Friday, December 4, 2009

Habitual Behavior

There are few, if any of us, who focus on our habits as we go about our daily activities. Most of us are preoccupied with making decisions rather than understanding the tools we are using to make them. We rely so heavily on our decision-making modalities that everything else in our lives is secondary.

For most victims, we prioritize making decisions as our top priority. Perhaps we think this way, because so many successful people have told us to. According to them, only successful people are able to make the necessary decisions to get what they want. And since most of us are perceived by society to be unsuccessful, we believe we are this way because of our inabilities to make decisions.

Nevertheless, some of us find it difficult  making decisions, especially those requiring courage, mindfulness, compassion, and so forth. We find it easier seeking refuge in our dithering. And yet, unbeknown to us, it's our dithering with making tough decisions that's inextricably tying us to victim beliefs. By our embracing behavioral habits that are producing intense pain and unrelenting emotional suffering, we are creating the foundation for victim beliefs.

Similarly, when our pain becomes overwhelming, this is when we are ready to listen, and promise to do whatever is necessary to change our lives. Unfortunately, this promissory commitment is not backed by a legal tender belief system sufficient enough to subsidize the work that must be done to change our behavior. It is nothing more than reflex responses to temporary pain.

The problems we face in changing our beliefs are enormous. Whenever we seek to change, some of us begin by becoming too enthralled with the decision-making process. And in many cases, this reaction is driven by victim beliefs, which causes us to perceive change from the prism of powerlessness. So the changes we desire to make are tainted with blurred visions of what life is without dysfunctional behavior.

Nevertheless, when we do decide to take action, we feel the fire of anxiety burning in us. We want to do something now, not later. And depending on how messed-up we are at the time, we seek out any person, information, or beliefs that will help us move beyond the pain. Regardless to what we acquire from this search, we inevitably return to our visions of empowerment. Unless we have clear visions, we risk becoming victimized by the ritualized process we use to search for enlightenment in people, places, and things.

For some of us, the search process becomes greater than the goal.  We're so happy to be meditating, praying, and eating healthy meals that we forget why we are doing this in the first place. It is not the process we use, it is our commitments to clearing our minds of victim beliefs that's paramount to our achieving enlightenment.

When we become more concerned with processes than enlightenment itself, we traveling in circles of pain and suffering. And instead of removing victim beliefs, we are creating new ones. In other words, our new beliefs are merely extensions of the old ones expressing themselves in symbiotic illusions of freedom. Even though we believe we are doing something different, we are simply repositioning victim beliefs. It's similar to our redecorating a room in our house with the same furniture. Nothing has changed, except we now believe the furniture looks better.

Meanwhile, as we try to reshape our habits, we begin to realize the magnitude of the work we must do to clear our minds of victim beliefs.  For some of us, this is the moment we begin to use victim tainted visions to prioritize our habits. While there's nothing right or wrong about this process, it is dangerous for those who are unclear about their long-term to achieving enlightenment.

For some unknown reason, victims believe we know exactly, without doing any investigation at all into the causes, the specific habits responsible for us believing we are victims in the first place. We believe our new process, which was born from victim consciousness, clearly reveals to us that we need to stop procrastinating, overeating, drinking too much, complaining, and so forth to achieve enlightenment.

For us to change victim behavior, we must understand how we became victims in the first place. We begin this by understanding there's something in our decision-making process that causes us to think and act as victims. This self-discovery epiphany allows us perceive our habits as friends, not enemies. We are now able to see them present in all our activities and truly understand this is who we are without victim interpretations.


Similarly, without truly understanding the origins of our habits, and the circumstances from which they were created, we are spinning our wheels in a game of intellectual gymnastics. In other words, we are playing mind games with ourselves. And to stop playing mind games, we must do the action to clear away the debris causing us to think of ourselves as victims.

In the meantime, we must appreciate the work we are doing to clear our minds. And when  we gain a little light, this moves us closer to our goal of having clear minds. Then we will know how it feels to act with compassion, courage, peace, love, and freedom.

The book "Seeds from the Ashes" is an inspirational tool for those who seek to change the way they think and live. It is available online at http://www.amazon.com/ It is a good holiday give for someone you know who is in prison, unemployed, ill, depressed, or lonely. n

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