In life we’re always looking for evidence to support our beliefs. If we believe in a higher power, we take all the good and the bad in our daily life and associate it with that higher power, proclaiming that it was His or Her will to either make things happy and easy or to put us through challenges so that we might become better for it. On the other hand, if we don’t believe in a higher power, we believe everything happens by chance, by coincidence, or by mere luck.

Things happen quite similarly when we’re looking for evidence about the people around us. If we see them as good people, as beings full of light, then we gather evidence about how amazing they are and we overlook the bad things or attribute them to momentary lapses in judgment rather than willfully wrong things. On the other hand, if we have already decided that someone is not trustworthy or is a bad person, everything they do will come as evidence to that. If they do something bad, then it supports our belief, if they do something good, we think there’s an ulterior motive to their good deed. At the end of the day whether we believe someone is a good person or a bad one, we will find ways to prove that our beliefs are correct.

So the question remains, what evidence do you want to gather about yourself and about the people around you? While making sure you don’t let yourself be blinded by one belief or the other, do you want to see every gesture as the act of a good person or do you want to put people in the bad category and not even acknowledge them when they do something good?