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We’ve all heard the phrase, “Opinions are like… noses; everybody has one.” Our opinions are shaped by our individual experiences. They are our personal beliefs about things, and our beliefs are formulated over time based on our likes, dislikes, and perceptions.
When I was in sixth grade, I had an experience where I was ostracized by all the girls who had been my “friends.” The episode may have lasted only a few weeks, but in my memory it felt like months. From that experience, I created a belief that girls - women - could not be trusted. I believed I had to guard my feelings and emotions, because others might use them against me.
That belief became an opinion about people, based on something that really happened. The fact was, those girls did exclude me. The opinion was, “women can’t be trusted.”
Facts can be tricky. A fact is something that appears to be objectively verifiable - something measurable, observable, or commonly agreed upon. And yet, facts change. What was once considered factual in science, culture, or even in our own memories can shift as new information emerges.
Over time, I came to see that my sixth-grade experience was one small event, not a universal truth. I created new experiences (new “facts”) and discovered that women could, in fact, be some of the most loyal and loving friends imaginable.
In The New Thought Dictionary, Truth is defined as:
“In its universal sense, The Truth means God, Spirit, Reality; in a lesser sense, the word truth designates anything that is true – a psychological truth, a spiritual truth, a physical truth.”
And in The Basic Ideas of Science of Mind, Ernest Holmes reminds us:
“We need to keep clearly in mind the difference between a fact, something that is evident and concrete, and a truth, that which everlastingly is, whether we can see it or not.”
So, I had a very human experience (a fact) and created opinions based on those facts. Yet the Truth remains: God is over us, around us, through us, and as us. We experience our Divinity at the level of our consciousness.
As souls ever expanding, I wonder sometimes if humanity is still learning the same lessons, over and over. History repeats itself - not because Truth changes, but because we forget to apply it.
It’s said that the average American now consumes about 34 gigabytes of information a day. That’s an extraordinary amount of data to process! With so much information coming at us, discernment becomes a spiritual practice.
Discernment helps us ask: Is this information true or merely opinion? If it’s fact, what is it based on? Will it still be a fact six months from now? And it reminds us: It’s always okay to change your mind when you receive new facts. Change is the one constant of life on this earthly plane.
In the introduction to the 1938 edition of The Science of Mind, Ernest Holmes wrote:
“We are not bound by precedent. We are not slaves to any tradition. The revelation of Truth is not closed to the human mind. We are open to the influx of new thought, to the receptive awareness of new ideas.” He later condensed that to the phrase we know so well: “Open at the top.”
This doesn’t mean our philosophy changes; it means we are willing to look at new ways to apply Ancient Wisdom. When we do, we truly embody what it means to have a New Thought.
Rev Gayle
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