There was a pilot who was once terrified of the clouds. They appeared huge, seemingly weightless and at times dark and fearsome. The pilot did everything he could to evade them on his flights.
He sought help to get rid of them, but no amount of work he could do would solve this problem he had to deal with everyday.
Until one day, by accident, he crashed into a cloud, and much to his horror, nothing happened. He finally understood that things aren’t always the way they seem to be, and flew happily ever after.
This idea of limiting beliefs has permeated human consciousness so deeply that it’s now dogma. Common interventions aim at helping us overcome them.
But what if the most limiting belief we hold is the belief in ‘limiting beliefs’?
I propose that we seem to confuse verbs with nouns, and processes with artifacts.
A belief is not an entity that lives in your mind. Not anymore than a cloud is an entity living in the sky.
What we call the sky is our atmosphere – made up of gases and water vapor. It is this same combination of gases and water vapor that appear as clouds.
Similarly, our mind-space has the capacity for what we call thinking, which is a process, and thought is an instance of thinking.
Belief is re-thinking the same thought and forgetting that you are engaging the process of thinking. It appears crystallized as a concrete reality.
Just as clouds are a persistent-seeming form of the substance of the sky, beliefs are a persistent-seeming form of the substance of thought.
So if thoughts are like clouds, they only appear solid, but are not. Imagine the pilot from the earlier story. What a terrific relief it would be to know that you don’t need to get rid of the clouds to be able to fly. You simply pass through.
Their ‘limiting solidity’ was only an illusion created through misunderstanding.
The Awakened Leader understands this. Instead of working hard to get rid of their limiting thoughts, they simply see through them.
The moment a thought is seen as a thought — not as truth, not as reality, not as fact — the misunderstanding collapses.
It no longer appears as a noun (a belief) but as a transient verb (thinking).
Instead of overcoming a noun of limiting beliefs, you stop engaging in the verb of active forgetful re-thinking.
From that place of awareness, you can experience the freedom to make conscious, discerning decisions, and fulfill your desires, unburdened by the need to fix an illusion.
