I was sitting in the back yard with a friend a few weeks ago. The moon was out and almost full. I had read that when the moon rises as the sun sets, it will be full. If the moon rises at midday, it will be a half moon. If the moon rise happens at sunrise, then we have a new moon, one you can’t see because the illuminated side is away from us, or only see a sliver. I had some time to think about the geometry of the planets, the phase of the moon as related to their time of rise and set made sense to me. It was a surprise when I read it, and yet so simple. After years of watching the moon and sun rise and set I had never noticed the pattern or put these things together.

My friend was quiet thinking about it for a while and then asked in curiosity, “How did they figure that out, what goes around what? How did they figure out the orbits of where each body is in the solar system?” I didn’t know.

I could imagine people watching the sun, moon, and other planets pass in the sky. It would be easy to assume that we are stationary and everything moves around us. Turns out that is what smart guys like Plato and Aristotle did 2500 years ago. It fits with appearances so would be believable and as such, we wouldn’t look further. But for real understanding there would need to be a more disciplined system and skepticism. That would come about 2000 years later with Copernicus and Kepler. They would need to take careful records and chart what was happening over time. They would also need to account for little bits of data that didn’t fit with the expectations, like a planet going into retrograde.  It’s important not to dismiss the small stuff that you don’t know what to do with.  A person’s memory is not good enough to track all 28 days of the phases of the moon in their head and see the pattern. However, charted on paper, the pattern would be there.

It would take longer to determine the tilt of the earth and deduce the earth revolving around the sun. It seems a big leap in understanding would be to imagine that that the earth is spinning and traveling around the sun at thousands of miles per hour even though we have the sensation of standing still, .

It’s is easy to see that without careful recording of the changes, and charting of all the bodies that a person could get it wrong. If you take things as appearances, then you are going to assume that you are standing still, and everything revolves around you.

The same thing happens when we look at what goes on in our mind or even in our relationships. We give it a glance, our mind comes up with a quick explanation for why we had a certain behavior, or an emotional outburst, made a bad money decision, or ate too much food that didn’t agree with us. We rationalize why someone else did what they did.  We have quick explanation for ourselves or them, but it is likely that we get it wrong.

We don’t know the truth of how unconscious belief systems are moving us on the inside. We cannot “see” these beliefs with our intellect, much in the same way we cannot detect our motion around the sun from watching it pass overhead.  Our intellect sees the sun passing from east to west, when unknown to us we are spinning from west to east.

If you want to really understand how your behaviors and emotions are being moved by your Unconscious Beliefs, then you will need to take some time to do some observations, and write them down. Your intellect and memory doesn’t have the ability to track your emotional, behavior, and thought patterns over the course of a day, much less a month. We have more than 10,000 thoughts a day, and our intellect can handle only about 7 bits of data at a time. To understand your self with some clarity it helps a great deal to write things down for a while.

The Self Mastery Program provides an organized system for taking data on your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. It will give you a system to chart your beliefs and see systems you didn’t notice before. It will be like finally understanding the planets movements.  It allows you that ability to shift your point of view from a stationary egocentric one the way astronomers did and see what is really going on.