Positive Energy Guide

Are you an “I’ll see it when I believe it,” or an “I’ll believe it when I see it type of person?” Or do you allow life to surprise you and gradually rework your beliefs to accommodate what experiences that don’t fit your previous models?

Advantages of Direct Experience:

• Promotes observation and exploration
• Directly engages with what is going on in life
• Allows for growth
• Encourages flexibility
• Does not limit life to what we have in our heads or have learned in the past
• Creating new insights is more exciting than reliving previous insights or memorizing the insights of others
• We feel more connected with life as a whole

Being guided by direct experience does not preclude committed spiritual affiliation. Instead of doing it because of something you think, you do it because you notice results.

Disadvantages of Direct Experience:

• Potential to become subjective in self-serving ways if lacking reflection from others
• Possible lack of commitment and/or direction
• Being too flexible can limit utility and clarity, since there are advantages to structure
• The personality may remain superficial and avoid deeper exploration, which could be stimulated by an ongoing group
• Requires confidence in your own process and path

Suggestions for Balanced Orientation:

• Allow yourself to move lightly, courageously, and organically between belief and direct experience, exploring life and allowing experience to impact what you believe.
• Allow belief to be your friend, not your master.
• Carry operational beliefs, premises, or hypotheses as long as they support growth, insight and action, and allow them to change as experience dictates.
• Do not cling to belief but allow it inform you
• Maintain clear, intentional principles that you believe in for yourself, because they make you feel good about how you are in the world. Make them fully your own, independent of belief. For example, if you choose to maintain good karma, do it because it feels good to you, whether or not you believe in Buddhism or reincarnation.
• Avoid making what you believe an opinion-party based on what your friends think.
• Invite input from trusted advisors, with whom you have developed respect.

Advantages of Balanced Orientation to Belief and Experience:

• Promotes neutral and objective observation and exploration
• Side-steps the disadvantages of belief and of being overly mired in your own process
• Allows for transformation through direct engagement and response to life events
• Graceful interface with people who hold different belief systems
• May help keep the ego slimmer and trimmer–if we’re not too self-congratulatory about it
• Increases acceptance of other people
• Invites the individual to refresh and renew values and release the past
• Supports Presence

Disadvantages:

• There is no distinct club
• Requires a degree of independence

Do YOU feel comfortable modifying your beliefs? What keep your belief in place?

Do you tend toward belief, direct experience, or a hybrid between the two?

How happy are you with your principles? Did you determine them for yourself, or accept them from someone else?