If your daily experience is filled with emotions on the positive end of the scale and you feel like you are constantly in the vortex, then maybe there really is no need to see your beliefs in black and white. You obviously do not need to "fix" what isn't broken. If, however, your life seems to be a chaotic mess, where nothing is manifesting the way you hoped it would and you can't break free from the negative emotions that keep you in a constant tailspin, then it might be time to try and discover/expose the beliefs that are playing a part in your self-made misery.

I will suggest an effective way for you to do this if you have some measure of self-discipline, some basic computer skills and some free time. I can assure you that the methods I'll suggest for both written and spoken beliefs work and can eventually reveal many, if not all, of your limiting beliefs, even those hidden in the deep recesses of your unconscious mind.

As you go through this process, the most important beliefs you will want to discover to be what Seth called "core" beliefs. Core beliefs are the ones that have the greatest influence in your life. These are often long held beliefs and are generally tucked away in the deeper recesses of the subconscious mind. Most of your core beliefs were adopted during childhood from parents, teachers, preachers, pals and other influences in your life. Many of the I/ME beliefs that apply to how you see yourself, your self worth and the ideas you hold about who you are as a person (your "personality), are generally buried amongst your core beliefs. You will find that some of your core beliefs are also some of your most limiting beliefs.

Understand however, that the vast majority of the beliefs you discover are really just "echoes" of your core beliefs. For example the belief that Ibuprophan will take away your minor aches and pains is just an echo of the belief in medicine as a means to manipulate biology, which in turn, is an echo of a belief in the science of biology. These are all echoes of the belief that science is the go to source for answers about all things that relate to this physical world. With this in mind, you can, in effect, trace any belief you discover back to the core belief from which it was born.

It is important to continually remind your self that all beliefs are valid. There are no right or wrong and no good or bad beliefs. Understanding the validity of all beliefs will provide you with a powerful tool for dealing with them. When I look a an exposed belief, I see it as just one of a million equally valid beliefs floating around out there in human consciousness. I owe it no special favor or place in my being. I simply give myself permission (Bashar) to toss it into the black hole of stupid beliefs. It is gone and any affect it had on my life, goes with it.

Exploring, discovering, and processing your written beliefs

At this point, I know of only two ways to explore peoples (including my own) beliefs. You will find beliefs that are "written" and beliefs that are "spoken". In order to keep this post to a semi-reasonable length, I'll explain my method for dealing with written beliefs here and continue with the a method for exploring spoken beliefs in a future post.

We are all familiar to some extent with beliefs that are written. They appear in religious texts, philosophical works and the published works of countless authors. Whereas you may find a number of shared beliefs in these places, you stand a better chance of exposing your own personal beliefs by looking at your own writings, both business and personal in nature.

Your letters, blogs, op-eds, emails, and even the questions and answers you post to this site are a virtual gold mine of beliefs just waiting to be discovered. I will often apply this method during the process of answering questions on IQ. You can find a recent example here

As you explore your beliefs and those of others, it is important to learn to recognize a belief when you see it. The easiest beliefs to recognize are those prefaced with an "I believe...", "The truth is....", "It's a fact that...." And other such statements that are a lead-in for a belief about to be exposed. Remember that these are just a preface to the belief, not the belief itself. It is counter productive to include these lead-ins when recording a belief. Most beliefs, you will find, do not come with any sort of preface.

Most beliefs are straightforward. They are clear statements that express and opinion.

The more difficult challenge will be recognizing "implied beliefs". You may need to study some statements a little more closely to find an implied belief. For example, a statement such as "I wish people would just learn to listen to each other" might imply the belief that "people don't listen to me" or "no one cares about what I have to say". While exploring your beliefs, it is solely up to you to recognize and decide what is a belief and what is not.

Allowing yourself to ignore a statement that reveals a belief because you don't like the way it sounds will not help you to resolve the issue being affected by that belief. Once you have learned to recognize a belief when you see it, you can begin the process of doing something about it.

To complete this exercise/process you will need some basic tools: a computer with a word processing program, a scanner (to digitize any hand written documents) and a basic ability to cut/copy and paste. Start by opening a Word doc. (save as My Beliefs) and begin to copy/paste the first batch of your text documents to the new document. Copy/paste as many text files as you think you can handle at one time. After you've pasted a bunch of files to 'My Beliefs', begin reading SLOWLY through the combined texts, deleting everything that you do not consider to be an expressed belief. I can assure you, beliefs will begin to appear almost immediately.

You may be tempted to delete beliefs during the process that you think no longer affect you only to find that the same belief keeps popping up in different places through slightly different phrasing. Don't delete a belief because it is a copy or bears a resemblance to one you already discovered. Recognizing repeated beliefs will give you an idea as to the potency of that particular belief. Remember, you will be discovering/exposing possibly hundreds of beliefs that affect every aspect of your life. During this phase of the process, just focus on getting them all down in one place with plans to sort thru them later. Continue to process all your remaining files.

Ultimately, you will want to get any beliefs you discover into written form. It is the best way to see your beliefs exposed in order to deal with them. It should be clear by now that discovering, culling and exposing your written beliefs from text documents is not rocket science. With a few basic computer skills, a little effort and a relatively short amount of spare time, you will have begun a process of discovering, recording and mapping the potentially vast number of beliefs that have thus far remained elusive to your conscious mind. Most of the beliefs you find may seem to be insignificant. That is not the case. When you explore further (begin to connect the dots) you are likely to discover that a single "insignificant" belief when looked at in relation to others may provide a clue to discovering a core belief.

The number and quality of the beliefs you will discover while exploring your written words may pale in comparison to those you'll find by when you begin to explore your spoken words. I have to admit, the process for exploring spoken beliefs is a little more difficult but it is more apt to provide a faster way to the deepest of your core beliefs. As I mentioned earlier, I'll delve further into this process in a future post. For now, happy hunting.