The search for truth is often an iterative search.
Let’s say that you have a lot of false beliefs in your mind and they distort your perception and clarity of life, events, other people, and understanding your self. Let’s assume a number and say that 50% of your beliefs are false and 50% of your assumptions and beliefs are true. If you read a book that is 60-70% truth, it could have extraordinary insights on truth. It could open your mind to more truth and help shatter many of your illusions.
While it can be an incredible book that brings you clarity on so many things, you will still have 30-40% illusions in that book, and in your mind. Perhaps what is more interesting is that the clarity that book gives you might inspire you to faith in everything it says, even those things that are illusions. You become inspired and passionate about a book that is 30-40% illusions even though it gave you great insights. For you it is as if you found something that was “The Truth.”
Now imagine another scenario. Imagine that a person that lives under many more false beliefs than you do. Imagine someone’s mind where 70-80% of their beliefs are false, or distorted by false assumptions. Imagine that they read the same book that has truthful clarity of 60-70%.
Do you think that they will just completely understand and accept the information in that book? The truth of what that person reads will be in conflict with their existing set of beliefs. The ideas in that book will be in conflict with so much of what they already accept as true. The belief system in their mind will reject the ideas on the page as not true. To accept as true the material in that book would mean the collapse of so much of the structure of their belief system. This would be uncomfortable and in an effort to avoid that discomfort their mind would reject the new ideas even though they have greater clarity.
When the mind is full of illusions there is no room for the truth. The existing set of beliefs rejects any ideas that are contradictory to it’s current structure. When in search of The Truth it can be more valuable to empty your mind of false beliefs than to attempt to fill it up with more truthful ones.
For specific exercises for identifying and dissolving fear based beliefs based in the Four Agreements, begin with the free practices in the Self Mastery audio program.
The original post located at The Search for Truth