Self discipline is essential to spiritual growth as well as emotional growth, and one area in which we need to discipline ourselves is our dedication to truth and reality. Our everyday behavior is based upon our understanding of the nature of the world around us. If our understanding is accurate, we generally know where we are in life and we have a good sense of purpose and direction. The light of our truth illuminates our spiritual environment and allows us to see clearly rocks and shoals along our spiritual path. On the other hand, if our understanding of the world is inaccurate or incomplete, we are more likely to get spiritually lost and find ourselves in situations that we do not understand. We may feel confused and uncertain how to solve our problems and lacking in a clear purpose and direction in our lives.

It is our responsibility, therefore, to make sure our view of reality is accurate. It is sort of like a "map" based upon which we get our bearings in life. The problem is, making sure our map is accurate takes effort, sometimes lots of effort. All through out our lives we are faced with new information that may contradict what our map tells us. We can ignore the new information and sail on through life with a possibly inaccurate map, or we can revise and update our map and incorporate new information as we receive it.

Unfortunately, many people choose the easy route and ignore all new information that is inconsistent with their current view of reality. They just do not want to deal with it. This can be psychologically and spiritually unhealthy because we can then become very misguided due to inaccuracies in our map, and as a result make wrong decisions in life. This may be one reason people become closed-minded: it is easier to routinely reject new information than to expend the time and energy necessary to find out if it is true and relevant to our lives. It is essential to validate and update our understanding of truth and reality, our map, if we really want to know where we are in life and where we are going, and if we hope to make wise decisions.