The world around us shapes itself to reflect what we believe about it, which is contrary to what the more immature way of thinking, which we all adopt from our tribe, has led us to believe. For the most part, we have been brought up to believe that we are victims of what happens in our outer world.
With a little deeper inspection, however, we can see that whatever we think about anything becomes the way life is for us and if we hold a particular belief for long enough, what then happens is that we end up, without realising, walking a pathway that remains within the boundaries of whichever belief we are holding and we end up only thinking and taking actions that validate the belief we hold as true, regardless of whether or not the belief is harming us or not.
We are continuously creating reality with the way we believe and think about life and as we experience life the way we do, we often think that the outer world is simply the way it is and that we have nothing to do with the events and situations that show up.
But two people in the same vicinity looking at the same event will have completely different experiences of what they are observing and this is always dependent on whatever beliefs they are holding as true.
Awareness of ourselves is the key component to changing our beliefs and then making sure we refrain from self-judgment.
A common mistake people make when they embark upon inner work to change their internal self-sabotaging beliefs is that once one is found, a massive amount of conscious self-judgement takes place even if they have been aware of the issue for years.
So the next progressive step forward is to swing back to awareness again; meaning that first, we become aware of the destructive or sabotaging belief, then if we realise we are judging ourselves for having that belief, we once again become aware of how we are judging ourselves and we let it be as it is. We must do this because we simply cannot change what we have done in the past but we can change how we see it and it is in our perception from a loving place, that we are then able to make a transformative and eventual permanent change.
So if and when we make the mistake again, we must laugh at ourselves in an endearing way, just as we would if we were observing a puppy dog that doesn't get something right, we would see them as cute as opposed to stupid and we would love them not judge them. When we are working to change our inner dynamics so that life gets better, we must operate from a strong foundation of self-forgiveness and kindness.
Essentially we are all innocent because, for the most part, we think we are making the best choices when we make them and it's not until something 'goes wrong' that we see that maybe it wasn't the best choice that could have been made. We're all doing the best we can with the information we have about life at any given time, and with awareness and conscious self-love, we can change the information we have to then make better choices so that life has no other option than to show up better for us.