Discernment in Times of Uncertainty

Right now, we live in a time that is increasingly both fascinating and uncertain. Every day, we find that so much is going on right now, and there is highly contradictory and divisive information about practically everything. Even a simple search for, say, properties and benefits of certain foods and diets can yield information that wildly differs from each other. You don’t have to be searching about current events or politics to encounter this issue: the spiritual and esoteric community, history, ufology, technology, literature, health – literally everything has that problem. So, what do we do when there is so much information? What is the truth in all of this?

I myself wonder that every day, as someone who encounters those issues when reflecting on what I have heard, read, or watched. However, I will never forget how I strongly resonated with certain information that I have encountered in my life, such as some of the concepts that I’ve read from the Law of One (L.L. Research). When you find something that truly shakes you to the core, that you know with your whole being that what you’ve just witnessed has some truth to it, if not the whole truth – then you’ve probably experienced one of the most clear, intuitive communications from your higher self, or that aspect of your self that already knows the truth. Currently, this is what I believe we should aim to achieve when trying to discern – this complete, inner knowing and clarity. However, my belief is that we should not forget about other aspects that are just as important in discernment: our ability to analyze and reason, our emotional intelligence, maintaining inner harmony, and keeping an open mind to all possibilities. One way we can think of it is akin to a “helping hand” to what your intuition tells you. This is kind of the equivalent of a guiding star on a night sky while everything else is the path and the scene that you are traversing through – the cliffs, the treacherous waters and waves, the landscapes, and any obstacles that you must maneuver through to reach your destination, to what your intuition has guided you toward all along.

Intuition & Spiritual Aspects

Let’s start by exploring our own inner compass towards truth, wisdom, and knowledge: our intuition. For some, listening to intuition comes as easy as breathing. However, for others who aren’t used to listening to their own inner guidance – their intuition? It will be harder, but not impossible. After all, we already do it automatically when it comes to assessing our immediate environment.

For instance, let’s say that you were supposed to attend a gathering of some sort – like a friend’s party, or something else – and as soon as you get near the place where that gathering is at, you just feel tension and maybe even anxiety from the whole place. Those feelings get stronger as soon as you enter the party and become surrounded by other attendees. Later on, someone tells you that a big fight broke out before you came in, and things got a bit out of hand. You could say, that it really changed the vibe of the whole gathering. Likewise, when you feel that there’s excitement in the air yet no one says or expresses it to you physically – that is also something you pick up intuitively.

Another good example is something I myself have experienced, and most likely you have as well. You meet a new person, but something just feels… off. You can’t exactly say what it is that unsettles you, until you begin to converse with that person and encounter various situations. In those situations, you are shown that yes, this isn’t a good person, and supposedly you aren’t the only one who has problems with that person, and what he or she has done. The vibe, the energy was just off about that person, and intuitively, you picked that up from your environment.

Now when it comes to discerning information, it is a fairly similar thing. Sometimes, we just know and feel that something is true. That unknown knowledge and certainty – the conviction – is felt with our very core, with our whole being. It simply just resonates with us. And then, as if by fate, we begin to encounter pieces of information that seem to support what we’ve resonated with, as if life itself is trying to show us that it is indeed true, to guide us towards the truth. At other times, events happen that prove that “Yeah, this is indeed what is happening,” like synchronicities. These are just some of the means through which information is being communicated with us spiritually. Now, this process gets more interesting if we are conscious of these things and our own intuition, and when we set an intention to go inward and find the truth.

To my knowledge, when it comes to conscious seeking through esoteric means, it is often achieved through meditation of some form and while maintaining that state where almost all of your senses and wandering thoughts are shut down or dulled down, we ask for guidance or questions from a specific or general source. I do want to warn that it may not always be safe if we don’t know what we are doing. I will go into rough details of the safety mechanisms, as a more in-depth look into meditation, channeling, remote viewing, or general esoteric practices and its mechanisms (including the role of intention) should be articles of their own.

