Do you value the truth? Do you want to be able to burn through lies with the speed and intensity of a terawatt laser facing a very thin sheet of paper?

Here's how.

1. Look and see if there's a you.

Start here if you don't understand what this means, or come here if you need extra help doing it.

This step is imperative. Strictly speaking, it's still possible to be brutally honest while operating under the delusion of self. But it's like becoming incredibly good at winning battles with a blunt butter knife when you have a katana sheathed at your side.

For as long as you believe in a self, you are handicapped when it comes to honesty. Being right matters. Being wrong matters. There's this mystical thing called "being true to yourself", which matters very much. There are beliefs which you need in order to withstand life's many challenges, like "God loves me" or "I have the power to keep my family safe", and the possibility of finding out that they're false is downright terrifying.

Recognising that there's no you brings freedom from all that. No-one is right or wrong. There are just thoughts which are true or false in the way they describe reality. And that means that you can afford to be 100% wrong about absolutely everything you've ever believed, and it's OK.

With this comes the courage to test any belief, no matter how deep or precious, and to shatter even the most beautiful lie on the rock of reality.

2. Plug in your power source.

Your lie-burning laser deserves the greatest power source it can get. That power source is not your finite human intelligence. It's not your personal skill at solving puzzles. It's not the strength and consistency of your belief system. It's not your capacity for analysis and comprehension.

That power source is reality itself.

What this means is that when you are faced with a belief you want to test, you do not try to pick it apart or compare it to your own beliefs. You put reality on one side and the belief on the other, and then dive the heck out of the way.

The key point here is to suspend everything you normally believe. If someone says to you "your father is actually a shapeshifting lizard from the planet Zong", you don't say "of course he isn't, because of X, Y and Z". If someone says to you "God doesn't exist", you don't say "of course he does, I believe in God". Instead, you step out of the way and let reality power your laser focus. Reality can be misinterpreted, but it cannot lie.

3. Aim the laser.

Your target is the belief in its strongest form. Assume that the belief you are testing is absolutely true. It is the truest thing you've ever believed.

Some flaws in the belief may become apparent to you immediately. Fix them. Find the best arguments you can to justify why these aren't really flaws, or why the belief is true in spite of them. That's what you do when you are convinced that a belief is true.

Now comes the fun part.

4. FIRE.

With the belief at the forefront of your mind, face reality head on. Look at your experience of life, and follow all the implications given that the belief is true.

Now, there are two things that can happen here.

A) The belief will be perfectly consistent with reality, no matter how long and hard you look.

Take your time confirming this. Hours, maybe even days if that's what it takes to be sure. If, at the end of that time, you haven't found a single contradiction between the belief and your experience, you have to accept that the belief is an accurate model of reality.

Of course, the belief could still be wrong, and could be disproved by new evidence coming to light. Every scientist knows that you can never conclusively prove something to be true. But until that new evidence emerges, you have to accept that this belief is as true as any of your beliefs can get.

or B) You will discover an inconsistency so staggering that the very notion of continuing to hold the belief will be ridiculous.

This is where laser focus really shines. Remember all that patching up of minor flaws you did earlier? You won't regret it, because the stuff you will discover by holding a belief up directly to the light of reality is in a whole other league. The most arcane, sophisticated, seemingly bulletproof structures collapse like houses of cards in a Magnitude 10 earthquake.

The great thing is that this process is not only supremely powerful. Honesty turned up to 11 is not only devastating to any lie. It is also beautiful.

The reason for this is that the truth is always simple. There may be vast layers of complexity to a belief itself, but the inconsistency at the root of a false belief can usually (in my experience, at least) be expressed in just one or two sentences.

As a lover of conciseness, I can't get enough of this. I see a brilliant, elaborate two-page argument, and in a single paragraph demolish it so utterly that those two pages become just so much waste paper.

As often as not, of course, that argument is my own. But that's just part of the fun.

So that's laser focus in a nutshell. There's just one more step, and actually, it's as important as the rest.

5. Train.

Laser focus is a skill. It can be trained. You can get better, faster, more efficient. You can learn to apply it as your default approach to life, to the point where your mere gaze vaporises deception as if you were Cyclops from the X-Men.

The only things you require for training are testable beliefs. You can get these anywhere. The best ones are your own, because whenever you eliminate a false belief, you become a distinctly more effective human being. You no longer make mistakes based on an incorrect understanding of reality, and you no longer waste time and energy trying to will a lie into being true.

But other people's beliefs work too. Sometimes, in fact, in the process of disproving a belief, you will discover that you unknowingly believe the same thing. In this case, you will be not only exposing someone else's error, but eliminating one within yourself at the same time.

Happily, with the advent of the Internet, you can find testable beliefs on any subject that interests you with ease. I've got some of my best insights, for example, by reading the arguments of people debating the topic of no-self on a personal development forum, and asking "is what this person saying true?"

I'm still learning to wield the great and terrible power of laser focus, and I may well post more on the topic once I get some more insights on how to optimise it. In the meantime, why not start developing your own? You can even use this blog as one of your targets - hold it up to the light of truth, and let me know of any inconsistencies that emerge.

Complete freedom from delusion is available to you, here and now. Do you value the truth enough to take it?