Open-Mindedness

The injunction to be "open-minded" is often uttered at tense moments, but what does that really mean? A definition is offered here: it is "the willingness to think in ways that are deeply counterintuitive, to loosen our preconceived ideas about how the world works and open our minds to ways of seeing reality" (Open-Mindedness). This requires humility and courage, as well as constant resistance to easy patterns.

Easier said than done, of course, contemplating the notion of the mind's awareness of itself. A threshold question is how much importance we might attach to the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge, especially applied to the Self. No judgment here as some effort is required and one may certainly remain sunnily confident even while trapped within one's own conceptual simulation. Objectivity, almost by definition, comes more easily when the object is the "other."

But let's take advantage of the club's Securus Locus to challenge the limits of our own open-mindedness. Some may already be acutely aware of the source of our cognitive or emotional biases. Perhaps one has only to hear a recording of oneself to catch, in the case of the son, the distinctive sound of the father's cough or in the case of the daughter the unmistakable echoes of the mother's laugh to wonder what else has been subliminally passed down.

May we be open-minded enough to share or otherwise tease out examples of our own close-mindedness, whether related to politics, religion, philosophy, or perhaps love. The exercise may not only test our genuine appetite for truth but also invite us to practice humility.

We may be surprised in the way we have been afflicted by those so-called "privileged conclusions" i.e. decisions emotionally made and only then intellectually justified or, perhaps, engagements with the world from the comfort of deep patterns. From that position, then, we might then cite an epiphany that lifted us out of a rut and opened the way to some new open-mindedness.

No judgments here as we address our own blend of nature and nurture.