Who am I? What are my deepest beliefs? These are questions that have popped up in my mind from time to time, but especially so during the last ten years as I sought to get a better understanding of myself.
We live in a world in which others are always trying to influence our thoughts such that we buy into their belief systems. Often we are expected to follow blindly. And so often, that is exactly what we do, thus failing to exercise our divine capacity for independent thought. As a result, we often end up living lives as dictated by others, trapped in a state of dependency, lacking in self-confidence and personally insecure. We can be so lost that we become the mental slaves of others and not be aware of it. We simply plod along under the control of others, never accepting responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Introspection puts us in touch with our true selves by giving us the opportunity to hear our inner voice and to discover our capacity for independent thought, free of the influences of others, whether or not they are our parents, teachers, friends, pastors, pundits, political leaders or any other person who seeks to influence our way of thinking. In February 2005 I felt the need to consolidate my beliefs as I sought to get a better understanding of myself, free of the influences of others. In seeking the truth of myself I wrote the following:
I believe in the power of freewill
I believe that I have the potential to think freely and to act according to conscience
I believe that I have human goodness -a goodness anchored in ethics and morality
I believe that my human goodness is my inner reality-my true reality
I believe that the expression of my human goodness is derived from my inner power
I believe that there is a universal spiritual power, by whatever name you may choose to make reference-God, Allah, Ram, Jah, or Universal Consciousness
I believe in the spirituality of the human being
I believe in humans' spiritual connectivity to the universal spiritual power, to other human beings and to the universal environment that we are part of
I believe that our freewill and our human goodness are derived from our spirituality
I believe that I have the ability to grow my inner power so that I can better express my freewill, my human goodness and my spirituality
I believe that I can grow my inner power through becoming more principle conscious, by discovering and living my purpose, by cultivating greater emotional mastery, through a better understanding of change and through being more knowledge empowered
I believe that in growing my inner power, I become stronger and more aware of the universal spiritual power, my own human goodness and my connectedness to other human beings and to the environment that I am a part of
I believe that in growing my inner power I become spiritually stronger and more inspirational to others
I believe that human development resides primarily in the expressed morality and spirituality of people
I believe that accelerated human development comes from cutting new paths, rather than mimicking what exists
I believe that spiritual poverty is the most widespread social disease of developing nations
I believe that a lack of understanding of self, and the potential therein, is the biggest problem in our developing countries
I believe that most of our developing countries are trapped in a syndrome of self-deception, insecurity, dishonest self-representation, beggary, pretence, arrogance, greed, buffoonery, creative intole- rance, dependency and outright stupidity
I believe the potential for greatness lies in all human beings
I believe that people will only develop when they are prepared to develop themselves
I believe that the world is a place of opportunity for all
I believe that those who are awake to their potential greatness are those who will lead the world
I believe that the so-called developing world has the opportunity to lead in the future development of the world
I believe that there is a moral line
I believe that right and wrong matter
I believe that human development is about moral progress
I believe that I have the power to redefine and remake my own life
I believe that I can undo my unwanted conditioning
I believe than I can let go of my external reality
I believe that I can be what life wants me to be
I believe that I can be the leader of my life
I believe that I can experience happiness every day of my life
I believe that I can only change others by changing myself
I believe in the message of Leading From Above The Line
I believe in the five sources of our inner power
I believe that it takes all five sources to strengthen us to lead from above the moral line
The journey of understanding self is a life-long journey and my journey continues.