How often have you been accused of not being "open minded" on DU? How often have you made that accusation?
I think I am an open minded person. Then again, most people think that about themselves.
For me being open minded means being willing to listen when someone else is stating their case. It means being willing to consider that I might be wrong in my own opinions, that some of my own so-called facts might be in error. This willingness is not entirely unbounded, however, nor do I think it can or should be.
We all have investments in our own current viewpoint, and those investments color how we process differing views. I'm aware of that, and I think I do a decent job of trying to take that into account. I'm fortunate to be in a position where I could freely change my views on many things without fear of being disowned or shunned by family and friends, without having to abandon a career or other major focus of my life -- no major "coming out" traumas would be likely.
A lot of what I'd like to explain about what being "open minded" means to me is best expressed by talking about what being open minded
isn't.
For me being open minded does not require, as I get the impression many people expect, that I extend an extremely generous benefit of the doubt to any idea or practice that meets the very weak standard of "well, you can't PROVE it's NOT true!". That a given idea or practice bears the label "religious" or "spiritual" does not, in my opinion, make that idea more deserving of special consideration.
Being open-minded doesn't mean I have to "try it myself and see" before I have a right to voice an opinion on the effectively infinite number of things I could be asked to try before forming an opinion. If someone thinks I should try something before I form any opinion whatsoever, that person should be able to make a good before-hand case about why it's a good investment of my time (or money or effort), why I should consider spending six months consuming nothing but rain water and figs, or three weeks at a "retreat" with their favorite guru.
After all, I don't need to study piano for years to understand and appreciate that people who study piano and practice at it are generally far better piano players (a few rare savants aside) than those who have never studied piano at all. I can see (and hear) clear benefits from such study, without having to engage in that study first myself, and I can make up my mind whether I want that benefit (along with maybe a few other benefits that I can't perceive so well right now, like an improved appreciation of music) enough to make the investment required.
If the supposed benefits from extensive study of some religious or spiritual book, and/or immersion into some religious or spiritual culture or practice, can only be perceived from within, or if the only perceivable benefits are vague, generic, and obtainable in many other very different ways (benefits like a sense of belonging, feeling more at peace, etc.) it is very sensible in my opinion, not close-minded at all, to view such results in terms of well-known human psychology rather than as results of genuine paths to Special Truth.
Speaking of truth (with or without the capital T), being open minded does not mean having to adopt a wishy-washy notion of "personal truth" where any notion of an objective truth is taken off the table. Without going into a long epistemological discussion, that view of truth is more a diplomatic ploy, a technique for ignoring or skirting around conflicts, than it is a workable way of making sense of the world. In the popular analogy of the
blind men and the elephant those various men don't each know "an aspect of the truth", they're all simply wrong about what the elephant is. At best each possesses a single piece of misinterpreted data. If yet another blind man comes along and thinks the elephant is a cell phone, he won't even have that much. Why should I be so generous when evaluating the myriad religious and spiritual beliefs of the world (many of which are very dogmatic and make no allowances for only having "a piece of the truth") to think they're all at least as close as the blind men in the fable to some sort of important Truth, and not like my completely off-base guy who thinks he's touching a cell phone?
This brings me to "experience". I would have little reason to argue, to continue the elephant analogy, that any of the men touching the elephant didn't truly experienced what he says he experienced. (Well, I would have to wonder if the cell phone guy wasn't just pulling my leg.) Being "open minded", however, doesn't mean I have to grant someone
their own interpretation of their experience, I don't have to accept that each man actually touched a rope or a pillar or a fan. I only need to accept that each man had an experience
like touching each of those things.
If you claim Jesus spoke to you, I'm not being closed-minded and "denying your experience" simply because I don't automatically accept that you really, actually were spoken to by Jesus. An open mind does not require me to believe that your experience of an alien abduction was a real abduction by real aliens.
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