Peace is structured by forming true, useful beliefs and taking action on the basis of them.
Useful beliefs allow effective action. Useless beliefs impede it.
To form true beliefs you must see reality clearly. You must pay close attention to experience while limiting what you project onto it. The less you project, the closer your view gets to reality.
To act, you must focus on a suitable target. Armed with reality, a well-planned action reaches its target. Changes to conditioned behavior are the goal.
The Core Cycle:
What
Why
New
Now
How
Attend to a moment.
Observe your behavior.
Choose which behavior to change.
Recognize the conditions that gave rise to the chosen behavior.
Choose which condition to recalibrate.
Design a new behavior to override the existing one.
Intentionally recreate the condition and practice immediately executing the new behavior in response.
Reward the new behavior.
Repeat.
Drop conscious effort.
Wait for the condition to arise unintentionally.
Check: when the condition arose, did you execute the new behavior without thinking?
Old Habits Die Hard
Using the cycle described above, it’s not difficult to change behavior in response to a specific condition. It take a few minutes of planning and a few rounds of practice. The difficult thing is maintaining awareness of the condition and your responses for enough time to ingrain a new behavior. Once the conscious effort to monitor yourself disappears, you fall to the level of your training. To be precise — you revert to the behavior most powerfully conditioned. Weakening that conditioning takes diligent effort. Effort towards what? Planning, execution, and maintaining awareness of the core cycle.
If you’re ready to dive deeper into the elements of change, head over to Where to Find It and let’s begin.