“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

– Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley may have been a biologist, and he may have been talking about forming and pursuing a hypothesis in learning something about how the world works, but I hear a message in his words that rings true for our personal journeys as well.

It is no small thing, in the world of Science, to step away from convention and to review the things one has been taught to be true, taking another look at the way old truths stand up to the scrutiny of a child’s eyes.  We must come as children, but possessing the minds of adults, when we decide to take a second look at things that are accepted to be true.  Only through the eyes of a child can we see without prejudice.  Only with the mind of an adult can we then synthesize what we have seen and form a conclusion about what we have observed.  Only then can we decide whether our view of truth has changed.

As we grow and change and become more today than we were yesterday, we need to use the same tools that the scientist brings to his work.  We must consider the things we assume to be true about ourselves.  We must look at the sources of the data we use to form those assumptions.  We must clear our minds of the preconceived notions that would prevent us from seeing clearly with the eyes of a child, and we must then use those clear minds to consider what really is true.

What assumptions do you make when you judge your own strengths and weaknesses?  What judgments have other people placed on you that are not true but have become the basis for your understanding of yourself?  Many times, we carry the negative messages given to us in childhood with us into our adult lives.  Because we took them in at such a tender age, we see them as a part of who we are.  In truth, the judgments of others belong to them, and we have no need to carry them with us.  If we are able to clear our minds of those unnecessary and untrue words, if we are able to look past them to the things we know about who we really are, then we can shed what is not real and find the things that are true about ourselves.  Only when we find what is true will we be able to liberate it and grow it and become who we were born to be.

Clear your mind.  Take a good look, with the eyes of a child, at who you truly are.  Come alive, leave behind the assumptions that have limited your truth.  Become your true self.