Willing to Consider

Transcript

This is how your life is already wonderful. I want to talk to you about being willing to consider.

So, so many times I have known people who were closed minded and sometimes it happens especially with intellectual people because intelligent people, sometimes academic people, they are intelligent enough to create more complex justifications.

They can create these complex Towers of Babel for their beliefs perhaps constructed on false premises. If they don’t have enough intellectual honestly like Steve Lopez talked about in the interview with me it can get more complex.

They’re out there building these houses of cards where they might not be able to escape or it might collapse.

One case with one man who was quite depressed. He would post on social media and say: Can anyone help, does anyone got any beers? What can I do to improve quality of life and quality of mind?

And I would send a message like “I have some ideas, certain books I can recommend like Practicing the Power of Now by Echart Tolle or Awaken the Giant Within.”

Things that I was reading back then but still recommend because these are very powerful books.

And he would say “I’m not going to do that. I had a look at the Tolle and it’s ridiculous what he is talking about is just woo woo nonsense, out of this world spiritual.”

On the lips of someone like this they say “it’s spiritual” if you think about what they are saying is its unreal.

I noticed his persistence in this type of behavior or thought patterns tragically what happened, I don’t know the full story but I know this fellow died quite young. I concluded what had happened was he committed suicide because he was not willing to consider alternate perspectives. It is tragic what can happen with a closed mind.

These kinds of things do have quite high stakes. They can affect our lives for decades if not in a more immediate fashion.

What happens with you?

Or me?

What happens when someone suggests a new idea? We might pause and say that’s interesting, I want to know more about it. Or sometimes we have a gut reaction or a knee jerk reaction even, it’s not even coming from our gut and we say “that is ridiculous, that cannot possibly be true. But the real open minded person, whether he has the first or second reaction, the interesting or ridiculous reaction.

Well let’s have a little look into this, I might think its ridiculous to begin with and I might well return to that perception later. But first I want to have a little bit of a closer look.

So as you go in a little bit further, you start to really understand the idea.

If you want to criticize an idea, it is find to criticize ideas and criticize techniques and practices.

What I see very often is people will criticize before they really understand something. And they will take some small piece of it and twist it like it is the whole thing like the blind man feeling the elephant and say “it is like this”.

For example someone looking at homeopathy they might say to me something like “they take these very high delusions, these 30c dilutions or whatever it is.”

I say “Ok, in some cases they might do that. In most cases they don’t do that, the more common dilutions are like 3x or something like that. These aren’t all that high.”

But again you can easily take a part of it and misinterpret it. They say things like “That’s impossible, there’s no way such a high dilution would have any of the original molecule or anything like that.” Not that I am making the case for it but it’s just an example.

If someone takes one part of something and then they branch it out or they imagine that they understand everything about it and dismiss the whole thing. That’s pretty unfortunate.

What happens is the open minded person he says “ok maybe it is ridiculous but lets have a further look” and he starts to find out more and more and maybe even if he concludes it is all false because he is enriched. These sorts of things are like fertilizer for the imagination to find out how different people think whether they are right or wrong.

This is the full scientific genuine attitude of an open mind where we can discover the lands of ideas. Explore where other people don’t dare to tread.

And when this person with an open mind grows older he may mature and gain wisdom but maintain the childish nature.

Not in terms of immaturity but in terms of being willing to look at the world with open eyes. Not just closed in and categorized but still discovering new things, still willing to play.

This person when he arrives at 70 years of age people say to him “I could have swore you were 15 years younger because his body is still probably reasonably flexible because there is that huge connection of flexibility of the body and cognitive flexibility.

When we are willing to change our habits, willing to consider new ideas we are also willing to experiment with our bodies putting them into new positions. Going hiking once in awhile if you haven’t done it before. This kind of thing.

All of these things come just from having that habit, that attitude that I may have prejudice about this but I am still willing to consider, willing to allow my mind to be receptive. Willing to open to something new. Willing to leave behind my preconceptions and think that maybe there is something very different to what I have ever known.

Maybe there are mysteries right in front of you waiting to be explored.

That’s what happens when you are willing to consider.