False ideas must produce dissonance. False ideas are based on ignorance and convenience. Falseness is based on self-fulfilling prophecy. One sees only what one wants to see and hears what ones to hear.
To maintain false ideas in the mind is truly hard work. It is a strain on the mind to shut out truth and justify the false. This is the cause of fatigue and lack of energy to bring about a change and live a different kind of life. The lack of initiative is again a reason not to see false as false. For one knows that no change is possible. So one uses ones position in an organization or in a family to block out any possibility of change.
How do we see a falsehood? Since we don’t know many truths, we cannot know a falsehood opposing a truth that we are cognizant of. Instead, we learn of a falsehood of a proposition seeing it contradicting its own rationale, its own stand as we go through its ramifications impersonally. Truth of a proposition cannot be settled by votes, cannot be settled by its supposed beauty, and cannot be accepted on faith, trust and its longevity. Truth is not a proclivity of any nation, any civilization or any race, nor does it belong to any time, tradition and value system man is often seen imprisoned in.
Sri Anandamayee Ma, a saint in 20th century India, put it in an interesting way. To an atheist seeking truth, she suggested: ‘If you say you have no faith, you should try to establish yourself in the conviction that you have no faith.’ In other words, whatever we propose to be true, we should attempt to rationalize it in our own life as though, in essence, this is what our ethical stand would allow. If it is false, our own life would reveal its emptiness as we lean forward in that conviction