7 Spiritual Beliefs You Are Better Off Without

Sometimes we get programmed with spiritual beliefs that do us more harm than good.  Here are some that are worth getting rid of.

Spiritual Beliefs You Might Do Without

When I was a little girl, my big brother Billy taught me a lot about life. His teaching was quite accidental, really a side effect of his bad-boy style of life. Billy was wise and charismatic and became addicted to drugs in his teens. I adored my big brother but was always afraid something terrible was going to happen to him. To distance myself from my anxiety, I began practicing the art of detachment. I was in fourth grade.

Many years later, Billy became my teacher again, this time on purpose. Soon after he died, to my stunned amazement, Billy began talking to me from his new dimension. He shared with me the secrets of the cosmos, which I in turn share in my book, The Afterlife of Billy Fingers: How My Bad-Boy Brother Proved To Me There’s Life After Death.

One of the things Billy talked with me about is beliefs. He said…

“Beliefs are big on earth. People collect them. Some of these beliefs are helpful but others just keep you running around trying to follow rules that others have laid down. They don’t have a lot of personal meaning. It’s a good idea to sort through your beliefs now and then and throw out the ones that don’t serve you.”

Here are some spiritual beliefs Billy says you might be better off without.

7 Spiritual Beliefs You Are Better Off Without

Spiritual Beliefs 1. THOUGHTS BECOME THINGS

Thoughts do not necessarily become things. When you meditate, you watch as all kinds of thoughts drift across your mind. If they magically became things, your meditation room would be jammed with stuff in a couple of hours. Thoughts can make you feel happy or sad. Thoughts can be interesting and insightful or just garbage in and garbage out. Thoughts are fluid. All of us have all kinds of thoughts and many of them never stay very long or amount to anything. Thoughts don’t automatically become things. That usually takes effort on your part.

Spiritual Beliefs 2. IT MUST BE MY KARMA

If life is difficult at a particular moment and there is no obvious reason why, you start to wonder if you did something wrong in a past life and you’re paying for it now. Our linear minds try to make sense of the Universe and satisfy our desire for fairness. Is it really easier to believe you’re being punished for some past transgression than to admit that you just don’t understand why this stuff is happening to you? Pain is part of the human experience, as natural as breath, or eyesight, or blood moving through your veins. Sure there’s pain in life but not necessarily because you’ve done something to deserve it, in this life or the last.

Spiritual Beliefs 3. MY PROBLEMS ARE THE RESULT OF MY NEGATIVE THINKING

A common “New Age” belief is that if you are ill, having a hard time with your love life, don’t have a love life, can’t make ends meet, or whatever, you must have somehow created the situation with your hidden, inner negativity. Isn’t it childish to believe that you control all the forces and all the people in the Universe? All kinds of situations we’ve never imagined pop up in our personal worlds. Isn’t it the ego that believes being spiritually advanced means you are in complete control of reality? Did starving children bring about their plight because of their negativity? This kind of thinking encourages a lack of compassion for others and ourselves.

Spiritual Beliefs 4. I AM NOT SPIRITUAL IF I FEEL ANGRY, ENVIOUS OR AFRAID

As Earth moves around the Sun, there’s nothing but shadow for a good part of the time. The mystery of life on earth cannot exist without the shadow element. You cannot have the sea without storms, the earth without quakes, the wind without tornados. When the light rises, the darkness comes with it. Where there is light, there is shadow. The earth experience features all kinds of emotions; some are lighter, some darker, and that’s okay. That’s as it should be. Don’t overlook the richness contained in your darker emotions. Let the moments fill you, the ones you judge as “bad” as well as “good”.

Spiritual Beliefs 5. I CAN DETERMINE A PERSON’S SPIRITUAL LEVEL BY THEIR LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES

You can never judge the spiritual value of anyone’s life or measure their state of grace by the way things appear to be on the surface. Figuring out who is happier, richer, better looking, or more together is just a human way of trying to measure the immeasurable. This measuring is usually just an excuse to do some comparison-shopping. We occupy our minds with whose life, job, relationship, you name it, is better or worse than ours. Whether you come out with more or with less, the comparison game is a big lie because you can never know the truth about someone else’s experience. You can try to put yourself in their shoes but it will never be the real thing, the true thing, the soul thing.

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Spiritual Beliefs 6. I NEED TO SOLVE MY PROBLEMS BEFORE I CAN BE HAPPY

People spend lots of time on things that make them unhappy, focus too much on their problems. This is not a recipe for happiness. Pleasure increases your joy. To cultivate pleasure try paying more attention to what you like. These don’t have to be big things. Savor the taste of your morning coffee, listen to music, spend time looking at the night sky. Paying attention to what you like is a spiritual practice that will make you happier pretty quickly. Your world is probably filled with things that give you pleasure; you just haven’t been paying enough attention. When you are happier, you are more creative and relaxed about your problems. You begin to feel that yesterday may have been difficult, but tomorrow could be better. When you have more pleasure, you understand that mistakes are okay. There’s always another chance to try something different.

Spiritual Beliefs 7. I NEED TO FIND MY LIFE’S TRUE PURPOSE

Okay, sometimes. And sometimes you are blessed to experience the “purposeless purpose” of creation; a place where the noise and static of the world are gone and you connect with the innocence and awe at the heart of life itself. The everyday becomes the miraculous; the ordinary, extraordinary. You feel the miracle of creation in the trees, the flowers, the sky and the beating heart that gives you life. You awaken to the grandeur of waking up or falling asleep or taking a breath or laughing, crying, singing, dancing and making love. These moments carry the fleeting glory, the purposeless purpose of creation, and take you inside the essence of being alive.

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You will also enjoy Annie Kagan: Insights of the Afterlife and 9 Things You Realize After You Die

About the Author

When she was sixteen, Annie Kagan was signed by a producer from Columbia Records. After 10 years of performing her songs in New York City clubs, Annie returned to college and became a chiropractor with a private practice in Manhattan. When her brother Billy died unexpectedly and began speaking to her from the afterlife, her future took a surprising turn. She recorded her conversations with Billy from the other side and published them in her debut book The Afterlife of Billy Fingers. afterlifeofbillyfingers.com