For the spiritual aspirant, however, it is not enough to exercise merely intellectual discrimination between the false and the true. Though intellectual discrimination is undoubtedly the basis for all further preparation, it yields its fruit only  when newly perceived values are brought  into relation with practical life. From the spiritual viewpoint, what matters is not theory but practice. The ideas, beliefs, opinions, views, or doctrines that a person might hold intellectually constitute a superficial layer of human personality. Very often someone believes in one thing and does exactly the opposite. The bankruptcy of barren beliefs is all the more pitiable because the person who feeds upon them often suffers from the delusion that he is spiritually advanced, when in truth he has not even begun spiritual life.
-Discourses 7th Ed. p352