Patterns of Spirituality

Matching Beliefs with Experience

As a young adult, if our belief systems "fit " neatly into reality, then we appear to be a healthy, well-adjusted person.  As we get older, however, our beliefs change as the result of experience, but reality doesn't change.  So sooner or later we may begin to be confused about our place and role in life.  When this happens, two choices appear.

a). If we have a well-developed social support system (family, close friends, a good job, etc) then we bury our confusion ; we don't learn from experience.  Nothing will change us until a big crisis appears and our support network lets us down.

b). The other choice, when we are more dependent on our own resources, makes us realise that something has gone wrong with our life.  Then we engage in a search to try and provide answers.  However, the difficulty is that we don't usually know the right questions to ask.

The path out of confusion will be unique to each individual, though obviously there will be many points of similarities in the experiences that searchers go through.  In general, we begin to follow our own path by deciding to broaden our understanding of human consciousness; so we need to study topics such as motivation, behaviour, ideals, sexuality, relationships.  The process is that of graduating from a narrow set of beliefs about reality to a broad and comprehensive set of beliefs that matches our personal experience of reality. Then we can begin to define what we really want out of life.

Most searchers will be content with a pragmatic approach. When their new set of beliefs matches their personal experiences, then they settle for being content with life.  A few searchers go on and question whether these new beliefs are actually true. Now that's a completely different journey.

Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
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