Evolving Spiritually Involves Overcoming Fear.
Evolving spiritually involves overcoming much fear. The fear of looking deep within ourselves as we ask the most challenging existential questions:
Spiritual growth is the process of again and again, confronting this fear barrier that results from addressing existence questions, and figuring out how to cross the conceptual abyss that these questions appears to represent. Most religions and spiritual practices are designed around either helping people confront the fear and grow spiritually, or protect them from it in order to provide them a feeling of safety.
Most religions and spiritual practices
are designed around either helping
people confront the fear and grow spiritually,
or protecting them from it in
order to give them an
feeling of safety.
All of these questions confront us with a fear barrier. This barrier needs to be crossed in order to enter a world where a more integrated set of beliefs begin to become truth. A set of beliefs that somehow accommodate an unlimited universe, a quantum universe where time, space and connection all operate under different rules than the physical universe we spend the first decades of our lives understanding.
I started thinking about these ideas after attending an Easter service at a very progressive Christian church called Kensington Church. I'm not a Christian, but occasionally I go to a service with good friends of ours.
The testimonials from people during the service were focused on the concept of getting to know Jesus on a personal level. A transformative spiritual journey. I started to compare what I heard with what I know about personal transformation steps, and breaking through into a new paragigm of spiritual understanding about life.
1. A Leap of Faith to a new belief paradigm becomes a priority when you reach a point of intolerance with your current situation, and the beliefs that you have that are causing it. The 'darkness before the dawn'.
2. A Leap of Faith require suspension of logical thought processes. This can be very difficult if your personality favors pragmatic reasoning to get you through life's challenges.
3. Enormous activation of the imagination is required to allow access to a new belief system. Sometimes just activating imagination can bring up fear that will need to be handled even prior to venturing into the realm of a new possibility.
4. A leap of faith requires using the imagination, addressing and defining the fear, then defusing the emotional content that the fear generates. EFT is an ideal technique for this.
5. If major transformation is desired, then a rapid and major expansion of the sense of what is possible is necessary.
One Interesting approach
Our deeply Christian friends believe in the concept of a beginning a personal relationship with Jesus as a leap of faith experience. This is a very clever belief paradigm for leap of faith because it contains key elements that many people crave in life : empathy from a non-judgmental other, compassion of another with your situation, problems and struggles, and the necessity to suspend logical cause and effect ideas about your role in life.
However, believing in 'God' or 'Jesus' is not necessary if you have the skill to manage yourself through the point of intolerance, leap of faith, and emotional support (compassion and empathy for the self going through transformational change). Spontaneous change can occur with or without a believe in a God concept, although concepts of God have been refined by religious leaders for centuries as ideal conceptual pathways for people to create transformative change for themselves.
Religions are powerful social contexts for deep personal change, as they provide support and community, and allow you to feel vulnerable. The big problem with religion is that oftentimes it is difficult or impossible to separate the religious agenda from the personal value you are seeking. Religions need followers to survive. And followers need to believe similar things. within this context
A support structure is useful, but not essential. Peer pressure can encourage and keep you on track, or it can annoy and become part of the problem.
The keys to breaking a Fear Barrier
- Commitment is absolutely key. There should be an eye of the needle experience with every meaningful goal. This experience typically comes when an event triggers a realization that the current state of experience is no longer acceptable.
- Details can be sketchy, but commitment is binding. You have to 100% believe that you will not go back on your commitment
- Once commitment is made, enormous energy can occur. This is where the Law of Attraction enters into play, making events that support the new idea or belief seemingly miraculously appear. In fact, the new belief paradigm and bigger space of possibility make aligned actions and opportunities increase in visibility and actionability.
- Commitment drives priorities, willingness to take action, and self confidence as aligned steps are taken.
"Why are we here?"
"Is there a supreme being"
"What is nature of life forces that makes us conscious"
Most religions and spiritual practices
are designed around either helping
people confront the fear and grow spiritually,
or protecting them from it in
order to give them an
feeling of safety.
All of these questions confront us with a fear barrier. This barrier needs to be crossed in order to enter a world where a more integrated set of beliefs begin to become truth. A set of beliefs that somehow accommodate an unlimited universe, a quantum universe where time, space and connection all operate under different rules than the physical universe we spend the first decades of our lives understanding.
I started thinking about these ideas after attending an Easter service at a very progressive Christian church called Kensington Church. I'm not a Christian, but occasionally I go to a service with good friends of ours.
The testimonials from people during the service were focused on the concept of getting to know Jesus on a personal level. A transformative spiritual journey. I started to compare what I heard with what I know about personal transformation steps, and breaking through into a new paragigm of spiritual understanding about life.
1. A Leap of Faith to a new belief paradigm becomes a priority when you reach a point of intolerance with your current situation, and the beliefs that you have that are causing it. The 'darkness before the dawn'.
2. A Leap of Faith require suspension of logical thought processes. This can be very difficult if your personality favors pragmatic reasoning to get you through life's challenges.
3. Enormous activation of the imagination is required to allow access to a new belief system. Sometimes just activating imagination can bring up fear that will need to be handled even prior to venturing into the realm of a new possibility.
4. A leap of faith requires using the imagination, addressing and defining the fear, then defusing the emotional content that the fear generates. EFT is an ideal technique for this.
5. If major transformation is desired, then a rapid and major expansion of the sense of what is possible is necessary.
One Interesting approach
Our deeply Christian friends believe in the concept of a beginning a personal relationship with Jesus as a leap of faith experience. This is a very clever belief paradigm for leap of faith because it contains key elements that many people crave in life : empathy from a non-judgmental other, compassion of another with your situation, problems and struggles, and the necessity to suspend logical cause and effect ideas about your role in life.
However, believing in 'God' or 'Jesus' is not necessary if you have the skill to manage yourself through the point of intolerance, leap of faith, and emotional support (compassion and empathy for the self going through transformational change). Spontaneous change can occur with or without a believe in a God concept, although concepts of God have been refined by religious leaders for centuries as ideal conceptual pathways for people to create transformative change for themselves.
Religions are powerful social contexts for deep personal change, as they provide support and community, and allow you to feel vulnerable. The big problem with religion is that oftentimes it is difficult or impossible to separate the religious agenda from the personal value you are seeking. Religions need followers to survive. And followers need to believe similar things. within this context
A support structure is useful, but not essential. Peer pressure can encourage and keep you on track, or it can annoy and become part of the problem.
The keys to breaking a Fear Barrier
- Commitment is absolutely key. There should be an eye of the needle experience with every meaningful goal. This experience typically comes when an event triggers a realization that the current state of experience is no longer acceptable.
- Details can be sketchy, but commitment is binding. You have to 100% believe that you will not go back on your commitment
- Once commitment is made, enormous energy can occur. This is where the Law of Attraction enters into play, making events that support the new idea or belief seemingly miraculously appear. In fact, the new belief paradigm and bigger space of possibility make aligned actions and opportunities increase in visibility and actionability.
- Commitment drives priorities, willingness to take action, and self confidence as aligned steps are taken.