Here are the following safety mechanisms:

1. Consciously set up means to protect yourself before you start asking your questions, or use that as a focus to start meditating. For instance: imagine a barrier made of light surrounding your entire body or your biofield/aura through which nothing can pass as it cleanses or transmutes the darkness into light. You can be quite creative as to what you can imagine so long as it envelops you completely and deters the darkness. Some people even imagine a mirror for a biofield, reflecting back any darkness to the receiver, not allowing any to attach. Other types of barriers I heard of are fire walls that burn the negative tendrils, impassable water walls that wash off anything, or stone guardians that don’t let anyone or anything pass, or even a prayer or mantra. Again: choose what best works for you. I did notice that when you are in a more highly vibrational state (ex: currently experiencing love, joy, peace, happiness) and not in a low vibrational state (ex: fearful, angry, sad, depressed), your shield is easier to setup and is more effective. Likewise, meditation also becomes easier to accomplish, as you are able to focus more easily and without any internal or external distractions or conflicts.

2. Phrase your query very specifically as to who can provide you guidance. You never know who is answering you and what intentions they have. Personally, I like the one that is used in one of the meditation videos by the Monroe Institute: “I am more than my physical body. Because I am more than physical matter, I can perceive that which is greater than the physical world. Therefore, I deeply desire to expand, to experience, to know, to understand, to control, to use such greater energies and energy systems as may be beneficial and constructive to me and to those who follow me. Also, I deeply desire the help and cooperation, the assistance, the understanding of those individuals whose wisdom, development, and experience are equal or greater than my own. I ask for their guidance and protection from any influence or any source that might provide me with less than my stated desires.” (source: “Free Hemi Synch Guided Meditation” YouTube video, Monroe Institute, also to get started with for beginners). There are other ways of phrasing it (or visualizing it, because that is an option), but this is one of them.

3. If something feels off about the information or the entity you are receiving it from, then listen to your intuition – it’s probably for a good reason. Appearances can be very deceiving – and I do mean that literally, an entity can pretend to look like someone else you know or have seen. However, one thing that is impossible to mask is the energy of our own soul, or being. Like with people, you’d usually feel an unexplained anxiety, tension, or something else that will unsettle you. Interestingly enough, such entities are afraid of us as much as we are perhaps of them; the protection we setup (especially the one made of light) seems to harm them. So, cease any connections with the entity (you can visualize it getting severed even), stay determined and do not get consumed by fear (it will make your actions less effective, just like in our everyday lives), strengthen the barrier, and do not be afraid to ask for help from other beings, if needed. There is always someone out there who can help – often times, we just need to ask in order to open the door for them to come through.

It takes practice and lots of fine tuning to get clear, quality answers through meditation or other practices. I am not a master of these – far from it, as I am also learning just like you – but I do know some of the pitfalls and the basic workings of the processes. To get started with consciously connecting to our intuitive side for the first time – it’s more than enough. Regardless, our intuition and the spiritual aspects need to be taken into account when considering what information is truthful and what is not, and sometimes we need to pay attention to our environment for anything that is being communicated to us, and to listen to our own intuition. This is our guiding star, our own inner compass by which we navigate through our life.

The Non-Intuitive Aspects

As I mentioned before, the other aspects will help us to navigate through the many obstacles in our world when you combine them with intuition and spirituality. Mainly, they help by forming a clearer path through the difficult terrain of information – a path whose destination is defined by our intuition, that inner guidance of ours.

First, let’s start with emotional intelligence. What exactly is it? In its basic form, according to various dictionaries, it is “the ability to manage both your own emotions and understand the emotions of people around you.” Now the reason for why it is highly important is because we sometimes become emotionally reactive to certain subjects, which can be anything from a situation to a specific individual. This reactive mode is akin to an instinctual response of fight or flight, driven by fear or other strong, usually negative emotion. Now, there are many reasons as to why an emotional response may arise towards a specific subject. To put it shortly, it comes down to several things:

1. Is this emotion yours or is it coming from your environment? Empaths may relate to this especially, as they can easily pick up the feelings of others and mistakenly identify them as their own. Additionally, in psychology there is something called second hand or vicarious trauma. It is a type of trauma that is acquired despite not personally experiencing them – typically by internalizing the suffering or negative experiences of other people. It is fascinating how quite similar this is to what I have described earlier. While I do not have extensive personal experience with that type of trauma, I do know of one thing that helped me as an empath, and maybe it might help you as well. What I found that works for myself is to say with conviction, sometimes several times like a meditative mantra: “I release all of negative thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that are not my own.” If it is truly not my own, I start to feel much better. This also works if you’ve picked up thoughts and beliefs that aren’t yours. Hence beware if you are taking on thoughts, emotions, and beliefs of others as opposed to forming your own, whether it was done through manipulation/social engineering or not.

