In our formative years we build what I call our Body of Truth (everything we believe) solely through our experience. As we grow and mature, reading and listening can become an agent for acquiring new truth, but even as adults we have a hard time allowing our experiential truth to be rooted out or displaced by other means. I define experiential truth to be this: That which seems to work because it allows me to get what I want and do what I want to do! I feel bad and want something, so I cry to get it. It works, so I keep doing it. Acquiring truth experientially is the most common way people get it.
Experiential truth seems to be self-validating but it is a slippery slope. Acquiring truth solely by experience is the kind most likely to cause us to believe a lie because our experience is influenced by the previous garbage we have allowed to infest our Body of Truth. Every lie we have previously believed corrupts our ability to process new experiences without putting a spin on them that makes them compatible with the previous lies we have accepted as truth. When a lifetime of lies has been stuffed into our Body of Truth without some sort of house cleaning, the results can be devastating.
By the time our Body of Truth is well formed it becomes the driving force for most of our thinking. For human beings, thinking is a full time job. We are always thinking about something. Our thoughts just seem to appear from nowhere. One thought leads to another and where our thoughts will end up is hard to predict. I can start out thinking about the weather and end up worrying about nuclear proliferation. The amazing thing about thinking is this: We can’t comfortably think in ways that conflict with the primary beliefs that live in our Body of Truth. Our thinking is literally controlled and shaped by the things we believe to be true.
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