Living Spiritual Rhythms Book 4 - October 11

Feelings and experience can often attempt to be our sole sources and criteria for assessing who we are and what the world is like. Someone says, “I feel like I have to accomplish something in order to be liked.” Why? “Because this has been my experience.” Another says, “I feel ashamed and have to hide my real self from others.” Why? “Because this has been my experience.” Both confirm, “this is who I am and the way the world works.” While feelings and experience are valid dimensions of being human, the question of whether or not we should trust or be suspicious of them cannot be solely based on feelings and experience. Why? In themselves they offer no valid way to discern if the perceptions of ourselves and the world are accurate. Unless we’re willing to go for the jugular and raise the difficult question of what is true, we will spin around in circles of the same, never having adequate criteria for being able to evaluate which feelings and experiences can be considered trustworthy and which suspicious. Once we begin to focus on this explosive question and start to answer it, trust and suspicion will function in better ways that will in turn lead to a truer view of ourselves and the world.