So the next question becomes, how to start to believe in a new course of action that may provide benefits, when generally we do not believe it or we would have already tried it. It seems to me that there are normally 2 main ingredients. First, we normally must get pretty desperate, or in other words our normal ways of handling things and dealing with life must not be working very well. Second in our desperation we grab onto some new ideas or beliefs about how things work and what would be best for us. I think the most reliable way for this 2nd thing to happen is that someone who has been through similar stuff shares some of that and it resonates deep within us to the point that we at least start to believe it on a deep level.
(I am not going to try to define it well here, but I want to make it clear that when I am discussing beliefs here I mean to some extent what we think and our minds tell us about ourselves and the world, but more importantly I am referring to something much more abstract and hard to define. Something I will call visceral beliefs, that are basically what our gut tells us and is deeper and more powerful that our thinking. These visceral beliefs in some ways are animalistic and definitely pre-language, meaning they originated before humans had language. As a result our language is not very good at describing them.)
So getting back to what I was saying before I went off on the tangent about beliefs, I think that the most efficient and likely successful way for myself and others to have our visceral beliefs changed is to hear the experience of others that we believe at a visceral or gut level. In order for us to really believe it (at least for a skeptic like me) we generally have to know the person well enough or get to know the person well enough to realize what they say or changes that have occurred in them are real. I am hoping that our prior relationship and you knowing at least a little of my struggles and hopefully viscerally believing some of the stuff I try to describe regarding what I think has happened to me, will be useful to you.
Before dropping this topic of changing our visceral beliefs, which are closely aligned with our gut/intuition/feelings, I want to mention that while getting together with others who are trying similar paths I think is the most efficient and likely successful way, this does also occur in other ways. Some of us are lucky enough to have little epiphanies or revelations come to us seemingly all of a sudden and amount to an internal shift of some sort. In my own case they normally seem to be revelations out of the blue, but I have come to believe now that they are generally a long time in the making and generally involve some sort of coming together of things I have read and heard, all of sudden making sense in a very new way at a deep level.
I know all of this might be too abstract to be helpful. I wanted to reply with something though and trying to explain how I think the process of change occurs was what started to come out when I started typing.
