What we choose to believe about ourselves and others is but the veil in which our perspective can be distorted. Filtering your thoughts of others, the world and yourself through your belief system determines your degree of happiness, the types of relationships you have, the height of your intelligence, what health you experience and the level of success you will experience.

Sometimes the truth of a matter is distorted by what we believe about such things and in essence we miss the truth completely. Beliefs are so powerful and are the panes of glass which you see the world through. Imagine a pane of glass in front of you, then another one in front of that and another one in front of this one etc, and each pane represents a belief we hold, dear to our hearts. When your panes of glass are clouded with negativity you will experience a life full of negative things. As we begin to clean our negative panes of glass, polishing them with positive spray, you will notice how the world miraculously changes before your very eyes.

How do you make decisions about what you feel about life? It is your belief about such things that determines how you feel. You may want to feel happy in a situation where in the past you have felt uncomfortable, all you have to do is change the pictures in your mind, change your beliefs about what you are seeing, rewrite the script of the play which is being performed in front of you.

You have the power, the power to control your life experiences through changing to positive belief systems that serve your purpose and your happiness.

Beliefs are designed by the belief program without any concern whatsoever for the truth. Concern for the truth is a higher acquired cognitive orientation that reflects an underlying philosophy which presupposes an objective reality that is not always perceived by our senses.

The belief program runs automatically, strengthening old beliefs and rejecting any new ones, rarely deleting any. Occasionally we see the flaws or foolishness in other people's beliefs. It is very difficult to see the same in our own. We believe in all sorts of things. Such beliefs are all similar in form, all thoughts of the same process. They may, however, involve greater or lesser involvement of critical-thinking and emotional-response.

Critical thinking, logic, reason, science -- these are all terms that apply in one way or another to the deliberate attempt to ferret out truth from the tangle of intuition, distorted perception, and fallible memory. The true critical thinker accepts what few people ever accept -- that one cannot routinely trust perceptions and memories. Figments of our imagination and reflections of our emotional needs can often interfere with or supplant the perception of truth and reality. Through teaching and encouraging critical thought our society will move away from irrationality, but we will never succeed in completely abandoning irrational tendencies, again because of the basic nature of the belief program. Experience is often a poor guide to reality. Skepticism helps us to question our experience and to avoid being too readily led to believe what is not so.