Don’t hide behind the blindfold.  Challenging your core beliefs is healthy; that’s how you find the truth.  So, the question is, are you seeking the truth?  Or are you just trying to convince yourself that what you believe must be true?  There is a big difference between the two.

Learn How to Seek The Facts

To seek the truth, you must take off the spiritual blindfold.  You must learn to seek evidence to support your conclusions.  Don’t put on a blindfold, and look for ways to affirm your beliefs.  Instead, make the truth a priority.  Make finding the facts the focus.  It will take you on a path of discovery and enable you to transcend cultural and religious boundaries.  Seeking the truth will lead you to the proper resources and teacher (s) at the right time.

“Seek truth from facts.” — Deng Xiaoping

When you seek a unique spiritual path, the universe will respond by revealing your soul’s spiritual gifts.  Many people find the virtues of the spirit as they embark on their journey.  These are the keys to your development.

You won’t find these spiritual gifts when you are under the spell of mythology and superstition.  If you place belief before truth, you are putting on a blindfold.  It is like wearing a spiritual blindfold if you only affirm what you think is true.  You must learn to attack all facts and evidence challenging your core beliefs.

If you do not seek the facts, you cannot see beyond what you already believe to be true.  At first, your blindfold may seem comfortable.   But it requires a lot of work to keep this blindfold in place.  You must attend regular sessions.  Here you undergo indoctrination and memorization of various rules and regulations.  These tactics shape your thinking to conform to the belief system’s boundaries.  Mythology is harmful if you treat it as fact and not a metaphor; that’s how myth becomes religion.  Religion substitutes myths for facts “in an attempt” to make faith perform like legitimate knowledge.

So, do you keep the blindfold on and hide from the truth?  Or do you take it off and seek the facts?  The choice is yours.  Taking off your blindfold will involve some effort.  It may be a little scary at first.  But it is worth the effort.  Thankfully, there are several tools helpful for this purpose.

Seek Evidence Challenging Your Core Beliefs

Comparative Analysis — Comparative Religious Study

Here’s an example of one of the most direct ways to challenge your sacred ground by comparing your worldview’s fundamental beliefs with those in other systems.  We recommend the following structured type of approach modeled after the scientific process.

1) Create a List of Your Beliefs Topics for Research
2) List the Reasons and Sources for Your Beliefs
3) Compile Topics about Your Beliefs for Research
4) Do Independent Research
5) What Does the Research Say?  Analyze the Results.
6) Revise Beliefs Based on the Data

1) Create a List of Your Beliefs Topics for Research

Start by writing a list of your most essential beliefs.  They could be things like your belief in avatars or divine beings like Odin, Mithra, Jesus, or Muhammad.  Or, it could be the belief in bigfoot, alien visitations, or that the earth is flat.

Maybe you believe Harry Potter is real.  A lot of people know about Harry Potter.

2) List the Reasons and Sources for Your Beliefs

After you write the list of your most sacred beliefs, write down what makes you believe it’s true.  Perhaps it is some evidence like divinely inspired texts such as the story of Harry Potter or the Bible.  Do you trust the words of your spiritual leader?

List as many sources as you can.  These are our original benchmark sources.

People often get their beliefs about spiritual reality from trusted sources like family and religious leaders.  But these aren’t sources; they are opinions.  Dig deeper to find the reasons you believe what you do.  If it is because it’s what you’ve been brainwashed to believe, now is your opportunity to start with a clean slate.  It’s the way we come into the world, innocent without any programming.

If you do have sources, list them, it could be a TV show, a book, an experience, or the teaching you get at a place of religious worship.  List the source and connect the dots to what you believe.

Our example above is Harry Potter.  He is known worldwide, and millions of books and movies have been published about his life.  His story gives us several moral lessons about truth, honesty, friendship, and dealing with those who are greedy and evil.

