As I point out often in my writing, the intellectual paradigm that we are allowing to dictate our relationship with life - the attitudes, beliefs, and definitions both conscious and subconscious - are what determine our expectations and perspectives and those in turn dictate our emotional reactions and relationships. In order to change how we are relating to, and reacting to, being human we need to change the intellectual beliefs that are dictating our relationship with being human.

It is vital to start realizing that we have the power to make choices about what attitudes, beliefs and definitions we are allowing to dictate our relationship with life. We do not have to keep being the victim of the beliefs that were imposed upon us in childhood. We do not have to keep living life based upon shame, fear, and scarcity just because that is what was role modeled for us by the adults who were our higher powers in childhood. Once we recognize that we are powerless to make life be what we want it to be out of our ego programming, then we become empowered to change the quality of our relationship with life.

By owning that we have the power to make choices about our perspective of life - and to choose a spiritual perspective - we can vastly improve the quality of our human experience. This is what I am trying to communicate in this series of articles on a Higher Power of my own understanding. It is specifically what I talked about in the third column here in this series: Spirituality - a broader perspective.

Looking at the horizontal and vertical dimensions of life helped me to start being and to start doing in a more balanced way. It helped me to stop being a human doing - thinking that what I accomplished, or how I looked, on the outside is what gives me worth.

I talked in last months column about the transcendent emotions of Joy and Love and how we can access these emotions by being in the moment when relating to nature for instance. I am going to close out this months column with a quote from one of my Update Newsletters where I talk about transcendent vertical emotions and horizontal human emotions.