2. If the emotion is yours, what is it trying to reveal to you? Emotions, when we don’t let them take control over us, are there to guide us when we try to understand why we feel a certain way and where they are coming from. I noticed that it is often related to the lessons we must learn, and typically to become aware of a deeper truth. Usually, a situation triggers because emotions are one way to bring to your attention that something is out of balance, that an awareness of something – and sometimes a resolution – is needed to spiritually grow. A lot of times, our triggered reactions happen unconsciously and for various reasons. It could be that we are avoiding acknowledging a certain truth because it reveals something that we’d rather hide in our closet. At other times, it could be more about how we respond to the truth itself, if it is known. Or, it could be because of a dissonance between our spiritual self – our true self and the deeper truth it already knows – versus what we believe we know but isn’t the full truth, like blindly believing someone or something without a question or thought despite knowing deeply inside that something is wrong or we aren’t being true to ourselves. There are many reasons. Regardless, once the truth is known, truly accepted, and understood, it then leads to healing and a gradual decrease (and in rare cases, immediate resolution) of that emotional response. You may even cease to encounter your triggering situations, mostly because you break any attachments to the trigger and have learned what was needed from those situations. It is kind of like the Russian saying about stepping on the same rake multiple times and getting hit with it in the process – you’ll keep stepping on it and getting hit until you truly understand that it is there and it shouldn’t be stepped on, that perhaps you need to take it and put it away.

Regardless of why the emotional response arises, it is not bad to feel negative emotions towards the subject of your emotions. However, we spiritually misalign ourselves when we constantly lean into those emotions – when we hold on to them tightly, when we do not question why we have them and their origin, and when we let them control us and our actions instead of guiding us. When we are in those states, we tend to ignore all information in regards to the subject, whose truth may prove to be the opposite of what those feelings and actions were founded upon. We are utterly blind in those states, becoming prone to deception and manipulation, and judgements are formed out of anger, fear, fanaticism, depression, or other negative emotions and not from truth. Persecution, for instance, is born from judgement, or that plus an agenda. So, when we make conscious actions from those states – especially towards the subject of our emotions – we fail to see the full truth within the information about the subject. When I say conscious actions, that also includes forming opinions or making decisions about something – any choice we make. Therefore, because we do not have the full information, we fail to fully discern the truth, and we do more harm than the perceived good when taking conscious actions. It is even worse when they are unconscious actions. In other words: reactions.

Emotional intelligence is therefore very important. Otherwise, we can lose our objectivity and become susceptible to getting swayed by something that may be false, whether it’s our own projections or external manipulation. This also ties in to inner harmony, actually. We need to have inner peace when we are delving into any topic regardless of our own beliefs. It does not mean we cannot feel those emotions, as stated previously, but it does mean that we need to make a conscience choice to become aware of them, understand them, and let them go before proceeding further. It will also help us to be more in tune with ourselves – that spiritual side of us, our heart – as opposed to the mind, especially when the mind is egoic and not consciously directed.

I don’t know about you, but you may have noticed something after reading about emotional intelligence – that everything I pointed out in the second paragraph of this article is interconnected with one another. For instance, in order to not let emotions control us, we need to have inner peace and listen to our intuition, understand our and others’ emotions, and to have an open mind to all possibilities. Possibilities that this is false, half true, fully true, or that perhaps what we believed in wasn’t the truth or the full picture to begin with. Maybe it’s 20% truth, or perhaps 50%, or more… or less.

Having an open mind is what leads to growth and expansion – after all, we ourselves create more room for new possibilities and awareness to fill in, either by getting another room to fill or by getting rid of things in the existent room that no longer serve our highest good. If not, if we perceive this room to be already full and complete, then how can we become more aware of something deeper than what we initially thought when there is no space for it to come into? Most don’t become aware because of this belief and perception, and that is one of the few reasons as to why you have, for example, scientists who hold on tightly to very specific theories despite another researcher pointing out the obvious holes in it. It happens in a lot situations, from very complex and official ones – like finding evidence of historical inaccuracies and struggling with getting officials to acknowledge them – down to the very mundane, everyday conversations between each other on a variety of topics. With these examples, we can then go onto the last point of the non-intuitive aspects.

