Excerpt From Relationships That Work: The Power Of Conscious Living
– By David B. Wolf
Awareness of our assumptions, or belief systems, enables us to consider whether they actually work for us. It also allows us to be open to alternative, more satisfying possibilities for viewing ourselves and the world. Being conscious of our assumptions helps us to take responsibility for changing them, or purposefully utilizing them, rather than giving power to our belief systems to determine our life from beneath the conscious surface.
One of my assumptions is the conviction that we are inherently spiritual persons, whose nature is to serve. Another assumption I embrace is that each of us possesses the capacity to handle our lives with a high level of effectiveness. By expression of our innate qualities we are able to produce extraordinary results in our life.
Presuppositions can filter our perception of reality, often preventing us from accessing our facility for conscious choice. Let us take a look at how this process conceals awareness.
I recollect an experiment in an undergraduate cognitive psychology class. We, the approximately two dozen students, were the subjects. The professor showed us a film, about a minute long, of a staged robbery on a city street. Afterwards each student completed a questionnaire of 20 closed-ended items. The questions dealt with details of the movie crime we had just witnessed, including items such as “Did the robber have a gun?”, “Did the robbery victim hold her purse in her left hand?”, “and “Did you notice a bakery on the street?” Next to each “yes” or “no” response we indicated whether we were “not sure” or “sure” about our response, and, if we were sure, whether we would be willing to give this response as testimony under oath in court. After again viewing the film and tallying results we found that every person in the class had been willing to testify to at least one lie.
Unexamined assumptions, instead of facilitating our understanding of reality, serve as a barrier to a fresh experience of reality. We can extend this to our life, where often we do not experience a situation as it is, or a person as he is, because we have already assumed how it must be, or what she must be like.
With transformative communication and spiritual empowerment we assist you in conscious living, in living life intentionally, not accidentally. It’s vitally important to determine whether we are living life out of unconscious habit, or whether we are consciously choosing this way of being and acting because it genuinely works for us.
To grow we need to examine our assumptions, about ourselves, relationships, abundance, and each aspect of existence. This process involves challenging the limitations of our worldview, and our view of what is possible for us to achieve. Frequently those limitations are composed of self-created conceptions and perceptions. Perceptions are powerful. They create restrictions as well as opportunities