For the most part, we know what we need to do in order to achieve our goals. What we don’t know is why we’re not doing it.
If you want to lose weight, you know you shouldn’t eat the cake but you don’t know why after all you give into the temptation. You know you need to sit down and write your article. But why are you playing just one last episode of your favourite Netflix show for a third time.
These underlying forces that shape our actions (or lack thereof) emerge from our view of ourselves. And our view of ourselves is often based in a set of false notions or lies. Some other terms used to refer to these lies include limiting beliefs, believable falsehoods, invisible ceilings, false notions, etc. The key thing to recognise about them is that they are not true but to us they appear to be true—we don’t see them as lies.
They are like a cage we live in without realising that we are in a cage. As the zoo is the real nature for an animal that’s never been outside of the zoo, so our lies are the real world to us.
There are four key things to recognise about these lies:
- They are not a lie to us. They are not true – but we have a lot of proof that they are.
- They are a blind spot for us.
- They are what stands between us and our happiest, liveliest self.
- To transcend them, we need to see them for what they are.
You can’t escape the cage if you don’t know you’re in a cage.
Step one: Look for the lie
To transcend our lies, we need to find them first. And we all have them. But often they are a blind spot for us. This not only makes them difficult for us to see, but contributes to us believing them to be real not false.
Reverse-engineering our actions, thoughts and feelings to get to the origins of the lies is one way of discovering them. Think of your feelings and actions as symptoms of something, and look for the thing they’re a symptom of. Peel of the layers of symptoms to get to the root causes of what’s manifesting.
Step two: Find the lie.
Our lies are normally in the realm of safety, scarcity and inadequacy. And they revolve around an idea about either us or life.
Some of the more common ones are: I’m not good enough. I’m powerless. I’m not valuable. I’m bad. I’m not important.
And we all have them to some degree or another.
Step three: Investigate the lie and see it for what it is: a lie.
We have believed our lies for a long time. And not only have we believe them, we’ve been looking for proof of them. This is what the ego does, because this is the structure of the ego—it is what we believe ourselves to be.
If you’ve believed for most of your life that you aren’t good enough, you would have accumulated a lot of proof that “demonstrates” this. And you would think that this evidence is “objective”. You may have examples of things that you’ve failed at, for instance; or people who are much better than you are at something.
Our lies preceded reality. It is because you’ve been believing that you’re not good enough that you’ve been going around collecting “evidence” to prove to yourself that you’re right. There’s a lot of comfort in being right, especially for someone who thinks that they’re not good enough. Finally a thing we’re good at—proving to ourselves that we’re not good enough!
Because the thing is—failing at something doesn’t prove that you’re not good enough. What failing at something “proves”, if anything, is that you didn’t succeed on that occasion. That’s all.
Someone else being better than you at something is no evidence that you’re not good enough. It just means that they’ve done something and you haven’t. And, normally, there are a lot of quantitative reasons explaining why someone has accomplished something that you haven’t yet, such as they’ve been working on it for much longer than you have; they have a bigger team; they have more resources, etc.
Step four: Step outside of it.
Through our investigation we can see the lie it for what it is—a lie. And we can see our “proof” in favour of the lie for what it is: a biased interpretation of facts. Our transcendence of the lie is on the other side of this realisation.
Integrating this new realisation takes patience and practice. Our ego will try to pull us back to our old belief system—to the familiarity and comfort of the world as we’ve known. It will reason and try to convince us that we are wrong about being wrong about ourselves.
The antidote is continuously reminding ourselves of why the lie is a lie and integrating this new awareness. Our true nature is what remains in the absence of the lie.