An Open Mind

Two people are arguing about football. Each of them finds, effortlessly, five arguments in favor of their own team and none in favor of the other — even though the arguments on both sides exist, and are equally available to both.

None of this has anything to do with football.

From the moment we make a choice and take sides, the mind stops looking for the truth and starts defending its idea. It is a way of protecting a comfort zone, and it works: we overvalue what we have chosen and undervalue what the other person has chosen. When someone brings a different view, the mind fires off arguments against it before receiving it whole.

The same happens with politics. With religion too — and that is where it gets interesting.

Your religion is the best one for you. If it were not, it would not be yours. The problem is that "the best for me" slides easily into "the best", and the second phrase says something else entirely. There is no worse or better religion: the judgment is relative to the one who makes it. It is we who, at times, identify too much with our choice and act as though ours were superior.

I will give two examples, both from Spiritism. I chose this religion for these examples because it is the one I attended for most of this life — and because pointing out excess in someone else's house is too easy to serve as an exercise. If your tradition is another one, do the translation: the equivalents exist in all of them.

In Spiritism, everyone agrees that there is no better or worse religion. It is said that

"the best religion is the one that makes man better",

and even so, one hears, every now and then:

"Spiritism is not the religion of the future, but the future of religions."

Read the second sentence right after the first. What is it, if not the belief that Spiritist truths are superior to all others? The sense of superiority is between the lines — and it lives, without any embarrassment, alongside the maxim that has just been quoted.

The second example I have heard countless times:

"the problem with the Spiritist doctrine is that it brings in too many Catholic concepts".

The sentence does not represent the whole Spiritist community, and many people disagree with it, of course. But it is said — and, for those who came from Catholicism, it makes sense: that is how they felt the revelation of Spiritism in their own lives.

But notice, even so, what it does. It calls an inheritance a problem, and places Spiritism above Catholicism.

Now I kindly ask you to read the question below, pause your reading for a moment, close your eyes and turn inward.

What did your mind do while you read the last few paragraphs? How did it react to what you have just read?

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Perhaps it disagreed, built arguments, went looking for where the writer was wrong. Perhaps it agreed with enthusiasm and repeated the sentences like someone confirming them. Perhaps it stayed quiet.

All three reactions are natural, and none of them is the point. The point is that you can see your mind doing this.

That is what the examples were for. I needed something that could stir you, so that there would be something to observe.

Observe your thoughts. Feel your body. These are the two prerequisites, and they are enough.

An open mind is the capacity to truly listen: to receive what is being said before judging it, and to receive it whole, instead of already cut down to the size of what you think.

With an open mind you start from the principle that another choice may be better than yours. And you accept the possibility that something you believe today may stop being true for you tomorrow.

This is not weakness of conviction. It is the condition for learning anything at all. To evolve, we need to leave some beliefs, values and attitudes behind.

What comes next is a revelation about our nature — a subject on which you already have a settled opinion, a choice made and an established belief. I invite you to a meditative reading: observing your thoughts and emotions, feeling the reactions in your body, and making room for what is to come.