Hi James, Hope this helps or provides some answer. You Wrote- “You ryte, "My point is, of course, is that beliefs are alot of bullshit backfilling conscious rationalization that offer us a story for the experience we already have." How so John?” This also explains it in another way "In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits." John Lilly Beliefs and Identity are a conscious construct, a model of a way of interpretation, a use of language to codify what we are unable to represent fully, the ability to divide experience into divisions through language in order to make sense of those experiences. In other words, beliefs and identity are a construct, in the realms of experience they do not exist as reality but as a story. Yet in the world of language and experience we make them exist by propagating them throughout our daily lives and not acting as if they are true but accepting their functions as that of truth, reality. Beliefs can either serve or enslave a person. The problem with them is that they are consistent in deleting everything else from experience as they act as a filter, this then generalises your experience, which in turn makes you search for other experiences to confirm and validate the belief, which altogether distorts your perceptions and experience of the world from FA to f2. That is, beliefs are a story of reality and not reality itself, that is, they don’t exist except through the use of language. Does a dog believe?? (Though they are an experience because we have an experience of them, but only in the realm of construct) although as we understand that we cannot get to reality as such or the world at large, but at least to FA, then it serves us to search for the counterexamples and as John said, “Learn to get to FA on demand”. To not accept the beliefs as if they are true, to not rationalise and distort our experience into constructs. FYI - Identity is a construct of beliefs without beliefs we have no identity (in that model). Does this help? Robert