Why are there self-limiting beliefs and what can be done about them?

by Vic Shayne
author
The Self is a Belief: the idea that causes suffering

Over the years I have studied the self, enquired into my own sense of self, and have written about what various disciplines say about the self. Many physicists, psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and gurus have all weighed in on the nature of the self as a creation of the mind, all in agreement.

Essentially, the sense of self, which is also called “me,” “I,” the center, the psyche, the ego, the egoic mind, and so on, is a construct; it is not real, but rather an artifact of an accretion of thoughts. These thoughts have conditioned the mind since the earliest years and have been implanted by parents, authority figures, religion, culture, teachers, and so on. The self, then, is constructed out of secondhand thoughts and information as well as beliefs.

The self is an idea of who you are, but it is not really who you are. You would need to dig very deep to find out what is beneath the self.
It is the self that imposes limiting beliefs, based upon psychological conditioning. Beliefs are ideas about what is true, but to believe means you do not actually know; you are taking information from other people and secondhand sources and then accepting them as true. A self-limiting belief or action is a redundant phrase, because the self is itself self-limited due to its beliefs. Remove the beliefs that there is a self and you remove all limiting ideas. Find out what the self is and you have discovered why the self is wont to be limited and full of apprehension, anxiety, and fear.