and discontent, and the child wants to avoid pain.
2. Child concludes that each similar situation to the one that caused the hurt will bring similar pain. So what was once a reality has now turned into an illusion because the generalization is false.
3. The generalization freezes into a rigid preconceived idea. This is the image: a frozen wrong conception, an inflexible, rigid mass in the soul substance, which attracts situations to justify its continued existence.
4. As the image is unreal, so must be the “remedy” or pseudo-solution which is adopted. Because it is unrealistic, the results are disappointing, often producing the exact opposite from what is desired. As such, the circumstances continue to be produced.

Dismantling an Image

1. Find the statement of the image and write it out in black and white. For example: People never listen to me; I have to do everything myself; People will always be mean to me; Nobody likes me; I have to prove myself; I’m not enough and I will never be enough; I didn’t make the cut.
2. Connect with the willingness to consciously find the original event where the pain was felt. Feel that old pain by letting go of the pride which prevents the experience of feeling the hurt.
3. Be willing to challenge the original conclusion and see what the right conclusion could be.
4. Pray for the truth to be revealed. Allow the new conclusion to be planted in the newly alive soil of our opened feelings.

Learn more in:

• Healing the Hurt: How to help using spiritual guidance
• Get a Better Boat, Essay 14: What’s hiding beneath our stories?

Next Chapter

Return to Spilling the Script Contents