Lǽring: Where spirituality and psychology collide.

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Today I’d like to discuss where spirituality, religion, and psychology all combine with an individuals belief system. From a very young age, children born in first and second world countries are instructed in the “goods and bads” of societal inclusion. Many think of the spiritual world as a limited subset of our overall existence here on Midgard, but don’t consider its impact to each and every life form. So, hopefully, in a clear concise way, I’d like to explain how all these forces come together to form what we’ll call our “belief system”.

First, your belief system is a collection of all facts that you “know” to be true. This collection then forms and “oversight”, or wisdom that can incite emotions’ and/or reasoning. It also dictates a process of selective senses input filtering. This collection is established, then challenged, possibly changed, then re-established, hundreds of millions of times per day. Considering the input of your five senses all bringing in information all the time, it’s easy to understand how the impact affects our minds. Think of our minds as a ball of play-dough. Some of the messages we receive throughout our day, we may not even be aware of can be implanted in our ball of play-dough. Much like we proved with the subliminal messages embedded in video messages, so too could the other senses be tricked into accepting data that is not immediately obvious to the individual, but has a lasting effect within our minds.

Now, having some understanding about the input to our mind of just our physical senses, we need to think about all the actual “thinking” that we do, which is separate of what we know. This is called cognitive thought. This is the process of taking the input received from the senses, contrasting it against our belief system to determine how much of the message we believe. Then, we properly store the appropriate memory bits with their necessary “related to” tags, thereby altering the belief system going forward. Now, we are not talking about any external forces here yet, this is just the intrinsic “thought” process doing what it does.

Now, we add an idea of spirituality. But first, let’s make sure we don’t confuse the idea of religion with spirituality. They are very different, but one can certainly drive the other, but they are different. Religion is a subset of one’s “belief system”. It is facts, dates, defined action steps, which then become memory bits within the mind, as well as part of the senses filtration system. Spirituality is very different in that an individual realizes that there is another “sense” and that would be the soul (if we want to call it that). This soul accepts input from hidden communications from spirits around us, as well as communications from the gods, regardless of what you want to call them. This input is no different than, say, hearing. Except instead of receiving the data via the ear, it comes from the soul.

There are many spiritual entities who communicate with us through the soul, sometimes they can be more forceful than others. However, its impact within the mind is absolutely no different than any of the other senses. Some people do better listening with their soul than others, and most people try to ignore these signals. In the same way as I mentioned about those hidden messages within the data received by the other senses, so too, the soul can receive hidden messages within the data it sends to the brain.

However, this is what makes us think the way we do. It has been my experience that the way we can alter this influence is by firstly, recognizing its influence. By ignoring it, we can not better prepare our belief systems for its influence. Secondly, we need to take periodic breaks from all the other sensual communications and focus on this soulful interactivity. By focusing on this type of communications, and drawing attention to it, we can better adjust our belief system filters to identify important information, versus the “white noise” that surrounds us. This can be done in meditation, or any other method that you use to just “shut out” the other senses and focus on your spirit.