Don’t be afraid to let your faith and beliefs evolve. Everything in us is geared toward figuring out all the “right” things to believe and then defending them and promoting them as what everyone else needs to believe, like they’re perfect in their current form and don’t need any revision or reformation. But the real truth is being uncovered, it is evolving and it is conversation. It’s not that the truth is changing necessarily; it’s that it is still emerging. You’ve just been wrong and underinformed this whole time. If your relationship with truth and the world is not also evolving, you’re becoming irrelevant. I guess that’s okay if that’s what you’re going for, but it is unwise and will become stressful.

When you are met with an experience that conflicts with your present conclusions, you have a choice to make. You can try to assimilate the new information (learn) somehow, or double down on your previously held beliefs and defend them with everything you have. You might even go further and believe others need to do the same: learn your way of being and believing and be “right” like you are “right.” That’s a dangerous thing if you haven’t discovered the whole truth and it is yet still emerging.

Many of us have been taught we will be saved by believing all the right things. That’s not a very interesting way to live your life and it is not the deepest truth. The deepest truth is more life-changing. It will change your inner makeup, the way you feel and who you are, and thereby how you behave in the world. The only way to get there is to die to what you currently believe. People are busy trying to figure out how to save themselves when the whole point is dying.

If you are willing to go through that death and rebirth, then you are also willing to surrender your current way of seeing. That is the practice – to let go of currently held beliefs and break apart your belief system to see if it’s actually useful – transformational, translatable and transferrable. Does your way of seeing produce fruit (is it transformational)? Is it useful to other people who are different from you (is it translatable)? Is it abstractable and universal (is it transferrable)?

Here are some signs your belief system needs to evolve: it doesn’t work outside your bubble. It is blunt, imprecise and unintuitive. You are busy trying to cram people inside your belief system instead of listening and trying to understand the particularities of their experiences. You start swinging “the truth” around like a club even when it isn’t the most likely thing to conclude in a given context. You are busy trying to make what you believe the only and largest context when it doesn’t fit inside another context. That’s imperialism and that’s when it’s time to practice letting your belief structure die and be reborn in a different form.