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4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools
10/01/2018 By Justin Deschamps 50 Comments
(Justin Deschamps)
We’ve all heard how important discernment is. In an age of deception, seeking the truth with wisdom is essential—it’s a survival skill.
The pros use established methods of discerning that we would greatly benefit from understanding, marrying logic with intuition to form a coherent toolset for meeting the challenges of belief that life has to offer.
I’ll show you 4 key steps that are extremely effective when it comes to discerning a claim, belief, or experience. We’ll also discuss some pitfalls to avoid.
Related What is Sovereignty? Why is it Important? How do You Earn it? | Debunking False Sovereignty
by Justin Deschamps, September 20th, 2018
What Discernment Is Not
Before we talk about what discernment is, we should discuss some misconceptions.
Discernment isn’t about confirming something you hope or want to be true. And it’s not about making you feel better about what you already believe.
Discernment requires honest truth-seeking. You have to want to know the truth, even if it means letting go of a belief you’ve had for a long time.
Be willing to be wrong, so you can learn how to be right.
Secondly, discernment is more about the process than the result.
I know we want a definitive answer, “yes this claim is true, or no it is not.” But rarely does a discernment process give us such clear results. Instead, discernment is more about using a personal investigation process that first and foremost gives you personal knowledge and understanding—you actually learn something that expands your compliment of truth.
Getting to the answer of true or false shouldn’t be your focus, that’s more a side effect of honest and complete investigation.
If you find yourself leaning toward an answer but you don’t understand why it’s true, then you’ve missed out on what discernment should provide you, which is understanding.
If you seek for understanding, instead of an answer, then a conclusion related to the question of “is this true or false?” naturally presents itself.
What is Discernment?
Discernment is defined as the act of judging well—but what are we judging?
No matter what it is you’re trying to discern, the same basic factors are at play: a claim, reality, and comparison.
Whether you’re trying to see if someone told you the truth, attempting to determine if a personal experience and resulting meanings are accurate, or you’re delving deep into highly abstract concepts like the ultimate nature and purpose of existence, discernment is one of the tools you’ll use.
Why is it important?
Because true knowledge is the master key to unlocking all our potentials—the ultimate problem solver is a mind guided by the truth. We need true knowledge to do things correctly in the world.
To play music properly, you need wisdom, the accumulation of true musical knowledge.
To run a successful business, you need true knowledge of the business.
The more true knowledge you accumulate, the more you can understand the past, master the present, and work to realize a self-directed satisfying future.
Role of Consciousness
Consciousness is the foundation for all subjective (personal) experience. The mind is the tool we use to gather data about our experience, whether internal feelings, insights, and intuitions or external observations and sensations.
The body provides the setting for experiencing what the mind records, which includes feelings as well as intellectual data points or nuggets of information.
Stated another way, the mind is the tool we use to recognize patterns—patterns recorded in the mind are representations of reality, not reality itself.
Consciousness is the dynamic exploration and experience of patterns recorded by the mind. Emotions are the overall holistic impression we feel in response to what is recorded in our mind, polarized in either a negative or positive expression dependent on our values, desires, and pre-existing knowledge.
All these factors work together giving us what we experience every day.
Consciousness is the laboratory where we conduct research and investigation to determine if a claim is true or not.
Book The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe — Walter Russell
The Territory and Our Map of Knowledge
Your mind as the ultimate recording device. Even though you are only consciously aware of a small fraction of what’s happening at any given moment, your subconscious records everything.
The mind is essentially a map maker, a cartographer. It takes all the pieces of your experience—like the chair your sitting in right now or the time of day based on ambient light—and records each element as a unique data point, which is a symbol on your map of knowledge.
The thing you observe is the territory (raw or primary reality) while your mind records these observations as thought forms, ideas, or memories—maps of knowledge.
Psychologically, you don’t actually interact directly with the world—there’s too much information buzzing around for you to do that.
Instead, your mind creates maps of knowledge or a kind of biological virtual reality environment where the individual components of experience can be “seen” in the mind’s eye—decisions are made from there.
In this sense, it’s as if the part of us that makes choices, exercises free will, is hovering over a desk with maps on it.
This is very similar to the Pixar film Inside Out.
The right brain works to harmonize or make a single picture of what you experience at any given moment, hence it plays a role in generating emotional charge. The left brain works to break up your experience into threads.
For example, imagine yourself watching a sunset overlooking a mountain valley, filled with streams, grass, trees, singing birds, buzzing bees, and wildlife. Your emotional or right brain aspect of consciousness sees the whole picture, a singular experience.
And it’s the intellectual and left brain aspect that sees each of these things in the territory as separate discrete objects.
The only reason you can remember a single element of an experience is because the intellectual pattern recognition aspect of your mind identifies things abstractly.
That is, a single tree in a beautiful sunset scene is abstract or exists as a thought or idea but not in physical reality because the tree and the landscape can’t really be separated from each other.
It’s only in our consciousness, in our minds, that we can separate the tree from the ground from which it springs forth.
It’s this left brain aspect that we use the most when discerning information from an intellectual perspective.
Key Point: All discernment works by comparing a map of knowledge to reality in some way. A claim, belief or theory, is itself a map of knowledge, whether it’s a personal claim you just intuited or deduced, or a claim coming from someone else, like a friend, a news agency, a scientific organization, or a government.
Book Pactum De Singularis Caelum (Covenant of One Heaven): Sol (Solar System) Version [A Repository of Divine, Natural, and Positive Law for A Golden Age Society]
Step 1: Absorbing the Claim (Making A Personal Copy)
The first thing we need to do is record what a claim is saying in our own minds.
This can sometimes be the hardest step because we can be tempted to jump the gun, trying to get to the end before we’ve even taken stock of what’s going on. We have to absorb the claim accurately and completely.
We can’t pick and choose things about the claim we like or don’t like—that comes later—we have to take it as is, no matter how much it might not resonate with our personal sensibilities. Exercising emotional detachment and clarity of mind helps here.
We have properly seen a claim and internalized it—we have to make an accurate copy of the map for ourselves. Once we have our own personal copy now we can proceed with the discernment process.
For example, if a friend runs up to you and says: “Oh my God! I was just teleported to Venus by a group of highly advanced extraterrestrials!” we need to sit down and carefully review as much of this story as possible so we can clearly comprehend what our friend is saying they experienced.
If you hear “extraterrestrials” and immediately dismiss the whole claim as bogus, you’ve skipped the first step; dismissal without investigation is prejudice based on personal incredulity, not true discernment.
You need to know the claim well enough to recount it accurately. This is critically important.
Avoid This:
A Straw Man fallacy is when you improperly reconstruct a claim in your mind.
If your friend said they were taken to Venus, but you thought they said Mars, you misunderstood their claim, you created a “straw man.”
It’s easy to make this mistake.
This is why being patient, humble, and open-minded is so important, we have to be willing to entertain things that might not feel true so we can form an accurate picture.
Most of the problems people encounter with discernment are due to misconception or not properly reproducing a claim in their own mind.
Don’t rush this step, it takes time and dedication, you need to be able to recognize when you’ve made a mistake and go back to fix it.
Sometimes our instincts flare up and try to convince us that we can skip ahead.
“The mainstream media are liars! I don’t have to understand what they’re saying to know it’s a lie!”
This is not true discernment.
Liars sometimes tell the truth.
If we only focus on a partial picture, it completely changes the meaning of what someone is saying or claiming…
(End Snip)
More at Source:
https://stillnessinthestorm.com/2018/10/4-key-steps-of-discernment-advanced-truth-seeking-tools/
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