So my dad used to say that: 'open your eyes, they won't fall out' whenever we, as kids, could not find something or were too lazy to look for ourselves.

We always need to look for ourselves, no one can 'see' for us.

Whatever your system of reality is, this is still true. You can't just go along with pop culture to decide your reality, you can't even just go along with what you grew up with. You have to open your eyes and see farther than your hometown.

I'm a Christian, but I think deeply about that. I test it, I try it out in every circumstance. Does this Christian stuff really work? I try to read up on Atheists who converted to Christianity to see what they saw, because they thought about it deeply and they tested it. One of my best and oldest friends in this life is an Atheist and so he tests my Christian beliefs all the time. It makes me think, it makes me probe and test. It has to be real. I can't just accept things at face value.

Even in my spiritual experiments with Hinduism (Vedanta), Buddhism and Taoism when I lived in Asia, it was always, what is the deepest part here, where does it go? What is the ultimate end?

"I myself will see him with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!" Job 19:27 was always the goal and still is.