In these times of huge misinformation and manipulation of the public, the ability to discern truth from lies is of the utmost importance. We need our discernment to work full-time as a filter, weeding out information that is false and misleading. Even the alternative media is not free from infiltrations by purposeful or accidental misinformation that obfuscates the truth. But not only in the media. Also in the spiritual field, our discernment needs to function like a well-trained muscle. Because we are in times when spirituality is blossoming. Eastern spirituality has settled in Western society, but also all kinds of holistic healing, new spiritual concepts are gaining in popularity. And that's a good thing, because Western man had developed a spiritual void, through its incessant exposure and indoctrination into the strongly limited worldview of modern Western science, reducing consciousness to just a physical phenomenon in the brain. People developed a spiritual hunger because they are discouraged by Western materialism and feel there's more to life. But where there is emptiness and hunger, there are people who play into it. Our ability to discern must always work 100%, because not everyone who claims to be a "spiritual leader" has pure intentions and is a channel of pure information.

Our discernment is closely tied to our perception and our beliefs. To discern the outer world, we must also look inwards and have the ability for introspection and question our beliefs. There must be an "openness", a willingness to be dynamic. When we think things are set in stone and are very sure our way is "the right way", we lose our ability to be discerning. This is closely tied to traumas (big or small) we may hold within ourselves. Shadow forces in the world play into trauma and fear to bypass and break our ability to discern. When a trauma is triggered, we go into fear mode (fight or flight reflex) and our ability to think clearly and calmly gets shut down. This is why discernment is a spiritual practice as well as a logical practise; it deals both with our inner world and the outer world of information.

One of the prime examples when people lose the ability to discern is when they enter a cult. There are numerous examples of cults that have ensnared people in their web, including the Peoples Temple (Jim Jones), Heaven's Gate (Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles), Aum Shinrikyo (Shoko Asahara), and Osho and his followers. Most of these people in the cult completely lost their ability to discern. The cult leader becomes a godlike figure who can do no wrong, even if his behaviour is blatantly toxic. The god like status of the leader cannot be questioned. But in our day and age, it is also much more subtle. You could say that the matrix we are living in, the mainstream version of everything, is like a cult. When you question the status quo, you are branded a conspiracy theorist. You cannot question the official version of events without experiencing some form of being ostracised. This is why our discernment is important. To guide us to the truth, and to be able to sense and spot the lies. This is necessary even in the alternative field. 

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