We are all seeking to enter the Kingdom of God—the kingdom of love. And then we stub our toes, over and over, on difficulties with others. We’re full of goodwill and we know about basic spiritual truths and how important love is.

Yet obstacles still arise.

The main problem here is blindness—others’ and our own. In their blindness, others hurt us. In our own blindness, we don’t see how much we hurt them in return.

Whenever we think our suffering is caused by someone else, we are not in reality.

To keep believing this is to remain blind—and therefore lost.

We build these elaborate cases against others—and we see them so clearly—fortifying our position by focusing only on their errors. We need to turn that light on ourselves and see what we are doing. Because objectivity is a fundamental requirement for being unselfish—and for having the capacity to love.

The more we battle against what we can’t change—which largely includes everything and everyone—the more unhappy we become. This happens regardless of how right we are or how wrong the other may be.

This brings us face-to-face with our opinions.

Holding wrong opinions

What exactly are they, these ironclad opinions of ours? Many we accept without question, even when we don’t know if they are truly ours.

Or why we believe them.

Under the weight of our emotional baggage, many of us carry opinions that aren’t actually ours.

These might be valid opinions. But if they aren’t our own—if we didn’t arrive at them through our own mature thought processes—it is more harmful than holding a wrong opinion that we came to in an honest way.

In other words, an honest mistake is better than an opinion formed through weak reasoning and lack of courage.

As humans, we’re fallible.

Sometimes we make mistakes.

But this doesn’t address the why we adopt opinions not of our own making.

One possible reason is that we’re lazy. If it’s not directly our problem, we may think it’s not important enough to make the effort of thinking independently about it—for the sake of truth.

So we’ll grab someone else’s opinion and try it on for size. If it fits well enough—we’re sold. We somehow think this is preferable to holding no opinion.

Another reason is that we feel inferior. In that case, we are so certain that others know better than we do, we’ll rely on them for forming our opinions for us.

The odd thing is, the more opinions we hold that aren’t our own, the more we secretly come to dislike ourselves. The more we despise ourselves, the greater our apparent need to let someone else think for us.

We need the courage to step off this wheel.

Forming an honest opinion

When we do formulate our own view of things, we may find our ideas differ from others. Then it takes courage to live by them, possibly even paying the price of swimming against popular opinion. If we do this, though, we will automatically find a whole new pool of self-respect.

And this is what sets us free.

On the other hand, we may come to the same opinion we held before, but now we truly own it. Then the courage it took to break free from the yoke of our previous weakness will have the same positive effect.

Perhaps we were being a conformist, just trying to fit in. This can stem from an immature sense of being different, of not belonging, of being unique—and not in a good way.

This is the reason behind children wanting to be like other children. They can feel deep shame about their imagined differences. As we mature, this tendency changes, and our opinions need to evolve with it.

Here’s something else to watch for. We may still have a craving to belong, but we secretly harbor feelings of rebellion against authority. Then we may compensate for this rebellion by conforming in other ways.

We borrow public opinion.

Alternatively, we may want to cover up a wish that we deny ourselves by adopting the opposite opinion. This can happen when our desires don’t conform to public opinion, and we are convinced those desires are wrong. Such opinions are often rigid or extreme.

We might even hold an opinion simply because it’s the opposite of one held by a hated and rejected authority. In this type of defiance, rebellion and hate, we are just as bound as if we were conforming.

We’re still dependent on others.

In all these cases, we are not being true to ourselves. We are selling out for an imagined gain.

This leads to self-hate which we then bury in the depths of our unconscious.

So it’s not hard to see how harmful it can be to hold an opinion we didn’t come to on our own.

Our motivation matters

The point here has nothing to do with whether the opinion is a valid one. We can all justify and rationalize our choices. The point is: how did we arrive at it?

What motivates us—that’s what really matters.

It may require a large dose of self-honesty to form an honest opinion.

We need to be aware of just how creative we can be with our reasoning. Our Lower Self is very clever. We can justify just about any viewpoint.

But if we are even more honest, can we challenge ourselves to see the point in the opposite view?

Whether the topic is politics, religion, love or sex, we may have a personal stake in our opinion—we are not able to be completely objective.

Such exploration develops greater self-honesty.

And that is what truly nourishes the soul.

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Read Original Pathwork^® Lecture: #51 Importance of Forming Independent Opinions