Changes in what we believe matter only when they change how we believe.

And changes in how we believe matter most when they change why we believe.

Changes in why and how we believe matter because they change not only the content our beliefs but in the very conceiving that engenders beliefs.

These changes reach deep behind the content of thought, and fundamentally reshape our experience of the world and our selves within the world. The deep reach is depth itself.

The givens of experience, the immediate intuitions preceding words — the givens that call words to mind, the givens that sometimes leave us speechless, the givens that address us and call forth a response — …these immediate givens change in ways that are literally inconceivable prior to their advent. Epiphanies burst into the world from nowhere, making the imperceptible nothingness that saturates reality suddenly conspicuous.

Yes, in changing our conceiving, beliefs do change.

Yes, in changing our conceiving, behaviors do change.

Yes, entertaining new beliefs and trying new behaviors, does sometimes change our conceiving.

Yet, to change our beliefs and behaviors is not, in itself, to change our conceiving.

When we entertain something new or we try something new, we offer these things to ourselves, to see how our deeper self — our intuitive self — our faith — responds to them.

Are we willing to respect the judgment of faith? Can we respect it, anymore? How do we experience its acceptance or rejection?

If we habitually neglect our faith, or overrule it, or talk over it, or argue it into submission, or misrepresent it, or imprison it in theories — (these are things we all do to some degree or another) — how can we even experience it at all? It is easy to succumb to bad faith — and replace faith with logic, consensus, fantasy or, in cases of mass-delusion, all three at once.

When we invent an idea and consider it, what are we doing?

We are offering that idea to our soul.

Will our soul embrace the idea with conception? Or will our soul hold the idea at arms length, conceiving only its elements and its logical cohesions, but repelling the organic whole?

When we conceive on the whole, and we conceive each part, and we conceive the relationship of whole-to-parts and parts-to-whole — that is when we understand.

Our conceiving is our being.

Our beliefs and our behaviors are symptoms of our being.

Conceiving our conceiving indirectly, by noticing spontaneous changes in our beliefs, behaviors, perceptions, emotions, values — our whole experience — our very objectivity — in response to what we entertain and try and accept at the deepest levels — changes everything, literally.

But we must get beyond the content and the forms and the objects — objectivity — and learn to know the subjectivity who conceives objectivity.

We must completely reconceive the relationship between subject and object.

Once we understand that a personal subject — a subject like me or you — is a subject in the same sense as an academic subject — one of myriad possible ways to know, experience and participate in reality.

A subjectivity is known by its fruits — the content of its enworldment.