One Approach to Managing Beliefs.

 “The mission of Avatar^® in the world is to catalyze the integration of belief systems. When we perceive that the only difference between us is our beliefs and that beliefs can be created or discreated with ease, the right and wrong game will wind down, a co-create game will unfold, and world peace will ensue.”

–Harry Palmer

 About Harry Palmer 

The Avatar Course, created by Harry Palmer, thus focuses in its descriptive materials on the importance of stepping back from one's belief systems, monitoring, consciously choosing them based on life goals. On first blush, to a scholar interested in the role of belief systems in an unfolding life this is a concept worthy of further investigation.

Aiming the materials at "world peace" hints at other levels beyond personal belief systems, and a quick web search reveals information about Avatar as a large-group awareness training--LGAT--suggesting caution in looking too deeply into it as a source of credible thoughts on human development and behavior. I've been around long enough to have experienced and observed these trainings and well know their methodologies and underlying philosophies.

As it turns out--bless the miracles of connected communication--Harry Palmer and the Avatar Course are also worthy of a Wikipedia page, where the history of the organization is linked directly and unquestionably to the world of Scientology. Aside from its controversial standing in contemporary culture, most people would agree that the Church of Scientology, as it has identified itself, is clearly an organization devoted to beliefs and practices.

We wind up here bumping head-on into a quandary I find myself pondering fairly often: what does one do with beliefs about Belief Systems, without being blinded by those beliefs?

It's a personal issue for me as I explore ideas in this journal.

And there is more--or less--to Mr Palmer than he presents in his Avatar Course materials.

Of course, the only way to learn about the materials in the Avatar Course is to take the course. While there are published materials about the course, those materials are explicit in their requirement of confidentiality for what the course actually contains:

There are a number of simple reasons why parts of the Avatar materials are kept confidential, but the most important reason requires some explanation.

Avatar is much more than a philosophy, as any student who has experienced its transmission from a licensed Master will quickly tell you. There are word-lessons, and there are world-lessons. A word-lesson is someone’s attempt to convey his experience to another via spoken or written symbols.

A world-lesson is something that a person lives through. It’s something he actually confronts and copes with in life, and from the world-lesson he emerges changed...more experienced...bigger! A word-lesson very rarely produces such a result.

A world-lesson is a unique personal experience; it does not require translation into symbols or sounds to be understood. It is involvement in, and observation, of events as they occur.

Avatar is both a word-lesson and a world-lesson. It is a word-lesson only for the purpose of introducing students to their own personal world-lessons. The word-lessons that Avatar conveys are insignificant compared to the world-lessons it opens to students.

The Avatar Course requires a well-trained and disciplined Avatar Master to ensure that the Avatar techniques make it off the page and into life. Avatar becomes valuable when it is conveyed as a world-lesson on how to assimilate world-lessons.

By keeping the Avatar materials confidential and permitting their teaching only by those trained to transmit them properly, each person receives his or her own unique world-lesson from the Avatar experience.

And of course the only way to experience these world-lessons is in an LGAT. For fees that are intentionally, purposely, set at a high level.

While I find it somehow strangely reassuring to know others are looking at beliefs about Belief Systems, I'll pass on further explorations of this particular avenue