Our biases or culturally and epoch based opinions we consider normal, may not have always been normal. Look at what you think is normal, as being strange, and see things from a different perspective. Do you have sufficient evidence and rationally coherent beliefs? Are your beliefs compatible with each other? Where do contradictions lie, and how can you justify yourself? There is a dependent origination for everything, a cause to every effect, things exist based on prior causes, and your conscious state is interwoven into the web of causality. If you can be a cause, you can influence the future, be the cause that produces the future which you wish to manifest. Others may show you reasons and truths, but consciously justifying it is your job, and your actions, and in general, your Being, create a ripple effect of causality, which can potentially modify the world in a useful and beneficial way, or the contrary, optimizing this modification towards wellbeing and truth is our individual responsibility. In making sure we manifest the values which we have developed as being important, there are better and worse ways to do so, and we should diligently strive to uncover what these ways are, and through experience, learn what does and doesn’t fall in line with our beliefs.
Look at why you do anything, where you learned it, even with language and thoughts, it all comes from somewhere, this is where practice in mindfulness helps you realize what is automated or cultivated and what you control. You can control what influences affect you, thus you consciously control the causes that will produce an effect from you in the future. This is the importance in discerning the right influences which enter into our experiences, teachers, friends, even something subtle such as music can affect you, so choose your influences to reflect your beliefs or they may lead you to be someone you don’t want to be. The danger is in allowing content contrary to our values to affect us, and in its re-occurrence, rubbing off on our character and beliefs and becoming habituated. Once contrary values become instantiated in our Being, and they become normalized, you won’t realize where you went wrong, or that you went wrong at all.
Seek Truth 