This is http://www.essayz.com/a9103241.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %BASIC ULTIMATE ASSUMPTION PARADIGM CONCERN CHANGE 910324 When our daily lives are perpetually burdened with disappointments, frustrations, unresolved dilemmas and fears; we need to consider what helpful changes we might make in our emotional, intellectual and behavioral life style. We need to look to others whose lives are not perpetually burdened with disappointments, frustrations, unresolved dilemmas and fears; to see what differences in their life styles might be the keys to recognizing the changes we need to make in our daily lives. We may be prone to think that they have more luck in what life presents to them; but if we are honest and seek we can without much difficulty find people who have less luck than we do; and who are not as burdened as we are with disappointments, frustrations, unresolved dilemmas and fears. The key to the difference between their lives and our lives must lie in the differences in our internal life styles. Usually the changes which we need to make in our internal life styles are changes which only we can make. Nobody else can make the necessary changes for us. Nobody else can make us make the necessary changes. Nobody can get us to make the necessary changes by offering adequate rewards, or threatening motivating punishments. We must want to make whatever changes are required; to get ourselves out of our cycle of disappointments, frustrations, unresolved dilemmas and fears. Those changes may well involve giving up what we have come to believe are ultimate truths, commandments, requirements, injunctions, needs, assumptions, and procedural necessities. We may need to be reborn as new creatures; by undergoing a radical transformation in which we cease to be what we have been, and become totally new and able to perceive our old selves in a new and liberating light. Our disappointments, frustrations, unresolved dilemmas and fears may be rooted tragically in our ultimate beliefs and concerns. We can be mistaken in our ultimate beliefs. There are many examples of people who have wasted their own lives and the lives of multitudes of people by tenaciously sticking to misleading ultimate beliefs. If others have been so tragically mislead by their ultimate beliefs, it is possible that we might also be so tragically wrong in our ultimate beliefs. We should entertain that possibility on some occasions, and seek evidence which might indicate that such is more than a possibility, and perhaps even a reality. Convictions do not make ultimate beliefs true. Convictions and sacrifices do not make ultimate beliefs lead us to personal and communal integrity. They may lead us into tragic disintegration if we hold them so tenaciously that we are unwilling to be honest with ourselves and others about what our experiences are and mean. Any beliefs which undermine our ability to know ourselves and others openly and honestly, are disintegrative beliefs; they undermine our personal and communal integrity. Such beliefs do not merit our ultimate respect, and are in need of examination in the honest light of our experiences and the experiences of those who are closest to us. When we want things to change we need to examine in what ways we need to change; for the changes we can effect are changes in the way we approach situations which present themselves to us. All changes in our behavior flow from changes in our emotional and intellectual life styles; in how we feel and think in response to what happens around us and within our relationships, and so lead to changes in other patterns of our daily lives. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================