3) Compile Topics about Your Beliefs for Research

Reduce your beliefs to topics you can use to research and compare with other systems.  For example, let’s say you believe Jesus spoke about the modern version of Christianity as your savior.  This belief contains several topics for research.  Here are some ideas for topics:

• • Salvation or what is salvation
  • What does it mean to be saved
  • What are you saved from
  • The existence of Jesus
  • Is there more than one Jesus
  • How is someone saved
  • Are the ways Jesus saves unique
  • Are there other ways to be saved

If you believe in Harry Potter, do the same.  Maybe some of these topics resonate with you:

• • What’s the central message of the Harry Potter
  • What do the characters represent
  • Which character do I identify with

4) Do Independent Research

Now go to a public library.  Here’s where we begin to seek the facts.  The library will have free resources that would need to pay to read on the internet.  It also makes you do research, not just read.  You’ll need to look up things in the catalog and pull hard copies.  You’ll need to learn how to scan the index of a book to find the topic or related topic.

The act of researching is good for your mind.  You can do this research on your own, but it works even better with a partner or a group, it’s even better.  You’ll discover things along the way that will provide food for further research projects.

We won’t be using the original benchmark sources you listed above to validate our assumptions about our beliefs.  We already know they are the source from which “we” derive our current understanding.  We want to test them.

Next, find independent resources.  If you believe in Harry Potter as a real person, we don’t use the Harry Potter series to validate our beliefs.  We take it a step further and research sources about the author that provide evidence of Harry Potter in other valid resources.

We start by researching J. K. Rowling.  We find out she began writing the series in 1991.  No other sources of evidence show that Harry Potter and the magician existed before this time.  There are no other sources that validate his existence by any other person.  There is no scientific evidence to support the existence of the reality that J. K. Rowling discusses in her book series.

So, although we may strongly want to believe Harry Potter and his world are real, there is no evidence to support it.  We want to seek evidence, not opinion, myths, or stories.

Do this with other people, avatars, or divine beings like Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, or Odin.  You’ll find their stories told in many timelines and languages.  For example, the stories of Odin are recounted in several languages dating back to Germanic, Scandinavian, and Norse oral traditions before 1 CE.  But, the widespread of a story does not make it true.  Just as the wide distribution of Harry Potter does not make his existence true, it’s a universal principle that applies to all avatars and divine beings, including God or whatever name you give.

So, look for other evidence of your topic in other worldviews.  If you look for Odin, you’ll find a lot of different stories.  There isn’t one “agreed upon” authoritative reference for the life of Odin like there is for other mythologies.  Some myths can be traced to the probable existence of an individual, like Buddha.

5) What Does the Research Say?  Analyze the Results.

Up until now, you’ve been gathering that data.  Now we start challenging your core beliefs with the evidence.

Your research should present a story or several versions of a story.  What does the evidence tell you?  Don’t fall back on, “well, here’s what I believe.”  Instead, learn to look at what the facts of the evidence tell you.

The facts are Harry Potter’s story has been translated into hundreds of languages and has a following in the hundreds of millions worldwide.  His story provides many parables, and analogies and teachings contain valuable lessons.  Yet, it is fiction—just as are all the major religions.

6) Revise Beliefs Based on the Data

If you believed Harry Potter was real at the beginning of your research, you probably don’t think so now.  We can still like the story and watch the movies, but we glean the lessons and enjoy it as fiction.

In Conclusion

It’s essential to realize Western organized religion does not want you to seek the facts.  They don’t want you to grow or think for yourself.  Organized religion hates it when you start challenging your core beliefs.  When you seek evidence, it undermines their control.  Their main goal is to keep you a paying customer.   Truth and facts are a threat to their cash flow.

There are legitimate ways to explore your spiritual path.  We call it spiritual exploration, which involves using methods for exploring consciousness.  We even teach these techniques in a blended learning process designed to your specific learning needs.  This learning platform reflects what Joseph Campbell calls the Hero’s Journey (1).

References

(1) Joseph Campbell, The Book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.