BIAS

Belief and bias have the power to move mountains and part seas. Perhaps to even raise the dead.

And it seems to require a lifelong quest to bring to conscious awareness what our beliefs and biases are.

If there is one thing I have grown certain of in this lifetime it is that we are always look at what we are looking with. Each of us was carefully and tribally programmed to see “reality” in a certain way. That programming is the prescription through which we see. I placed “reality” in quotations because reality is a subjective experience. Our beliefs and our biases are literally the lens through which we see ourselves, each other, and the world. This “seeing of “reality” does not mean that what we are looking at and feel so certain about is true. In fact, it rarely is. We are looking at the effects of our own programming and conditioning. We are always looking for what we are looking with. To be unconscious of this is to be captive to it. To not know that how you see is what is creating your suffering is to remain in bondage.

What we Essentially are does not change. What we Essentially are does not need to change. It is True. It is beyond belief or bias. It cannot be affected by the stories we tell or the perceptions we hold. It is Truth that is forever True.

What does need to be changed is our erroneous core beliefs and the biases we look through. It is bias and belief that evolve. It is how we see what we see. It is the prescription in the lens of consciousness. We all have a mostly unconscious sense of self that is emotionally imprinted and mentally programmed. We look through it and believe that what we see is out there.

It is not.

Alright, the forms are certainly out there. The meaning that is applied to them is in fact in here. It is how we meet the out there, in here, that is everything to our experience. What I say about something determines my experience of it. What I say literally goes. We were created to be self-determining. Self-referred. We are here to literally and co-creatively word our worlds. When we grow to a place where we can consciously name something we can then claim it. Tame it. The outer then has no authority over us. We get a clear sense of our beliefs. Our biases. We understand that we look at life through them. If something is bringing resistance and suffering, we don’t rush to judge and change the outer. We go immediately to the inner.

This is the foundation of authentic power.

We are designed to decide and to choose our moment-by-moment experience. Until we understand what our current prescription is we cannot change it. To understand our prescription, we must be willing to own our part in how we see. We must also have the courage to be willing to be mistaken. We must be willing to detach from the programming of our tribe, and to stand strong in choosing a higher and more expansive way. We must risk autonomy. We cannot fit in and evolve. It can feel frightening to challenge our beliefs and question our biases. It could cost us our place in the tribal system.

And that is what courage and bravery are all about.

I have never been clearer about how I was imprinted and programmed. I have never been clearer about my sense of self. I have never had such clarity about the fallacy of so much that I was taught. While it was not intended to hurt me my beliefs and biases have largely done just that. They disempowered me and kept me playing small for much of my life. I projected that sense of sense outward, and it became my world. My reality.

I suffered from me.

Now that I can distinguish the belief and bias from what I truly am and how I am seeing what I am seeing my world is radically changing.

Radically.

Discomfort and discontent are now internal sirens letting me know my prescription needs to be questioned. If I continue to run the program, suffering will be my equivalent reaction. I am invited to question what I am saying about what is occurring. I am implored to make a distinction between belief and reality. Bias and what is true. Cause and effect. Between my actual I am and the conditional me. Discomfort is an internal pointer to distortion. To gain clarity I must go to the projector, not to the screen.

Whatever is occurring externally it is my birthright to determine what I make it mean. And what I make it mean will determine my reality.

Now, I am not saying that disturbing things don’t happen in our world. I am not saying that people do not berate and slime each other. Life is always unfolding via Law, and that outpicturing can be painful and unskillful for sure. Yet the power to overcome is always in how we choose to be in response. How we see in a visionary way. How we challenge programs we are running. What apps we have open. How we name our experience is how we choose to claim authority. In this way we tame the wild lizard inside. Left unexamined it will wreak havoc in our energy systems. It will self-disturb and then unconsciously react.

From my former rather fragile sense of self I completely believed my own core beliefs. I saw mirrored all around me my biases reflected as situations, circumstances, and relationships. I believed the stories that I was streaming. I buckled under and identified with the web I was weaving. I believed your biases about me and hustled to change myself to accommodate and please you.

I rarely do that anymore.

Your beliefs and biases about me are not about me. And my beliefs and biases about you are all up to me. I do not need to change to fit your beliefs. And you do not need to change to assuage my biases.

That, my friends, is freedom. It is liberation in the truest sense. The clearer I become about my beliefs and biases and how they are my lens of reality the more wakefully I may respond to yours.

I am always looking at what I am looking with.

I am always looking for what I will always find. It is perceptual. It is the mystical meaning of “seek and you will find.” Change what you are looking with and you will change what you are looking for. And that literally changes everything.

I am aware that if you are reading these words, you are doing so through a lens of belief. You have a bias through which you experience this. Those are completely independent of what I am actually saying. You are reading through an expectation of what you think I will say. It may or may not be accurate. Your experience is most certainly colored by your lens of perception.

I am aware that as I intuit and as I type I do so awake to a lens of how I think this will be received. It is my self-belief made conscious. I see and feel it, and yet I do not believe or identify with it. My bias says not many will read, agree, and affirm this. That is how I was imprinted and programmed. That is a perception that is directly related to my sense of self. It disempowers me and limits my creative expression and my ability to effectively serve.

And I no longer am held captive by it.

And so, I continue to write, trusting the impulse from which this missive flows. An impulse that is transcendent of belief or bias. A creative urge that is vaster than my sense of self. Clearer than the lens through which I see.

Now that I have a clear and adaptive sense of what my biases and beliefs are they no longer have me.

And now my reality is truly up to me. I can move the mountains and part the seas that inside of me.

I can even raise the dead.

I do so by rising above the deadening beliefs and biases that kept me in a tomb of my own making.

Now what I call reality is what I decide that it will be. I am largely and increasingly free to determine my experience.

That is another way to say that I am free. And free is what I was born to be.