When paired with intuition, our ability to reason and analyze is what helps us to work with the information we’ve got. Ask questions and compare and contrast with the information that was gathered. Does this information make sense? What is my intuition showing me? What is the intention behind so and so, and what does it actually achieve versus intended? Is there a contradiction in what someone said versus what they did? What does this make me feel and is it purposeful? Who exactly are these people who said/did so and so? Do they have any connections to something/someone else and what are they? Are these connections strongly supported? Are the goals of those connections contradictory to what the person supposedly says/does? Did this person said/did what they personally wanted, or did someone else told them to? Is this person being influenced by someone/something, and what exactly is it? To what extent is the person being influenced? What does the opposition say? Is there anything strange in this person’s behavior?

As you can see, there are a lot of avenues and inquiries that we can explore to help us arrive to an answer closest to the truth, if not the truth itself. The idea here is to keep asking questions and analyzing the information we have in order to draw the right conclusions. While we should utilize reason and analysis as part of our discernment, this may not always be achievable if the topic has either too much disinformation (quantity does not always equal to quality!) or scarcity of information. Always listen to your intuition when there is too much confusion or contradictions – it’ll help to sort through when it becomes too muddy.

In other instances, it is simply about waiting for the right moment in time to acquire the information we seek, such as getting new research, new events, new angles to explore – there are many possibilities. This information, however, may not always come in a way or the form we expect. Sometimes it is tangible, and at other times it comes through synchronicities, letting us know that we are heading in the right direction with our thinking. For example, just the other day I was exploring with my father some ideas and theories about time and space and the possibilities of manipulating them and creating technology, from teleportation to mimicking “infinite energy” and an “infinite processor.” The next day, I became nostalgic and decided to rewatch some TV series from my childhood. You can imagine my surprise when a character in it mentioned the manipulation of time and space as a reason for being transported into a different world, which I have forgotten about completely. After all, I have not seen this show in a very, very long time. So, do you see how certain clues can appear to us in such unexpected ways? In my case, it was a confirmation that time and space is more unusual than what we perceive it to be – that we might find interesting things about both, and thus build an even more accurate portrait of our reality. So, noticing these synchronicities, be it through events, words, numbers, symbols, or anything else can definitely help to find answers when we are aware of the synchronicities and understand what they are. They are always there, but we often don’t notice them or think much about them.

With everything that I have explored in this section, we can use all of this knowledge to help build up our critical thinking, but also to help ourselves in everyday life. Healing ourselves from emotional wounds or trauma, or understanding ourselves in order to become a better version of us, or helping our friends and loved ones when needed – there’s a lot of different things and applications. Not only that, but a lot of these aspects are part of our everyday life and existence – it’s is simply our choice whether we want to be aware of and work with them to help ourselves and those around us or not.

A Delicate Balance

Discernment is really about understanding the processes that go on internally and externally – finding the truth in each and every matter. And yet, in order to begin to discern, we need to tune ourselves to our own inner guidance as much as possible. It brings new ideas, thoughts, observations – anything, really – into our awareness. Only through this awareness, we can truly understand the challenges that we face so that we learn from them and grow, and choose the path most suitable for ourselves individually. This is why I gravitate toward the analogy of a guiding star, which is our intuition – and spirituality as a whole. Without it, we are lost, aimlessly traveling through oceans, rivers, mountains, and paths that do not lead anywhere specific – not without a destination, a guiding star that helps us when we go off course. I like this analogy, as this beautifully illustrates the relationship between our spiritual self and our mental, physical, and emotional aspects in navigating the world around us.

Of course, the aspects and processes that I have described so far are just some of the ones that stood out to me the most, as what I am describing is my current understanding of how these things help me in my own discernment and spiritual journey. There’s a lot more nuance and a lot more things that we can pay attention to when discerning, as everything is far more complex than what I described – and there are most likely aspects I probably missed. What I do know is that everything is connected to each other, like delicate strands of web where tugging on one part may affect the others. The ones I listed in this article so far are simply the ones I encounter the most in myself and others. My only hope is that by bringing this information into collective awareness, it will in turn, help each and every one of us to spiritually grow. Instead of giving up our own will to someone else – to tell us what to think, believe, act – we instead start analyzing and understanding everything ourselves, and use all of our own abilities that we were born with, and which, like many things, we have forgotten about.

When we follow our heart, our intuition, and discern the truth in any situation that we encounter, and then understand the lessons that were presented to us, and we reflect that understanding through every choice and action we take from that point on, and grow and evolve from there? That is true wisdom.