Today I'm going to cover some history and how my understanding of beliefs evolved. My first encounter with the things that I call "beliefs" was when I read "Dianetics," by L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, I know, Hubbard and Scientology have become somewhat of a national joke, but he had, or acquired, some insights that were fundamentally correct, once you strip them of all the window dressing. What he did with them was rather silly, though understandable, given his upbringing.
His first insight was that there were these things, that he called "engrams," (I call these "beliefs") which contained thoughts and emotions, and controlled a persons life through the recorded emotions. In other words, when something happening today reminded you of something stored in an engram, the emotions of that engram will be replayed, for example, fear or embarrassment. You, not realizing that these feelings were just an echo of some past event, would assume that there was some reason to be afraid or embarrassed, and behave accordingly, even if there was nothing in the present situation to be afraid of, or embarrassed about.
The second insight was that the engrams occur in chains. That once an engram has been created, by some event, it can be reactivated by subsequent, similar, events in a person's life, and that reactivation creates a new engram, energetically linked to the previous one. Engrams that are frequently reactivated can create long chains, each engram using up a little more of your "life energy."
The third, and maybe the most important insight, is that engrams can be removed by draining the emotional content. This last one is huge. It implied that things like phobias and compulsions could be permanently removed by a relatively simple process. Alas, the process turned out to not be so simple and attempts by Hubbard and his staff to "scienceify" it and make it easily replicable, met with limited success, at best. The bugaboo was that intuitive people could make the process work so much better than non-intuitive people, but Hubbard, and Scientology in general, has never been able to wrap their collective heads around that, so their "science" has long since stalled with clunky procedures of limited usefulness. Later incarnations of the same techniques, under the names EST and Landmark Education, have managed to move the ball forward to some extent, but they still don't acknowledge our intuitive nature, which means that their techniques can only go so far.
I don't know if the people running Landmark Education are just materialists who can't see the true complexity of the mind, or if they are just deliberately keeping it out of their teachings in order to appeal to a particular clientele. But either way, I found that while I initially had some great breakthroughs in their courses, I reached the point where there was nothing more I could get out of their techniques. I had questions but they had no answers.
Next: I finally step off the materialist merry-go-round.
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